Hey, why not have two systems in the car running Win95, then you can reboot one and put it into suspend mode when the boot has finished, so it'll be ready for the next car trip...
... while you're using the other to play music, and reboot that one on the next trip:-)
If not, then anybody distributing "converted" GPL software may be unable to comply with the GPL.
The GPL states that: "... The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable...."
So as long as this converter from Sun isn't bundled with Solaris, any converted binary must be accompanied by the source code of Sun's converter or a hyperlink to it.
That doesn't seem to make the converter itself illegal.
Aren't you confusing banned British beef (because of "mad-cow" disease) with hormone meat? There is plenty of proof that hormone-filled meat has an effect on humans.
But that isn't even the matter. Do you really think that the US government should force other countries or even their own citizens to "eat" their propaganda or do you think that they should really convince people and show how convinced their are by giving people the choice to eat the contaminated food they call safe or the food that has been safe for decades?
This is a difficult issue. I think the type of response from people like this Bove guy is warranted, but I'm not sure wether MacDonald's is an appropriate target (unless someone can show that MacDonald's is actively involved in limiting consumer choice on hormone and genetically modified food and is helping the US government to put pressure on countries to allow imports from the US violate local food laws).
There is a very interesting case that shows that property destruction, although forbidden by local law, can be legal when seen on a larger scale.
The following piece is cut-and-paste from the following URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:pegasus.la. saga-u.ac.jp/peace/citizdisarm.htm+indones ia+england+jet-fighter+judge&hl=en
"The cases are relying upon the defence of lawful and reasonable excuse of damage to property in order to prevent a terrible crime from being committed. There was a landmark case in 1996 which rocked the English Judiciary when 4 women (I was one) were acquitted of doing one and a half million pounds worth of damage to a Hawk jet-fighter plane due to be exported to Indonesia where it was likely to be used to continue the genocide of the East Timorese people. We were acquitted in June 1986 after having spent 6 months on remand in prison. We admitted disarming the plane and preventing it from being exported to Indonesia but explained that we were acting lawfully and ethically because it would have been used to bomb innocent civilians and this was contrary to international humanitarian law. We won the case. Similarly we will eventually win the legal arguments in our cases against Trident. We will eventually win because the law is based upon ethics and a common morality and there is no way forward for the global community but to impartially enforce all the laws of war and to back all efforts of peaceful and practical nuclear disarmament."
As someone else already pointed out, the attack that resulted in a death was not attributed to him.
Also, France doesn't boycott US meat, it boycotts unlabeled hormone-containing meat. The US knows clearly that meat from animals raised hormone-laced food or genetically altered produce don't go down well with consumers, so against the interest of openness they press the rest of the world to accept these foods unlabeled.
In retaliation for the fact that France doesn't exclude the US from compliance with food laws, the US puts a 100% tariff on several typical French food items that threaten the existence of small producers (probably hoping that these producers will lobby the government to allow unsafe food from the US to enter)
If Europe doesn't import a lot of food from third-world countries because it doesn't live up to the host of regulations about food, then why should we import unsafe (because unlabeled, anti-choice) food from the worlds richest nation?
The funny thing is that NSI assumes that the whole world is located in the United States. They assume that the way they handle registration agreements is legal in any part of the world, which I strongly think it isn't.
IANAL, but I think that, especially for those domains that were registered before NSI hijacked the whole domain registry system and for which agreements have been changed in a way that is probably illegal or void in most countries except for the USA, the owners can make a strong case in a court in their country of residence.
I would love to see NSI being sanctioned by a court outside the USA, but I think that enforcing those sanctions directly against NSI would be difficult under international law (although of course foreign assets could be frozen to force NSI to comply in such a case).
There is another options that would be more interesting, because it really shows the flaw in a system were one for-profit company, by the incompentence of the responsible US-government-sponsored organisations, has been handed a monopoly on what was once an international cooperation. (Essential the government showed that they were incapable of taking that monopoly away, since they backed down while trying to create a more competetive system, so now NSI still has special privileges that other registrars don't have, such as first access and best access and the ability to force the rules).
