I was searching for "Counter Terrorism Act 2008 right to silence" when I first came across this, but after a split-second press of the print-screen key, I figured Google had borked majorly as every link on the SERP was flagged as malware (as was confirmed a second later when searching for "Google").
I'll have you know a Brit, Charles Babbage, designed the first computer. Now, he may have never actually managed to get the thing built so it worked, but...oh never mind...
You do realise that the main reasons for adopting an electoral college system were practical?
Specifically, that communicating the results, let alone running a single co-ordinated election, took a very long time (with only horses), and that the union was newly formed so the states still didn't trust each other or the federal goverment?
I don't see what is so draconian about terminating government employees who take personal data (that might be used for, say, ID theft) on citizens out of the building, no doubt committing a crime under data protection legislation in the process. After a few terminations, I'm sure they'd stop doing it. Governments tend to be way to lax with our data allowing their employees to repeatedly "mislay" it.
My bad. It says "after recalling the thumb drives used by workers. Most of those had been purchased independently by the employees, causing myriad problems for security personnel, Main said. The new policy requires workers to use the drives supplied by the agency. Main said he eventually plans to destroy all existing thumb drives collected as part of the security policy change." Although, I think from this and following comments like "The general perception is no one will report a lost USB memory stick because they're so cheap" there is an implication (although it isn't explicit at all) that the drives were bought with public money and used for public work.
Once again, I don't think there is too much to complain about here. It shocks me how many employers (even in sensitive areas like government departments and law firms) have PCs that will even, by default, run software or an operating system from a USB drive. According to TFA, in this case "sensitive data transported by off-site workers include[d client's] tax documents, employer records, criminal histories and federal passport data" and commonly "the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of children".
Of course, in opposition to what the article says, I think education about data protection legislation and issues is more important than attempting to physically constrain employees (which is ultimately impossible), although both may have their place.
It doesn't say in TFA that they have confiscated and destroyed existing drives (and, if they have, it may only be state-owned drives).
Although, it does say in the quote from the manager that they will "manage and back up the new drives using SanDisk's Central Management & Control server software...which relies on a Web connection to directly communicate with agents on the tiny flash drives [and can] remotely monitor and flush any lost drives" so they could read and delete files on the disks remotely.
It also says that they chose the disks for their MSW Vista compatibility which suggests that the "agents" really are (as previously quoted) on the disk rather than the PCs (one assumes so they can track what their employees do with the disks while not using their PCs, which really doesn't seem necessary to me). Hopefully they do have software on the PCs too to ensure that non-authorised disks are not used and to monitor activity if the "agents" are removed from the disk by intrepid employees.
Although, I suppose, in principal, the right to privacy of their clients (which could be breached by data being transferred out of the building) overrides the right to privacy the government employees have while in the office.
Actually, per Article 15 (2) of Regulation 17, they can only issue fines up to a maximum of 10% of turnover, as well as a further 5% of turnover for every day the original fine is not paid. See the guidelines for fining.
however a civil suit like this one should be dealt with by the judiciary instead.
I wouldn't really describing a ruling by a competition regulator as a civil suit, and it was dealt with by the judiciary (of whom MS has shown and publicly expressed contempt) on numerous occasions (see court orders) as part of the appeals process.
And they can't threaten us as we have enough nukes to take out the USA several times over.
Of course anyone who thinks anyone is going to start a war over MS is probably on drugs and has recently been reading World War 3.0 (and taken it way too literally).
Leaving that aside, although you maybe right, there is no EU army (yet); and many of the members's states governments love to suck up to the US's current regime, are in the US-controlled NATO military coalition and their nukes were sold to them by the US government along with US proprietary launch software to which the US still holds the over-ride sequences (or worse still, the US gov requires a day's notice to hand over the launch codes to the nukes they sold them). Most importantly the US have many times more nukes than all the European countries put together, I heard enough to destroy the planet four times over, and Bush is the guy behind the big red button so what makes you think he won't use that power so he can gloat about winning the war when he meets us all in the next life.
Hmm, now I wonder just what MS has that's worth $1.3B? Windows/Office copyright perhaps?
Declaring their copyrights fair game would definitely be an absolute last resort. It would effectively be the same as outlawing MS. It would also probably go against international treaties and piss off the US of A.
This judgement seems pretty final (MS has been showing contempt for the court for years) so, to answer the question, I'm guessing if MS don't pay up now, the EC will just freeze their EU bank accounts, and rumour has it that Microsoft keeps most of its money in Ireland as a tax dodge. I guess they could raid their offices and take away their furniture (or what's left since Ballmer's last European trip) too, but that would be messy and not too cost effective—I'm sure MS has billions in the bank.
