After swearing it off since my disaster with RedHat 4
It might be a good thing to be more specific, as there are now two entirely different Red Hat distributions that could be shortened to Red Hat 4, the ancient Red Hat Linux 4 and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, which arrived in February 2005. My guess is that you are referring to the former.
I now know I am going to make the effort to explore Linux again.
Even if you would finally end up with something else, I suggest trying one of Red Hat's recent distributions so that you can compare with the last one you ran. There is the free community-developed and Red Hat-sponsored Fedora (Latest release is 7), and there is the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Latest release is 5). The latter can be used for free anyway, by using one of its clones, e.g. CentOS. CentOS is built from RHEL sources, with only the Red Hat artwork replaced.
So you can be sure that, if there is any such law imposed, the law will say "must include a legal copy of Microsoft Windows", and not just "must include an operating system".
Don't be so sure about that. Microsoft may be lobbying for such a law, but the United States is still their adversary. Making a law that says that you must buy an american operating system if you buy a computer would not seem like a sensible thing to do.
In western Europe, such laws would be strongly frowned upon, as we have no tradition of forcing people to use a specific product.
Well, I initially misread the caption as Man Finally Makes Weed-Smoking Robot...
And I misinterpreted the title as a robot designed to search for and destroy Cannabis fields. Unfortunately, it turned out that this robot is just designed to eliminate ordinary weeds from fields of useful crops.
Re:Microsoft has nothing to fear
on
GPLv3 Released
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· Score: 1
I don't think it would be hard for them to find the proxy patent troll for a reasonable fee.
They already have one. It's called Intellectual Ventures, and is run by the former Microsoft manager Nathan Myhrvold.
Refuse? Then they will put it on your credit report. Now try getting a job or apartment or home?
I can understand that it may be hard to get things that consts money, like an apartment or a loan. But a job? Do employers check the credit report of would-be employees in the US? Why?
The code that for example novell puts in the kernel is covered by the GPL 2, but how will that work out with the patent deal they made? Will a switch (if)to GPL 3 of the kernel change this?
The switch can't happen unless all contributors accept it, since they usually hold the copyright to their contributions. Novell can simply say "no, we won't permit that", and the kernel either stays GPLv2, or the Novell contributions must be ripped out.
Avoiding being tagged for illegal uploads by using Linux imagaes was brilliant
Well, I needed some large data files that would be legal to share to even enter the hubs, so Linux distribution images looked like a good option, especially since I already had them on the disk.
I have no idea how anybody could come to the conclusion that it's OK to download that which is not acceptable to upload... as a matter of scale I can certainly understand, but as a matter of what is considered morally or legally right I don't see the difference.
The reason was that the ones facilitating the unauthorized spreading of copyrighted material were the uploaders, not the downloaders, who just took advantage of the opportunity. Without uploaders, there would be no filesharing, so even if you just go after the uploaders, you could theoretically shut down the entire operation.
It is also an issue of who you want to punish. In Sweden, prositution is legal, but buying sex from prostitutes is not. The reason is that the state does not want to go after and punish the prostitutes by making it a crime (they often have sufficient hardships without also becoming criminals), but still go after the phenomenon. The buyers were seen as the party to go after (the greater evil, if you wish), and thus only buying sex was made to be a crime.
I suspect that the reason that they didn't say "all Core 2 Duos, Extremes, and Quads" is because there is a 32-bit only Core 2 model (based on Yonah I believe) floating around that it doesn't affect.
The Yonah is not a Core 2, but a Core processor. To add some confusion, the Core (Yonah) does not even use the Core microarchitecture, but the Pentium M microarchitecture. Thus, technically it would probably be correct to say that all processors of the Core microarchitecture are affected, but since Intel created such a confusing scheme (namely introducing the Core processor brand before the Core microarchitecture), they must explicitly exclude the Core Duo.
and that trains are unprofitable unless they are subsidised to about half of their operating costs every year.
You could also say that air travel is heavily subsidised, as they pay no energy taxes. If they would pay the same energy taxes as ground vehicles, they might go bust in an instant.
That depends. The microcode update could either reside in the BIOS image, and be applied during BIOS startup, or reside in the operating system and be applied during the operating system startup process.