The option is to try to sue another root dns server operator outside the USA, such as NorduNet in Scandinavia, RIPE or LINX in Amsterdam, or WIDE in Japan) to force _them_ to reinstate a domain that was unlawfully (according to your local laws) cancelled by NSI.
It could break the global domain name system by having information at some root servers but not at others, but it would force people to really look at the issue and would force foreign governments to call the US government to task.
* to remove all the special privileges from NSI and give operational control of the DNS system to an organisation that is not involved in commercial domain name registration.
* to require restrictions on NSI for any domain name holder that had a domain name through NSI before there was a choice in registrars: to require NSI to not to change agreements anymore, and to provide an easy and fast way to transfer your domain to any other registrar.
Okay, so what symmetric cipher are you using/allowing on those SSL connections?
3DES, DES, Blowfish,... ?
What assymetric ciphers are you using for authentication, and what strength?
I'm asking because you can easily allow 40-bit encryption in you SSL connections if you don't disallow it explicitly, and SSL doesn't free you from making the decision about which cipher to use.
I don't understand why this is not everybodies first reaction; you're talking about their holier-than-thou attitude, and that attitude is most clear because they advertise having child pornography.
How can it be worse to search for "little girl*" than to offer files with such names implying horrible pictures.
They say there aren't really horrible pictures in there; they say that the file names have nothing to do with the contents of the files.
But how is downloading a file that only pretends to contain horrible material more illegal than offering pretend-horrible material? Aren't these guys creating a market for these kinds of pictures?
Just like police operations of this kind: how do you know that somebody would have bought illegal drugs had the police not offered it to them?
Now, if you want to find out if it is actually true what they say: that these files don't really contain horrible pictures. How do you do that without being labelled a pedophile by them?
I wouldn't yet say that these guys are as sick as those people who create a market for these pictures by collecting them, but they really need to check their heads IMO.
Well sir, I guess I should sue you then under libel law for implying that I am a thief.
So far, I've found it an easy way to get the songs I have on CD to my laptop whenever I feel like listening to one. It beats running Grip and an MP3 encoder (if you have cable Internet), especially if you change the 'working set' of songs on your laptop frequently.
Sure, there may be a lot of people using it for illegal purposes. But that's not the issue. The issue is way more fundamental. You shouldn't be allowed to throw a nuke on a city because there are a lot of mosquitos, even if there are more mosquitos than people in a city. That's what we call rule of law, instead of "he who has most power wins". And the latter is exactly what the recording industry is trying, even shamelessly blurting out that they will change that law because they may have made a slight mistake the last time they subverted the democratic process.
That's the important issue here, and not what conservative "common sense" may say about it.
In the Netherlands we also have decent consumer protection laws. Shrink wrap licenses aren't valid and contracts are only valid between two parties, not between you and a box you bought from a computer store. Sellers need to be very clear if your purchase also includes other things like a subscription.
It would be interesting if I bought one of those over the net from the Netherlands. I'd like to see if Dutch judges are as eager to extend their jurisdiction as their USA-an counterparts.:-)
So if you buy something, you should not only look at what you're buying but also at what the seller thinks you should use it for?
Face it, Netpliance is so scared to loose money on people not buying the service that they decided to even charge the people who ordered when they didn't yet have the notice on the website. In the hope that not too many people would complain.
That's fraud, or at least it is if they don't apologise and give a refund right away.
Not to defend Bezos' suing of Barnes&Nobles, but the typical use of defensive patents is different than you describe.
Say a company threatens you with a claim that your company infringes on their patent X, then you can claim "we don't know about that, but look here we got patent Y that you are infringing on, so just shut up or we'll sue you in response."
" I do catch myself occasionally wondering what it would be like to be a female in life situations. Every guy does this. If you say you don't, you're a liar. Once you accept you are male early in life, it's natural to wonder what it would be like to be female. I also say that anyone who says "Oh God, you're a guy and you're playing a FEMALE?" is pretty insecure about themselves. "
The seems exactly the spirit of many posts here, with people going out of their way to explain they're no transvestites or gays. So ligthen up, what if you were. I wouldn't care at all.
