It's been a few weeks since I read the DMCA, but as I recall the counter-notice just has to say that you're contesting it. You don't have to go into any legal theory of why. It just shows that a) you're responding and b) don't agree that you've infringed.

The problem is worse than that, in my view. Suppose Bell has a patent on foo. Foo is not used in Plan 9. Microsoft wants the foo patent to go away. Microsoft puts a non-obvious reference to foo in their new raid card driver, then contributes a Plan 9 port of the driver. Alcatel is still distributing Plan 9, now with the reference to foo, at least for a few hours until they notice the problem. Alcatel has given up their patent on foo by briefly distributing Microsoft's code

It should perhaps be noted that Red Hat and others including Apache do in fact have a similar policy. The strongest legally and I think most important part of Canonical's policy is as follows:

Any redistribution of MODIFIED versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical IF you are going to associate it with the [Canonical] Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks

(Emphasis mine). That's common sense - you can't call your version "Ubuntu", and Red Hat does the same. Centos is essentially RHEL with the Red Hat trademarks removed.

What may be different is that Canonical claims their specific arrangement of packages may be subject to copy rights. That is to say, each individual package is distributable under GPL, but they suggest that copying Unbuntu's own selection of groupings for desktop, server, etc., and the exact method of integration may be subject to Canonical's consent via their stated policy. That's an interesting position. They may or may not be correct that they have the legal right to claim some aspects of distribution as their own, apart from the packages used in the composition. It may also be a dickish move to assert that right in absence of a trademark issue.

It's PIRATE bay, not PromoteYourFreeSoftwareBay.
It's for pirating (aka unlawfully taking my work while telling my baby to go fuck herself, she doesn't need to eat because you're a selfish dick who chose to trade in your integrity rather than fork over the $25 for my work that you want to have so badly.

Current systems, even phones, have dual and quad core processors. That means the existing hardware can run four threads on the CPU simultaneously, or about 16 active processes. System V runs one process at a time, meaning it's only using 6% of the hardware's capability.

Systemd, on the other hand, runs several processes at once, getting things done faster by making use of post-1995 hardware.

You say you don't see point of changes that take advantage of modern hardware. You only really benefit from 64 bit if you have more than 2GB of RAM. Does that mean 64 bit is silly?

If you know any html, the subject line answers the question. If you don't, you might just have to trust that if I put something like the above in my web page, it causes visitors to hack their own router for me.

Getting a Netgear WND3700 would solve the problem. That particular model is one I'm happy with , but there are plenty of perfectly fine routers around.

Linksys will probably put out an update that fixes the problem. You could mark your calendar for 30 days from now and Google search "update Linksys firmware to find illustrated instructions showing what buttons to press to do the update.

If you wish, you could use an old, cheap router while waiting for the update. Your friendly neighborhood geek probably has a few spares piled in a box somewhere.

No, it's not similar. In this case, the plaintiff complained that someone linked to them, apparently within a iframe or something. Nobody linked to unlawful or "pirated" material. The (silly) claim was that linking to Slashdot would violate Slashdot's copy rights.

TBP llinks to unlawful material, and exists primarily for the purpose of assisting in the unlawful distribution of material. They are therefore committing "contributory infringement" - they are contributing to a direct infringement. In the instant case, there is no direct infringement for anyone to contribute to.

This is the difference. Employment where the payer takes the risk and reaps the rewards, vs contracting, where the seller has the risks and rewards.

If you contract a brick company to build a wall (at $150 / hour), they will in turn employ brick layers at $15 / hour. The $135 difference is that the contractor is paid to get the wall built, even if it takes three to.es as long as expected. The bricklayer is paid to show up 8-5 and lay bricks. For $15 / hour, he is responsible for showing up and doing what the boss says, NOT for the results.

I do both in programming. Customers call and get a bid on a project. If I have to work until 2AM to get the project done, I work until 2AM. I bid those projects based on $125 / hour - however many hours I think it'll take, I multiply that by $125 to set the price. I also work for a government agency, as an employee. They pay $50 / hour, and I leave work at 5:00, whether the job is done or not. If they want me to spend my off hours working on it, they can a) pay contract rates and b) not complain when I go home at noon because the job is done.

> On some laptops, Ubuntu can even use the wireless card without all the typical struggle to get the driver into the kernel.

Funny you mentioned that. The last laptop I bought was from Walmart. Since Walmart only carries a couple of laptops in the store at any given time, I figure they must sell millions of those models.

I got it home and spent a few minutes checking to make sure everything worked with the factory disk image before I put an OS on it. Hmm, everything was fine except the wireless. Control panel said the driver wasn't installed. That's odd, why sell millions of units and not bother to install the wireless driver? So I go to download the driver, can't find one. I guess that explains why the driver wasn't installed - apparently there was no driver for that version of Windows. No big deal, we weren't going to use the wireless anyway. So I pop in the CentOS Linux installation stick with my kickstart file on it and walk away. An hour later I come back and I see it's downloading updates. What the heck? I haven't plugged it into the network yet. The Linux distro included the wifi drivers, drivers that weren't available for the new version of Windows.

Niche software, such as occupation-specific software, sometimes requires Windows XP or whatever specific version of a specific OS. Lately, I've had better luck with drivers on Linux than on Windows. My HP printer "just works" on the Linux devices. On Windows, the driver is bundled with a 150 MB download.

I often install Linux for non-technical people. They USE Facebook. Some of them are aware that Firefox is how they get to Facebook.They don't _care_ what's running underneath Firefox. If I ask someone what version of Windows they are currently using and they aren't sure, they are likely a good candidate to upgrade to Linux. Android and ChromeOS are examples of this. How many people buying smartphones know that they are using Linux? How many care?

The people I don't suggest Linux for are the people who enjoy editing their registry and such, but are NOT interested in the far greater flexibility for customization that Linux has. Anyone who doesn't know what "the registry" is won't miss it on Linux. Those who love tweaking their registry or other more advanced OS tweaks are the ones who would be lost in Linux.

> I think the increased efficiency and longer life will balance out in their favor at the end.

The efficiency of fluorescent tubes with a modern ballast is comparable. So the only two factors are cost and lifespan. At say 2 years per tube, about $20 will cover ten years of use. With bulk discounts, it might cost half that, $10.

An LED fixture with approximately the same light output is $472. For now, and probably for the next 10 years, florescent, halide, and some other options make sense for bulk lighting, but LED doesn't even begin to come close. Led makes sense for small amounts of directed light, such as a reading light, or an accent light on a picture. It makes no sense for lighting an entire office building, factory supermarket, parking lot, etc.

I like the way you said that. That was funny.

You stumbled upon some truth. You did some thinking and came to a new realization. The only question remaining is, do you have the ability to learn from this, or will you choose to remain ignorant in order to protect the insane idea that you already knew everything before?

You're forgetting grade school science. The experiment, study, or calculations should be reproducible one person does should be able to be done by other scientists. If someone working for Chicago Solar claims that tree rings indicate that ... and therefore San Francisco will be underwater by the year 2000, other scientists should be able to look at those same tree ring photos, do the same calculations, and end up with the same result.

If a student at TTI runs an analysis of the dihydrogen monoxide levels published by the national weather service, any scientist running the same calculations on the same data should get the same result. THAT'S reproducibility, it's a basic foundation of science and it was on the test in about 4th grade.

If the data is kept secret and the calculations are kept secret, that's not reproducible. That's not science, that's mysticism - tea reading.