If you read the discussion on his website (or posted above), you can see that what he is proposing is really more along the lines of "selling" a character in an online RPG. He is effectively going to "sell" the AppleID account that owns the song to the highest bidder.
This would appear to be a way around the eBay policy restriction you cite.
All of which is besides the point, anyway, unless/until eBay decides to cancel the auction (and refund his listing fee).
The Linux rpms available on SCO's ftp site are offered for download to
existing customers of SCO Linux, Caldera OpenLinux or SCO UnixWare with
LKP, in order to honor SCO's support obligations to such customers.
Yes, but saying it's legal and "contractual" doesn't make it so. The fact is, SCO has no right to redistribute the Linux kernel if they do not accept the GPL! Even if they are right, and parts have been stolen from them, there are many parts that were not, and represent the original contributions of authors other than SCO. Those authors have ONLY licensed their work for redistribution under the GPL.
They can use all the fancy language, rationales, and excuses they want, but what it comes down to is they want something for nothing.
If Open Source development is such a low-quality, impotent process then why are they insisting on stealing as much Open Source code as possible?
The article ends with the following conclusion (courtesy of an anonymous "small time" Spammer):
The only thing that's going to make spam go away is if people do not respond.
But that's not actually the case. As the article demonstrates, the companies making money off of spam are big, legitimate companies - companies that can be sued, or subpoenaed, or fined for their support of the Spam economy.
What should happen is that the companies that are ultimately hiring the spammers - Ameriquest, Quicken Loans, LoanWeb, and Ivy Mortgage - should be legally obliged to keep an audit trail for every contact email they send out on their "bought leads." Then if one of their "leads" complains, and they cannot provide a spam-free audit trail, they pay a fine.
As it is, they can say they have a "no tolerance" policy for spam (ha!), but there is no teeth to it; one person complains, and one relationship gets "severed", but no one really suffers, and the affiliate can pop right back up with another batch of "legitimate" leads the very next day. Once the companies have incentive to actually police their own affiliates, the profit margin for spamming goes way down.
You may want to pick up the author's actual book. In addition to predicting the fate of the universe, the so-called "Concordance Model" of cosmology makes a number of other, eminently testable, predictions.
One of these is the presence of dark matter - weakly-interacting subatomic particles that even now are (most probably) streaming through your body at the rate of millions per second. We have the technology, now, to search for these, and if we find them (give it a few years) - score another one for the model.
This is just one example - cosmology and the dark energy being extremely active areas of current research, there are in fact dozens of research projects under way to test the predictions and assumptions of the Concordance Model. Any one of these could disprove the theories and send everyone back to the drawing board - and our conclusions would be subject to revision in that case.
In the end, of course, we cannot know the fate of the universe until we get there - we can only give it our best guess. But, again, we can't know that Pluto will actually complete its full 250-year orbit, either, until it actually does; we can only give it our best guess.
As opposed to, say, the really big assumption of your going to sleep each night and expecting to wake up in approximately the same body, and approximately the same bed, with approximately the same house around you, and approximately the same sun up overhead?
How do we know this? Because it has always been true in the past.
It's not knowledge; it's a prediction. And as far as that goes - so far, so good.
Since theres so much more dark energy than matter, would it be possible that some future descendants of humans could tap this energy...
First answer: No. Dark energy is a property of the vacuum itself - being able to tap into it would be like extracting energy from a uniform, infinite heat bath (the vacuum), or from the zero-point energy of an atom's ground state, and would enable construction of perpetual motion machines and other impossibilities. That is, extraction of useful work from the "dark energy" is ruled out by basic thermodynamics (or, if you prefer, basic quantum - the same principles apply). However...
Second answer: Maybe. In general it is true that the universe and the systems in it tend naturally towards their ground states (increasing entropy). However, it is also true that thermodynamic fluctuations happen, every now and then, and the lifetime of these "defects" can be quite long - think, for example, of the conjectured cosmic strings. Now that we know the Dark Energy exists, we can guess that it might be possible - far, far in the future, when we are an intergalactic species - to find some defects in the system. We could then set up some apparatus, and extract energy from these defects as we watch (or encourage) their "decay" to the true ground state.