In the US, Dell offer the Inspiron 1420 and the
XPS M1330 laptops with Ubuntu on and the Inspiron 1501, Inspiron 1520 and XPS M1730 laptops with MSW XP on.
In the UK, they offer the XPSTM M1710 laptop with MSW XP on and the InspironTM 6400 and XPSTM M1330 laptops with Ubuntu on.
Having said that, last time I checked they had cleverly made their Ubuntu PCs look cheaper than their MSW Vista equivalent ones until one got to finally pay when they turned out to be more expensive thanks for the clever use of special offers that only applied to the Vista ones. YMMV.
I would've thought Linux would be even cheaper right?
If your company wants to have any dealings with MS ever again, it is actually more expensive. All of Microsoft's agreements with OEMs charge based on how many PCs are shipped by the OEM, rather than how many PCs are shipped with an MS OS on. And that's leaving aside the fact that MS forces all OEMs to "recommend" the latest version of their OS and has consistently penalised any who ship with a non-MS OS using various lawful and unlawful means.
Actually that really isn't funny. Microsoft Office (and I think maybe Microsoft Windows too) has long had a term in its EULA outlawing its use to write anything that might harm Microsoft's reputation or disparage their products.
Unfortunately, Microsoft makes their Microsoft Office EULA available for download only as an executable binary (.EXE) following a couple of download pages (containing a flashing Javascript pop up that moves about encouraging me to upgrade my browser to Internet Explorer)—I kid you not—making it difficult for me to check the latest terms on GNU/Linux.
In this particular case, how does the book, Vista Annoyances, not just duplicate the full contents of the equivalent title in the publisher's equally popular The Missing Manual series (also reviewed by Slashdot) which according to its official webpage "offers complete and comprehensive coverage of all five versions of Vista."
The whole point is that most people who have looked into this (including many experienced legal academics) don't think "intellectual property" is property (in part, because it is not tangible) and believe it is unhelpful, and even divisive, to call it that. Please bear in mind that it is a matter of public record that the term "intellectual property" was first used in the name of WIPO, and, whatsmore, was intentionally coined by the stakeholders who were behind that organisation to alter the terminology the next generation of law students would use as a first step in their stealth campaign to expand their legal rights.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand the analogy between the two; I just think it is too tenuous to be useful. We believe property is by definition tangible (and your dictionary will probably agree).
There are lots of different types of tangible property, from land to zebras, with all kinds of varying rules that apply...
The rules are all very similar though, and, most importantly, the nature of ownership (i.e.: the basic meaning of "own") is the same for all of these. Your claim they are all property regardless of tangibility because they both can be owned is difficult to swallow as one tells who owns something by who has physical control of it. Ownership is transferred through a transfer of physical control. How would this work with intangible "property". In fact, if you think about it; what control "ownership" confers; how one can tell who "owns" something, and how one and whether one can transfer "ownership" varies between all the exclusive rights you call "intellectual property". (Also, note that copyright, patent and trademark legislation in most jurisdictions are careful to never mention "property" or "ownership" as these terms have specific legal meanings that don't apply to such rights).
The concept of ownership is just as intangible as the concept of copyright.
No. Something you own, exists; the thing you hold a copyright on does not (and is merely a legal fiction).
There is no similarity in any aspect of the detail of the laws relating to different exclusive intellectual exploitation rights (or "intellectual property"). In fact, Even the type of law varies: some are covered by criminal, some civil and some both (and in some countries, are covered by different jurisdictions such as federal and state). What counts as "ownership" or, more accurately, what exclusive rights one has in the criminal and civil law in relation to a single right may vary.
Bringing this back on topic, trademarks are designed to stop sellers passing off goods as something they are not. They do not restrict the usage of that language in non-commercial situations. They, therefore, bear much more relation to other consumer laws than to copyright law.
Actually, in practice, we do have quite a lot of software patents on the books, they just aren't legally valid. That doesn't stop lawyers, judges, the European Patent Office and member state's government (especially those that wish to cosy other to the US) trying to enforce them illegally.
Even if EU would approve software patents later it wouldn't really matter
It would. The proposed directive the European Patent Office and European Commission where trying to get through that was defeated by the European Parliament would have done exactly that: retroactively grant validity to invalid patents illegally granted by the patent office.
I suppose so proprietary software developers have to pay them the 10 000 again (or pay Samba for a non-GPL license), although an X11-style licensed free software project could, of course, get the documents gratis from the PFIF making that situation moot.
