Better still can we detect if the red blood cell is actually inside a mosquito (as distinct from inside a human), then attach the thermometer to a nano-thermonuclear device, and blow the little bastard sky high? They'll either evolve the ability not to bite humans or explode themselves out of existence.
"OK. So I download an album from the internet that I Do Not Own. It is horrible and illegal and for this I will burn in hell"
No. You have not committed a crime here*. The person who uploaded the song to you is who has committed a crime - they do not have the right to copy (aka copyright), so they are not allowed to create a copy and send it to you. There may be something similar to receipt of stolen goods but you have not broken copyright law by downloading, and indeed the RIAA isn't quoting receipt as the problem, but copyright.
(*Receipt of stolen goods is a crime, and different from theft. Not sure if receipt of illegally copied materials is a crime, but if it is, it is certainly different from copyright violation in the same way.)
If you downloaded straight into your shared directory, and someone downloads from your shared directory, THEN you have broken the copyright law, because you do not have the right to copy. This appears to be Brianna's problem, and as I read the article it seems she didn't realise she was automatically sharing everything she downloaded (that's how it's painted anyway. Who knows whether or not she knew for real.)
Buying a second hand CD is legal under First Sale. However it does mean that (at least) two people have now listened to the same music for only one royalty payment. This is something all merchants have to accept (with the possible exception of the new online merchants selling information that is tied to you as an individual).
Actually, you have enriched someone. The second hand CD shop has almost certainly made a profit on the sale. You haven't enriched the original artist, you'd have to buy new to do that, and it's up to you to decide if paying $15.99 to enrich an artist by $0.01 is better than paying $1.99 for, essentially, the same thing.
Buying the CD hasn't let the person who sent you the copies of those tracks off the hook. They are still guilty of copyright violation whether or not you own the CD, even if you bought it new and downloaded the track after you bought the CD.
Copyright laws are in fact very simple. It's the RIGHT... to COPY. That's it. If you copy something, and you haven't been granted the right to do that by the author, then you break the law. SCO, for instance, is breaking the law by redistributing GPL'd Linux code while rejecting the GPL terms - hell, they reject the whole GPL so why they think they have any rights at all to that code is beyond me, unless their lawyers aren't yet out of kindergarten and are using Toddler Logic.
"Lamo frequently trespassed on the networks of prominent companies, uncovering security holes and accessing sensitive information. He then informed the companies of his exploits and often worked with them, as a consultant, to close the holes."
On an enormous salary, no doubt. I expect he could pretty much name his price. It doesn't surprise me then that they can make out they are victims, because, essentially, they are victims, of extortion.
The approach needed now is to approach them first, before hacking them, and if they don't want your skills then leave them alone. If they do want your skills, then they can recruit you at a fair price, on mutually agreeable terms, and nobody has anyone over a barrel.
The other benefit of this approach is that they'll be able to tell the difference between malicious hackers and hackers who are only doing it for the good of the community, which I have absolutely no doubt is going to be Lamo's defence ("I'm breaking into your house for your own good, can't you see that?"). The former will hack without a contract; the latter will hack with one.
> impossible to filter out, or block, offensive Web sites without also blocking some legitimate sites
Remember how easy it was to block alt.sex.pedophilia? "Don't like it? Then don't go there." But the existence of this group was deemed "wrong", so a.s.p no longer exists, and as predicted this hasn't actually stopped the CPs who are now inhabiting alt.grannies.knitting instead, thus leading to the dual problem of people wanting knitting patterns getting a nasty shock and CP blocking now being impossible without also blocking knit-wits.
CP is a social problem, not a technological one. Reinstate a.s.p and anon.penet.fi, then it can be blocked on an induhvidual basis very easily, simply by induhviduals choosing not to go there.
Just for the terminally stupid - I'm not supporting kiddie pr0n here. All I'm saying is that there isn't a technical solution to it, just as there isn't a web site that can be blocked to put an end to drunk driving. Just like drunk driving, the solution is a social one, not a technological one. Even if we revert technology back to the stone age, child abuse will still happen in the back of caves.
