You wouldn't, by any chance, be talking about the Haagse Hogeschool? I know it's not a university by dutch terms, but perhaps you were actually referring to it.
Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it, or insist that users do not get a refund anyway (the EU would have a field day and think up some higher billion dollar amounts for fines).
Actually the reason you're able to refund your copy of Microsoft Windows is because of Microsoft itself.
The background story. Back in 1999 some members from the SVLUG and also a Slashdot editor (Chris DiBona) organized Windows Refund Day, I found out about this while watching the documentary Revolution OS (there's footage of the event in there) so I thought I'd share it with you. From the Windows Refund day page:
The windows EULA (End User License Agreement) clearly states that the agreement can be refused by the end user, and that windows can be returned to the manufacturer. In real life, however, manufacturers typically say that they can't refund the windows license and tell the user to contact microsoft directly.
Turns out it's a whole lot easier nowadays to return your copy of Windows than it was back then and you can thank these guys for it.
DUI's are nothing more than "feel good" legislation, like seatbelt, and helmet laws that pad city and county bank accounts while making the cattle feel safer.
I disagree with you and the fact you agree with the GP (who's wrong on so many levels).
Let us look at some statistics mostly supplied by the CBS (the dutch census office) and SWOV (Institute for Road Safety Research). While the number of fatal accidents considerably decreased in 2004, the percentage of those fatalities caused by driving under the influence rose to 33%. "The use of alcohol has a strong and proven relation with driving ability and the risk of a crash.", you can look up the numerous amount of rapports yourself. Summary? Drinking and driving bad.
Also take a look at this graph which displays the number of fatalities in the period 1950-2004. Notice that free fall in the 1970s? That's when the government mandated seat belts and helmets, and implemented an alcohol limit (next to numerous other traffic safety measures).
This isn't "feel good" legislation, these laws actually make us safer without taking away any of our freedoms and are a prime example of the issues with which the government should concern itself.
He's an excellent speaker too, see this video in which he discusses topics such as Network Neutrality (most of the presentation), Free Culture, Copyright and Fair Use at the Rochester Institute of Technology. When answering questions from the audience (and perhaps even earlier on) the Grokster case is also discussed (1:47:00 - 1:52:53).
My view was that any responsibility imposed upon peer-to-peer technology companies should be imposed by congress passing law, rather than courts litigating the matter. The problem with courts litigating the matter is that [...] it's extraordinarily expensive, it's strategic opportunity to shutdown your competitor, and then you have in the end a kind of federal judge [...] who sits down there and figures out whether this technology is allowed or not. That was the problem, it's that congress stepped away from the responsibility and the courts took it up.
"Prior to its first release, the closest approximation to a Linux distribution had been H J Lu's "Boot-root" floppies. These were two 5¼" diskettes consisting of the kernel and the minimum tools required to get started. So minimum were these tools that to be able to boot from a hard drive required editing its master boot record with a hex editor."
"If more code was released under BSD-type license, we would've seen wider adoption."
The premier goal of those who license their code under the GPL is not wider adoption (neither by public nor business), it is guaranteed freedom of software (including any forks). Any business that builds upon GPLed code should be well aware of this.
"The point is about the rules being too restrictive for some people."
I believe it is relevant to quote Stallman concerning this subject, so I shall. The following is taken from The GNU GPL and the American Way:
"I designed the GNU GPL to uphold and defend the freedoms that define free software--to use the words of 1776, it establishes them as inalienable rights for programs released under the GPL. It ensures that you have the freedom to study, change, and redistribute the program, by saying that nobody is authorized to take these freedoms away from you by redistributing the program under a restrictive license.
For the sake of cooperation, we encourage others to modify and extend the programs that we publish. For the sake of freedom, we set the condition that these modified versions of our programs must respect your freedom just like the original version. We encourage two-way cooperation by rejecting parasites: whoever wishes to copy parts of our software into his program must let us use parts of that program in our programs. Nobody is forced to join our club, but those who wish to participate must offer us the same cooperation they receive from us. That makes the system fair.
Millions of users, tens of thousands of developers, and companies as large as IBM, Intel, and Sun, have chosen to participate on this basis. But some companies want the advantages without the responsibilities."
I noticed you mentioned Pandora and not Last.fm, for the sake of discussion I'll presume you are referring to the service that both Pandora and Last.fm have in common, which is presenting music based on patterns. Let me start off by mentioning that I haven't actually used Pandora apart from the limited front page functionality myself since it requires a U.S. postal code (i.e. it expects you to be a U.S. citizen) and I am in fact a European. Instead I am a subscriber to Last.fm, which (as mentioned in the article) is based in the United Kingdom and available to non-U.K. residents (which coincidently also means it is not directly affected by this regulation).