Well said. I only want to add this, not for you, but for the RIAA:
If you are going to argue from a moral high position, you cannot at the same time stoop to moral low positions in your quest against copyright infrinements of your members' works. By using immoral tactics while arguing about the immorality of sharing your copyrighted works, your hypocrisy becomes extremely obvious. Morality does only seem to be important when it benefits the RIAA. When it benefits someone else, morality can obviously be overlooked.
since DC++ requires 500MB (...) of your own files to be available on the network
It does? Wrong, that's hub-specific. I don't use DC any longer, but IIRC the required share sizes varied from hub to hub. Some would require nothing, while others could require share sizes as large as 60 or 100 GB.
it's a pretty good bet that they are all uploading as well.
Well yes, but what are they uploading? To avoid uploading something illegal, I always put some ISO images of a few Linux distros in my share folder when I used DC. This at least defeats the automatic share size detection, although the administrator could manually kick you out if they find out that your share does not contain any "valuable" (read: illegal) content. Never happened to me though, as far as I can recall, but it is a possibility, especially on a hub with a small user base and an active administrator.
Call me a coward, but I stopped filesharing when Sweden (where I live) implemented a new copyright law prohibiting unauthorized downloads of copyrighted material. Before the new law was implemented, only uploads were illegal. If you made sure that you didn't upload any material that you weren't allowed to upload, you were in the clear. Even top government officials, such as at least one minister in the then-current administration, publicly admitted that they downloaded (stole, according to the music companies) music from the filesharing networks. I actually doubt that the law would have been changed if it weren't for the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD), which mandated prohibition of unauthorized downloads.
Yay ! State-sponsored universities should spend bazillions of tax dollars in courts to protect our God-given "right" to download Britney's latest tripe for free (and saturate their bandwidth in the process) ! For great justice !!11!!
Denying requests for students' private information based on mere allegations does not amount to "protecting our God-given "right" to download Britney's latest tripe for free", it simply amounts to protecting their students' privacy. If the RIAA has something else than unfounded claims, they can surely go to court and obtain a subpoena for that information.
Correct, but you can hardly call someone a thief just because the RIAA says so. If they had any evidence, why wouldn't they go to court and acquire a subpoena for the information? Then the university would have a legal obligation to provide the information.
In this case though, it appears that the RIAA does not have any evidence, and may have just selected some random IP addresses belonging to the university with a demand that the students using those IP addresses at the time the RIAA specified pay up or risk prosecution.
To deny requests for information based on mere allegations doesn't amount to defending theives, it amounts to protecting their students' privacy. I guess you never heard of "innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt".
If I learned that they wasted my donations for supporting illegal file sharing, then I'd stop my donations immediately
How about supporting their students' privacy? I mean, unless the RIAA has a warrant or a subpoena, the university does not have any obligation to give out their students' personal information. Does this amount to supporting illegal filesharing to you? Just because they refuse a warrantless request from the RIAA?
Doesn't the RIAA have the right to find out who is sharing their members' product without permission?
Based on mere allegations without any credible evidence, no. They can try, but nobody have any obligation to give in to their requests. If they have evidence, why not go to court and get a warrant/subpoena? Instead, they just try to bully the university into handing out the information. "Give us this information, or we'll sue you for the infringement"
If everyone on a campus wrote their representative and demanded they change the laws, the RIAA would be drowned out in the noise.
Written demands from citizens surely does not trump expensive dinners and campaign contributions.
The University has decided that they do not want to fight that battle.
I just hope that enough students choose other universities then so that they feel that fighting this battle might be a good thing. I for sure wouldn't want to go to a university that hands out my personal information to anyone that asks.
If the university willingly turn over information, then no law has been broken.
No, but the university shouldn't turn over the information, unless the requestor is a law enforcement authority with a court order or someone else with a subpoena.
What is wrong with one agency asking another agency about yet another agencies' identity?
Well, nothing. They can ask all they want, the issue is that the university should not give in to these requests unless required by a court order or subpoena.
So if I accuse you of breaking the law, I should get your real name, address, telephone number, social security number, etc?
Accusations are not enough. If the university hands out personal information to an accuser that does not hold a court order for that information, the university is doing the wrong thing. Students trust the university to not share their sensitive identifying information with third parties (authorities are not included), and helping the RIAA just because of an accusation breaks that trust.
We all think permissions are a good idea for computer security.
Yes we do, as long as their enforcement is managed by the computer owner.
I can see how portable intrinsic permissions could be a very good idea for media.
