'Working in high-security department for research and development involving strategic planning for medium and long-term projects. Research & Development projects including 128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan.
Right, because the first thing you do when hired into a high-security department is tell everyone on the Internet what you're working on. Sounds like this guy was a dunce right off the bat.
This ranks right up there with twittering about how much you hate your boss.
However, this case is not so clear-cut. They reproduced the ad in its entirety, unmodified.
Modification is not a pre-requisite of fair use. Especially when its something as small as a magazine ad. You can't really criticize a fraction of this ad since the photo takes up the whole page.
This is one of the few areas where my instinct says that a guilty mind should not be necessary at all to punish someone.
Your instinct isn't wrong. Courts have long upheld judgements that ignorance of the law is not a shield from it. Lawyers know this better than anyone but they make routine (ab)use of the fact that non-lawyers frequently aren't aware of their own rights and responsibilities.
Additionally, you *can* go after someone who makes a false DMCA takedown claim. The problem is, the DMCA does not allow you to dispute the takedown notice until after the "infringing" material has been removed. To me, that's the most bullshit part of the fully-bullshit DMCA.
i wish it was mandatory by the law to allow reselling with full rights transfer and creating obstacles would get smacked hard.
You can't have it both ways. It's only one or the other: Either there is no DRM or there is no rights transfer.
If there is no DRM, and reselling of copyrighted content is legal, there is nothing stopping someone from downloading an MP3, making 5 copies of the file on his hard drive, and selling each of those 5 copies to someone else because there's nothing to verify the authenticity of those files. It's usually pretty obvious when a music CD has been copied (different color media, poor or non-existent insert), not so obvious when an MP3 has been copied. The only way to reconcile this is to make the legal transfer of copyrighted, non-DRM content illegal. (Obviously content could still be distributed under an open license that allows free redistribution, like Creative Commons.)
However, content protected by DRM should be expressly allowed by law to be resold and otherwise allow the transfer of ownership rights since those files cannot simply be copied and played in an unrestricted fashion. DRM was invented to give content publishers all of the benefits of digital distribution and none of the drawbacks; consumers should not have to suffer none of the benefits and all of the drawbacks. Companies who implement DRM on their content distribution systems should be required to build into them a way to allow one individual to transfer their rights to another individual.
What I didn't get from this story was just what they where using for the development system? I doubt that it is all in c or c++ so maybe they are using mono.
Right, this is why I don't understand why anyone is making a huge deal out of this. Yeah, it makes great press for Linux, but not open source in general since there's no way the business-specific applications they are running will be open source. It's about as exciting as some major website revealing that they run Linux on their servers. Anyone can use open source in their profit-generating business, it's only newsworthy when a major player makes a significant contribution back to the community whose shoulders it stands upon.
It wouldn't even surprise me if they're just taking a page from PC manufacturers, corporations, governments, and schools: It's not a secret anymore that large organizations which very publicly announce their endorsement of Linux wind up on the receiving end of some amazing counter-offers from Microsoft.
Well, regardless of how messy it is or the excuses that Verizon has given you, if they promised IPv6 as part of the original order, and you have documentation to prove it, go talk to your lawyer. Slashdot can't really help you with this.
Stargate always had problems thinking imaginatively.
This was always my problem with Stargate. After a season or two, the writers seem to get lazy because they know they'll have a fat paycheck at the end of it, as long as the ratings don't fall too badly. They'd much rather recycle old, safe plots and keep the show relatively mundane than risk rocking the boat over an edgy new idea. SG-1 was pretty good at first. They took the premise of the Stargate movie and expanded it very effectively and imaginatively. But the series as a whole just lost more and more steam as it went on. For awhile there, the only thing keeping me watching it was Richard Dean's (admittedly sporadic) comedy moments. And then he stepped down from the lead. Atlantis was one recycled plot after another and none of the characters had even the slightest depth.
I haven't watched SGU yet, but since the production team seems to be unchanged from SG-1 and Atlantis. Given this, I don't really have much hope that SGU will be much different from its predecessors: a soap opera with flat characters, little action, and terribly predictable plots.
And I'm sorry, but the whole "stranded far away and trying to get home" thing has been done to DEATH in science fiction.
