IANAL, but if I understand US law correctly you can drag anyone's ass to court if they file a bogus take down notice.
You obviously aren't a lawyer, because if you were one, you'd know just how God-awful expensive it is to "drag someone's ass to (Federal) court".
Big Content knows that the probability that someone would think it worthwhile to countersue is minuscule. Probably even quite a bit less than the probability of being threatened to be sued for filesharing.
Are you intentionally being dense? The timeline (link to fixed version of article) has an explicit entry for when the real work of transition started: September 22, 2006. Between that and the last milestone, 31 December 2009, I count 3.25 years.
The fact of the matter is, linux migrations of any size are not smooth and uneventful as the OP was suggesting, especially in a government beaurocracy.
The fact of the matter is, many of the posters here who have dealt with migrations away from Microsoft in small businesses (with tens of users and not tens of thousands of users), have reported the exact opposite. (There is no way for you to refute them, either.)
The microsoft bid was $23.7 million.... License upgrades? it's 14,000 computers. Even if you calculated the cost based on retail prices, that's 14,000 x $199, that's 2.7 million dollars,
I don't understand. Microsoft wanted Munich to pay $23.7M instead of going to the store and paying $2.7M? Sounds like a great deal to me (not)?
Your post doesn't make sense. It seems pretty clear that taking the Microsoft bid meant that Munich would be paying another $23M again at least every 6 years. Whereas going the Linux route means that after the initial conversion costs, they're only going to have to pay some developers whatever it takes to keep their distro current with respect to hardware (the cost of which cannot possibly be close to $4M/yr.).
You do realize that the post you are replying to explicitly qualifies that statement with "in my personal experience"?
> 7 *YEARS* later, and at a budget that is blown up to 2x the Microsoft bid
I already commented on your "2x" calculation in another post, but a quick perusal of the Wikipedia article on LiMux leads me to believe that the only "2x" we're going to find here when we look at the facts, is that it's not 7 years, it's actually 3.25 years, the other 3.25 years being delays in deciding to actually do it. Not in actual implementation.
And actually, after only a little over 2 years of actual work, roughly 85% of the Windows-only macros and forms had been converted to OpenOffice/Linux.
This leads me to believe that they will be "finished" within another 2 years or so. Long before your 2020 prediction. (I put the finished in quotations, because the goals of the project are only to get FOSS running on most of the desktops.)
> at a budget that is blown up to 2x the Microsoft bid
I'd like to see the calculation there. I have a feeling that this "2x" doesn't take into consideration the following:
The cost of the Microsoft bid needs to take into consideration the present value of the never-ending stream of payments for license upgrades in the future,
The cost of converting to Linux needs to be similarly calculated, as the present value of the stream of expenses to convert and also maintain in the future.
My observation that RMS is not "most people" was not judgmental, merely observational; actually, I hold him in very high regard. And when I wrote the post, I was thinking exactly what you posted (that it is lucky that there are some who have the balls to say things they believe in without regard to the whims of society).
I do my fair share of moderation, but I try to be careful to mod down only the posts which I feel do not add to the discussion, regardless of whether I personally agree or disagree (my apologies if the meaning of your post was that you wanted to mod me down as Offtopic).
But what I find most interesting is that most people learn, after a certain age, that it doesn't pay to say everything you think, no matter how insightful it actually is.
> you are handing your information over to other people, you can't make assumptions > about what they'll do with it.
This is not making assumptions, rather, it is assigning a risk factor, which is something all of us, including you, do 24/7 (well, at least during all sober waking hours), in order to survive. You do it whenever you drive (never "assume" that the car coming from the other direction isn't going to swerve into your lane?), whenever you deposit money in the bank (or you never "assume" that the bank won't make some mistake, or that your identity won't get stolen, and your money will disappear?), etc.
Your post seems to me to be based on a fallacy which I cannot name, which I will call "reality is binary". This fallacy is common in the security realm, where, for example, people see that a one-time pad is the only absolutely secure encryption and believe it is superior to AES, when the reality is that it never pays to make something absolutely secure, it only pays to make everything secure enough that it isn't worthwhile to make it more secure (and, of course, there is nothing which is absolutely secure, even using a one-time pad, because security also isn't binary).
