Yet again, we get into a conflict between what the legal system wants to think e-mail is, and what e-mail actually is.
When I send an e-mail, I open up a TCP connection to port 25 of a mail server, and stream the text of my e-mail to it. I have an understanding that in doing so, that mail server will then, at minimum, store the mail, and subsequently make one or more attempts to send it on to another mail server, possibly belonging to a third party unknown to me. That mail server will then store the mail, until such time as the eventual recipient of the e-mail downloads it. I have an expectation that, once the messages have been passed on, they will ultimately be deleted by the servers they pass through.
But, since I don't attach a license agreement granting any of the intermediate servers the right to store or copy the message, the only laws that could possibly apply are those of copyright. Therefore, SMTP servers are illegal. That can't be right, though...
Lawyers try to get around this contradiction by talking about the intentions of the user. I intend for the mail to reach the recipient I intended, so I must implicitly be granting some rights, allowing the SMTP servers to function. The question I have is, what is the extent of those rights? To what extent can a server deviate from the plan I set out above, as what I expect to be its behavior? Can a server automatically publish the mail to a web site (as happens with some mailing lists, for example)? Can it keep a permanent logged copy of every mail it processes? Can it forward it to another recipient in addition to the one I intended? What control can I resonably expect over what copies will be made of the email once I stream it to port 25 of that server?
Disclaimers such as that on the bottom of this mail deal with the possibility that one or more servers along the route might misdirect the mail, or are configured to forward messages to someone other than the intended recipient, or log the message text somewhere where someone other than the recipient may see it. Now, since I sent an e-mail, it could certainly be argued that I can't assume none of these things will happen, so the inclusion of such a disclaimer is necessary. But if it can be argued that these consequences could occur, and must be anticipated (to the extent where disclaimers such as this are necessary), then surely I'm granting a lot more rights to the SMTP server when I open that connection and send it my email in the first place...
I still maintain that lawyers just don't get how internet protocols work. No matter how far you stretch the metaphor, e-mail isn't like sending letters, or postcards - it's a lot more like passing a message through chinese whispers. Conventional copyright and ownership arguments just can't be applied....
> Check daily for patches on your software, patch it, reboot, get back to work
Actually, the most common cause of a 'forced reboot' on any of my Windows systems nowadays isn't an MS patch (neither of the last couple of RPC vulnerability patches required a reboot on WinXP or 2003) - it's Norton Antivirus. NAV uite often seems to download something that requires a full reboot of the machine. Quite why it's possible to patch the OS without a reboot, but an application can't restart itself cleanly without a full restart I have no idea...
You've made the critical error of posting an obligatory Simpsons quote, without pointing the fact out in the subject line. How are you going to get +5 Funny for nodding knowingly at a pop culture reference if the moderators don't know it?
As of last month, I get my gas and electric bills by e-mail (this is in the UK). Pretty soon, I'll just be able to leave a recycle bin under my letter box to collect junk mail, since I'll no longer receive any legit snail mail at all.
Thing is, whenever I install an OS to try it out, I don't go in expecting much, whether it's FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Windows, or BeOS. I play with the OS tools, then, more often than not, I've left my testbed machine alone and gone back to my workhorse Mac OS X or Windows boxes to get on with doing stuff. Unless there was a piece of software I wanted to use, which caused me to install the OS in the first place. Then I find a lot more to do.
Operating systems don't do a whole lot. Don't expect Linux to magically change your life. You need to find some software that does interesting things you want to do, install it if it's not already on the system, and use it.
Want to do computer graphics? Get GIMP. Want to write code? break out Vi or Emacs and GCC, perl or javac. Want to build web sites? look at PHP and Apache. Want to rip CDs, edit movies, play games, render 3d images? Go google.
The problem a lot of people have when they install OSes is they expect there to be more to them than a file browser and a bunch of control panel preferences. They're not, for the most part.
You call that foul language? You're new here, aren't you?:)
You're right, of course, the OS should do whatever it can to obey user commands. Provided those user commands are issued by a competent authority. What if the process accessing the disk belongs to the root user, and the user attempting to press the eject button is a lowly peon? Should the computer tell the root program to lump it, unmount the disk, and hope the program running as root handles IO errors correctly? Probably not...
It's not a black and white issue, in UNIX-land. The user is not always right. It is up to the OS to protect other users of the computer from the behavior of other users.