I'm wondering why you seem to imply that listening to Pandora doesn't "broaden your spectrum"? Thanks to services like Last.fm and Pandora, I myself and many others have actually come in contact with a more diverse set of music than we would ever have without them. Through Last.fm I have personally discovered not only what I'd call my "true taste in music", but so many individual artists that I would never have heard of if it wasn't for Last.fm.
By using methods such as collaborative filtering, data analysis and pattern mining these services are able to predict and assist in finding out about music that might interest you. These systems however do not limit you solely to this aspect, Last.fm for example offers functionality such as being able to listen to tags (which also represent categories). But the former aspect is what I personally consider the most valuable.
So I in fact believe these services do broaden the spectrum of those listening, unlike (in general) Internet radio stations that still follow the "old model" of having human DJs decide what music to play. Not to mention commercial radio which is heavily influenced by advertisers, deals with record labels and in lesser extent government regulation.
Now I would also like to take this moment to respond to the issue at hand. However the solution I myself envision has already been presented by a fellow Slashdotter further down in the thread.
What needs to happen is for Internet radio stations to turn to independent labels. Consumers will buy the music they hear. If Internet radio stations commit to changing the majority of their playlist to artists on non-RIAA labels then the majority of profits will be diverted from the RIAA - they don't get per play royalties and they don't get royalties on purchases. ("Genuine solution is actually really easy")
Regrettably several artists I rather enjoy are signed to record labels who are affiliated with the RIAA (you can verify this using the RIAA Radar). However, I'd rather have services like Pandora and Last.fm continue to exist without offering these artists than go under because of royalty fees taking up their revenue. I for one refuse to purchase any albums from artists affiliated with an organization such as the RIAA.
Repeat after me "this is not stuff that matters, this is not news for nerds". I honestly can't decide between tagging it 'slashvertisment', 'vaporware' or plain simply 'bullshit'.
Just stop posting stories like this damnit, I'm looking at you Zonk!
Reminds me of a video on my YouTube playlist, Frank Caliendo - Letterman - Impressionists Week. Frank Caliendo does an impression of John Madden, should help those who haven't heard of him get the joke above.
I myself heard about it from a documentary on the Discovery Channel, I couldn't find the documentary itself but I found a couple of articles while Googling for it.
If you've set your box to block everything tagged with sex and violence and adult content, or perhaps "controverisal" or "unpatriotic", then in fact YOU are the one who's being controlled, as the simple act of tagging something with those flags blocks it from your view.
Emphasis mine, you cannot be controlled by your own choice. As long as you are free to ignore the categories you are not being controlled nor are you being censored. Self-censorship indicates that you are in fact in control.
control verb, -trolled, -trolling, noun -noun the situation of being under the regulation, domination, or command of another: The car is out of control.
I'd first like to state that I am convinced that the category tagging example offered by Shawn is an Asshole above is a definite improvement over simply adding an age flag.
Again, like the "tagging" thread above, who decides what's appropriate for what age? What do you do when someone thinks a topic like abortion isn't suitable for anyone at any age?
Any tagging scheme ultimately take the control out of your hands, and places it into someone elses. And that person has their own worldview, and as such doesn't have YOUR best interests at heart.
You seem to have misunderstood the concept, tagging a broadcast stream does not take anything out of your control. When your hardware device receives the stream it can (using the settings you supplied it) decide to censor the material based on the available categories, or simply ignore the categories right out and relay the stream untouched. Unlike the method (read: censorship at the broadcast level) presented in the article, you in fact are the one control.
(quote from the article, emphasis mine) The long-overdue report suggests Congress could craft a law that would let the agency regulate violent programming much like it regulates sexual content and profanity -- by barring it from being aired during hours when children may be watching, for example.
The content is barred from being broadcast, there for prohibiting it from ever reaching your home. This is plain old censorship.
Sexual content and violence should be regulated by the government exactly the same, which is no regulation at all. I'll admit there are a couple of extremes which obviously need to be regulated, but in general this isn't something the government should concern itself with.
This however is an excellent idea, let the users regulate themselves by adding an age flag in the transmission. Regulation such as that suggested by the report only adds another annoyance factor to a medium which is already plagued by them.
The store did not look open. He did not enter through the front door. It was very clear that he was exploiting something that was not ever intended to happen -- at best, the analogy would be entering through an unlocked (or insufficiently locked) window when the store was clearly closed.