According to the Hubble Law, two galaxies which are a distant D apart are moving away from each other at a speed HD where H is Hubble's constant. In that case two galaxies which are a distance greater than c/H apart are moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. This is quite correct. The distance between two objects can be increasing faster than light because of the expansion of the universe. However, it is meaningless to say that the universe is expanding faster than light because the rate of the expansion is measured by Hubble's constant alone which does not even have the units of speed.
As was mentioned above, in special relativity it is possible for two objects to be moving apart by speeds up to twice the speed of light as measured by an observer in a third frame of reference. In general relativity even this limit can be surpassed but it will not then be possible to observe both objects at the same time. Again, this is not real faster than light travel. It will not help anyone to travel across the galaxy faster than light. All that is happening is that the distance between two objects is increasing faster when taken in some cosmological reference frame.
It describes real increase in distance faster than the speed of light, not apparent speed. What is important is that this is not travel: two stars can move apart faster than light, but you cannot move from one star to another faster than light. (But as the document I referred to describes, "faster than light" is a tricky term; you can move from across universe in 13 years [in your own frame of reference, not that of an observer])
The paragraph about the moon revolving around your head is the next one in the document; the URL I posted had an anchor but perhaps your browser didn't show you the correct part of the document.
The distance between two objects in the universe can grow at a speed faster than light. That's because they're not really moving; it's the universe that is expanding.
That accounts for part of this paradox. See: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/FTL.html#13
I believe you sum it up quite well. Most discussions about licenses, patents, freedom of speec issues etc are completely useless, the way they are done now.
I think it wouldn't be a bad idea if Slashdot editors remind the readers of such articles that the issues of law and of ethics are two different things. Laws should be the implementation of (some) ethics, but many times the connection between law and ethics is so loose that it isn't useful to see it that way.
You say "Companies need to have a format for distributing copyrighted material. How many musicians would there be if there was no way for them to make money off it??"
To which I say, first off, that there is a simple answer to your question: all formats allow distribution of copyrighted materials. But I suppose you mean "heavily armed format". That makes me wonder where you have been the last couple of years. I don't think you've been reading Slashdot, since you don't seem to know that ReadHat is making a lot of money with unprotected material. The same can work for music: as long as the price you pay for convenience of allways having the newest version of songs, and of knowing that you are a good person because you support the author (and getting a trouble free, supported compilation instead of a possible virus-full, trojaned version), as long as what you get for the price outways the cheapness of getting a possibly outdated copy from your neighbour, then people will pay for it.
Creeps, both Roblimo and JonKatz frequently engage in extreme paranoia. Some therapy forms have a moderate success in helping paranoid people to gain some insight into their problems.
Now Roblimo and JonKatz can afford therapy since Slashdot has been bought, but others aren't so fortunate.
Also, calling people with any mental problem "nuts" either means that Roblimo hasn't read the article, or that we have a case of serious defensive projection.
More seriously, it seems that Slashdot takes more and more to be a magazine for "outsiders", people who, usually because of how they grew up, don't feel they can be part of a mainstream group, and do their utmost best to blame mainstream groups for that. Now that's a serious problem that can be alleviated with group therapy. Untreated, it can also result in cult-like behaviour with people defining themselves in terms of what they are not, instead of what they are.
And I think that's sad. I come here for interesting computer news, not for pathetic self-victimizing outsiders.
I think the Germans consider scientology a criminal organization. I don't think banning products from criminal organizations is something people would object to. Wether scientology is should be labeled as a criminal organization is the whole point, but it is another discussion.
That is, of course, not true. If it were true you could decipher any data stream that uses a public key-based key exchange by breaking that initial key exchange.
Generally, good public key cryptography with a certain key length is not as strong as good symmetric key cryptography with the same key length; that's why you need a 1024 bit RSA key to be safe for a while, and not more than 128 bits for an algorithm like blowfish.
(Unless, of course, somebody finds a way to break either algorithm in a way that's faster than brute force, for example by mathemetical breakthrough)
The loan was authorized by Visa. She probably got her Visa card in California, so the agreement under which Visa lent her the money at the moment that the casino charged her card was signed in California.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, why not have two systems in the car running Win95, then you can reboot one and put it into suspend mode when the boot has finished, so it'll be ready for the next car trip... :-)
... while you're using the other to play music, and reboot that one on the next trip
EJB
If not, then anybody distributing "converted" GPL software may be unable to comply with the GPL.