It's hard to tell from the summary, but did you sign a contract with them back in May that included IPv6 support? If yes, and they spent six months building out the line only to tell you in the end, "oh, sorry, we don't want to do IPv6 anymore" then you can get them in court for material change of contract. If there was no contract (hard to believe if there was a 6-month build-out), or if it never specified IPv6 anywhere, then you're hosed and pretty much get what you deserve for taking Verizon's word at face value.:)
It's been awhile since I took business law, but I seem to remember that, historically, retailers have been given wide latitude in their efforts to promote their wares. They can basically say anything they like about a product, but must stop short of actual lies or deliberate misrepresentation. In other words, they can only get in trouble for something false that was added to the promotion of a product, not something that was taken away. No judge is going to agree with the assertion that failing to publish a user review (whether positive or negative) is fraud or misrepresenting the product.
I have to side with the GP on this. It's their site so they get to choose what user content (if any) is published. Consumers who think the reviews on a particular retailer's site are unfair always have the option to do what they normally do when they don't like a particular retailer for any reason: shop somewhere else.
but then I remain unconvinced that colour laser printers are worth while yet. Cheap inkjets give significantly better print quality, at the cost of having to keep two printers around, one for colour and one for black and white.
Yeow, I was with you up until this point. In my experience, a low-end color laser beats the pants off an inket at any price. No lines, no smudging, no wrinkled paper, no fading. I bought a Konica Minolta color laser printer for $400 quite a few years ago. The thing is noisy as heck but it prints color photos that look every bit as gorgeous as glossy magazine ads and I haven't had to change the toner cartridges since buying it. Before owning this, we were changing the ink cartridges on our old inkjet at least once every six months. I'm reasonably certain that this printer has paid for itself just due to the price of ink alone.
Unfortunately Jack Thompson might (for once) have something on his side since he's complaining that Facebook didn't remove the hate groups against him
Hate groups are entitled to the same First Amendment rights as anyone else.
(like the now removed "i'll pay someone $50 for a video of you punching Jack Thompson in the face" post)
But threatening or conspiring to threaten someone with physical assault is a crime.
but removed a poll of "Should Obama be shot."
Threats or implied threats of assassination of a U.S. President are likewise serious crimes. If the Secret Service hadn't insisted that such a poll be taken down, then they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
If the Facebook postings are direct physical threats against Thompson, then he has a right to complain, but he's barking up the wrong tree by suing Facebook. As a lawyer, he should know that he's supposed to go after the people who wrote the threats since Facebook has little control over what content people choose to post. Suing someone on Facebook is actually easier than anywhere else on the net, because Facebook totally lacks any form of anonymity. Uncovering the real life identity of someone on Facebook is just a court order away. The only problem is, Thompson knows he'll get a lot more press if he just sues Facebook instead since they're a household name these days.
The motivation problem is quite the opposite of what you're suggesting. Ask a hundred random 12th grade kids what their career goals are, and if 90 of them don't say either "professional sports" or "I dunno," I'll eat my hat.
Success is not some inborn trait. It takes a lot of work and motivation and in many cases, intelligence doesn't have a lot to do with it. (Witness our last U.S. President) Unless a kid is diagnosed with an acute learning disability, and unless you have a time machine that I don't know about, it's unfair and in fact immoral to tell them that their potential for success is anything less than unlimited.
On top of that, certain content producers (read: most large software, movie, music, and games companies) are offered special treatment on eBay while normal users have to go through a lengthy dispute process where eBay favors the seller.
A few years back, I tried to auction a broken laptop that had a visible (but not legible in the photos) Windows 2000 Certificate of Authenticity on it. I explained clearly in the auction details that no media or hard drive shipped with the laptop. On the last day of the auction, eBay ended the auction (without refunding listing fees) on the premise that I was selling counterfeit software. They said if I tried to relist the item, my account would be terminated. eBay offered NO way to dispute or challenge the decision. My emails to their support went unanswered.
A few weeks later, I get no less than 3 identical cease-and-desist letters from Microsoft explaining that by selling a computer with a COA, but no media, I was in some way infringing on their copyright.