Stopping the expansion of the universe itself, however, will even then be well out of reach. Our best long-long-term bet, if you ask me, is to create our own new universe and go live there, once this one gets old...
Here at/. we have human editors for spelling independencence... not to mention English grammar transcendencence... or (my favorite) just plain incoherencence...
CNET also has an extensive interview with SCO CEO Darl McBride, who is now claiming that there are "hundreds of thousands of lines" of infringing code in Linux. Choice quote: "The world seems to be divided into two camps - those that respect intellectual property and those that don't." I guess the only question then is: Which side is SCO on?
Thanks for explaining that. Properly understood, this is the best news we've had so far in the whole SCO debacle.
The SCO claims always seemed so bizarre and (given their own GPL'd distribution of the code) self-referential that they were almost a logical contradiction in terms, and now we can see that this is the case. Against the claims of the independent kernel developers, SCO has no possible self-consistent legal defense.
And if a critical mass of kernel developers can get together on this anti-SCO suit (Linus?), they might just succeed...
2. You have to request the code for the specific modules you want. It is not valid to issue a request for any "code you may be using."
Fair is fair; however, it is Linksys who is distributing the programs in binary form to begin with. They cannot simply provide a copy of the GPL in the documentation with their product and say that this covers "all GPL code distributed with this product" without themselves identifying what software the product contains which falls under the GPL. Here, check out the TiVO website for an example of how it's done.
Comparing the components lists from MadPenguin (for Linux Desktop 1.0) to those from SuSE (for Linux Office Desktop 8.1),
I'm not quite getting the difference. The latter product retails for $129, which is much more reasonable than the $600 quoted at MadPenguin.
Yeah, and if you order prints through iPhoto then they come to you courtesy of Kodak... this is not paid advertising, this is partnership. Apple decides to offer a service (Dial-up internet connectivity; prints of digital photos; iTunes albums in physical CD form) to its users, and chooses to partner with another company (Earthlink; Kodak; Amazon) to deliver that functionality. Sure, there's a monopoly aspect to it, but if you don't want the functionality, don't use it. And remember, if Apple hadn't made the partnership to begin with, you wouldn't even have a choice.
The alternative of Apple negotiating & interfacing with multiple providers, for each of these services, just so that you can have a choice ("I'd like my prints from Fuji this time, please.") is simply not going to happen. Apple is an underdog in the larger PC market. Exclusive arrangements are one of the few carrots they have to offer (and allow them to negotiate good rates for their users).
-renard
Re:They help, and they hurt.
on
Steal This Idea
·
· Score: 1
You miss the entire point of the book. Obviously both of those factors are at work, but the author has written the book to answer the question, "Do patents hurt more than they help?"
His detailed scientific and economic analysis reveals that they do. So, ditch 'em.
If it were anything other than SCO and Linux, this site would be condemning the decision and lamenting the loss of free speech rights.
There are a number of exceptions to the First Amendment liberties (and their international equivalents). For instance, "fighting words", slander, libel, "yelling fire in a crowded theater," (some types of) pornography, and so forth.
Thus if SCO wishes to cast FUD upon the Linux community, without providing any concrete evidence in support of their accusations, thereby harming the commercial prospects of their competitors, then I think it is perfectly appropriate for them to be enjoined against such behavior by the courts.
It's a simple request, really: Either substantiate the accusation or withdraw it. The same could be required of a newspaper, tabloid, or political candidate that wished to claim, i.e., that some competing political candidate had been a member of a white supremacist movement in his youth.
Step 2: Keep multimillion-song digital catalog of downloadable, copyrighted music online for millions of Mac and, real-soon-now, Windows users to access at their convenience, and take a percentage of every purchase.
Since the choice for Apple is, quite obviously, either update/downgrade the misused software or get sued out of existence?
FYI: Max Tegmark is a leading cosmologist, working on understanding what the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure of galaxies can tell us about the universe.
Calling this particular piece, speculative as it may be, the sign of a new "low" for Scientific American - unless you personally have also published extensively in the field - may be premature.
If I own a music CD, is it all right for me to download the digitally compressed version of the songs on that CD via a peer-to-peer file sharing service?