Of course, at the same time, the OS should be careful to ensure that programs acting on behalf of one user can't lock up the CD drive and prevent other users from being able to eject the disk from it.
Perhaps locks on removable media devices should be leased to programs for a fixed time. If a request comes in for a lease while the device is locked by another program, the current lessee can be polled to see if it wants to keep the lock (or pre-empted if the request is from a user who 'outranks' the user who has the lease). It may even be required to supply a reason, and an estimate of how long it'll need it for, so a sane error message can be delivered to the user (not 'the file is in use', but 'could not unmount volume FOO. A program is using a file on that volume. The program supplied the following details: Decoding CSS data. Time remaining: 22 seconds'). If the lease is allowed to expire without the lessee renewing it or unlocking it, then the lock is automatically released - meaning lazy programs that don't release their locks can't lock up the disk forever. This is just basic resource sharing.
You're quite right. Knew I shoulda googled before posting. They're both on the same road.
The thing that most impressed me among all the heavy engineering at Dinorwig (and the biggest goddamned quarter-turn taps (fawcets) I've ever seen) is the fact that the turbine/dynamo configuration is built in such a way that they also use it as an electric-motor/pump - they just run the same process backwards to pump water up the hill as they use to get electricity out when the water's running down.
Building efficient turbines, dynamos, pump blades, and motors is hard enough, but getting each part to do two jobs impressed me no end.
You have an incomplete understanding of evolution. It's all about extinction. Species that are unsuited die out. Species that are well suited survive. All species vary over time. The species that survive for the longest time are those whose variation cycle most closely matches the varying needs of their environment. Naturally, those that exist in environments which have seen the least change have generally survived the longest. Some long term survivors, like sharks and crocodiles, must 1) be pretty good at surviving in a wide range of conditions, and 2) be pretty lucky (both have lived through major mass extinction events that wiped out similar types of animal).
Most species in existence simply haven't been around that long. Humans are a very young species.
Now, if you ignore the species boundary (not a philosophy I recommend adopting in your personal life), then yeah, sure - every animal that's alive today is alive by virtue of the fact that its parents, its parents' parents, its parents' parents' parents, and so on, back through every ancestor to the dawn of life on this planet, survived to breeding age. That means that individual bloodlines have survived by adapting. But around 99.9% of all the species forms that have ever been taken by life on earth have died out, leaving us with a comparatively tiny range of species types in existence today. Most of the types of creature your ancestors were no longer exist (in fact, I'd go so far as to say that all of the species which have carried your DNA right up to your first human ancestor are probably extinct).
Load of rubbish. Yes, power stations need to keep running for efficiency reasons (not safety reasons - you can turn off the turbines and just vent steam if you really don't want the energy coming out of a coal furnace or nuclear reactor). But we can do a lot better than streetlights as a tension load on the electricity grid. Why not, for example, pipe the power into a pumped storage station - use it to lift water up a mountain. Then the next day, let it run down through turbines to generate electricity when it's needed.
Pumped storage is like a rechargable battery for the electricity network, and they can be pretty damned efficient at it. Instead of just burning off electricity all night because you have to generate it anyway, a good pumped storage network will let you pool about 60% of the generated electricity and let it go when you need it. And pumped storage stations can be brought online and switched off almost instantaneously - there's one in Wales (the electric mountain plant at Trawsfynnydd - basically a hollowed out mountain) that claims the fastest response time of any power station in the world - something like 6 seconds.
> 100% death rates of all people that get too much light
Okay - three problems.
1) name a group of people that doesn't have a 100% death rate
2) 'too much' light means 'that quantity of light which is excessive, so as to be harmful'. Of course 'too much' light is bad for you; so is 'too much' water, 'too much' breathing, and so on. That's precisely what 'too much' means. You're not going to die from getting 'enough' light, though, are you?
3) the article makes no such claim. It talked about increases in breast cancer risk among women who work night shifts.
I don't think I recal any company with a paid for content model demanding that since making money is their inherent right, nobody else may provide the same kind of content for free... all I'm saying is that if content has value, people should be willing to pay for it.
> What ever happened to the old days *before the dot-com era* where people did things on the net because they thought it was (awesome | fun | informative | gave something back to the community | the-next-best-thing-since-sliced-bread)?
Well, er... what ever happened to the old days *before digital technology* where people did things in the real world because they could sell the results?
