If more companies were clear about their limits, like yours, everything would be fine. I think all people want is a clear indication of what the allowable bandwidth actually is. It should also have an easy way of tracking how much bandwidth the ISP thinks they have used. The companies should not claim "unlimited" if there is a limit, they should just state the limit. It's too bad if non-technical users don't know what a gigabyte is, but they should not punish the ones that know with hidden rules.
Cell/mobile phone companies, as annoying as some of them are, all have no trouble being forthcoming with limits and tracking usage. I don't see why ISPs should be any different.
I don't think you are right. I RTFA, and "theory" is used 3 times and "hypothesis" is used once. You can form a hypothesis that "the pyramid could be built this way", since you can test it. What you can't do is form a hypothesis that "the pyramid was built this way"; That will always be a theory since we can never know for sure. Just like mass extinction of Dinosaurs, which is a theory even though we have some pretty strong evidence it occurred.
The reason the story is annoying is that alongside "theory", the article contains claims that this work is "Ending eight years of study on the subject", and "Houdin used 3D technology to have his theory confirmed". That is more than you should claim for a theory you have yet to find physical evidence for.
It's only disappointing if you think intelligence derives directly from the size of our brain, and not from decades of knowledge, experience, and training. Our big brains allow us to learn, but it is not a substitute for experience. The goal of much advanced AI is that we don't need to program the neat tricks manually, not that the neat tricks are no longer needed at all.
Very little. While it's possible that a bad driver could somehow damage the hardware, I'd say that for anything non-mechanical it would still be that fault of the hardware for having a bad design. It's not like vendor drivers in Windows don't hard-lock things on occasion (looking at vendor-written driver code for Linux is enlightening as to why).
In the end I don't really care much though. All this does is reaffirm my choice to build my own systems (thanks newegg!). Since I run Linux, I'm not even missing out on a warranty.
While there may be some difficulties in the law, with harsh penalties predicated on ambiguous undefined concepts in the current phrasing, I feel you're losing sight of the big picture. We have to think of the children, and how we can best protect them in a world with so many dangers, many of which have been caused by violent music and video games (but not movies). So, while there may be some shortcomings in the current law, it is well worth the price. As Benjamin Franklin said, sometimes you have to give up some freedom temporarily in order to gain security. Also, several senators have gone on record promising that they would not abuse this additional power, so I think your fears of abuse are unfounded.
Thanks, I'll save a link to your post. Then, the next time someone claims "Linux Sucks" when I spend 10 minutes fixing something, I can just tell them "If it's ok to troubleshoot a Mac, why can't I troubleshoot Linux?"
I did read it. Another thing he says is that once a PC has Linux on it, it doesn't count and its beyond its useful life, because it no longer contributes to the software market. So, even though the PC is still around, it doesn't count, while the Mac does, even if it hasn't had a software upgrade in several years. What does the software have to do with the hardware anyway? His assumption also means that all of my computers had a "useful life" of one day, since I installed Linux on them. So, he's fighting myths and massaged numbers... with his own massaged numbers and broken assumptions, often conflating hardware with software.
I'm not sue what article you read. The one I read jumped all over between topics, didn't finish one issue before launching into the next, and included graphs that it didn't even adequately explain. Roughly drafted, indeed.
Fair enough, but it pays to be clear from the outset.
You on the other hand appear to believe that the GPL poses a limit. Actually the GPL only gives freedoms that the licensee would otherwise not have.
The GPL does place some limitations on copying, however the default copyright law places a lot more. I was specifying it in absolute terms, while you are referring to it in the relative sense. If you don't want to include excessive context in your comments, please extend me the same courtesy. I know plenty about the GPL, having released somewhere north of 40 thousand lines of code that way.
The term "fiction" means the presumption of a contract where the parties have not formally agreed to a contract when the absence of a contract would cause more problems for the party which has the choice to accept the contract.