So according to Microsoft and eBay, every time you sell a computer second-hand without removing the COA label, destroying the original media, and wiping the hard drive clean, you are violating Microsoft's copyright.
1. You have to start somewhere. No one but the super-gifted come out of college and start inventing new algorithms or designing spaceships. In the old days, you were expected to apprentice for years (in some cases, decades) before being allowed to actually practice your craft.
2. Where is your motivation? What are you doing to advance your knowledge and experience? If the answer is, "nothing," then yes, you did waste your time in university and should look forward to a long comfortable career in technical support.
I think you don't understand what a benchmark is. A benchmark is meant to give you a rough idea of how certain (yes, narrow!) tasks perform on a given OS or hardware. Some benchmarks focus on disk-bound tasks, some on memory-bound tasks, some on CPU-bound tasks (which can be further divided into primarily integer or floating-point tasks), or some combination of these. The reason they include so many is because you're supposed to know enough to pick one that roughly matches the application that you care most about. Or take the composite of two or more benchmarks together. For example, for most database applications, you will probably care most about disk I/O performance unless you have some crazy nutty queries and then you'll care about memory and CPU too.
Further, the point of the benchmarks is not to give you absolute numbers for these tasks. Nobody really cares exactly how many seconds it takes Ubuntu to encode an MP3 file, because it's going to be different for every system, even those with ostensibly identical hardware. The information is in the comparison between operating systems. In this case, Ubuntu was found to perform better in most cases than two versions of FreeBSD. That was what the author of the article set out to find and report.
What irks me the most is that your whole complaint is that the benchmark suite doesn't include things that you think are useful. And because the article didn't include those things that you want, it's worthless for everyone, right? Well, the good news is that the Phoronix Test Suite is open source, so you can add whatever tests that you would like and contribute them back to the community. Shall I let them know you'll be sending in your patches soon?
The only real chance legislators have in the U.S. of stopping the growth of the Pirate Party here is ironically to embrace the tenets of the Pirate Party and implement the freedom of information it espouses.
No, their best chance would be to establish and entrench a two-party winner-take-all system that deliberately excludes all meaningful third-party participation in both local and national politics.
(For those who didn't get the cynicism: a Pirate Party in the U.S. would be utterly fruitless since we have no such thing as proportional representation. Our election system as it currently exists is designed such that the people can only choose between the lesser or two evils.)
That's just JWZ for you. He wrote a web browser, bought a nightclub, and now envisions himself as some sort of Internet rockstar.
Within a few days after the Mozilla project was originally announced, I joined the mailing list (or newsgroup or whatever) and, as a newbie, made the suggestion that the browser, email client, and other components be broken up into different applications to make developing and maintenance easier. Not even distributed separately, just developed as separate projects. A few people responded in agreement and then JWZ came onto the thread and lambasted me for being a backwards idiot or somesuch. I unsubbed from the mailing list immediately since I didn't see any point to sticking around a community that insulted people for their well-meaning suggestions.
Interesting how things turned out, though: he left the Mozilla project after a short while and now the web browser, email client, and other components are developed and distributed separately.
(I'm not taking credit for the idea in any way, mind you. It was an obvious forward path to almost everyone at the time.)
And just like we all ignore the gas guzzling inefficient vehicles and allow everyone to drive around without a catalytic converter, we should ignore the Windows botnet market and not require people to use a tighter OS.
Correct. Within the boundaries of law, nobody should be forced into doing anything they don't want to do, or be required to conform to the ideals of one particular group or another.
A person is allowed to drive to work every day in a 20-ton SUV that gets 2 miles per gallon. If the owner of such a monstrosity or any other highly inefficient vehicle wants to subject themselves to that inconvenience, that is their right as the law currently stands (or should stand). However, it's up to people like you and me to educate them on what a poor choice it is for themselves and for their children (read: the environment). If they don't change their mind, then so be it. Either their opinion can't be swayed or we need to work harder to reach the public.
Same thing for software. We can educate people on the advantages of open source software (that it's free, reliable, secure, lacking crapware, usually has great community support, etc) but we can't stop them from buying Windows or OS X if that's what they ultimately choose to do. It would be antithetical to the idea of open source in the first place, which is to provide more freedom and choice, not less. If they aren't smart enough to make the right decision, we can attempt to educate, but that is as far as it goes.