Just cos the internet enabled people to use their copious leisure time to goof off doing productive things for no personal gain, doesn't mean that everybody has to. It turns out, a lot of people want rewarding for using their time to generate things you want or need - software, insight into current events, technical information, stories, music, films, whatever.
You're actually saying everybody who creates, researches, thinks, or analyses for a living is wasting their time - the output of that activity has no intrinsic value. I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree. I have to - I'm a writer.
> Obviously if I personally paid a small amount for all of the little things that I use on the net, I'd be dead broke.
Sounds to me like you're admitting that you're wasting your life. Spending so much time accessing online services which don't actually enhance the value of your life one iota (if they did, you'd surely be willing to pay for them, right?). Maybe if you spent your time more productively, you'd be able to earn more and afford to splash out on little online luxuries from time to time?
The EU government may well go off against citizens someday. Well, I conced that is a true statement - it may happen. Most states go through phases of that sort from time to time. Hell, I don't think there's a country in Europe that doesn't have some shameful abuse of basic rights in its history in the last century.
But I think the chances of any governmental institution created through intragovernmental co-operation in Europe actually being given the power to seriously abuse citizen rights, then using that power, without at least one or two states seceding, are pretty remote.
Still, I guess you could have said the same thing about Germany in 1880...
Ah, I dunno. I'm a euro-optimist. I tend to think an EU government couldn't be much worse than any of the individual governments European states have saddled themselves with this decade.
Never underestimate the stupidity of the average criminal. It is a sad fact that most crime is committed in the immediate neighborhood of the criminal.
I think you're reading too much into this - nobody is going to be 'targetted' by this system. This is just data mining. Tying together databases they already have. They've got the DMV records that tell them vehicle make, model and color - so they can do a query to find all the vehicles that match a description; even if they don't have 'hair color' as a question on the driving license application, they have your driving license photo on file - so, they can have extracted hair color information from that. Then they tie the address information in to a geographical DB, along with the crime scene, and they've just got themselves a bunch of leads that might have taken weeks to track down otherwise.
Look, the real problem here isn't that innocent people will get hassled by the cops. For serious crime - robbery, mugging, burglary, murder, rape - coincidental circumstantial evidence, with no prior record or other connection to the crime, and you'll be eliminated from the police's enquiries in a flash, unless nothing more promising shows up. For crimes that can be committed by anybody - DUI hit-and-run, for example - this gives the cops a great starting point for an enquiry that simply has to treat all people who match the description as suspects. If they can tie in surveillance camera footage and find out which direction the criminal's vehicle went, or enhance the image and grab the number plate, then so much the better. This isn't going to cause innocent motorists to get arrested - it's going to bring people to justice who wouldn't otherwise be caught.
Anonymity - the ability to simply blend into the community and be an invisible drone - is not a particularly desirable consequence of modern lifestyles, let alone a right. A hundred years ago, everybody in a town knew everybody else, and something of their business. Just because you live in a big city, drive an anonymous car and live in an anonymous house, I don't see why it isn't society's business to pay a little bit of attention to what you get up to.
> The person who added it will be sued by many Linux vendors for putting it there. SCO's case is with the person who put the code into to the kernel, not with Linux users.
Hmm - interesting point about what the remedy would be if SCO is right. If it is SCO code in the kernel (i.e., code on which copyright belongs to SCO), then there are two illegal acts:
1) plagiarism and passing off - the person who contributed the code to the kernel claimed code as their own that was not theirs. That's illegal, assuming the person doing the passing-off resides in a jurisdiction where SCO's copyright is recognised. And no, they wouldn't need to be sued - the relevant government could prosecute them for copyright infringement.
2) distribution - this is where the real damage is done. Anybody who distributed the infringing code would be guilty of copyright-infringing distribution. You may claim 'good faith' belief that you had the right to distribute the code - but, I'm afraid, the GPL comes and haunts you here. The author disclaims all warranty and indemnity, if I recall. In other words, you're on your own, and it was up to you to make sure that the author of the code was telling the truth. So, anybody who ever distributed the code (and, under the GPL, thaqt could be anybody, couldn't it? not just distros, but mirror FTP site hosts, people who burnt copies for friends, anybody) could be liable to prosecution for infringing SCO's copyright. Doubtless, they could try to palm the suit off onto the original infringer, but because of the warranty disclaimer they may not get away with it.