This won't happen though. A lot (with a space) of my ideas seem to be crazy, such as removing a substantial proportion of drug crime my legalising drugs and selling them at Boots for a penny a pound rather than creating this enormous black market which needs similarly vast amounts of crime to keep it lubricated. Perhaps this is why my middle name is Vetinari:-)
"That's not an option" usually means "That's not an option worth pursuing," i.e. although it is technically an option, there is a flaw in it somewhere that causes bigger problems than it solves. It doesn't mean it really isn't an option. Agreed, in the strict sense of the word, it is an option, just as going on a red traffic light is an option.
Actually, I don't support it. But it was the bands who voluntarily signed the contract. A lot of up and coming bands think that getting a record contract is equal to hitting the big time and will sacrifice all to get that big contract. If I advertise for a development position that only gets the developer some cash when the product is sold, and then only a tiny percentage of the sale price, then any given developer has the choice whether or not to sign that contract. If nobody signs it, then I have to come up with a better contract. If millions of people are scrambling to get that contract, then why should I bother changing the terms? All bands have the choice whether or not to sign up with a record company.
Hollywood doesn't work that way because nobody would sign such a contract. Software engineering doesn't work that way for the same reason. But music does. Why? I dunno. Ask the bands who sign up with record companies.
> Optimally, what you would want to do is download the songs, and then mail the artists a nice crisp $2 bill
Ok, so supposing you go out on a job for your employer, at a cost to the client of $2500/day. Client says I'm not going to pay that, what's your salary son? followed by here's a cheque for that amount.
For accepting this you are defrauding your employer, and the client is acting dishonestly.
Like it or not the record label (big 5 or indy, doesn't make any difference) *IS* entitled to a share of the cake, for the risk they took when they pressed 1,000,000 CDs of your bashing, yelling, scraping and blowing; the marketing, the studio time, the lawyers, etc etc. If the musicians are stupid enough to sign a contract that gives them only 1% of that cake, then that's their problem. If you like their music (where "their" = "performing artist, composer, label"), your options are (1) buy the CDs and quit whingeing (2) find similar artists on other labels and listen to/buy that instead (3) pirate it. Sending cash directly to the artist is NOT an option.
> piracy is not only a lesser crime (IMHO) than stealing, as it only deprives the owner of an imagined profit, and, in fact, does not cause a direct loss like shoplifting, it really bears no relation to stealing
Still wrong. Piracy is a different crime than stealing, yes, but it has degrees of severity and cannot accurately be said to have a lesser impact in all cases.
Pete Jackson has just made a fortune with LOTR:FOTR and LOTR:TT, and is about to make another fortune with LOTR:ROTK. This has not yet been released. Let's assume he has the complete film and is just waiting for the right time to release it.
Now assume you somehow get hold of this reel and take a copy. That would be piracy. The impact to PJ at this point in time is non-existent. You have a copy, but you have done nothing with it. Suppose the dog eats it or something. If that remains the case, then the impact to PJ is zero, and if your crime were discovered at this point, your punishment would (should) be accordingly limited.
Now let's suppose you wait until release date, then watch your copy (and then the dog eats it, or whatever). Assuming you would have paid if you didn't have the copy, this now means you have deprived PJ of that ticket price. The impact of the piracy is still fairly non-existent, and any punishment you would receive at this stage, if caught, would still be fairly minimal.
What if you didn't wait until release date, and decided to encode your copy of LOTR:ROTK on VCD and sold 1,000,000 copies at a fiver each. You have now clearly deprived PJ of that income, and the effect of your piracy is much greater. The punishment should reflect the fact that you are now 5m better off, at PJ's expense. I'm NAL of course, and this isn't proof of any kind, but I'm sure any reasonable person would accept that PJ is worse off than he would have been had you not released those VCDs. You would have a hard time explaining in this scenario why PJ's loss is only imaginary.