However, the more fundemental reason is that Microsoft's European lawyers need something that they can tell Ballmer they haven't backed down on in their fight with the EC to avoid any coniciosesiation* incidents.
That's the point I'm a little confused about. I fully understand that Samba decided to continue propping up the EC's prosecution (after all the other witnesses...ahem...changed their minds about testifying) of Microsoft as a matter of principle as the victim of a crime (rather than necessarily to be compensated in any way), but, I am assuming (even though they didn't pay for it themselves) this information must be worth something to them still (despite how well Samba currently works) and the PFIF apparently thinks it is worth 10 000 (which might be donated to the Samba developers for reverse engineering or something instead). Maybe someone with knowledge of Samba development (rather than the legal cases) fill me in on what they need from this data.
If you read my post you'll see I didn't say that. I was saying that it was a totally stupid thing to do (even recklessly and especially to the police).
What I was suggesting, as an aside, was that I would have more sympathy if it was a military aircraft that had been harassing them by continually flying low over them unlawfully as they sometimes are known to do (sometimes intentionally to people they don't like) as opposed to the police who one assumes don't fly over the same spot over regularly over an extended period, use small helicopters not noisy fighter jets and, most importantly, are actually trying to catch criminals.
I'd imagine to do this effectively (so it still hurts after hours) you'd need a class 3b laser; those can actually blind if one's eye is exposed to them for a fraction of a second (usually if the blink reflex doesn't kick in or is overidden)--the exact time and effect is dependent on the exact megawattage obviously. Also most laser pointers cheaper red variety (rather than green), which are I think are naturally less distracting for some reason.
Obviously, if they did it intentionally, this is a really stupid, immoral and unlawful thing to do. Having said that it might be a good way to rid military aircraft flying unlawfully over your property (esp. if they deny it), if, of course, you want to take the risk of them bombing you or something.
At risk of stating the obvious, this won't get anywhere near as popular as Wikipedia because everyone can't edit any article (thereby keeping the articles up-to-date and reaching decisions by consensus so ensuring accuracy)--although I do suspect that Google will be able to develop a better interface--Wikimedia is in desperate need of developers to work on RFEs.
An on-line encyclopedia model where articles are owned has been tried many times before by the likes of ODP/DMoz spin-off, the Open Encyclopedia Project, and Slashdot spin-off, Everything2. In fact, nearly all the online encyclopedias except Wikipedia have some kind of article ownership even if in some cases it isn't absolute (including Wikipedia predecessor, Nupedia, of course, which was abandoned when it was realised how successful the anyone-can-edit model they were trialing was).
...or maybe arrenlex is the codename of a Best Buy employee who submitted it to/. to bring down the site without legal action. Best Buy will now inform the owners that the DOS attack will only be stopped when all mention of their shirts is removed.
I should clarify that Parliament can explicitly outlaw behavior by individual civil servants (which helps if you know which one was negligent) but never government ministers acting in their official capacity or government departments themselves. If a civil servants killed someone at the behest of the government I'd imagine they may probably get off; I'll have to check.
Slashdot Mirror
I was searching for "Counter Terrorism Act 2008 right to silence" when I first came across this, but after a split-second press of the print-screen key, I figured Google had borked majorly as every link on the SERP was flagged as malware (as was confirmed a second later when searching for "Google").
Why don't the British make computers?
I'll have you know a Brit, Charles Babbage, designed the first computer. Now, he may have never actually managed to get the thing built so it worked, but...oh never mind...
You do realise that the main reasons for adopting an electoral college system were practical? Specifically, that communicating the results, let alone running a single co-ordinated election, took a very long time (with only horses), and that the union was newly formed so the states still didn't trust each other or the federal goverment?
I don't see what is so draconian about terminating government employees who take personal data (that might be used for, say, ID theft) on citizens out of the building, no doubt committing a crime under data protection legislation in the process. After a few terminations, I'm sure they'd stop doing it. Governments tend to be way to lax with our data allowing their employees to repeatedly "mislay" it.
My bad. It says "after recalling the thumb drives used by workers. Most of those had been purchased independently by the employees, causing myriad problems for security personnel, Main said. The new policy requires workers to use the drives supplied by the agency. Main said he eventually plans to destroy all existing thumb drives collected as part of the security policy change." Although, I think from this and following comments like "The general perception is no one will report a lost USB memory stick because they're so cheap" there is an implication (although it isn't explicit at all) that the drives were bought with public money and used for public work.