Well, in the current legal system, even shrink-wrap EULAs are allowed. That's the reality. I would argue that a distribution-only license, which is more permissive than the default license under the law, is not a fiction at all. It's quite simple, and you don't even have to agree to the GPL; In that case, one defaults to normal copyright law. I don't see that as a fiction, and that is my only significant disagreement with what you originally said.
The general principals embodied in common law are universal insofar as they fill the gaps left by normal laws. Laws cannot possibly specify everything, yet a case history can come close to doing that. Also, this is hardly an explicit act, unless you can point to a statute specifically about the legality of archival on the internet. If not, then you are trying to use precedent to extrapolate a law (probably written for printed material) into a new situation.
Nice job of missing my point. "Reasonable expectation of privacy" is in the eyes of the legal community, not mine. You don't address that point, probably because you can't. So, why is an explicit notice needed to trump that notion of reasonable expectation? Perhaps it is because a website is accepted by default as public, and it takes an explicit notice to specify otherwise. If that weren't the case, even with "selective editing", it would still be considered private, right? By saying that I could only prove my point by using selective editing, you are weakening your own position.
Of course, I'm sure your explicit notice doesn't depend on javascript support, isn't at the very end of the page after all of the content, and lacks all electronically accepted forms of achieving the same result (robots.txt, meta tags). In which case, why are you defending this woman, where all of these things are true?
Believe it or not, we don't care about your website, and it isn't the topic of this article. I could not care less about what happens to spiders that don't obey accepted forms of exclusion. I'm sorry you've lost precious bandwidth, and are apparently unwilling to put a password on your site. However, don't try to equate your experience with this lawsuit, as they are not similar at all.
You don't really understand the concept of precedent in common law legal systems, do you? Through legal precedent, accepted norms and customs can carry the same force as law. I doubt the law on "unlawful entry" specifies exactly what kind of door is or is not public, and thankfully it doesn't need to. Precedent can do the work, along with the common sense of the judge and jury. On the internet, there may not be a law (yet) supporting things such as privacy and robots.txt, but there's plenty of precedent, and it doesn't agree with you.
For exactly the same reason a public bathroom is still considered private. It's a called a "reasonable expectation of privacy", and it's a well established legal principle. The letter of the law may be exact text, but despite what you might believe, judges and juries are human, and can interpret the law based on common sense.
A much better analogy would be that information posted on the web is like a campaign poster or some other notice posted on someone's lawn. Yes, it's hosted on private property and the information posted there belongs to the person posting it, but it is displayed publicly
Thank you, that is a truly excellent analogy for the internet. If you don't mind, I think I'll use that one from now on...
It's called a "reasonable expectation of privacy", and it's a well established principal. In a public bathroom, one can still reasonably expect privacy, however while on the stage of a public theater, one cannot reasonably expect privacy. A publicly accessible website advertising your business seems more similar to the latter example than the former.
She essentially uses the same fiction that underlies the GPL: If you copy, you are assumed to have agreed to the license terms.
And you demonstrate a commonly held, yet totally incorrect misconception of the GPL. You can copy GPL'ed code all you want, as it is only a limit on DISTRIBUTION, not COPYING. If that's a fiction, then a copyright notice with "All rights reserved" is also meaningless. Why don't you try to sell that view to the RIAA/MPAA?
This woman seems to be angry just at the mere fact that it's been copied, and not with any occurrence of distribution. In a GPL violation case, one normally asks for compliance or a cessation of distribution, trying to work something out before launching into a lawsuit. That's because the violation may have been totally accidental (as it would be with a spider with no robots.txt present), and even if you "won" the lawsuit, your tiny award would not cover the costs. So, if she didn't first ask archive.org to remove the material, she'll have a difficult time showing she was acting with any good faith.