Of course the real reason for the change of name to PalmSource is that they've discovered 80 lines or so of C code in PalmOS that matches code in the heart of the Linux kernel, no, the edges, no, the utilities, and they've decided to take a leaf out of SCO's book and sue IBM, no, Linus, no, everyone who even mentions Linux to try to prop up a dwindling market share.
Quick everyone, buy Palm shares cos they're about to shoot through the roof!
Um, not sure why you think doing your job isn't contributing to society. You're paying taxes, you're not sponging, you're doing something useful to someone, and your spare cash is pushing the economy along as you spend it. You want to contribute to society - do your job well, get pay rises etc.
So you're a student. Getting an education, even if it's at the country's expense, *is* giving to society. Instead of leaving and sponging, you're seeking to improve your skills, and thus eventually be able to do the above even better. Most societies, if not all, recognise the value of education and know the future lies in that route, even if it does cost a lot of tax$$$. Not educating people has a much greater impact on a society than educating people at that same society's expense. If you really feel you must do volunteer work as well, make sure your first, second, third and fourth priorities are your education and that you cannot possibly do better, then and ONLY then look to do a few hours outside that. You probably have a lot of homework - excel at that, then you can do the volunteer stuff when you're doing a 9-5. Don't underestimate the value of idle time - you need time to recover so that you can do your top priority best.
GCC is not the licence. GCC doesn't work on my ZX81, but that doesn't make the GPL discriminatory.
I see no reason the community should continue to support the company that is trying to destroy that community. Under the GPL SCO can continue to support a branch of GCC that works on SCO Unix; the difference is that they are doing the porting work instead of the community.
Agreed, this will affect users of SCO Unix. But only for code that is dependent on future releases of GCC, because all current GCC releases with SCO support will still be usable. That means nobody's software that is working today will suddenly stop working today. No planes will fall out of the sky, and the world won't implode. But if the next release of SCO SomethingWare needs GCC 3.(next release, whatever that is), then SCO are going to have to add compiler support in themselves, or make sure it works with GCC 3.(current release, with SCO support).
Not sure how you get that from the graph. For myself, I didn't know what the subject matter was, so I opened the window, went "ugh, geology", and closed it more or less straight away. Ok, perhaps this proves the point - for subjects I'm not interested in I have a short attention span, but this doesn't mean I have a SAS for everything.
You get an exponentially decaying number of hits, yes, but how many of those are people doing exactly what I did and not staying, as opposed to those who stay a while because they find geology interesting?
The last time you were/.ted, did the graph decay at the same rate or did it take longer to go down? If it took longer that would suggest shortening ASs, but then did you have anything of special interest up at the time? Bung some pr0n up there and see if the, er, bulge is a different shape.
It's more than just hardware this applies to. Right now I have a Linux box with a working ethernet card, no problem with that. I can ping IP addresses, but can't ping domain names. So DNS isn't working. But everything appears to be setup ok. I have absolutely no clue why it isn't working, and no amount of looking at hardware is going to change that.
DEFINITELY the length of time it takes to configure simple stuff.
Sometimes I genuinely find it easier to fdisk, install Windows, have it autodetect everything, note down what I want, then reinstall Linux again, and hope I don't have to iterate over this loop too many times.
Or you go onto the mailing lists and get all sorts of LAMER abuse and RTFM and so on. It just isn't worth it.
Ok so autodetection might not give an optimally working computer. But it would give a working computer, and I can get on with my life and optimise at my leisure.
The point of courts is to decide between right and wrong regardless of laws, not to decide whether or not a law was broken.
That's why laws are meaningless until they are proven in court.
Courts overrule politicians. Politicians can pass laws, but courts uphold them or not.
Patent laws are upheld because a court upheld them, not because a politician granted them. If all the court did was "did you break the law? yes? ok - GUILTY" then it wasn't doing its job properly.
Therefore the court/jury *is* who is to blame for this judgement.