..."
The GPL states that: "... The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
So as long as this converter from Sun isn't bundled with Solaris, any converted binary must be accompanied by the source code of Sun's converter or a hyperlink to it.
That doesn't seem to make the converter itself illegal.
EJB
Aren't you confusing banned British beef (because of "mad-cow" disease) with hormone meat? There is plenty of proof that hormone-filled meat has an effect on humans.
But that isn't even the matter. Do you really think that the US government should force other countries or even their own citizens to "eat" their propaganda or do you think that they should really convince people and show how convinced their are by giving people the choice to eat the contaminated food they call safe or the food that has been safe for decades?
This is a difficult issue. I think the type of response from people like this Bove guy is warranted, but I'm not sure wether MacDonald's is an appropriate target (unless someone can show that MacDonald's is actively involved in limiting consumer choice on hormone and genetically modified food and is helping the US government to put pressure on countries to allow imports from the US violate local food laws).
. saga-u.ac.jp/peace/citizdisarm.htm+indones ia+england+jet-fighter+judge&hl=en
There is a very interesting case that shows that property destruction, although forbidden by local law, can be legal when seen on a larger scale.
The following piece is cut-and-paste from the following URL:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:pegasus.la
"The cases are relying upon the defence of lawful and reasonable excuse of damage to property in order to prevent a terrible crime from being committed. There was a landmark case in 1996 which rocked the English Judiciary when 4 women (I was one) were acquitted of doing one and a half million pounds worth of damage to a Hawk jet-fighter plane due to be exported to Indonesia where it was likely to be used to continue the genocide of the East Timorese people. We were acquitted in June 1986 after having spent 6 months on remand in prison. We admitted disarming the plane and preventing it from being exported to Indonesia but explained that we were acting lawfully and ethically because it would have been used to bomb innocent civilians and this was contrary to international humanitarian law. We won the case. Similarly we will eventually win the legal arguments in our cases against Trident. We will eventually win because the law is based upon ethics and a common morality and there is no way forward for the global community but to impartially enforce all the laws of war and to back all efforts of peaceful and practical nuclear disarmament."
EJB
As someone else already pointed out, the attack that resulted in a death was not attributed to him.
Also, France doesn't boycott US meat, it boycotts unlabeled hormone-containing meat. The US knows clearly that meat from animals raised hormone-laced food or genetically altered produce don't go down well with consumers, so against the interest of openness they press the rest of the world to accept these foods unlabeled.
In retaliation for the fact that France doesn't exclude the US from compliance with food laws, the US puts a 100% tariff on several typical French food items that threaten the existence of small producers (probably hoping that these producers will lobby the government to allow unsafe food from the US to enter)
If Europe doesn't import a lot of food from third-world countries because it doesn't live up to the host of regulations about food, then why should we import unsafe (because unlabeled, anti-choice) food from the worlds richest nation?
EJB
IANAL, but I think that, especially for those domains that were registered before NSI hijacked the whole domain registry system and for which agreements have been changed in a way that is probably illegal or void in most countries except for the USA, the owners can make a strong case in a court in their country of residence.
I would love to see NSI being sanctioned by a court outside the USA, but I think that enforcing those sanctions directly against NSI would be difficult under international law (although of course foreign assets could be frozen to force NSI to comply in such a case).
There is another options that would be more interesting, because it really shows the flaw in a system were one for-profit company, by the incompentence of the responsible US-government-sponsored organisations, has been handed a monopoly on what was once an international cooperation. (Essential the government showed that they were incapable of taking that monopoly away, since they backed down while trying to create a more competetive system, so now NSI still has special privileges that other registrars don't have, such as first access and best access and the ability to force the rules).
The option is to try to sue another root dns server operator outside the USA, such as NorduNet in Scandinavia, RIPE or LINX in Amsterdam, or WIDE in Japan) to force _them_ to reinstate a domain that was unlawfully (according to your local laws) cancelled by NSI.