This is all quite subjective, but I tend to believe most of us equate security vulnerabilities which are made possible trough sloppy input filtering (defining badness instead of goodness) as open doors, with sufficient technical expertise these kind of things are, as Samy demonstrated, a walk-in.
Understanding technology has nothing to do with it -- a lot of computer people have this bizarre conflation of what can be done with what is acceptable to actually do.
I'm not saying what Samy did was acceptable, I'm saying that the sentence was unnecessarily harsh. You might disagree with me on this, but that's just how I look at it. I would have agreed with the sentence if it had been just the community service and repaying damages up to a reasonable amount, I disagree with the probation and computer restrictions. Seeing as Samy admitted guilt, I can't believe this was the least restrictive sentence that could have been given.
Intent should be taken into account in sentencing (and I think in this case it was, or there probably would have been jail time), but that doesn't mean that wide scale vandalism should receive a mere slap on the wrist, just because computers are involved.
The keyword here is "malicious intent", from Wikipedia: "Malice is a legal term referring to a party's intention to do injury to another party. Malice is either expressed or implied.". It looks to me that the judge completely ignored intent. And come on, "Wide scale vandalism"? The web consists of thousands upon thousands of websites, he exploited just one of those (albeit it a popular one). I wouldn't even equate this with vandalism
As somebody who seems to know Samy expressed: "I know Samy personally and he is one of the smartest and most level-headed individuals I know. This is the case where a joke went a bit awry but it could have happened to any of us. He specifically made sure he wasn't malicious in what he did but the side effect over overwhelming MySpace's server was unintended." (the post itself is so far down in the thread I doubt it'll ever get noticed)
Even though I could continue with the analogy and still prove my point, let's step away from it for a second. This kid created a worm which exploited a security vulnerability in MySpace's system which added dear Samy as a friend to whomever stumbled upon the page containing the JavaScript in question.
The result of this is most likely a cross table containing Samy's unique ID and the ID for all of those who added him as a friend. Tell me... how long does it take to delete these records from the database? Go ahead and charge poor Sammy for the system administrator's time, repeat after me "I sentence you to pay a fine of 1 dollar to the evil and gutless corporation that is MySpace".
Now you might try and prove your point from a different perspective, "Ok, so what about the bandwidth used by this worm?". Let me tell you, it was most likely a lot less than Samy's site had to suffer through after being posted to Slashdot. Heck most of us use more downloading porn. But if you wish, go ahead and charge him 20 bucks or so for bandwidth used. Oh, and the fact that MySpace apparently shut down the entire site is their own fault.
The GP is spot on, the problem is that the people judging Samy don't understand technology and as a result the sentence was unnecessarily harsh. Then again, considering the US justice system perhaps he shouldn't have plead guilty and he would probably have got off scott-free.
Finally some common sense and well thought out reasoning in a thread primarily plagued by idiots. Regretfully/. has not blessed me with moderator points today, so I can only offer you kudos.
In essence I agree with you, sometimes it's better to ignore silly people. But in this case I believe Jack Thompson has quite a following among certain groups of people, if we were to ignore them they might be able to do a lot more damage. Instead, pointing out their flawed reasoning or mistakes such as this and discussing it openly can benefit "the cause".
Slashdot Mirror
I really, really don't want to see that in context.
The pure adrenaline pumping through my veins is the sole reason I don't do backups during system upgrades.
You wouldn't, by any chance, be talking about the Haagse Hogeschool? I know it's not a university by dutch terms, but perhaps you were actually referring to it.
The background story. Back in 1999 some members from the SVLUG and also a Slashdot editor (Chris DiBona) organized Windows Refund Day, I found out about this while watching the documentary Revolution OS (there's footage of the event in there) so I thought I'd share it with you. From the Windows Refund day page:Turns out it's a whole lot easier nowadays to return your copy of Windows than it was back then and you can thank these guys for it.
Why doesn't Google just sue itself and set precedent?
Let us look at some statistics mostly supplied by the CBS (the dutch census office) and SWOV (Institute for Road Safety Research). While the number of fatal accidents considerably decreased in 2004, the percentage of those fatalities caused by driving under the influence rose to 33%. "The use of alcohol has a strong and proven relation with driving ability and the risk of a crash.", you can look up the numerous amount of rapports yourself. Summary? Drinking and driving bad.
Also take a look at this graph which displays the number of fatalities in the period 1950-2004. Notice that free fall in the 1970s? That's when the government mandated seat belts and helmets, and implemented an alcohol limit (next to numerous other traffic safety measures).