Once again, I don't think there is too much to complain about here. It shocks me how many employers (even in sensitive areas like government departments and law firms) have PCs that will even, by default, run software or an operating system from a USB drive. According to TFA, in this case "sensitive data transported by off-site workers include[d client's] tax documents, employer records, criminal histories and federal passport data" and commonly "the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of children".
Of course, in opposition to what the article says, I think education about data protection legislation and issues is more important than attempting to physically constrain employees (which is ultimately impossible), although both may have their place.
Although, it does say in the quote from the manager that they will "manage and back up the new drives using SanDisk's Central Management & Control server software...which relies on a Web connection to directly communicate with agents on the tiny flash drives [and can] remotely monitor and flush any lost drives" so they could read and delete files on the disks remotely.
It also says that they chose the disks for their MSW Vista compatibility which suggests that the "agents" really are (as previously quoted) on the disk rather than the PCs (one assumes so they can track what their employees do with the disks while not using their PCs, which really doesn't seem necessary to me). Hopefully they do have software on the PCs too to ensure that non-authorised disks are not used and to monitor activity if the "agents" are removed from the disk by intrepid employees.
Although, I suppose, in principal, the right to privacy of their clients (which could be breached by data being transferred out of the building) overrides the right to privacy the government employees have while in the office.
Actually, per Article 15 (2) of Regulation 17, they can only issue fines up to a maximum of 10% of turnover, as well as a further 5% of turnover for every day the original fine is not paid. See the guidelines for fining.
Of course anyone who thinks anyone is going to start a war over MS is probably on drugs and has recently been reading World War 3.0 (and taken it way too literally).
Leaving that aside, although you maybe right, there is no EU army (yet); and many of the members's states governments love to suck up to the US's current regime, are in the US-controlled NATO military coalition and their nukes were sold to them by the US government along with US proprietary launch software to which the US still holds the over-ride sequences (or worse still, the US gov requires a day's notice to hand over the launch codes to the nukes they sold them). Most importantly the US have many times more nukes than all the European countries put together, I heard enough to destroy the planet four times over, and Bush is the guy behind the big red button so what makes you think he won't use that power so he can gloat about winning the war when he meets us all in the next life.
This judgement seems pretty final (MS has been showing contempt for the court for years) so, to answer the question, I'm guessing if MS don't pay up now, the EC will just freeze their EU bank accounts, and rumour has it that Microsoft keeps most of its money in Ireland as a tax dodge. I guess they could raid their offices and take away their furniture (or what's left since Ballmer's last European trip) too, but that would be messy and not too cost effective—I'm sure MS has billions in the bank.
In the US, Dell offer the Inspiron 1420 and the XPS M1330 laptops with Ubuntu on and the Inspiron 1501, Inspiron 1520 and XPS M1730 laptops with MSW XP on.
In the UK, they offer the XPSTM M1710 laptop with MSW XP on and the InspironTM 6400 and XPSTM M1330 laptops with Ubuntu on.
Having said that, last time I checked they had cleverly made their Ubuntu PCs look cheaper than their MSW Vista equivalent ones until one got to finally pay when they turned out to be more expensive thanks for the clever use of special offers that only applied to the Vista ones. YMMV.
Actually that really isn't funny. Microsoft Office (and I think maybe Microsoft Windows too) has long had a term in its EULA outlawing its use to write anything that might harm Microsoft's reputation or disparage their products.
Unfortunately, Microsoft makes their Microsoft Office EULA available for download only as an executable binary (.EXE) following a couple of download pages (containing a flashing Javascript pop up that moves about encouraging me to upgrade my browser to Internet Explorer)—I kid you not—making it difficult for me to check the latest terms on GNU/Linux.
In this particular case, how does the book, Vista Annoyances, not just duplicate the full contents of the equivalent title in the publisher's equally popular The Missing Manual series (also reviewed by Slashdot) which according to its official webpage "offers complete and comprehensive coverage of all five versions of Vista."
The whole point is that most people who have looked into this (including many experienced legal academics) don't think "intellectual property" is property (in part, because it is not tangible) and believe it is unhelpful, and even divisive, to call it that. Please bear in mind that it is a matter of public record that the term "intellectual property" was first used in the name of WIPO, and, whatsmore, was intentionally coined by the stakeholders who were behind that organisation to alter the terminology the next generation of law students would use as a first step in their stealth campaign to expand their legal rights.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand the analogy between the two; I just think it is too tenuous to be useful. We believe property is by definition tangible (and your dictionary will probably agree).