To avoid this fallacy, you should have said "when you put your information on the internet, it is less private", but of course, that doesn't have the authoritative ring and doesn't look as good in bold letters. Effectively, your post should have dealt with the relative advantages to the woman for using Google Reader to communicate in a semi-private way vs. the probability that something would change and the information would become less private (as it did) and the damages that would cause.
It only takes one act to commit infringement. Congress specifically crafted the statute (and changed it from an earlier version) to say damages "per work" rather than damages "per act of infringement".
In that case, why would the judge even think about remittitur? You've answered the wrong question. The question you didn't answer was "what are the actual damages"?
Neither side has produced evidence that large numbers of copies of the works in question were distributed. Given the way filesharing works, it is highly unlikely that Thomas distributed more than 3-4 copies of each work (and even that is unlikely).
And by "being a dick" I meant more along the lines of simply being a jerk. To everyone. No discrimination necessary.
Personally I think that "being nice" is practically supererogationby definition. Are you sure you want to put the boundary between moral obligation and supererogation such that "being nice" is a moral obligation?
Example: if some guy is suffering from chronic pain, I don't think of that justifying him doing something I consider to be immoral, like torturing small animals, but I could easily see it justifying him being inconsiderate to other people (being "a jerk", like butting in line at the supermarket).
Sorry if this is too much of a waste of your time, but I've always wondered: is your Slashdot ID taken from dark elves, or is it after my favorite cat character in SF&F?
The sampling of posts I've seen here on Slashdot about the ramifications of personal bankruptcy lead me to believe that it is not something which "ruins your life for all eternity". I assume that Australia also has personal bankruptcy laws which prevent debt bondage of the form you are talking about.
The quote is from a statement to Congress, smart guy. There is no copyright on government documents. Work on your reading comprehension.
Way to try to pretend that the mess which is copyright law is simple! The real truth is that works of the US Government, i.e., employees of the government, are not subject to US copyright. Works which are commissioned by the US Government, e.g., anything done by a contractor, may or may not be subject to US copyright, it depends.
Anyway, you more or less have made an epic fail in mathematics. If there was no copyright on his words, this is equivalent to the copyright on them expiring at time = 0, i.e., immediately.
And BTW, did you even think about the significance of my post? It has little to do with whether that particular speech was ever under copyright. Or do you feel that we should be content to be limited to only posting quotations before Congress on Slashdot? Because that would be the reality of the situation if Clemens had had his way with respect to eternal copyright.
A tip to you. You are totally correct, and are posting in a thread which does actually reflect poorly on Apple. And they managed to do it without any help from Tim C.
Pretty funny that the only reason why you could post that here, and the only reason I was able to read it, and check what was the context by searching in Google, is because, well, the copyright on it expired?
I hate the **{IA}A's as much or more than the average Slashdotter, but there's one big problem with your post. Judicial decisions like this are valid only on a per-case basis. Most of what you state is true, except for two items:
They didn't sue the network printer IIRC, just sent it a DMCA takedown notice.
Since they have won in court in two different cases already (ignoring all of the default judgments), it's not at all clear that it wasn't their goal in this particular case. I do agree that, in general, their strategy is "Enough people will fold and pay up immediately that it is worth our while". You just haven't presented any evidence that this particular case was frivolous.
> Make steganography and encryption completely illegal with harsh penalties and they all but go away.
You do realize that DRM is a form of encryption, right? I don't see that encryption is going to be illegal in the near future. Too useful for our corporate overlords.
I suppose you're right that most people won't bother to chance trying to be free under such a harsh totalitarian government, but the point of my post was that technology would at least give them the tools for freedom, if they dared. For example, their illicit tools could be on a bootable CD, which prompts for a password to decrypt the OS. It is possible to have an encryption scheme with a data rate less than 1/2 such that there are actually 2 passwords, each one of which decrypts the file to a different (given) result (and except for the unusual data rate, the existence of the second password is deniable). So one password could let you boot a legal OS, and the second, an illicit one (assuming hardware which doesn't require Trusted Computing).
So, no. The only closed Internet is a a read-only Internet.
It does lower the bandwidth a lot. But as Thing 1 already replied to you, the high-bandwidth stuff can be done by sneakernet.