Is it all right for me to make and distribute, to my friends and non-commercially, "mix CDs" that consist of compilations of music from my collection?
If not, please reconcile explicitly with the language of the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
Under current law, is online file-sharing both illegal and punishable?
If not, then why is the RIAA pursuing legal action against so many individuals and their ISPs?
If so, then why is the RIAA lobbying Congress for legislation allowing them to, for example, commit cybercrimes against suspected file-sharers?
<sarcasm> Which would not be the case if the slides had been created with Agnubis or Impress. </sarcasm>
You're right. Obviously, it is possible to create crappy presentations using any given product - just as it is possible to write crummy code in any programming language.
However, you miss one of Tufte's main points. There are many, many ways to produce high-quality technical documents (I prefer TeX/LaTeX). There are even multiple ways to produce overhead-projector or LCD-screen presentations (see LaTeX slides, or the Prosper package). Packages that are designed to work with variables, equations, and scientific notation, would have done a better job with this presentation than (what looks like) PowerPoint did.
They would have made it easy for the authors to use a consistent, clear notation for the "cubic inches" unit measure that is crucial to their analysis. At the very bottom of the slide, they reveal that the piece of foam that struck Columbia was 640 times the size of the foam chunks they experimented with on the ground! As it is, they refer to this unit as "cu in" several times but each time the unit, as plain text, blends into its surroundings rather than associating itself with the accompanying number.
Have you ever tried to write an equation in PowerPoint? PITA. Now of course, ideally the Boeing engineers would have put in boldface 18-point font at the bottom of the slide that they did not want to extrapolate their test results by a factor of 640. But in the absence of this honorable impulse, a technically-minded presentation package would have made it easier for them to present the critical information in an readily-digested manner (and may even have warned them against using all those single-item sublevels).
As it is, any time they wanted something other than plain, bulleted text, they were working against the grain of their software. Who knows if it made the critical difference (I doubt it), but please recall that we are talking about 7 lives and several billion dollars here.
What's more, he recently wrote a whole memo about how he didn't like the direction that online music distribution was going. This would be a way for him to make a strong statement about that.
Frankly, with all this poiticization of "Open Source", I feel a strong desire to distance myself from this "movement". I much prefer the days when Linux was just Linux and people used it 'cause it was useful, not for some ridiculous philosophical or political reasons.
No such thing. I suggest you read up a bit more on the history of the open-source movement (or try C-h C-p in your emacs window). Open source was political before the first GPL, back when it was still just a gleam in RMS's eye. And without GNU, once (that is, if) Linus was able to compile his first kernel, he would have had no software to run with it.
If you think the freedoms you have (to code, to compile, to speak, to think) are not the direct result of someone else's politicization some 2, 20, or 200 years ago, then you are sorely mistaken. Similarly, it is our politicization that will preserve those freedoms for our children and grandchildren.
Slashdot Mirror
This would appear to be a way around the eBay policy restriction you cite.
All of which is besides the point, anyway, unless/until eBay decides to cancel the auction (and refund his listing fee).
-renard
Yes, but saying it's legal and "contractual" doesn't make it so. The fact is, SCO has no right to redistribute the Linux kernel if they do not accept the GPL! Even if they are right, and parts have been stolen from them, there are many parts that were not, and represent the original contributions of authors other than SCO. Those authors have ONLY licensed their work for redistribution under the GPL.
They can use all the fancy language, rationales, and excuses they want, but what it comes down to is they want something for nothing.
If Open Source development is such a low-quality, impotent process then why are they insisting on stealing as much Open Source code as possible?
-renard
To the contrary! It is clear that SCO has very excellently researched these examples, and these are the best they can come up with.
Already gone from the kernel, too. Oh, boohoo.
-renard
- Story on Star Wars and Sex, featuring explicit pictures of... robots
- Posted late on a Saturday night
- Gets >200 comments (and counting)
Perfect! Thanks everyone, good work. I'm quite certain we couldn't have matched this "quality" of "dialogue" on any other site on the Internet.-renard
Thus doth Faust7 give wholly new meaning to the phrase karma whore...