It could break the global domain name system by having information at some root servers but not at others, but it would force people to really look at the issue and would force foreign governments to call the US government to task.
* to remove all the special privileges from NSI and give operational control of the DNS system to an organisation that is not involved in commercial domain name registration.
* to require restrictions on NSI for any domain name holder that had a domain name through NSI before there was a choice in registrars: to require NSI to not to change agreements anymore, and to provide an easy and fast way to transfer your domain to any other registrar.
EJB
Okay, so what symmetric cipher are you using/allowing on those SSL connections?
... ?
3DES, DES, Blowfish,
What assymetric ciphers are you using for authentication, and what strength?
I'm asking because you can easily allow 40-bit encryption in you SSL connections if you don't disallow it explicitly, and SSL doesn't free you from making the decision about which cipher to use.
EJB
I don't understand why this is not everybodies first reaction; you're talking about their holier-than-thou attitude, and that attitude is most clear because they advertise having child pornography.
How can it be worse to search for "little girl*" than to offer files with such names implying horrible pictures.
They say there aren't really horrible pictures in there; they say that the file names have nothing to do with the contents of the files.
But how is downloading a file that only pretends to contain horrible material more illegal than offering pretend-horrible material? Aren't these guys creating a market for these kinds of pictures?
Just like police operations of this kind: how do you know that somebody would have bought illegal drugs had the police not offered it to them?
Now, if you want to find out if it is actually true what they say: that these files don't really contain horrible pictures. How do you do that without being labelled a pedophile by them?
I wouldn't yet say that these guys are as sick as those people who create a market for these pictures by collecting them, but they really need to check their heads IMO.
EJB
Well sir, I guess I should sue you then under libel law for implying that I am a thief.
So far, I've found it an easy way to get the songs I have on CD to my laptop whenever I feel like listening to one. It beats running Grip and an MP3 encoder (if you have cable Internet), especially if you change the 'working set' of songs on your laptop frequently.
Sure, there may be a lot of people using it for illegal purposes. But that's not the issue. The issue is way more fundamental. You shouldn't be allowed to throw a nuke on a city because there are a lot of mosquitos, even if there are more mosquitos than people in a city. That's what we call rule of law, instead of "he who has most power wins". And the latter is exactly what the recording industry is trying, even shamelessly blurting out that they will change that law because they may have made a slight mistake the last time they subverted the democratic process.
That's the important issue here, and not what conservative "common sense" may say about it.
EJB
For $200 an hour I'll spend the next five weeks finding an answer to your question :-)
EJB
Well, that's probably the issue then.
:-)
In the Netherlands we also have decent consumer protection laws. Shrink wrap licenses aren't valid and contracts are only valid between two parties, not between you and a box you bought from a computer store. Sellers need to be very clear if your purchase also includes other things like a subscription.
It would be interesting if I bought one of those over the net from the Netherlands. I'd like to see if Dutch judges are as eager to extend their jurisdiction as their USA-an counterparts.
EJB
So if you buy something, you should not only look at what you're buying but also at what the seller thinks you should use it for?
Face it, Netpliance is so scared to loose money on people not buying the service that they decided to even charge the people who ordered when they didn't yet have the notice on the website. In the hope that not too many people would complain.
That's fraud, or at least it is if they don't apologise and give a refund right away.
EJB
Not to defend Bezos' suing of Barnes&Nobles, but the typical use of defensive patents is different than you describe.
Say a company threatens you with a claim that your company infringes on their patent X, then you can claim "we don't know about that, but look here we got patent Y that you are infringing on, so just shut up or we'll sue you in response."
SIR patents provide no alternative for that.
EJB
" I do catch myself occasionally wondering what it would be like to be a female in life situations. Every guy does this. If you say you don't, you're a liar. Once you accept you are male early in life, it's natural to wonder what it would be like to be female. I also say that anyone who says "Oh God, you're a guy and you're playing a FEMALE?" is pretty insecure about themselves. "
The seems exactly the spirit of many posts here, with people going out of their way to explain they're no transvestites or gays.
So ligthen up, what if you were. I wouldn't care at all.