Your fear from Trusted Computing is more real. But even there, we are close to the point where third-world countries can host illicit fabs for untrusted computing platforms. Well, I suppose if possession of untrusted computing would be punished draconianly.... but if it gets that bad, the third world will be looking like a really good place to live for a lot of us technophiles....
I have little detail about iBooks, but I see a comment asking about DRM within the first 31 comments on the review on cnet.com. The reply to that comment leads me to believe that the eBook industry is heading into a big mess of incompatible DRM formats, just what caused the music industry such problems when they unsuccessfully tried to dethrone iTunes.
One of the fallouts of that was that selling DRM-free music started to be viewed by the music industry as a a necessary evil. We can only hope that the book publishing industry will take less time to get to the same (correct) conclusion.
> no one has ever been arrested, charged, or sued for downloading a song.
The whole reason for the second trial in this case was because in the first trial the judge instructed the jury that "making available" was a form of "distribution". In the second trial, he was careful to sidestep that legal question by instructing the jury merely that "downloading or distributing without permission of the rightsholder is in violation of copyright law" (not an exact quotation). Considering that RIAA didn't attempt to prove distribution, only "making available", one must assume that the jury awarded the second trial's damages for the downloading, no?
> Not too long ago, it was deemed completely impossible
Yes, but this is a much different matter than faster-than-light travel. Ordinary flight wasn't deemed impossible because we had a model of the physical universe where the impossibility of ordinary flight was an axiom. That would have been pretty stupid if physicists had thought that, considering that birds are also heavier than air.
It seems to me that the vast majority of vendor-supplied cellular phones which are capable of doing encrypted VoIP also implement firmware update Over-the-Air, and I wouldn't be surprised if even those models/vendors which ordinarily notify their customers about such updates (or even ask for confirmation) have a special backdoor which skips that for "updating" the phone for the three-letter agencies/law enforcement.
If you worry about this kind of stuff, you take your phone battery out when you don't need to use it (turning the phone off is reported to be insufficient). Or you use a really really old phone which you know can't be updated over the air (but that still doesn't stop the cellular provider from knowing where you are).
From looking at the other posts you're thrown out in this discussion, including one where you tried to claim that since using P2P can give increased download speeds that's "profiting", I'm just waiting for you to pull the "think of the artists" line out of your posterior next.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but if I understand US law correctly you can drag anyone's ass to court if they file a bogus take down notice.
You obviously aren't a lawyer, because if you were one, you'd know just how God-awful expensive it is to "drag someone's ass to (Federal) court".
Big Content knows that the probability that someone would think it worthwhile to countersue is minuscule. Probably even quite a bit less than the probability of being threatened to be sued for filesharing.
Are you intentionally being dense? The timeline (link to fixed version of article) has an explicit entry for when the real work of transition started: September 22, 2006. Between that and the last milestone, 31 December 2009, I count 3.25 years.
The fact of the matter is, linux migrations of any size are not smooth and uneventful as the OP was suggesting, especially in a government beaurocracy.
The fact of the matter is, many of the posters here who have dealt with migrations away from Microsoft in small businesses (with tens of users and not tens of thousands of users), have reported the exact opposite. (There is no way for you to refute them, either.)
The microsoft bid was $23.7 million. ... License upgrades? it's 14,000 computers. Even if you calculated the cost based on retail prices, that's 14,000 x $199, that's 2.7 million dollars,
I don't understand. Microsoft wanted Munich to pay $23.7M instead of going to the store and paying $2.7M? Sounds like a great deal to me (not)?
Your post doesn't make sense. It seems pretty clear that taking the Microsoft bid meant that Munich would be paying another $23M again at least every 6 years. Whereas going the Linux route means that after the initial conversion costs, they're only going to have to pay some developers whatever it takes to keep their distro current with respect to hardware (the cost of which cannot possibly be close to $4M/yr.).
Please explain?
> "never materialize" my rear end.
You do realize that the post you are replying to explicitly qualifies that statement with "in my personal experience"?
> 7 *YEARS* later, and at a budget that is blown up to 2x the Microsoft bid
I already commented on your "2x" calculation in another post, but a quick perusal of the Wikipedia article on LiMux leads me to believe that the only "2x" we're going to find here when we look at the facts, is that it's not 7 years, it's actually 3.25 years, the other 3.25 years being delays in deciding to actually do it. Not in actual implementation.