There's a multitude of ways to describe what that means in any human language. If I saw comments that matched verbatim, I would certainly assume the source of those was [snip troll]
If a comment such as "Operation not permitted" or "I/O error" is a creative work, then I'm registering a copyright on "No solicitors" and "Beware of Dog" signs. So, if you have a similar sign, obviously you copied it, and owe me $3 million for each (since SCO wants $1B for 326 lines).
Now, long comments that actually say something can be creative, but terse comments a few words long will not be unique. In my own code, I have a distance function with the comment "returns distance between two points". There are 83 hits on google for that exact phrase. Some people *gasp* even used the same name for their function: "dist". Using your reasoning, clearly they are "copy pasting" my code, since they replicated both the functionality and the way of specifying the comment.
That's big. That throws the whole of linux into doubt. If he copy pasted 300 lines from SCO, and that can be shown, now the doors open for people to start auditing and making their own claims.
That's not big unless SCO proves anything about where those lines came from. Many of them could actually be from BSD (AT&T stole liberally from BSD, and some vice-versa, as was found in the USL lawsuit). Windows and OS/X copy tracts of BSD code too, so if SCO managed to somehow pin Linux for implementing a standard, don't think that you'd be safe. Luckily, BSD is free, and has been free, and the code in question has also been released by SCO itself under the GPL. IBM has 5 separate licenses to the code. So, that's not big, that's nothing.
And as far as auditing, why wait? I'm sure every IP troll has already been scanning Linux (the code is out there to look at) for anything they could find since the lawsuit started in 2003. After four years, all they have to show for it is FUD from MS and 326 lines of uncopyrightable code from SCO. Let's just say I'm not real scared...
#define EPERM 1/* Operation not permitted */ #define ENOENT 2/* No such file or directory */ #define ESRCH 3/* No such process */ #define EINTR 4/* Interrupted system call */ #define EIO 5/* I/O error */
The comments aren't exactly works of art, are they? In fact its pretty much a simple expansion of the define's abbreviated name. There isn't really a human creative element here. If you pick up any UNIX standard, or the (quite free) BSD code, you'll probably see the errors stated with exactly the same comments. Calling this copyrightable is like calling a "No Solicitors" or "Beware of Dog" sign copyrightable.
And of course to top it off, the numbers in Linux/386 don't even match UNIX. Now before you throw a chair, the numbers in some other architectures do match their respective versions of UNIX, however in most cases that's because the processor maker/UNIX company itself put them there.
All I am saying is that for an experienced linux user this is easy. I'm used to using google to find solutions to fix obscure error messages. For someone who just wants to add a second monitor to their linux box without tinkering with xorg.conf, this approaches impossible. While that is a problem, things are better right now than you might think. The strides taken by user-friendly distros such as Ubuntu have been quite impressive. Like you, I personally don't mind diving into technical details, and occasionally fixing things, and the fact that I run Debian demonstrates that. However, when someone new wants to run Linux, we don't have to teach them how to run Slackware, Debian, or Gentoo anymore. There are far friendlier ways of getting acquainted with Linux now, and the most important thing we can do is point people in the appropriate direction based on what they know and what they want. Later on, once a user has a firm grasp of what they are doing, they can always choose a different distro if they wish.
Slashdot Mirror
If more companies were clear about their limits, like yours, everything would be fine. I think all people want is a clear indication of what the allowable bandwidth actually is. It should also have an easy way of tracking how much bandwidth the ISP thinks they have used. The companies should not claim "unlimited" if there is a limit, they should just state the limit. It's too bad if non-technical users don't know what a gigabyte is, but they should not punish the ones that know with hidden rules.
Cell/mobile phone companies, as annoying as some of them are, all have no trouble being forthcoming with limits and tracking usage. I don't see why ISPs should be any different.
Don't worry; There will be a TTL of 255 which gets decremented at every hop.
Oh wait...
I don't think you are right. I RTFA, and "theory" is used 3 times and "hypothesis" is used once. You can form a hypothesis that "the pyramid could be built this way", since you can test it. What you can't do is form a hypothesis that "the pyramid was built this way"; That will always be a theory since we can never know for sure. Just like mass extinction of Dinosaurs, which is a theory even though we have some pretty strong evidence it occurred.