Checking the site I'm not sure that's what these guys do. Clicked on Organisation and got a page full of weird PHB stuff like directors and committees...(shudder)
But DSL is still provided by the same weaselly companies that will screw you as soon as they've got enough subscribers that they don't need to be nice any more.
Why doesn't the/. community put more effort into stuff like Fibre to the Home? http://www.ftthcouncil.org/
Seems like a great idea to me. I'm not affiliated, I just like the idea of a full speed fibre running through my wall without any weaselly company trying to screw with my connection.
Hmm yes I can just see how well the following will go down in the Litigious States of America:
"Ah, Mr Jones. Please take a seat. Our computer says you're overweight, black and have missed two lectures, and that this means you're about to drop out, so we're going to bung you into Remedial classes, ok?"
yeah, but one they've taken the big sharers out and spread FUD around a bit they won't need to get to everyone. Coppers don't have to fine all speeders; only a few, and as a result the majority of us obey the speed limit to within a few mph; generally they don't give a hoot about people doing 80 in a 70 unless there's something dangerous about it (patchy fog etc) but if you do 150 in a 70 then you've got a big target painted on you.
Besides, won't everyone shortly be moving over to Freenet and make tracing impossible?
You can't countersue, because you would have to prove their claims were false, which is going to be difficult if not impossible without knowing exactly what code they are talking about. Why do you think IBM haven't lodged a countersuit yet? If IBM with all their legal beagles aren't countersuing, perhaps there's a good reason, no? For further proof why exactly do you think SCO haven't lodged a damage-limiting injunction, which they should already have done if they're genuinely losing money? Perhaps because they have NO CASE.
Slashdot Mirror
Better still can we detect if the red blood cell is actually inside a mosquito (as distinct from inside a human), then attach the thermometer to a nano-thermonuclear device, and blow the little bastard sky high? They'll either evolve the ability not to bite humans or explode themselves out of existence.
"OK. So I download an album from the internet that I Do Not Own. It is horrible and illegal and for this I will burn in hell"
No. You have not committed a crime here*. The person who uploaded the song to you is who has committed a crime - they do not have the right to copy (aka copyright), so they are not allowed to create a copy and send it to you. There may be something similar to receipt of stolen goods but you have not broken copyright law by downloading, and indeed the RIAA isn't quoting receipt as the problem, but copyright.
(*Receipt of stolen goods is a crime, and different from theft. Not sure if receipt of illegally copied materials is a crime, but if it is, it is certainly different from copyright violation in the same way.)
If you downloaded straight into your shared directory, and someone downloads from your shared directory, THEN you have broken the copyright law, because you do not have the right to copy. This appears to be Brianna's problem, and as I read the article it seems she didn't realise she was automatically sharing everything she downloaded (that's how it's painted anyway. Who knows whether or not she knew for real.)
Buying a second hand CD is legal under First Sale. However it does mean that (at least) two people have now listened to the same music for only one royalty payment. This is something all merchants have to accept (with the possible exception of the new online merchants selling information that is tied to you as an individual).
Actually, you have enriched someone. The second hand CD shop has almost certainly made a profit on the sale. You haven't enriched the original artist, you'd have to buy new to do that, and it's up to you to decide if paying $15.99 to enrich an artist by $0.01 is better than paying $1.99 for, essentially, the same thing.
Buying the CD hasn't let the person who sent you the copies of those tracks off the hook. They are still guilty of copyright violation whether or not you own the CD, even if you bought it new and downloaded the track after you bought the CD.
Copyright laws are in fact very simple. It's the RIGHT... to COPY. That's it. If you copy something, and you haven't been granted the right to do that by the author, then you break the law. SCO, for instance, is breaking the law by redistributing GPL'd Linux code while rejecting the GPL terms - hell, they reject the whole GPL so why they think they have any rights at all to that code is beyond me, unless their lawyers aren't yet out of kindergarten and are using Toddler Logic.
Maybe, but there's always going to be a niggling "but what hasn't he told us".