And actually, after only a little over 2 years of actual work, roughly 85% of the Windows-only macros and forms had been converted to OpenOffice/Linux.
This leads me to believe that they will be "finished" within another 2 years or so. Long before your 2020 prediction. (I put the finished in quotations, because the goals of the project are only to get FOSS running on most of the desktops.)
> at a budget that is blown up to 2x the Microsoft bid
I'd like to see the calculation there. I have a feeling that this "2x" doesn't take into consideration the following:
My observation that RMS is not "most people" was not judgmental, merely observational; actually, I hold him in very high regard. And when I wrote the post, I was thinking exactly what you posted (that it is lucky that there are some who have the balls to say things they believe in without regard to the whims of society).
I do my fair share of moderation, but I try to be careful to mod down only the posts which I feel do not add to the discussion, regardless of whether I personally agree or disagree (my apologies if the meaning of your post was that you wanted to mod me down as Offtopic).
> That's pretty insightful of him!
But what I find most interesting is that most people learn, after a certain age, that it doesn't pay to say everything you think, no matter how insightful it actually is.
> you are handing your information over to other people, you can't make assumptions
> about what they'll do with it.
This is not making assumptions, rather, it is assigning a risk factor, which is something all of us, including you, do 24/7 (well, at least during all sober waking hours), in order to survive. You do it whenever you drive (never "assume" that the car coming from the other direction isn't going to swerve into your lane?), whenever you deposit money in the bank (or you never "assume" that the bank won't make some mistake, or that your identity won't get stolen, and your money will disappear?), etc.
Your post seems to me to be based on a fallacy which I cannot name, which I will call "reality is binary". This fallacy is common in the security realm, where, for example, people see that a one-time pad is the only absolutely secure encryption and believe it is superior to AES, when the reality is that it never pays to make something absolutely secure, it only pays to make everything secure enough that it isn't worthwhile to make it more secure (and, of course, there is nothing which is absolutely secure, even using a one-time pad, because security also isn't binary).
To avoid this fallacy, you should have said "when you put your information on the internet, it is less private", but of course, that doesn't have the authoritative ring and doesn't look as good in bold letters. Effectively, your post should have dealt with the relative advantages to the woman for using Google Reader to communicate in a semi-private way vs. the probability that something would change and the information would become less private (as it did) and the damages that would cause.
It only takes one act to commit infringement. Congress specifically crafted the statute (and changed it from an earlier version) to say damages "per work" rather than damages "per act of infringement".
In that case, why would the judge even think about remittitur? You've answered the wrong question. The question you didn't answer was "what are the actual damages"?
> the infringement of the right to distribute
Neither side has produced evidence that large numbers of copies of the works in question were distributed. Given the way filesharing works, it is highly unlikely that Thomas distributed more than 3-4 copies of each work (and even that is unlikely).
And by "being a dick" I meant more along the lines of simply being a jerk. To everyone. No discrimination necessary.
Personally I think that "being nice" is practically supererogation by definition. Are you sure you want to put the boundary between moral obligation and supererogation such that "being nice" is a moral obligation?
Example: if some guy is suffering from chronic pain, I don't think of that justifying him doing something I consider to be immoral, like torturing small animals, but I could easily see it justifying him being inconsiderate to other people (being "a jerk", like butting in line at the supermarket).
Sorry if this is too much of a waste of your time, but I've always wondered: is your Slashdot ID taken from dark elves, or is it after my favorite cat character in SF&F?
The sampling of posts I've seen here on Slashdot about the ramifications of personal bankruptcy lead me to believe that it is not something which "ruins your life for all eternity". I assume that Australia also has personal bankruptcy laws which prevent debt bondage of the form you are talking about.
The quote is from a statement to Congress, smart guy. There is no copyright on government documents. Work on your reading comprehension.
Way to try to pretend that the mess which is copyright law is simple! The real truth is that works of the US Government, i.e., employees of the government, are not subject to US copyright. Works which are commissioned by the US Government, e.g., anything done by a contractor, may or may not be subject to US copyright, it depends.
Anyway, you more or less have made an epic fail in mathematics. If there was no copyright on his words, this is equivalent to the copyright on them expiring at time = 0, i.e., immediately.