Linux didn't have any commercial backing until after it had a sizeable non-commercial hacker community and it was fairly obvious that Linux + GNU would be a viable platform for a Free OS. But my original point still stands: I believe there would be a free OS in some form or another even without Linus and/or RMS. (Most likely around BSD.) We just can't envision any specifics because the alternatives are not how history played out.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because the first thing you do when hired into a high-security department is tell everyone on the Internet what you're working on. Sounds like this guy was a dunce right off the bat.
This ranks right up there with twittering about how much you hate your boss.
Modification is not a pre-requisite of fair use. Especially when its something as small as a magazine ad. You can't really criticize a fraction of this ad since the photo takes up the whole page.
Your instinct isn't wrong. Courts have long upheld judgements that ignorance of the law is not a shield from it. Lawyers know this better than anyone but they make routine (ab)use of the fact that non-lawyers frequently aren't aware of their own rights and responsibilities.
Additionally, you *can* go after someone who makes a false DMCA takedown claim. The problem is, the DMCA does not allow you to dispute the takedown notice until after the "infringing" material has been removed. To me, that's the most bullshit part of the fully-bullshit DMCA.
You can't have it both ways. It's only one or the other: Either there is no DRM or there is no rights transfer.
If there is no DRM, and reselling of copyrighted content is legal, there is nothing stopping someone from downloading an MP3, making 5 copies of the file on his hard drive, and selling each of those 5 copies to someone else because there's nothing to verify the authenticity of those files. It's usually pretty obvious when a music CD has been copied (different color media, poor or non-existent insert), not so obvious when an MP3 has been copied. The only way to reconcile this is to make the legal transfer of copyrighted, non-DRM content illegal. (Obviously content could still be distributed under an open license that allows free redistribution, like Creative Commons.)
However, content protected by DRM should be expressly allowed by law to be resold and otherwise allow the transfer of ownership rights since those files cannot simply be copied and played in an unrestricted fashion. DRM was invented to give content publishers all of the benefits of digital distribution and none of the drawbacks; consumers should not have to suffer none of the benefits and all of the drawbacks. Companies who implement DRM on their content distribution systems should be required to build into them a way to allow one individual to transfer their rights to another individual.
Right, this is why I don't understand why anyone is making a huge deal out of this. Yeah, it makes great press for Linux, but not open source in general since there's no way the business-specific applications they are running will be open source. It's about as exciting as some major website revealing that they run Linux on their servers. Anyone can use open source in their profit-generating business, it's only newsworthy when a major player makes a significant contribution back to the community whose shoulders it stands upon.
It wouldn't even surprise me if they're just taking a page from PC manufacturers, corporations, governments, and schools: It's not a secret anymore that large organizations which very publicly announce their endorsement of Linux wind up on the receiving end of some amazing counter-offers from Microsoft.
Well, regardless of how messy it is or the excuses that Verizon has given you, if they promised IPv6 as part of the original order, and you have documentation to prove it, go talk to your lawyer. Slashdot can't really help you with this.
This was always my problem with Stargate. After a season or two, the writers seem to get lazy because they know they'll have a fat paycheck at the end of it, as long as the ratings don't fall too badly. They'd much rather recycle old, safe plots and keep the show relatively mundane than risk rocking the boat over an edgy new idea. SG-1 was pretty good at first. They took the premise of the Stargate movie and expanded it very effectively and imaginatively. But the series as a whole just lost more and more steam as it went on. For awhile there, the only thing keeping me watching it was Richard Dean's (admittedly sporadic) comedy moments. And then he stepped down from the lead. Atlantis was one recycled plot after another and none of the characters had even the slightest depth.
I haven't watched SGU yet, but since the production team seems to be unchanged from SG-1 and Atlantis. Given this, I don't really have much hope that SGU will be much different from its predecessors: a soap opera with flat characters, little action, and terribly predictable plots.
And I'm sorry, but the whole "stranded far away and trying to get home" thing has been done to DEATH in science fiction.
Only if you were paid or otherwise compensated for advertising the product.