The problem here is that with DRM, computers obey the content owners' wishes, not the computer owners' wishes. The idea that my computer would refuse to permit me to do something because some third party says so is simply unacceptable.
Protecting internal documents.
No DRM is required to protect internal documents, ordinary permission systems would do fine. DRM is used to protect content that the owner want to publish for a wider audience, but still retain some control over. The problem is that to view the content, the key needs to be supplied, and with the key, the content can be permanently emancipated. Their so-called "solution" is to obfuscate the code in several ways so that key recovery will be harder. It is still not impossible to recover though.
And people complain about the hardware compatibility in Linux
Quite commonly just because they read a five year old post on some message board. It usually turns out that the user didn't experience the problem himself, but heard it from his father's friend's sister's friend, who read it on a message board, so it must be true.:)
Slashdot Mirror
It might be a good thing to be more specific, as there are now two entirely different Red Hat distributions that could be shortened to Red Hat 4, the ancient Red Hat Linux 4 and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, which arrived in February 2005. My guess is that you are referring to the former.
I now know I am going to make the effort to explore Linux again.Even if you would finally end up with something else, I suggest trying one of Red Hat's recent distributions so that you can compare with the last one you ran. There is the free community-developed and Red Hat-sponsored Fedora (Latest release is 7), and there is the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Latest release is 5). The latter can be used for free anyway, by using one of its clones, e.g. CentOS. CentOS is built from RHEL sources, with only the Red Hat artwork replaced.
Don't be so sure about that. Microsoft may be lobbying for such a law, but the United States is still their adversary. Making a law that says that you must buy an american operating system if you buy a computer would not seem like a sensible thing to do.
In western Europe, such laws would be strongly frowned upon, as we have no tradition of forcing people to use a specific product.
And I misinterpreted the title as a robot designed to search for and destroy Cannabis fields. Unfortunately, it turned out that this robot is just designed to eliminate ordinary weeds from fields of useful crops.
They already have one. It's called Intellectual Ventures, and is run by the former Microsoft manager Nathan Myhrvold.
I think that he meant that TiVo publishes the modifications it makes to the GPL-covered software, as required by the license.
I can understand that it may be hard to get things that consts money, like an apartment or a loan. But a job? Do employers check the credit report of would-be employees in the US? Why?
The switch can't happen unless all contributors accept it, since they usually hold the copyright to their contributions. Novell can simply say "no, we won't permit that", and the kernel either stays GPLv2, or the Novell contributions must be ripped out.
Well, I needed some large data files that would be legal to share to even enter the hubs, so Linux distribution images looked like a good option, especially since I already had them on the disk.
I have no idea how anybody could come to the conclusion that it's OK to download that which is not acceptable to upload... as a matter of scale I can certainly understand, but as a matter of what is considered morally or legally right I don't see the difference.The reason was that the ones facilitating the unauthorized spreading of copyrighted material were the uploaders, not the downloaders, who just took advantage of the opportunity. Without uploaders, there would be no filesharing, so even if you just go after the uploaders, you could theoretically shut down the entire operation.
It is also an issue of who you want to punish. In Sweden, prositution is legal, but buying sex from prostitutes is not. The reason is that the state does not want to go after and punish the prostitutes by making it a crime (they often have sufficient hardships without also becoming criminals), but still go after the phenomenon. The buyers were seen as the party to go after (the greater evil, if you wish), and thus only buying sex was made to be a crime.
The Yonah is not a Core 2, but a Core processor. To add some confusion, the Core (Yonah) does not even use the Core microarchitecture, but the Pentium M microarchitecture. Thus, technically it would probably be correct to say that all processors of the Core microarchitecture are affected, but since Intel created such a confusing scheme (namely introducing the Core processor brand before the Core microarchitecture), they must explicitly exclude the Core Duo.
You could also say that air travel is heavily subsidised, as they pay no energy taxes. If they would pay the same energy taxes as ground vehicles, they might go bust in an instant.
That depends. The microcode update could either reside in the BIOS image, and be applied during BIOS startup, or reside in the operating system and be applied during the operating system startup process.
And that is why the microcode update has to be applied on each boot.
No, but they are certainly part of the copyright and DRM mafia. Incidentally, they are a member of a similar organization called the BSA.