It describes real increase in distance faster than the speed of light, not apparent speed. What is important is that this is not travel: two stars can move apart faster than light, but you cannot move from one star to another faster than light. (But as the document I referred to describes, "faster than light" is a tricky term; you can move from across universe in 13 years [in your own frame of reference, not that of an observer])
The paragraph about the moon revolving around your head is the next one in the document; the URL I posted had an anchor but perhaps your browser didn't show you the correct part of the document.
The distance between two objects in the universe can grow at a speed faster than light. That's because they're not really moving; it's the universe that is expanding.
That accounts for part of this paradox.
See: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/FTL.html#13
What I don't understand: why don't temps get benefits from the staffing agency (including sick leave and holidays)?
That's the way it works here in the Netherlands, and it seems to work well.
EJB
I believe you sum it up quite well. Most discussions about licenses, patents, freedom of speec issues etc are completely useless, the way they are done now.
I think it wouldn't be a bad idea if Slashdot editors remind the readers of such articles that the issues of law and of ethics are two different things. Laws should be the implementation of (some) ethics, but many times the connection between law and ethics is so loose that it isn't useful to see it that way.
Hi,
You say "Companies need to have a format for distributing copyrighted material. How many musicians would there be if there was no way for them to make money off it??"
To which I say, first off, that there is a simple answer to your question: all formats allow distribution of copyrighted materials. But I suppose you mean "heavily armed format".
That makes me wonder where you have been the last couple of years. I don't think you've been reading Slashdot, since you don't seem to know that ReadHat is making a lot of money with unprotected material. The same can work for music: as long as the price you pay for convenience of allways having the newest version of songs, and of knowing that you are a good person because you support the author (and getting a trouble free, supported compilation instead of a possible virus-full, trojaned version), as long as what you get for the price outways the cheapness of getting a possibly outdated copy from your neighbour, then people will pay for it.
EjB
Creeps, both Roblimo and JonKatz frequently engage in extreme paranoia. Some therapy forms have a moderate success in helping paranoid people to gain some insight into their problems.
Now Roblimo and JonKatz can afford therapy since Slashdot has been bought, but others aren't so fortunate.
Also, calling people with any mental problem "nuts" either means that Roblimo hasn't read the article, or that we have a case of serious defensive projection.
More seriously, it seems that Slashdot takes more and more to be a magazine for "outsiders", people who, usually because of how they grew up, don't feel they can be part of a mainstream group, and do their utmost best to blame mainstream groups for that. Now that's a serious problem that can be alleviated with group therapy. Untreated, it can also result in cult-like behaviour with people defining themselves in terms of what they are not, instead of what they are.
And I think that's sad. I come here for interesting computer news, not for pathetic self-victimizing outsiders.
EjB
I think the Germans consider scientology a criminal organization. I don't think banning products from criminal organizations is something people would object to.
Wether scientology is should be labeled as a criminal organization is the whole point, but it is another discussion.
"Public key algorithms aren't cryptographically strong."
That is, of course, not true. If it were true you could decipher any data stream that uses a public key-based key exchange by breaking that initial key exchange.
Generally, good public key cryptography with a certain key length is not as strong as good symmetric key cryptography with the same key length; that's why you need a 1024 bit RSA key to be safe for a while, and not more than 128 bits for an algorithm like blowfish.
(Unless, of course, somebody finds a way to break either algorithm in a way that's faster than brute force, for example by mathemetical breakthrough)
EjB
I don't think so; since Slashdot is now owned by AndOver.net they actually have some cash to hire lawyers, and/or countersue for frivolous suing.
I'm sure IDG is only trying to bully a person who presumably doesn't have enough money to hire lawyers for a case like this.
The loan was authorized by Visa. She probably got her Visa card in California, so the agreement under which Visa lent her the money at the moment that the casino charged her card was signed in California.
So it's California law.
EjB
We need a new tag to mark important words within the text. Such as:
This page discusses the different <keyword>flavors</keyword> and <keyword>colors</keyword> of <keyword>Pez</keyword> <keyword>candy</keyword>
The meta tags are seperate from the page, you can't normally see them, but I don't think a court will easily censor the contents of a web-page.
EjB