The lesson? When someone hands you a chunk of code with the GPL on the top of it, before you exercise any of the _rights_ the GPL grants you (such as redistribution), make damned sure the person who granted you those rights had the rights to grant in the first place. When someone licenses you code, you're entering into a legal agreement with them - you'd better be sure they're in a position to hold up their end of the bargain.
Liberal tech industry? You seen the kind of opinions that crop up whenever someone mentions the letters H1-B around here? Not being american, I'm not always sure which political opnions you guys think of as 'liberal' or 'conservative', but I'm pretty sure liberal thinking doesn't generally encompass moaning about foreigners coming and stealing your jobs (although I could certainly see proper socialists taking that view, I think that species has pretty much died out in the US, hasn't it?)...
I think you'll find the tech industry has just the same spread of opinion as society in general. What I have noticed is that politically-inclined Americans (few though they are) all tend to see the world around them as a conspiracy of the political wing they oppose - so to lefties, everything they see is a neo-con plot, and right-wingers see liberal PC bias in everything.
I think you guys all need to chill out a little; complaints about media bias are really just thinly disguised patronising assertions that the average joe is too dumb to make up his own mind and see propaganda for what it is.
So, ah - you're saying that Microsoft shouldn't set up this lab? Or they shouldn't publish the opinions generated by the lab? Or that they shouldn't publicise the fact that they're setting up the lab? Or that they must publish everything the lab discovers - even if it's positive for OSS and negative for them? I mean, what are you trying to argue here?
In fact, I'm not sure you actually have a point at all. Microsoft is perfectly entitled to do this - and it makes perfect sense for them from a technological, marketing, and, bottom-line, revenue point of view... so I'm inclined to think you're just bitching because MS is big enough to afford to pay someone to play with Linux all day and report any bad things they find.
Okay, so the very existence of MS offends you; you find some of their business methods immoral. I can appreciate your concerns.
But complaining that a company is setting out to publish propaganda that makes them look good against their competitors is like complaining that the sky is blue. Get over it. Spend your energy on more useful pursuits.
Your faith that Linux is perfect is touching, truly.
I don't think many of the kernel development team would agree with you. If they did, surely they'd be putting their feet up and sitting back to watch their perfect creation slowly take over the world.
Any criticism of Linux that emerges from this lab can be addressed by its developers and users. Simply saying that any criticism that is levelled at Linux must be a lie because Linux doesn't need improving is dogmatic nonsense.
That contract may be null and void in the event of bankruptcy. If the company goes out of business, having paid you already for some or all of the work done, then that clause would give you preferential status over creditors in divvying up the company's assets. Bankruptcy law trumps contract law, I'm afraid.
> I mean, can't they ratify laws to allow low power FM devices access?
Well, no. Not right now. The issue only really just arose because a distributor wanted to sell the iTrip in the UK, and has realised they can't (and posted a press release about it widely enough to hit the BBC, the Register and/.). If they want to lobby an MP, maybe they could get them to consider putting a private members bill to modify spectrum regulation of low power devices in the next parliamentary term - if they can find a sympathetic MP, and the MP wins a ballot giving them the right to propose legislation. Alternatively, they could go the more expensive route and lobby government directly, try to get spectrum reform into the legislative program.
Either way, with parliament just shut down for the summer, nothing's gonna happen until September.
Alternatively, the Radio Agency (the government body that regulates UK spectrum) could take matters into its own hands and modify the regulatory regime - but it'd need a pretty compelling argument to make it do so.
What we need to do is start a pressure group campaigning against the growing number of people crashing into pedestrians because they're driving with headphones on. One or two tabloid headlines and a human interest documentary presented by Trevor Macdonald, and we could easily rush through kneejerk legislation securing the banning of headphones in cars, and allowing the use of alternative technology like this.
Yeah! since 1949, we've discovered loads more frequencies in the FM band, and it's not like we're using the electromagnetic spectrum any more intensively now than we were back then. This ancient piece of outdated legislation should have been repealed decades ago...
While we're about it, why doesn't the US get rid of that old constitution thing - that must be over two hundred years old by now. Surely it can't be relevant any more?
Slashdot Mirror
Yet again, we get into a conflict between what the legal system wants to think e-mail is, and what e-mail actually is.