And BTW, did you even think about the significance of my post? It has little to do with whether that particular speech was ever under copyright. Or do you feel that we should be content to be limited to only posting quotations before Congress on Slashdot? Because that would be the reality of the situation if Clemens had had his way with respect to eternal copyright.
A tip to you. You are totally correct, and are posting in a thread which does actually reflect poorly on Apple. And they managed to do it without any help from Tim C.
Pretty funny that the only reason why you could post that here, and the only reason I was able to read it, and check what was the context by searching in Google, is because, well, the copyright on it expired?
I hate the **{IA}A's as much or more than the average Slashdotter, but there's one big problem with your post. Judicial decisions like this are valid only on a per-case basis. Most of what you state is true, except for two items:
> Make steganography and encryption completely illegal with harsh penalties and they all but go away.
You do realize that DRM is a form of encryption, right? I don't see that encryption is going to be illegal in the near future. Too useful for our corporate overlords.
I suppose you're right that most people won't bother to chance trying to be free under such a harsh totalitarian government, but the point of my post was that technology would at least give them the tools for freedom, if they dared. For example, their illicit tools could be on a bootable CD, which prompts for a password to decrypt the OS. It is possible to have an encryption scheme with a data rate less than 1/2 such that there are actually 2 passwords, each one of which decrypts the file to a different (given) result (and except for the unusual data rate, the existence of the second password is deniable). So one password could let you boot a legal OS, and the second, an illicit one (assuming hardware which doesn't require Trusted Computing).
> Imagine a closed Internet where every communication, every URL and every download is logged.
Cannot happen. Well, at least effectively. Because of things called "steganography" and "perfect forward secrecy".
So, no. The only closed Internet is a a read-only Internet.
It does lower the bandwidth a lot. But as Thing 1 already replied to you, the high-bandwidth stuff can be done by sneakernet.
Your fear from Trusted Computing is more real. But even there, we are close to the point where third-world countries can host illicit fabs for untrusted computing platforms. Well, I suppose if possession of untrusted computing would be punished draconianly.... but if it gets that bad, the third world will be looking like a really good place to live for a lot of us technophiles....
I have little detail about iBooks, but I see a comment asking about DRM within the first 31 comments on the review on cnet.com. The reply to that comment leads me to believe that the eBook industry is heading into a big mess of incompatible DRM formats, just what caused the music industry such problems when they unsuccessfully tried to dethrone iTunes.
One of the fallouts of that was that selling DRM-free music started to be viewed by the music industry as a a necessary evil. We can only hope that the book publishing industry will take less time to get to the same (correct) conclusion.
> no one has ever been arrested, charged, or sued for downloading a song.
The whole reason for the second trial in this case was because in the first trial the judge instructed the jury that "making available" was a form of "distribution". In the second trial, he was careful to sidestep that legal question by instructing the jury merely that "downloading or distributing without permission of the rightsholder is in violation of copyright law" (not an exact quotation). Considering that RIAA didn't attempt to prove distribution, only "making available", one must assume that the jury awarded the second trial's damages for the downloading, no?
> Not too long ago, it was deemed completely impossible
Yes, but this is a much different matter than faster-than-light travel. Ordinary flight wasn't deemed impossible because we had a model of the physical universe where the impossibility of ordinary flight was an axiom. That would have been pretty stupid if physicists had thought that, considering that birds are also heavier than air.
It seems to me that the vast majority of vendor-supplied cellular phones which are capable of doing encrypted VoIP also implement firmware update Over-the-Air, and I wouldn't be surprised if even those models/vendors which ordinarily notify their customers about such updates (or even ask for confirmation) have a special backdoor which skips that for "updating" the phone for the three-letter agencies/law enforcement.
If you worry about this kind of stuff, you take your phone battery out when you don't need to use it (turning the phone off is reported to be insufficient). Or you use a really really old phone which you know can't be updated over the air (but that still doesn't stop the cellular provider from knowing where you are).
From looking at the other posts you're thrown out in this discussion, including one where you tried to claim that since using P2P can give increased download speeds that's "profiting", I'm just waiting for you to pull the "think of the artists" line out of your posterior next.
Wow, I think that's the hardest I've ever laughed at Penny Arcade, ever... Thanks, putting it into the context of the thread was genius.