That's also true for paid work, but less likely as you're in serious doo-doos if found out then.
Not that he isn't in serious doo-doos now, of course.
"Lamo frequently trespassed on the networks of prominent companies, uncovering security holes and accessing sensitive information. He then informed the companies of his exploits and often worked with them, as a consultant, to close the holes."
On an enormous salary, no doubt. I expect he could pretty much name his price. It doesn't surprise me then that they can make out they are victims, because, essentially, they are victims, of extortion.
The approach needed now is to approach them first, before hacking them, and if they don't want your skills then leave them alone. If they do want your skills, then they can recruit you at a fair price, on mutually agreeable terms, and nobody has anyone over a barrel.
The other benefit of this approach is that they'll be able to tell the difference between malicious hackers and hackers who are only doing it for the good of the community, which I have absolutely no doubt is going to be Lamo's defence ("I'm breaking into your house for your own good, can't you see that?"). The former will hack without a contract; the latter will hack with one.
> impossible to filter out, or block, offensive Web sites without also blocking some legitimate sites
:-)
Remember how easy it was to block alt.sex.pedophilia? "Don't like it? Then don't go there." But the existence of this group was deemed "wrong", so a.s.p no longer exists, and as predicted this hasn't actually stopped the CPs who are now inhabiting alt.grannies.knitting instead, thus leading to the dual problem of people wanting knitting patterns getting a nasty shock and CP blocking now being impossible without also blocking knit-wits.
CP is a social problem, not a technological one. Reinstate a.s.p and anon.penet.fi, then it can be blocked on an induhvidual basis very easily, simply by induhviduals choosing not to go there.
Just for the terminally stupid - I'm not supporting kiddie pr0n here. All I'm saying is that there isn't a technical solution to it, just as there isn't a web site that can be blocked to put an end to drunk driving. Just like drunk driving, the solution is a social one, not a technological one. Even if we revert technology back to the stone age, child abuse will still happen in the back of caves.
This won't happen though. A lot (with a space) of my ideas seem to be crazy, such as removing a substantial proportion of drug crime my legalising drugs and selling them at Boots for a penny a pound rather than creating this enormous black market which needs similarly vast amounts of crime to keep it lubricated. Perhaps this is why my middle name is Vetinari
[ENGLISH LESSON]
"That's not an option" usually means "That's not an option worth pursuing," i.e. although it is technically an option, there is a flaw in it somewhere that causes bigger problems than it solves. It doesn't mean it really isn't an option. Agreed, in the strict sense of the word, it is an option, just as going on a red traffic light is an option.
[/ENGLISH LESSON]
Actually, I don't support it. But it was the bands who voluntarily signed the contract. A lot of up and coming bands think that getting a record contract is equal to hitting the big time and will sacrifice all to get that big contract. If I advertise for a development position that only gets the developer some cash when the product is sold, and then only a tiny percentage of the sale price, then any given developer has the choice whether or not to sign that contract. If nobody signs it, then I have to come up with a better contract. If millions of people are scrambling to get that contract, then why should I bother changing the terms? All bands have the choice whether or not to sign up with a record company.
Hollywood doesn't work that way because nobody would sign such a contract. Software engineering doesn't work that way for the same reason. But music does. Why? I dunno. Ask the bands who sign up with record companies.
> Optimally, what you would want to do is download the songs, and then mail the artists a nice crisp $2 bill
Ok, so supposing you go out on a job for your employer, at a cost to the client of $2500/day. Client says I'm not going to pay that, what's your salary son? followed by here's a cheque for that amount.
For accepting this you are defrauding your employer, and the client is acting dishonestly.
Like it or not the record label (big 5 or indy, doesn't make any difference) *IS* entitled to a share of the cake, for the risk they took when they pressed 1,000,000 CDs of your bashing, yelling, scraping and blowing; the marketing, the studio time, the lawyers, etc etc. If the musicians are stupid enough to sign a contract that gives them only 1% of that cake, then that's their problem. If you like their music (where "their" = "performing artist, composer, label"), your options are (1) buy the CDs and quit whingeing (2) find similar artists on other labels and listen to/buy that instead (3) pirate it. Sending cash directly to the artist is NOT an option.