It's hard to tell from the summary, but did you sign a contract with them back in May that included IPv6 support? If yes, and they spent six months building out the line only to tell you in the end, "oh, sorry, we don't want to do IPv6 anymore" then you can get them in court for material change of contract. If there was no contract (hard to believe if there was a 6-month build-out), or if it never specified IPv6 anywhere, then you're hosed and pretty much get what you deserve for taking Verizon's word at face value. :)
It's been awhile since I took business law, but I seem to remember that, historically, retailers have been given wide latitude in their efforts to promote their wares. They can basically say anything they like about a product, but must stop short of actual lies or deliberate misrepresentation. In other words, they can only get in trouble for something false that was added to the promotion of a product, not something that was taken away. No judge is going to agree with the assertion that failing to publish a user review (whether positive or negative) is fraud or misrepresenting the product.
I have to side with the GP on this. It's their site so they get to choose what user content (if any) is published. Consumers who think the reviews on a particular retailer's site are unfair always have the option to do what they normally do when they don't like a particular retailer for any reason: shop somewhere else.
Yeow, I was with you up until this point. In my experience, a low-end color laser beats the pants off an inket at any price. No lines, no smudging, no wrinkled paper, no fading. I bought a Konica Minolta color laser printer for $400 quite a few years ago. The thing is noisy as heck but it prints color photos that look every bit as gorgeous as glossy magazine ads and I haven't had to change the toner cartridges since buying it. Before owning this, we were changing the ink cartridges on our old inkjet at least once every six months. I'm reasonably certain that this printer has paid for itself just due to the price of ink alone.
Hate groups are entitled to the same First Amendment rights as anyone else.
But threatening or conspiring to threaten someone with physical assault is a crime.
Threats or implied threats of assassination of a U.S. President are likewise serious crimes. If the Secret Service hadn't insisted that such a poll be taken down, then they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
If the Facebook postings are direct physical threats against Thompson, then he has a right to complain, but he's barking up the wrong tree by suing Facebook. As a lawyer, he should know that he's supposed to go after the people who wrote the threats since Facebook has little control over what content people choose to post. Suing someone on Facebook is actually easier than anywhere else on the net, because Facebook totally lacks any form of anonymity. Uncovering the real life identity of someone on Facebook is just a court order away. The only problem is, Thompson knows he'll get a lot more press if he just sues Facebook instead since they're a household name these days.
The motivation problem is quite the opposite of what you're suggesting. Ask a hundred random 12th grade kids what their career goals are, and if 90 of them don't say either "professional sports" or "I dunno," I'll eat my hat.
Success is not some inborn trait. It takes a lot of work and motivation and in many cases, intelligence doesn't have a lot to do with it. (Witness our last U.S. President) Unless a kid is diagnosed with an acute learning disability, and unless you have a time machine that I don't know about, it's unfair and in fact immoral to tell them that their potential for success is anything less than unlimited.
Then what on earth would we be paying our congresscritters to do? Play ping-pong for 360 days out of the year?
On top of that, certain content producers (read: most large software, movie, music, and games companies) are offered special treatment on eBay while normal users have to go through a lengthy dispute process where eBay favors the seller.
A few years back, I tried to auction a broken laptop that had a visible (but not legible in the photos) Windows 2000 Certificate of Authenticity on it. I explained clearly in the auction details that no media or hard drive shipped with the laptop. On the last day of the auction, eBay ended the auction (without refunding listing fees) on the premise that I was selling counterfeit software. They said if I tried to relist the item, my account would be terminated. eBay offered NO way to dispute or challenge the decision. My emails to their support went unanswered.
A few weeks later, I get no less than 3 identical cease-and-desist letters from Microsoft explaining that by selling a computer with a COA, but no media, I was in some way infringing on their copyright.
So according to Microsoft and eBay, every time you sell a computer second-hand without removing the COA label, destroying the original media, and wiping the hard drive clean, you are violating Microsoft's copyright.
Two things:
1. You have to start somewhere. No one but the super-gifted come out of college and start inventing new algorithms or designing spaceships. In the old days, you were expected to apprentice for years (in some cases, decades) before being allowed to actually practice your craft.