Well said. I only want to add this, not for you, but for the RIAA:
If you are going to argue from a moral high position, you cannot at the same time stoop to moral low positions in your quest against copyright infrinements of your members' works. By using immoral tactics while arguing about the immorality of sharing your copyrighted works, your hypocrisy becomes extremely obvious. Morality does only seem to be important when it benefits the RIAA. When it benefits someone else, morality can obviously be overlooked.
It does? Wrong, that's hub-specific. I don't use DC any longer, but IIRC the required share sizes varied from hub to hub. Some would require nothing, while others could require share sizes as large as 60 or 100 GB.
it's a pretty good bet that they are all uploading as well.Well yes, but what are they uploading? To avoid uploading something illegal, I always put some ISO images of a few Linux distros in my share folder when I used DC. This at least defeats the automatic share size detection, although the administrator could manually kick you out if they find out that your share does not contain any "valuable" (read: illegal) content. Never happened to me though, as far as I can recall, but it is a possibility, especially on a hub with a small user base and an active administrator.
Call me a coward, but I stopped filesharing when Sweden (where I live) implemented a new copyright law prohibiting unauthorized downloads of copyrighted material. Before the new law was implemented, only uploads were illegal. If you made sure that you didn't upload any material that you weren't allowed to upload, you were in the clear. Even top government officials, such as at least one minister in the then-current administration, publicly admitted that they downloaded (stole, according to the music companies) music from the filesharing networks. I actually doubt that the law would have been changed if it weren't for the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD), which mandated prohibition of unauthorized downloads.
Denying requests for students' private information based on mere allegations does not amount to "protecting our God-given "right" to download Britney's latest tripe for free", it simply amounts to protecting their students' privacy. If the RIAA has something else than unfounded claims, they can surely go to court and obtain a subpoena for that information.
Correct, but you can hardly call someone a thief just because the RIAA says so. If they had any evidence, why wouldn't they go to court and acquire a subpoena for the information? Then the university would have a legal obligation to provide the information.
In this case though, it appears that the RIAA does not have any evidence, and may have just selected some random IP addresses belonging to the university with a demand that the students using those IP addresses at the time the RIAA specified pay up or risk prosecution.
To deny requests for information based on mere allegations doesn't amount to defending theives, it amounts to protecting their students' privacy. I guess you never heard of "innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt".
How about supporting their students' privacy? I mean, unless the RIAA has a warrant or a subpoena, the university does not have any obligation to give out their students' personal information. Does this amount to supporting illegal filesharing to you? Just because they refuse a warrantless request from the RIAA?
Based on mere allegations without any credible evidence, no. They can try, but nobody have any obligation to give in to their requests. If they have evidence, why not go to court and get a warrant/subpoena? Instead, they just try to bully the university into handing out the information. "Give us this information, or we'll sue you for the infringement"
.Written demands from citizens surely does not trump expensive dinners and campaign contributions.
The University has decided that they do not want to fight that battle.I just hope that enough students choose other universities then so that they feel that fighting this battle might be a good thing. I for sure wouldn't want to go to a university that hands out my personal information to anyone that asks.
No, but the university shouldn't turn over the information, unless the requestor is a law enforcement authority with a court order or someone else with a subpoena.
Well, nothing. They can ask all they want, the issue is that the university should not give in to these requests unless required by a court order or subpoena.
So if I accuse you of breaking the law, I should get your real name, address, telephone number, social security number, etc?
Accusations are not enough. If the university hands out personal information to an accuser that does not hold a court order for that information, the university is doing the wrong thing. Students trust the university to not share their sensitive identifying information with third parties (authorities are not included), and helping the RIAA just because of an accusation breaks that trust.
Yes we do, as long as their enforcement is managed by the computer owner.
I can see how portable intrinsic permissions could be a very good idea for media.The problem here is that with DRM, computers obey the content owners' wishes, not the computer owners' wishes. The idea that my computer would refuse to permit me to do something because some third party says so is simply unacceptable.
Protecting internal documents.No DRM is required to protect internal documents, ordinary permission systems would do fine. DRM is used to protect content that the owner want to publish for a wider audience, but still retain some control over. The problem is that to view the content, the key needs to be supplied, and with the key, the content can be permanently emancipated. Their so-called "solution" is to obfuscate the code in several ways so that key recovery will be harder. It is still not impossible to recover though.
Quite commonly just because they read a five year old post on some message board. It usually turns out that the user didn't experience the problem himself, but heard it from his father's friend's sister's friend, who read it on a message board, so it must be true. :)