Who needs to click? Their robots.txt doesn't appear to ban WebReaper...bwahahaha...
Slashdot all their affiliates too, with "Objects no more than 2 servers away from root".
And of course I wouldn't be irresponsible enough to say something like "Shift-Delete the lot and start again".
What Would SCO Do?
> piracy is not only a lesser crime (IMHO) than stealing, as it only deprives the owner of an imagined profit, and, in fact, does not cause a direct loss like shoplifting, it really bears no relation to stealing
Still wrong. Piracy is a different crime than stealing, yes, but it has degrees of severity and cannot accurately be said to have a lesser impact in all cases.
Pete Jackson has just made a fortune with LOTR:FOTR and LOTR:TT, and is about to make another fortune with LOTR:ROTK. This has not yet been released. Let's assume he has the complete film and is just waiting for the right time to release it.
Now assume you somehow get hold of this reel and take a copy. That would be piracy. The impact to PJ at this point in time is non-existent. You have a copy, but you have done nothing with it. Suppose the dog eats it or something. If that remains the case, then the impact to PJ is zero, and if your crime were discovered at this point, your punishment would (should) be accordingly limited.
Now let's suppose you wait until release date, then watch your copy (and then the dog eats it, or whatever). Assuming you would have paid if you didn't have the copy, this now means you have deprived PJ of that ticket price. The impact of the piracy is still fairly non-existent, and any punishment you would receive at this stage, if caught, would still be fairly minimal.
What if you didn't wait until release date, and decided to encode your copy of LOTR:ROTK on VCD and sold 1,000,000 copies at a fiver each. You have now clearly deprived PJ of that income, and the effect of your piracy is much greater. The punishment should reflect the fact that you are now 5m better off, at PJ's expense. I'm NAL of course, and this isn't proof of any kind, but I'm sure any reasonable person would accept that PJ is worse off than he would have been had you not released those VCDs. You would have a hard time explaining in this scenario why PJ's loss is only imaginary.
In Soviet Russia, Chewbacca uses YOU as a defence!
ok, sorry, couldn't help myself. I'll go and install SCO Unix as penance.
Of course the real reason for the change of name to PalmSource is that they've discovered 80 lines or so of C code in PalmOS that matches code in the heart of the Linux kernel, no, the edges, no, the utilities, and they've decided to take a leaf out of SCO's book and sue IBM, no, Linus, no, everyone who even mentions Linux to try to prop up a dwindling market share.
Quick everyone, buy Palm shares cos they're about to shoot through the roof!
Um, not sure why you think doing your job isn't contributing to society. You're paying taxes, you're not sponging, you're doing something useful to someone, and your spare cash is pushing the economy along as you spend it. You want to contribute to society - do your job well, get pay rises etc.
So you're a student. Getting an education, even if it's at the country's expense, *is* giving to society. Instead of leaving and sponging, you're seeking to improve your skills, and thus eventually be able to do the above even better. Most societies, if not all, recognise the value of education and know the future lies in that route, even if it does cost a lot of tax$$$. Not educating people has a much greater impact on a society than educating people at that same society's expense. If you really feel you must do volunteer work as well, make sure your first, second, third and fourth priorities are your education and that you cannot possibly do better, then and ONLY then look to do a few hours outside that. You probably have a lot of homework - excel at that, then you can do the volunteer stuff when you're doing a 9-5. Don't underestimate the value of idle time - you need time to recover so that you can do your top priority best.
DMCA Zealots
GCC is not the licence. GCC doesn't work on my ZX81, but that doesn't make the GPL discriminatory.
I see no reason the community should continue to support the company that is trying to destroy that community. Under the GPL SCO can continue to support a branch of GCC that works on SCO Unix; the difference is that they are doing the porting work instead of the community.