2. Where is your motivation? What are you doing to advance your knowledge and experience? If the answer is, "nothing," then yes, you did waste your time in university and should look forward to a long comfortable career in technical support.
If everybody told their kids that, there would be no fucking NASA scientists, or neurosurgeons, etc.
I think you don't understand what a benchmark is. A benchmark is meant to give you a rough idea of how certain (yes, narrow!) tasks perform on a given OS or hardware. Some benchmarks focus on disk-bound tasks, some on memory-bound tasks, some on CPU-bound tasks (which can be further divided into primarily integer or floating-point tasks), or some combination of these. The reason they include so many is because you're supposed to know enough to pick one that roughly matches the application that you care most about. Or take the composite of two or more benchmarks together. For example, for most database applications, you will probably care most about disk I/O performance unless you have some crazy nutty queries and then you'll care about memory and CPU too.
Further, the point of the benchmarks is not to give you absolute numbers for these tasks. Nobody really cares exactly how many seconds it takes Ubuntu to encode an MP3 file, because it's going to be different for every system, even those with ostensibly identical hardware. The information is in the comparison between operating systems. In this case, Ubuntu was found to perform better in most cases than two versions of FreeBSD. That was what the author of the article set out to find and report.
What irks me the most is that your whole complaint is that the benchmark suite doesn't include things that you think are useful. And because the article didn't include those things that you want, it's worthless for everyone, right? Well, the good news is that the Phoronix Test Suite is open source, so you can add whatever tests that you would like and contribute them back to the community. Shall I let them know you'll be sending in your patches soon?
No, their best chance would be to establish and entrench a two-party winner-take-all system that deliberately excludes all meaningful third-party participation in both local and national politics.
(For those who didn't get the cynicism: a Pirate Party in the U.S. would be utterly fruitless since we have no such thing as proportional representation. Our election system as it currently exists is designed such that the people can only choose between the lesser or two evils.)
That's just JWZ for you. He wrote a web browser, bought a nightclub, and now envisions himself as some sort of Internet rockstar.
Within a few days after the Mozilla project was originally announced, I joined the mailing list (or newsgroup or whatever) and, as a newbie, made the suggestion that the browser, email client, and other components be broken up into different applications to make developing and maintenance easier. Not even distributed separately, just developed as separate projects. A few people responded in agreement and then JWZ came onto the thread and lambasted me for being a backwards idiot or somesuch. I unsubbed from the mailing list immediately since I didn't see any point to sticking around a community that insulted people for their well-meaning suggestions.
Interesting how things turned out, though: he left the Mozilla project after a short while and now the web browser, email client, and other components are developed and distributed separately.
(I'm not taking credit for the idea in any way, mind you. It was an obvious forward path to almost everyone at the time.)
Hey some of us consider that a good time
I reallly hope there's not going to be either alcohol or firearms at that party
Correct. Within the boundaries of law, nobody should be forced into doing anything they don't want to do, or be required to conform to the ideals of one particular group or another.
A person is allowed to drive to work every day in a 20-ton SUV that gets 2 miles per gallon. If the owner of such a monstrosity or any other highly inefficient vehicle wants to subject themselves to that inconvenience, that is their right as the law currently stands (or should stand). However, it's up to people like you and me to educate them on what a poor choice it is for themselves and for their children (read: the environment). If they don't change their mind, then so be it. Either their opinion can't be swayed or we need to work harder to reach the public.
Same thing for software. We can educate people on the advantages of open source software (that it's free, reliable, secure, lacking crapware, usually has great community support, etc) but we can't stop them from buying Windows or OS X if that's what they ultimately choose to do. It would be antithetical to the idea of open source in the first place, which is to provide more freedom and choice, not less. If they aren't smart enough to make the right decision, we can attempt to educate, but that is as far as it goes.
Linux didn't have any commercial backing until after it had a sizeable non-commercial hacker community and it was fairly obvious that Linux + GNU would be a viable platform for a Free OS. But my original point still stands: I believe there would be a free OS in some form or another even without Linus and/or RMS. (Most likely around BSD.) We just can't envision any specifics because the alternatives are not how history played out.
Not to get all nitpicky, but this should instead say:
"650+ MB of cheap CD to work with or 4-64 MB of expensive ROM chips"