The reason the story is annoying is that alongside "theory", the article contains claims that this work is "Ending eight years of study on the subject", and "Houdin used 3D technology to have his theory confirmed". That is more than you should claim for a theory you have yet to find physical evidence for.
Well said. I'd give you mod points if I had them.
It's only disappointing if you think intelligence derives directly from the size of our brain, and not from decades of knowledge, experience, and training. Our big brains allow us to learn, but it is not a substitute for experience. The goal of much advanced AI is that we don't need to program the neat tricks manually, not that the neat tricks are no longer needed at all.
Well, it looks like Groklaw will now have something to cover after the IBM-SCO lawsuit is done. Hopefully this one won't take 4+ years to be decided.
Very little. While it's possible that a bad driver could somehow damage the hardware, I'd say that for anything non-mechanical it would still be that fault of the hardware for having a bad design. It's not like vendor drivers in Windows don't hard-lock things on occasion (looking at vendor-written driver code for Linux is enlightening as to why).
In the end I don't really care much though. All this does is reaffirm my choice to build my own systems (thanks newegg!). Since I run Linux, I'm not even missing out on a warranty.
Thanks for the information free summary...
While there may be some difficulties in the law, with harsh penalties predicated on ambiguous undefined concepts in the current phrasing, I feel you're losing sight of the big picture. We have to think of the children, and how we can best protect them in a world with so many dangers, many of which have been caused by violent music and video games (but not movies). So, while there may be some shortcomings in the current law, it is well worth the price. As Benjamin Franklin said, sometimes you have to give up some freedom temporarily in order to gain security. Also, several senators have gone on record promising that they would not abuse this additional power, so I think your fears of abuse are unfounded.
Thanks, I'll save a link to your post. Then, the next time someone claims "Linux Sucks" when I spend 10 minutes fixing something, I can just tell them "If it's ok to troubleshoot a Mac, why can't I troubleshoot Linux?"
I did read it. Another thing he says is that once a PC has Linux on it, it doesn't count and its beyond its useful life, because it no longer contributes to the software market. So, even though the PC is still around, it doesn't count, while the Mac does, even if it hasn't had a software upgrade in several years. What does the software have to do with the hardware anyway? His assumption also means that all of my computers had a "useful life" of one day, since I installed Linux on them. So, he's fighting myths and massaged numbers... with his own massaged numbers and broken assumptions, often conflating hardware with software.
I'm not sue what article you read. The one I read jumped all over between topics, didn't finish one issue before launching into the next, and included graphs that it didn't even adequately explain. Roughly drafted, indeed.
I would pay so see that same senator attempting to explain Robots.txt
Fair enough, but it pays to be clear from the outset.
You on the other hand appear to believe that the GPL poses a limit. Actually the GPL only gives freedoms that the licensee would otherwise not have.
The GPL does place some limitations on copying, however the default copyright law places a lot more. I was specifying it in absolute terms, while you are referring to it in the relative sense. If you don't want to include excessive context in your comments, please extend me the same courtesy. I know plenty about the GPL, having released somewhere north of 40 thousand lines of code that way.
The term "fiction" means the presumption of a contract where the parties have not formally agreed to a contract when the absence of a contract would cause more problems for the party which has the choice to accept the contract.
Well, in the current legal system, even shrink-wrap EULAs are allowed. That's the reality. I would argue that a distribution-only license, which is more permissive than the default license under the law, is not a fiction at all. It's quite simple, and you don't even have to agree to the GPL; In that case, one defaults to normal copyright law. I don't see that as a fiction, and that is my only significant disagreement with what you originally said.