When I send an e-mail, I open up a TCP connection to port 25 of a mail server, and stream the text of my e-mail to it. I have an understanding that in doing so, that mail server will then, at minimum, store the mail, and subsequently make one or more attempts to send it on to another mail server, possibly belonging to a third party unknown to me. That mail server will then store the mail, until such time as the eventual recipient of the e-mail downloads it. I have an expectation that, once the messages have been passed on, they will ultimately be deleted by the servers they pass through.
But, since I don't attach a license agreement granting any of the intermediate servers the right to store or copy the message, the only laws that could possibly apply are those of copyright. Therefore, SMTP servers are illegal. That can't be right, though...
Lawyers try to get around this contradiction by talking about the intentions of the user. I intend for the mail to reach the recipient I intended, so I must implicitly be granting some rights, allowing the SMTP servers to function. The question I have is, what is the extent of those rights? To what extent can a server deviate from the plan I set out above, as what I expect to be its behavior? Can a server automatically publish the mail to a web site (as happens with some mailing lists, for example)? Can it keep a permanent logged copy of every mail it processes? Can it forward it to another recipient in addition to the one I intended? What control can I resonably expect over what copies will be made of the email once I stream it to port 25 of that server?
Disclaimers such as that on the bottom of this mail deal with the possibility that one or more servers along the route might misdirect the mail, or are configured to forward messages to someone other than the intended recipient, or log the message text somewhere where someone other than the recipient may see it. Now, since I sent an e-mail, it could certainly be argued that I can't assume none of these things will happen, so the inclusion of such a disclaimer is necessary. But if it can be argued that these consequences could occur, and must be anticipated (to the extent where disclaimers such as this are necessary), then surely I'm granting a lot more rights to the SMTP server when I open that connection and send it my email in the first place...
I still maintain that lawyers just don't get how internet protocols work. No matter how far you stretch the metaphor, e-mail isn't like sending letters, or postcards - it's a lot more like passing a message through chinese whispers. Conventional copyright and ownership arguments just can't be applied....
> Check daily for patches on your software, patch it, reboot, get back to work
Actually, the most common cause of a 'forced reboot' on any of my Windows systems nowadays isn't an MS patch (neither of the last couple of RPC vulnerability patches required a reboot on WinXP or 2003) - it's Norton Antivirus. NAV uite often seems to download something that requires a full reboot of the machine. Quite why it's possible to patch the OS without a reboot, but an application can't restart itself cleanly without a full restart I have no idea...
I'm looking for a power supply in the minus three hundred watt range.
You've made the critical error of posting an obligatory Simpsons quote, without pointing the fact out in the subject line. How are you going to get +5 Funny for nodding knowingly at a pop culture reference if the moderators don't know it?
Anyone looking at SGI?
As of last month, I get my gas and electric bills by e-mail (this is in the UK). Pretty soon, I'll just be able to leave a recycle bin under my letter box to collect junk mail, since I'll no longer receive any legit snail mail at all.
Same thing could easily happen in the US...
Question is, what are you trying to do?
Thing is, whenever I install an OS to try it out, I don't go in expecting much, whether it's FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Windows, or BeOS. I play with the OS tools, then, more often than not, I've left my testbed machine alone and gone back to my workhorse Mac OS X or Windows boxes to get on with doing stuff. Unless there was a piece of software I wanted to use, which caused me to install the OS in the first place. Then I find a lot more to do.
Operating systems don't do a whole lot. Don't expect Linux to magically change your life. You need to find some software that does interesting things you want to do, install it if it's not already on the system, and use it.
Want to do computer graphics? Get GIMP. Want to write code? break out Vi or Emacs and GCC, perl or javac. Want to build web sites? look at PHP and Apache. Want to rip CDs, edit movies, play games, render 3d images? Go google.
The problem a lot of people have when they install OSes is they expect there to be more to them than a file browser and a bunch of control panel preferences. They're not, for the most part.
You call that foul language? You're new here, aren't you? :)
You're right, of course, the OS should do whatever it can to obey user commands. Provided those user commands are issued by a competent authority. What if the process accessing the disk belongs to the root user, and the user attempting to press the eject button is a lowly peon? Should the computer tell the root program to lump it, unmount the disk, and hope the program running as root handles IO errors correctly? Probably not...