This isn't "feel good" legislation, these laws actually make us safer without taking away any of our freedoms and are a prime example of the issues with which the government should concern itself.
From the Wikipedia article:Now that's hardcore.
I'm wondering why you seem to imply that listening to Pandora doesn't "broaden your spectrum"? Thanks to services like Last.fm and Pandora, I myself and many others have actually come in contact with a more diverse set of music than we would ever have without them. Through Last.fm I have personally discovered not only what I'd call my "true taste in music", but so many individual artists that I would never have heard of if it wasn't for Last.fm.
By using methods such as collaborative filtering, data analysis and pattern mining these services are able to predict and assist in finding out about music that might interest you. These systems however do not limit you solely to this aspect, Last.fm for example offers functionality such as being able to listen to tags (which also represent categories). But the former aspect is what I personally consider the most valuable.
So I in fact believe these services do broaden the spectrum of those listening, unlike (in general) Internet radio stations that still follow the "old model" of having human DJs decide what music to play. Not to mention commercial radio which is heavily influenced by advertisers, deals with record labels and in lesser extent government regulation.
Now I would also like to take this moment to respond to the issue at hand. However the solution I myself envision has already been presented by a fellow Slashdotter further down in the thread.Regrettably several artists I rather enjoy are signed to record labels who are affiliated with the RIAA (you can verify this using the RIAA Radar). However, I'd rather have services like Pandora and Last.fm continue to exist without offering these artists than go under because of royalty fees taking up their revenue. I for one refuse to purchase any albums from artists affiliated with an organization such as the RIAA.
Repeat after me "this is not stuff that matters, this is not news for nerds". I honestly can't decide between tagging it 'slashvertisment', 'vaporware' or plain simply 'bullshit'.
Just stop posting stories like this damnit, I'm looking at you Zonk!
Reminds me of a video on my YouTube playlist, Frank Caliendo - Letterman - Impressionists Week. Frank Caliendo does an impression of John Madden, should help those who haven't heard of him get the joke above.
- More On Gunshot Detection
- Don't Fire A Gun In Minneapolis, They're Listening
Follow the links in those posts for more information.Dating analogies on Slashdot, now I've seen it all.
grumbles, undoing trollmod.
Sexual content and violence should be regulated by the government exactly the same, which is no regulation at all. I'll admit there are a couple of extremes which obviously need to be regulated, but in general this isn't something the government should concern itself with.
This however is an excellent idea, let the users regulate themselves by adding an age flag in the transmission. Regulation such as that suggested by the report only adds another annoyance factor to a medium which is already plagued by them.
As somebody who seems to know Samy expressed: "I know Samy personally and he is one of the smartest and most level-headed individuals I know. This is the case where a joke went a bit awry but it could have happened to any of us. He specifically made sure he wasn't malicious in what he did but the side effect over overwhelming MySpace's server was unintended." (the post itself is so far down in the thread I doubt it'll ever get noticed)
Please have a little heart.
Even though I could continue with the analogy and still prove my point, let's step away from it for a second. This kid created a worm which exploited a security vulnerability in MySpace's system which added dear Samy as a friend to whomever stumbled upon the page containing the JavaScript in question.
The result of this is most likely a cross table containing Samy's unique ID and the ID for all of those who added him as a friend. Tell me... how long does it take to delete these records from the database? Go ahead and charge poor Sammy for the system administrator's time, repeat after me "I sentence you to pay a fine of 1 dollar to the evil and gutless corporation that is MySpace".
Now you might try and prove your point from a different perspective, "Ok, so what about the bandwidth used by this worm?". Let me tell you, it was most likely a lot less than Samy's site had to suffer through after being posted to Slashdot. Heck most of us use more downloading porn. But if you wish, go ahead and charge him 20 bucks or so for bandwidth used. Oh, and the fact that MySpace apparently shut down the entire site is their own fault.
The GP is spot on, the problem is that the people judging Samy don't understand technology and as a result the sentence was unnecessarily harsh. Then again, considering the US justice system perhaps he shouldn't have plead guilty and he would probably have got off scott-free.
cmon everybody let's send him an email to cheer the poor guy up! Oh wait...
Finally some common sense and well thought out reasoning in a thread primarily plagued by idiots. Regretfully /. has not blessed me with moderator points today, so I can only offer you kudos.
In essence I agree with you, sometimes it's better to ignore silly people. But in this case I believe Jack Thompson has quite a following among certain groups of people, if we were to ignore them they might be able to do a lot more damage. Instead, pointing out their flawed reasoning or mistakes such as this and discussing it openly can benefit "the cause".