The rules are all very similar though, and, most importantly, the nature of ownership (i.e.: the basic meaning of "own") is the same for all of these. Your claim they are all property regardless of tangibility because they both can be owned is difficult to swallow as one tells who owns something by who has physical control of it. Ownership is transferred through a transfer of physical control. How would this work with intangible "property". In fact, if you think about it; what control "ownership" confers; how one can tell who "owns" something, and how one and whether one can transfer "ownership" varies between all the exclusive rights you call "intellectual property". (Also, note that copyright, patent and trademark legislation in most jurisdictions are careful to never mention "property" or "ownership" as these terms have specific legal meanings that don't apply to such rights).
No. Something you own, exists; the thing you hold a copyright on does not (and is merely a legal fiction).
There is no similarity in any aspect of the detail of the laws relating to different exclusive intellectual exploitation rights (or "intellectual property"). In fact, Even the type of law varies: some are covered by criminal, some civil and some both (and in some countries, are covered by different jurisdictions such as federal and state). What counts as "ownership" or, more accurately, what exclusive rights one has in the criminal and civil law in relation to a single right may vary.
Bringing this back on topic, trademarks are designed to stop sellers passing off goods as something they are not. They do not restrict the usage of that language in non-commercial situations. They, therefore, bear much more relation to other consumer laws than to copyright law.
Right, but according to Jeremy Allison on the podcast he hasn't seen them with his own eyes yet, so I think the may was reasonable.
However, the more fundemental reason is that Microsoft's European lawyers need something that they can tell Ballmer they haven't backed down on in their fight with the EC to avoid any coniciosesiation* incidents.
* chair throwing
That's the point I'm a little confused about. I fully understand that Samba decided to continue propping up the EC's prosecution (after all the other witnesses...ahem...changed their minds about testifying) of Microsoft as a matter of principle as the victim of a crime (rather than necessarily to be compensated in any way), but, I am assuming (even though they didn't pay for it themselves) this information must be worth something to them still (despite how well Samba currently works) and the PFIF apparently thinks it is worth 10 000 (which might be donated to the Samba developers for reverse engineering or something instead). Maybe someone with knowledge of Samba development (rather than the legal cases) fill me in on what they need from this data.
Umm...milliwattage...I definitely meant milliwattage.
[No one must know of the megawatt lasers I will use for world domination...]
If you read my post you'll see I didn't say that. I was saying that it was a totally stupid thing to do (even recklessly and especially to the police).
What I was suggesting, as an aside, was that I would have more sympathy if it was a military aircraft that had been harassing them by continually flying low over them unlawfully as they sometimes are known to do (sometimes intentionally to people they don't like) as opposed to the police who one assumes don't fly over the same spot over regularly over an extended period, use small helicopters not noisy fighter jets and, most importantly, are actually trying to catch criminals.
I'd imagine to do this effectively (so it still hurts after hours) you'd need a class 3b laser; those can actually blind if one's eye is exposed to them for a fraction of a second (usually if the blink reflex doesn't kick in or is overidden)--the exact time and effect is dependent on the exact megawattage obviously. Also most laser pointers cheaper red variety (rather than green), which are I think are naturally less distracting for some reason.
Obviously, if they did it intentionally, this is a really stupid, immoral and unlawful thing to do. Having said that it might be a good way to rid military aircraft flying unlawfully over your property (esp. if they deny it), if, of course, you want to take the risk of them bombing you or something.
See the lasers and aviation safety article and the the laser safety article on Wikipedia for more info on this topic and the federal legislation.
At risk of stating the obvious, this won't get anywhere near as popular as Wikipedia because everyone can't edit any article (thereby keeping the articles up-to-date and reaching decisions by consensus so ensuring accuracy)--although I do suspect that Google will be able to develop a better interface--Wikimedia is in desperate need of developers to work on RFEs.
An on-line encyclopedia model where articles are owned has been tried many times before by the likes of ODP/DMoz spin-off, the Open Encyclopedia Project, and Slashdot spin-off, Everything2. In fact, nearly all the online encyclopedias except Wikipedia have some kind of article ownership even if in some cases it isn't absolute (including Wikipedia predecessor, Nupedia, of course, which was abandoned when it was realised how successful the anyone-can-edit model they were trialing was).
There are no Best Buy shirts.
I should clarify that Parliament can explicitly outlaw behavior by individual civil servants (which helps if you know which one was negligent) but never government ministers acting in their official capacity or government departments themselves. If a civil servants killed someone at the behest of the government I'd imagine they may probably get off; I'll have to check.