It's not a black and white issue, in UNIX-land. The user is not always right. It is up to the OS to protect other users of the computer from the behavior of other users.
Of course, at the same time, the OS should be careful to ensure that programs acting on behalf of one user can't lock up the CD drive and prevent other users from being able to eject the disk from it.
Perhaps locks on removable media devices should be leased to programs for a fixed time. If a request comes in for a lease while the device is locked by another program, the current lessee can be polled to see if it wants to keep the lock (or pre-empted if the request is from a user who 'outranks' the user who has the lease). It may even be required to supply a reason, and an estimate of how long it'll need it for, so a sane error message can be delivered to the user (not 'the file is in use', but 'could not unmount volume FOO. A program is using a file on that volume. The program supplied the following details: Decoding CSS data. Time remaining: 22 seconds'). If the lease is allowed to expire without the lessee renewing it or unlocking it, then the lock is automatically released - meaning lazy programs that don't release their locks can't lock up the disk forever. This is just basic resource sharing.
You're quite right. Knew I shoulda googled before posting. They're both on the same road.
The thing that most impressed me among all the heavy engineering at Dinorwig (and the biggest goddamned quarter-turn taps (fawcets) I've ever seen) is the fact that the turbine/dynamo configuration is built in such a way that they also use it as an electric-motor/pump - they just run the same process backwards to pump water up the hill as they use to get electricity out when the water's running down.
Building efficient turbines, dynamos, pump blades, and motors is hard enough, but getting each part to do two jobs impressed me no end.
You have an incomplete understanding of evolution. It's all about extinction. Species that are unsuited die out. Species that are well suited survive. All species vary over time. The species that survive for the longest time are those whose variation cycle most closely matches the varying needs of their environment. Naturally, those that exist in environments which have seen the least change have generally survived the longest. Some long term survivors, like sharks and crocodiles, must 1) be pretty good at surviving in a wide range of conditions, and 2) be pretty lucky (both have lived through major mass extinction events that wiped out similar types of animal).
Most species in existence simply haven't been around that long. Humans are a very young species.
Now, if you ignore the species boundary (not a philosophy I recommend adopting in your personal life), then yeah, sure - every animal that's alive today is alive by virtue of the fact that its parents, its parents' parents, its parents' parents' parents, and so on, back through every ancestor to the dawn of life on this planet, survived to breeding age. That means that individual bloodlines have survived by adapting. But around 99.9% of all the species forms that have ever been taken by life on earth have died out, leaving us with a comparatively tiny range of species types in existence today. Most of the types of creature your ancestors were no longer exist (in fact, I'd go so far as to say that all of the species which have carried your DNA right up to your first human ancestor are probably extinct).
Load of rubbish. Yes, power stations need to keep running for efficiency reasons (not safety reasons - you can turn off the turbines and just vent steam if you really don't want the energy coming out of a coal furnace or nuclear reactor). But we can do a lot better than streetlights as a tension load on the electricity grid. Why not, for example, pipe the power into a pumped storage station - use it to lift water up a mountain. Then the next day, let it run down through turbines to generate electricity when it's needed.
Pumped storage is like a rechargable battery for the electricity network, and they can be pretty damned efficient at it. Instead of just burning off electricity all night because you have to generate it anyway, a good pumped storage network will let you pool about 60% of the generated electricity and let it go when you need it. And pumped storage stations can be brought online and switched off almost instantaneously - there's one in Wales (the electric mountain plant at Trawsfynnydd - basically a hollowed out mountain) that claims the fastest response time of any power station in the world - something like 6 seconds.
> 100% death rates of all people that get too much light
Okay - three problems.
1) name a group of people that doesn't have a 100% death rate
2) 'too much' light means 'that quantity of light which is excessive, so as to be harmful'. Of course 'too much' light is bad for you; so is 'too much' water, 'too much' breathing, and so on. That's precisely what 'too much' means. You're not going to die from getting 'enough' light, though, are you?
3) the article makes no such claim. It talked about increases in breast cancer risk among women who work night shifts.
I don't think I recal any company with a paid for content model demanding that since making money is their inherent right, nobody else may provide the same kind of content for free... all I'm saying is that if content has value, people should be willing to pay for it.
> What ever happened to the old days *before the dot-com era* where people did things on the net because they thought it was (awesome | fun | informative | gave something back to the community | the-next-best-thing-since-sliced-bread)?