The general principals embodied in common law are universal insofar as they fill the gaps left by normal laws. Laws cannot possibly specify everything, yet a case history can come close to doing that. Also, this is hardly an explicit act, unless you can point to a statute specifically about the legality of archival on the internet. If not, then you are trying to use precedent to extrapolate a law (probably written for printed material) into a new situation.
Nice job of missing my point. "Reasonable expectation of privacy" is in the eyes of the legal community, not mine. You don't address that point, probably because you can't. So, why is an explicit notice needed to trump that notion of reasonable expectation? Perhaps it is because a website is accepted by default as public, and it takes an explicit notice to specify otherwise. If that weren't the case, even with "selective editing", it would still be considered private, right? By saying that I could only prove my point by using selective editing, you are weakening your own position.
Of course, I'm sure your explicit notice doesn't depend on javascript support, isn't at the very end of the page after all of the content, and lacks all electronically accepted forms of achieving the same result (robots.txt, meta tags). In which case, why are you defending this woman, where all of these things are true?
Believe it or not, we don't care about your website, and it isn't the topic of this article. I could not care less about what happens to spiders that don't obey accepted forms of exclusion. I'm sorry you've lost precious bandwidth, and are apparently unwilling to put a password on your site. However, don't try to equate your experience with this lawsuit, as they are not similar at all.
You don't really understand the concept of precedent in common law legal systems, do you? Through legal precedent, accepted norms and customs can carry the same force as law. I doubt the law on "unlawful entry" specifies exactly what kind of door is or is not public, and thankfully it doesn't need to. Precedent can do the work, along with the common sense of the judge and jury. On the internet, there may not be a law (yet) supporting things such as privacy and robots.txt, but there's plenty of precedent, and it doesn't agree with you.
It's called a "reasonable expectation of privacy", and it's a well established principal. In a public bathroom, one can still reasonably expect privacy, however while on the stage of a public theater, one cannot reasonably expect privacy. A publicly accessible website advertising your business seems more similar to the latter example than the former.
This woman seems to be angry just at the mere fact that it's been copied, and not with any occurrence of distribution. In a GPL violation case, one normally asks for compliance or a cessation of distribution, trying to work something out before launching into a lawsuit. That's because the violation may have been totally accidental (as it would be with a spider with no robots.txt present), and even if you "won" the lawsuit, your tiny award would not cover the costs. So, if she didn't first ask archive.org to remove the material, she'll have a difficult time showing she was acting with any good faith.
If a comment such as "Operation not permitted" or "I/O error" is a creative work, then I'm registering a copyright on "No solicitors" and "Beware of Dog" signs. So, if you have a similar sign, obviously you copied it, and owe me $3 million for each (since SCO wants $1B for 326 lines).
Now, long comments that actually say something can be creative, but terse comments a few words long will not be unique. In my own code, I have a distance function with the comment "returns distance between two points". There are 83 hits on google for that exact phrase. Some people *gasp* even used the same name for their function: "dist". Using your reasoning, clearly they are "copy pasting" my code, since they replicated both the functionality and the way of specifying the comment.
That's not big unless SCO proves anything about where those lines came from. Many of them could actually be from BSD (AT&T stole liberally from BSD, and some vice-versa, as was found in the USL lawsuit). Windows and OS/X copy tracts of BSD code too, so if SCO managed to somehow pin Linux for implementing a standard, don't think that you'd be safe. Luckily, BSD is free, and has been free, and the code in question has also been released by SCO itself under the GPL. IBM has 5 separate licenses to the code. So, that's not big, that's nothing.
And as far as auditing, why wait? I'm sure every IP troll has already been scanning Linux (the code is out there to look at) for anything they could find since the lawsuit started in 2003. After four years, all they have to show for it is FUD from MS and 326 lines of uncopyrightable code from SCO. Let's just say I'm not real scared...
And of course to top it off, the numbers in Linux/386 don't even match UNIX. Now before you throw a chair, the numbers in some other architectures do match their respective versions of UNIX, however in most cases that's because the processor maker/UNIX company itself put them there.