-renard
They're not. They are a longstanding part of the classic pump-and-dump, however.
Why don't journalists just ignore SCO...
- This is Slashdot. There are no journalists here.
- This is just a link to SCO's press release - there is no evidence that actual journalists are paying attention to it, as yet.
- If SCO can move the markets with this horse manure, then it doesn't matter how badly it smells, it's still news.
-renardWhat should happen is that the companies that are ultimately hiring the spammers - Ameriquest, Quicken Loans, LoanWeb, and Ivy Mortgage - should be legally obliged to keep an audit trail for every contact email they send out on their "bought leads." Then if one of their "leads" complains, and they cannot provide a spam-free audit trail, they pay a fine.
As it is, they can say they have a "no tolerance" policy for spam (ha!), but there is no teeth to it; one person complains, and one relationship gets "severed", but no one really suffers, and the affiliate can pop right back up with another batch of "legitimate" leads the very next day. Once the companies have incentive to actually police their own affiliates, the profit margin for spamming goes way down.
-renard
One of these is the presence of dark matter - weakly-interacting subatomic particles that even now are (most probably) streaming through your body at the rate of millions per second. We have the technology, now, to search for these, and if we find them (give it a few years) - score another one for the model.
This is just one example - cosmology and the dark energy being extremely active areas of current research, there are in fact dozens of research projects under way to test the predictions and assumptions of the Concordance Model. Any one of these could disprove the theories and send everyone back to the drawing board - and our conclusions would be subject to revision in that case.
In the end, of course, we cannot know the fate of the universe until we get there - we can only give it our best guess. But, again, we can't know that Pluto will actually complete its full 250-year orbit, either, until it actually does; we can only give it our best guess.
So I think the analogy is quite apropos.
-renard
As opposed to, say, the really big assumption of your going to sleep each night and expecting to wake up in approximately the same body, and approximately the same bed, with approximately the same house around you, and approximately the same sun up overhead?
How do we know this? Because it has always been true in the past.
- It's not knowledge; it's a prediction. And as far as that goes - so far, so good.
- If you've got a better idea, I'm all ears.
-renardFirst answer: No. Dark energy is a property of the vacuum itself - being able to tap into it would be like extracting energy from a uniform, infinite heat bath (the vacuum), or from the zero-point energy of an atom's ground state, and would enable construction of perpetual motion machines and other impossibilities. That is, extraction of useful work from the "dark energy" is ruled out by basic thermodynamics (or, if you prefer, basic quantum - the same principles apply). However...
Second answer: Maybe. In general it is true that the universe and the systems in it tend naturally towards their ground states (increasing entropy). However, it is also true that thermodynamic fluctuations happen, every now and then, and the lifetime of these "defects" can be quite long - think, for example, of the conjectured cosmic strings. Now that we know the Dark Energy exists, we can guess that it might be possible - far, far in the future, when we are an intergalactic species - to find some defects in the system. We could then set up some apparatus, and extract energy from these defects as we watch (or encourage) their "decay" to the true ground state.
Stopping the expansion of the universe itself, however, will even then be well out of reach. Our best long-long-term bet, if you ask me, is to create our own new universe and go live there, once this one gets old...
-renard
Here at /. we have human editors for spelling independencence... not to mention English grammar transcendencence... or (my favorite) just plain incoherencence...
-renard
The SCO claims always seemed so bizarre and (given their own GPL'd distribution of the code) self-referential that they were almost a logical contradiction in terms, and now we can see that this is the case. Against the claims of the independent kernel developers, SCO has no possible self-consistent legal defense.
And if a critical mass of kernel developers can get together on this anti-SCO suit (Linus?), they might just succeed...
-renard
Fair is fair; however, it is Linksys who is distributing the programs in binary form to begin with. They cannot simply provide a copy of the GPL in the documentation with their product and say that this covers "all GPL code distributed with this product" without themselves identifying what software the product contains which falls under the GPL. Here, check out the TiVO website for an example of how it's done.
-renard
Can someone please explain? Thanks.