Well, er... what ever happened to the old days *before digital technology* where people did things in the real world because they could sell the results?
Just cos the internet enabled people to use their copious leisure time to goof off doing productive things for no personal gain, doesn't mean that everybody has to. It turns out, a lot of people want rewarding for using their time to generate things you want or need - software, insight into current events, technical information, stories, music, films, whatever.
You're actually saying everybody who creates, researches, thinks, or analyses for a living is wasting their time - the output of that activity has no intrinsic value. I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree. I have to - I'm a writer.
> Obviously if I personally paid a small amount for all of the little things that I use on the net, I'd be dead broke.
Sounds to me like you're admitting that you're wasting your life. Spending so much time accessing online services which don't actually enhance the value of your life one iota (if they did, you'd surely be willing to pay for them, right?). Maybe if you spent your time more productively, you'd be able to earn more and afford to splash out on little online luxuries from time to time?
The EU government may well go off against citizens someday. Well, I conced that is a true statement - it may happen. Most states go through phases of that sort from time to time. Hell, I don't think there's a country in Europe that doesn't have some shameful abuse of basic rights in its history in the last century.
But I think the chances of any governmental institution created through intragovernmental co-operation in Europe actually being given the power to seriously abuse citizen rights, then using that power, without at least one or two states seceding, are pretty remote.
Still, I guess you could have said the same thing about Germany in 1880...
Ah, I dunno. I'm a euro-optimist. I tend to think an EU government couldn't be much worse than any of the individual governments European states have saddled themselves with this decade.
Never underestimate the stupidity of the average criminal. It is a sad fact that most crime is committed in the immediate neighborhood of the criminal.
I think you're reading too much into this - nobody is going to be 'targetted' by this system. This is just data mining. Tying together databases they already have. They've got the DMV records that tell them vehicle make, model and color - so they can do a query to find all the vehicles that match a description; even if they don't have 'hair color' as a question on the driving license application, they have your driving license photo on file - so, they can have extracted hair color information from that. Then they tie the address information in to a geographical DB, along with the crime scene, and they've just got themselves a bunch of leads that might have taken weeks to track down otherwise.
Look, the real problem here isn't that innocent people will get hassled by the cops. For serious crime - robbery, mugging, burglary, murder, rape - coincidental circumstantial evidence, with no prior record or other connection to the crime, and you'll be eliminated from the police's enquiries in a flash, unless nothing more promising shows up. For crimes that can be committed by anybody - DUI hit-and-run, for example - this gives the cops a great starting point for an enquiry that simply has to treat all people who match the description as suspects. If they can tie in surveillance camera footage and find out which direction the criminal's vehicle went, or enhance the image and grab the number plate, then so much the better. This isn't going to cause innocent motorists to get arrested - it's going to bring people to justice who wouldn't otherwise be caught.
Anonymity - the ability to simply blend into the community and be an invisible drone - is not a particularly desirable consequence of modern lifestyles, let alone a right. A hundred years ago, everybody in a town knew everybody else, and something of their business. Just because you live in a big city, drive an anonymous car and live in an anonymous house, I don't see why it isn't society's business to pay a little bit of attention to what you get up to.
It died because its acronym wasn't cool enough to play with the big boys.
> The person who added it will be sued by many Linux vendors for putting it there. SCO's case is with the person who put the code into to the kernel, not with Linux users.
Hmm - interesting point about what the remedy would be if SCO is right. If it is SCO code in the kernel (i.e., code on which copyright belongs to SCO), then there are two illegal acts:
1) plagiarism and passing off - the person who contributed the code to the kernel claimed code as their own that was not theirs. That's illegal, assuming the person doing the passing-off resides in a jurisdiction where SCO's copyright is recognised. And no, they wouldn't need to be sued - the relevant government could prosecute them for copyright infringement.
2) distribution - this is where the real damage is done. Anybody who distributed the infringing code would be guilty of copyright-infringing distribution. You may claim 'good faith' belief that you had the right to distribute the code - but, I'm afraid, the GPL comes and haunts you here. The author disclaims all warranty and indemnity, if I recall. In other words, you're on your own, and it was up to you to make sure that the author of the code was telling the truth. So, anybody who ever distributed the code (and, under the GPL, thaqt could be anybody, couldn't it? not just distros, but mirror FTP site hosts, people who burnt copies for friends, anybody) could be liable to prosecution for infringing SCO's copyright. Doubtless, they could try to palm the suit off onto the original infringer, but because of the warranty disclaimer they may not get away with it.