Agreed, this will affect users of SCO Unix. But only for code that is dependent on future releases of GCC, because all current GCC releases with SCO support will still be usable. That means nobody's software that is working today will suddenly stop working today. No planes will fall out of the sky, and the world won't implode. But if the next release of SCO SomethingWare needs GCC 3.(next release, whatever that is), then SCO are going to have to add compiler support in themselves, or make sure it works with GCC 3.(current release, with SCO support).
Not sure how you get that from the graph. For myself, I didn't know what the subject matter was, so I opened the window, went "ugh, geology", and closed it more or less straight away. Ok, perhaps this proves the point - for subjects I'm not interested in I have a short attention span, but this doesn't mean I have a SAS for everything.
/.ted, did the graph decay at the same rate or did it take longer to go down? If it took longer that would suggest shortening ASs, but then did you have anything of special interest up at the time? Bung some pr0n up there and see if the, er, bulge is a different shape.
You get an exponentially decaying number of hits, yes, but how many of those are people doing exactly what I did and not staying, as opposed to those who stay a while because they find geology interesting?
The last time you were
It's more than just hardware this applies to. Right now I have a Linux box with a working ethernet card, no problem with that. I can ping IP addresses, but can't ping domain names. So DNS isn't working. But everything appears to be setup ok. I have absolutely no clue why it isn't working, and no amount of looking at hardware is going to change that.
DEFINITELY the length of time it takes to configure simple stuff.
Sometimes I genuinely find it easier to fdisk, install Windows, have it autodetect everything, note down what I want, then reinstall Linux again, and hope I don't have to iterate over this loop too many times.
Or you go onto the mailing lists and get all sorts of LAMER abuse and RTFM and so on. It just isn't worth it.
Ok so autodetection might not give an optimally working computer. But it would give a working computer, and I can get on with my life and optimise at my leisure.
The point of courts is to decide between right and wrong regardless of laws, not to decide whether or not a law was broken.
That's why laws are meaningless until they are proven in court.
Courts overrule politicians. Politicians can pass laws, but courts uphold them or not.
Patent laws are upheld because a court upheld them, not because a politician granted them. If all the court did was "did you break the law? yes? ok - GUILTY" then it wasn't doing its job properly.
Therefore the court/jury *is* who is to blame for this judgement.
Checking the site I'm not sure that's what these guys do. Clicked on Organisation and got a page full of weird PHB stuff like directors and committees...(shudder)
But DSL is still provided by the same weaselly companies that will screw you as soon as they've got enough subscribers that they don't need to be nice any more.
/. community put more effort into stuff like Fibre to the Home? http://www.ftthcouncil.org/
Why doesn't the
Seems like a great idea to me. I'm not affiliated, I just like the idea of a full speed fibre running through my wall without any weaselly company trying to screw with my connection.
Hmm yes I can just see how well the following will go down in the Litigious States of America:
"Ah, Mr Jones. Please take a seat. Our computer says you're overweight, black and have missed two lectures, and that this means you're about to drop out, so we're going to bung you into Remedial classes, ok?"
yeah, but one they've taken the big sharers out and spread FUD around a bit they won't need to get to everyone. Coppers don't have to fine all speeders; only a few, and as a result the majority of us obey the speed limit to within a few mph; generally they don't give a hoot about people doing 80 in a 70 unless there's something dangerous about it (patchy fog etc) but if you do 150 in a 70 then you've got a big target painted on you.
Besides, won't everyone shortly be moving over to Freenet and make tracing impossible?
You can't countersue, because you would have to prove their claims were false, which is going to be difficult if not impossible without knowing exactly what code they are talking about. Why do you think IBM haven't lodged a countersuit yet? If IBM with all their legal beagles aren't countersuing, perhaps there's a good reason, no? For further proof why exactly do you think SCO haven't lodged a damage-limiting injunction, which they should already have done if they're genuinely losing money? Perhaps because they have NO CASE.