-renard
The alternative of Apple negotiating & interfacing with multiple providers, for each of these services, just so that you can have a choice ("I'd like my prints from Fuji this time, please.") is simply not going to happen. Apple is an underdog in the larger PC market. Exclusive arrangements are one of the few carrots they have to offer (and allow them to negotiate good rates for their users).
-renard
His detailed scientific and economic analysis reveals that they do. So, ditch 'em.
There - just stole his idea.
-renard
There are a number of exceptions to the First Amendment liberties (and their international equivalents). For instance, "fighting words", slander, libel, "yelling fire in a crowded theater," (some types of) pornography, and so forth.
Thus if SCO wishes to cast FUD upon the Linux community, without providing any concrete evidence in support of their accusations, thereby harming the commercial prospects of their competitors, then I think it is perfectly appropriate for them to be enjoined against such behavior by the courts.
It's a simple request, really: Either substantiate the accusation or withdraw it. The same could be required of a newspaper, tabloid, or political candidate that wished to claim, i.e., that some competing political candidate had been a member of a white supremacist movement in his youth.
-renard
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
Okay, I'll bite, how about:
Since the choice for Apple is, quite obviously, either update/downgrade the misused software or get sued out of existence?-renard
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
You may ask: How do we make money selling the tickets at a loss? The answer is simple:
Volume!
(Apologies to SNL)
Calling this particular piece, speculative as it may be, the sign of a new "low" for Scientific American - unless you personally have also published extensively in the field - may be premature.
-renard
- If I own a music CD, is it all right for me to download the digitally compressed version of the songs on that CD via a peer-to-peer file sharing service?
- Is it all right for me to make and distribute, to my friends and non-commercially, "mix CDs" that consist of compilations of music from my collection?
- Under current law, is online file-sharing both illegal and punishable?
Thanks!If not, please reconcile explicitly with the language of the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
If not, then why is the RIAA pursuing legal action against so many individuals and their ISPs?
If so, then why is the RIAA lobbying Congress for legislation allowing them to, for example, commit cybercrimes against suspected file-sharers?
renard
Which would not be the case if the slides had been created with Agnubis or Impress.
</sarcasm>
You're right. Obviously, it is possible to create crappy presentations using any given product - just as it is possible to write crummy code in any programming language.
However, you miss one of Tufte's main points. There are many, many ways to produce high-quality technical documents (I prefer TeX/LaTeX). There are even multiple ways to produce overhead-projector or LCD-screen presentations (see LaTeX slides, or the Prosper package). Packages that are designed to work with variables, equations, and scientific notation, would have done a better job with this presentation than (what looks like) PowerPoint did.
They would have made it easy for the authors to use a consistent, clear notation for the "cubic inches" unit measure that is crucial to their analysis. At the very bottom of the slide, they reveal that the piece of foam that struck Columbia was 640 times the size of the foam chunks they experimented with on the ground! As it is, they refer to this unit as "cu in" several times but each time the unit, as plain text, blends into its surroundings rather than associating itself with the accompanying number.
Have you ever tried to write an equation in PowerPoint? PITA. Now of course, ideally the Boeing engineers would have put in boldface 18-point font at the bottom of the slide that they did not want to extrapolate their test results by a factor of 640. But in the absence of this honorable impulse, a technically-minded presentation package would have made it easier for them to present the critical information in an readily-digested manner (and may even have warned them against using all those single-item sublevels).
As it is, any time they wanted something other than plain, bulleted text, they were working against the grain of their software. Who knows if it made the critical difference (I doubt it), but please recall that we are talking about 7 lives and several billion dollars here.
-renard
What's more, he recently wrote a whole memo about how he didn't like the direction that online music distribution was going. This would be a way for him to make a strong statement about that.
-renard
No such thing. I suggest you read up a bit more on the history of the open-source movement (or try C-h C-p in your emacs window). Open source was political before the first GPL, back when it was still just a gleam in RMS's eye. And without GNU, once (that is, if) Linus was able to compile his first kernel, he would have had no software to run with it.
If you think the freedoms you have (to code, to compile, to speak, to think) are not the direct result of someone else's politicization some 2, 20, or 200 years ago, then you are sorely mistaken. Similarly, it is our politicization that will preserve those freedoms for our children and grandchildren.
Or not.
-renard