The lesson? When someone hands you a chunk of code with the GPL on the top of it, before you exercise any of the _rights_ the GPL grants you (such as redistribution), make damned sure the person who granted you those rights had the rights to grant in the first place. When someone licenses you code, you're entering into a legal agreement with them - you'd better be sure they're in a position to hold up their end of the bargain.
Liberal tech industry? You seen the kind of opinions that crop up whenever someone mentions the letters H1-B around here? Not being american, I'm not always sure which political opnions you guys think of as 'liberal' or 'conservative', but I'm pretty sure liberal thinking doesn't generally encompass moaning about foreigners coming and stealing your jobs (although I could certainly see proper socialists taking that view, I think that species has pretty much died out in the US, hasn't it?)...
I think you'll find the tech industry has just the same spread of opinion as society in general. What I have noticed is that politically-inclined Americans (few though they are) all tend to see the world around them as a conspiracy of the political wing they oppose - so to lefties, everything they see is a neo-con plot, and right-wingers see liberal PC bias in everything.
I think you guys all need to chill out a little; complaints about media bias are really just thinly disguised patronising assertions that the average joe is too dumb to make up his own mind and see propaganda for what it is.
So, ah - you're saying that Microsoft shouldn't set up this lab? Or they shouldn't publish the opinions generated by the lab? Or that they shouldn't publicise the fact that they're setting up the lab? Or that they must publish everything the lab discovers - even if it's positive for OSS and negative for them? I mean, what are you trying to argue here?
In fact, I'm not sure you actually have a point at all. Microsoft is perfectly entitled to do this - and it makes perfect sense for them from a technological, marketing, and, bottom-line, revenue point of view... so I'm inclined to think you're just bitching because MS is big enough to afford to pay someone to play with Linux all day and report any bad things they find.
Okay, so the very existence of MS offends you; you find some of their business methods immoral. I can appreciate your concerns.
But complaining that a company is setting out to publish propaganda that makes them look good against their competitors is like complaining that the sky is blue. Get over it. Spend your energy on more useful pursuits.
> You can't fix what is not broken.
Your faith that Linux is perfect is touching, truly.
I don't think many of the kernel development team would agree with you. If they did, surely they'd be putting their feet up and sitting back to watch their perfect creation slowly take over the world.
Any criticism of Linux that emerges from this lab can be addressed by its developers and users. Simply saying that any criticism that is levelled at Linux must be a lie because Linux doesn't need improving is dogmatic nonsense.
That contract may be null and void in the event of bankruptcy. If the company goes out of business, having paid you already for some or all of the work done, then that clause would give you preferential status over creditors in divvying up the company's assets. Bankruptcy law trumps contract law, I'm afraid.
> I mean, can't they ratify laws to allow low power FM devices access?
/.). If they want to lobby an MP, maybe they could get them to consider putting a private members bill to modify spectrum regulation of low power devices in the next parliamentary term - if they can find a sympathetic MP, and the MP wins a ballot giving them the right to propose legislation. Alternatively, they could go the more expensive route and lobby government directly, try to get spectrum reform into the legislative program.
Well, no. Not right now. The issue only really just arose because a distributor wanted to sell the iTrip in the UK, and has realised they can't (and posted a press release about it widely enough to hit the BBC, the Register and
Either way, with parliament just shut down for the summer, nothing's gonna happen until September.
Alternatively, the Radio Agency (the government body that regulates UK spectrum) could take matters into its own hands and modify the regulatory regime - but it'd need a pretty compelling argument to make it do so.
What we need to do is start a pressure group campaigning against the growing number of people crashing into pedestrians because they're driving with headphones on. One or two tabloid headlines and a human interest documentary presented by Trevor Macdonald, and we could easily rush through kneejerk legislation securing the banning of headphones in cars, and allowing the use of alternative technology like this.
Yeah! since 1949, we've discovered loads more frequencies in the FM band, and it's not like we're using the electromagnetic spectrum any more intensively now than we were back then. This ancient piece of outdated legislation should have been repealed decades ago...
While we're about it, why doesn't the US get rid of that old constitution thing - that must be over two hundred years old by now. Surely it can't be relevant any more?