I had to scratch ice from my car's windows for the first time this season. We are even expecting snow today.
When did we have 20 degree for the last time? Less than three weeks ago IIRC.
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Steve talks about the UK enacting the EU copyright policy and calls it the EU version of DMCA.
Well, from his description and the recent laws being discussed in Germany it's kind of obvious that different countries of the EU have very different views of what would be required to follow the EU.
Let's use music CDs as an example. Under German law you have the right to take private copies of a CD you've purchased, you may even take copies for your friends (as long as you do so for a limited number of friends and don't charge money for it).
This remains true even with the new copyright laws in Germany, with some silly changes. You still are allowed to make copies if you can. But it is illegal to defeat a copy protection mechanism, or to distribute software that can disable copy protection - I don't know whether pressing the Shift key is now illegal as well. You may even copy MP3s you've obtained, unless it is from an "obviously illegal" source.
How copy protected CDs and the right to obtain private copies can get together is still in some kind of flux. Things like shipping three CDs instead of one per box are being discussed.
Oh, if you have any legal problems getting your Tour de France coverage next year, Steve, we can certainly arrange something for the German coverage. You won't understand the famous commenters Emig and Watterot, but I wouldn't say you'd miss much either. I expect next year's media coverage in Germany to even exceed this year's hype now that Jan Ullrich has re-joined Team Telekom (will be T-Mobile next year).
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I just received one of the spam mails causing trouble for the broken mail server I've talked about before. "Copy DVD's to a standard CD - without a DVD Burner" - I couldn't care less.
So I gave piston a short try and it (well, JavaMail underneath it) managed to pick up all mails without dieing. Looks as if it would be worth to figure out how it is supposed to work (and maybe contribute some docs after that 8-).
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All my mail is collected on a single box via fetchmail. I've been doing so for years now and it's always been fine that way.
Some months ago some spammers started to put a single dot on a line by itself somewhere close to the end of their mails. An RFC compliant POP3 server is supposed to escape that. One mail-server that receives mails for me unfortunately isn't compliant to that and I don't have control over it.
When fetchmail encounters such a message, it will die because of a protocol error after it has delivered the mail to my local MTA but before deleting it from the POP3 server. The result is that I get duplicates of this spam mail over and over again until I manually delete the problematic mail.
I've upgraded my (originally RPM installed) fetchmail to the latest version, RTFMed and STFWed to no avail - there doesn't seem to be a way to make fetchmail recover from a problem like this.
Currently I'm half-way torn between brushing up my rusty C knowledge in order to dive into fetchmail's code and simply looking for an alternative. Conor started piston a while ago, maybe I should give it a try before anything else.
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