Slashdot Mirror

Well, there's legally a public domain.

There's a public domain, but its content is pretty much fixed: no works will ever expire into it.

For instance, if you sign an NDA, the information you get isn't required to go into public domain. I'd love to see them try to pull that.

One word: EULA. The "you may not copy" clause does not terminate when the copyright expires (which is effectively never). And it's trivial to put a binding EULA on a CD or DVD: a seal placed over the center of the disc reads "by breaking this seal you agree to the EULA printed inside the back pages of the booklet." All rights can be contracted away.

The "life + 70" figure (doesn't that sound like a prison sentence for free speech?) comes from the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, also known as the Copyright Theft Act.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

The "life + 70" figure (doesn't that sound like a prison sentence for free speech?) comes from the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, also known as the Copyright Theft Act.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

you cant ... copyright something that should instead be trademarked

Then what should we do with cartoon characters? Copyright them and get perpetual copyright? Or trademark them and get perpetually renewable trademark? Most companies <cough>Disney</cough>do both.

you cant ... copyright something that should instead be trademarked

Then what should we do with cartoon characters? Copyright them and get perpetual copyright? Or trademark them and get perpetually renewable trademark? Most companies <cough>Disney</cough>do both.

It's like when Hemos misspelled Babel Fish in a story.
(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!)
TIP: If the URL is valid, the link will be black on the preview (you've been there) instead of blue-green (you haven't).

This is a case that Apple couldn't win

But you're forgetting the Second Golden Rule. Just so you remember:

1. Act toward others as you'd have them act toward you.
2. He who has the gold makes the rules.

• You moderated. There are several trolls out there who are trying to squash the moderation system by M2ing all moderations "unfair" to discourage the moderators from doing their job.
• Karma pack rape. A comment that irritates a lot of trolls might irritate a few with M1 points so much that they go to your User Info page and moderate down your last 50 comments. (Something similar has happened to Everything2.)

Ever since 1923, there has been no public domain. And fair use rights can be signed away in a contract (think shrinkwrap license on a CD).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Ever since 1923, there has been no public domain. And fair use rights can be signed away in a contract (think shrinkwrap license on a CD).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

yes, it is almost always possible to work around [software patents]

Let's see how you'd work around this:

• A web site does not sell merchandise; it has to support itself somehow <cough>banner ads</cough>.
• Banner ads nowadays must be animated, or no advertisers will apply.
• Unisys owns the LZW compression method (U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts) used in all GIF images.
• The licensing terms for the LZW patent are incompatible with all free software licenses.
• The only other GIF-like animated graphics format supported by web browsers is MNG, and it only works in 6.x browsers such as Mozilla.
• It's possible to write a plug-in to display MNG images on pre-6.x browsers, but browsers reject unsigned plug-ins.
• Signing plug-ins requires a certificate from VeriSign, and this is beyond the budget of individual free software developers.

some of these poorly written programs check the robots.txt file every 5 minutes when they're in a spidering mood. Nice. You've got to wonder how much bandwidth is wasted due in part to moronic programming practice.

Many spiders (e.g. Googlebot) are distributed among many colocated boxen so they can get better network performance. Each box needs its own copy of robots.txt so it can choose whether or not to index pages and follow links. Read your server logs again; are all the robots.txt hits from the same IP address, or are they from different machines?

If robots.txt was there, how did Google index the site at all (instead of just poorly)?

• The presence of robots.txt doesn't automatically exclude everything, only the directories specified in the file.
• Google can index even robots-excluded sites by looking at the 50 or so characters on either side of the page that links to the excluded pages. That's why Google sometimes gives URLs without any content.

Assembly programs have runtimes on the order of magnitude of 20-100X faster than compiled C code.

Assembly language is also one stage in the compilation of a C program. The speed of an assembly program typed by you is no faster than the speed of an identical assembly program generated by a compiler. Besides, nowadays, compilers know their target machines' schedulers more intricately than the average asm programmer does. One of the only times asm would be useful is if you are using bleeding-edge features (e.g. vector processing) that the compiler's language can't take advantage of.

The Java Platform's class libraries and security model are not the best: no preprocessor ergo no macros and no #ifdef DEBUG, few or no inlining hints, huge memory overhead per allocated Object, poor String handling (partly because String is final), no destructors (facilitates denial of service), et fucking cetera.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Gates's law: The speed of Microsoft software halves every 18 months, supposedly to balance out so-called Moore's law. At the current rate (Word needs 600 MHz), the 10 GHz mark will be reached after about four doublings, or six years.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

My programs that require the user to press a key after reading something tell the user to "press a key." If the literal-minded luser reads too much into it, (s)he will press the [A] key (or the [1] key in foreign translations), which obviously works. And it saves a couple bytes too.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

You probably need to try DHL

Did you read the article? "After talking to DHL with unsatisfactory results"

The Inktomi-based Yahoo results can be found at HotBot, another Inktomi-based engine.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Bowie J. Poag (uid=16898) is not a troll. Bowie J. Paog (uid=229002), on the other hand... Check the user bio's.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Project Gutenberg accepts only public domain texts. This means that even if PG manages to OCR everything published on or before December 31, 1922, there's that pesky perpetual copyright problem due in part to a loophole in the Constitution.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Project Gutenberg accepts only public domain texts. This means that even if PG manages to OCR everything published on or before December 31, 1922, there's that pesky perpetual copyright problem due in part to a loophole in the Constitution.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

And there are other days when I think it's only a matter of time before the domain squatting starts to wind down as more gTLDs are opened up

NOT. Witness Google.net and Google.org . Microsoft.com is the same site as Microsoft..net . Squatters will squat on every available TLD. Even Slashdot.org has its own .com.

This is like boycotting JPeGs

No, it's more like boycotting GIFs. MP3 is patented.

MP3 is patented. Use of any encoder not licensed by Fraunhofer/Thomson (who is probably already in bed with RIAA by now) is patent infringement.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I mean, if its in MP3 format, then i guess it should automatically be made illeagal [sic] right?

If you're not an MP3 patent licensee, yes. But there's always the patent-free Vorbis codec.

If you can read the drive, you can make a copy. You don't even need to be able to read the filesystem on the disk. You can read the disk as raw data and make an image.

Commercial pressed DVD discs store CSS keys in an area that is already burned with zeroes in DVD-ROM media. You may be able to copy the files, but you won't be able to copy the key.

Our economic system is based on the ability of people to be compensated for their work.

Then why aren't recording artists being compensated?

In the case of the music industry, we protect the artist's copyright so that they can be compensated for their work.

But the labels generally don't compensate the artists enough to make a living.

We buy the CD's, the record companies skim off the bulk of the money and pay some remaining portion to the artist.

According to Courtney Love, our "remaining portion" isn't even enough to buy promotion for the record, let alone pay the bills.

As I understand it, the main reason Napster is considered different is the fact that MP3s are (for all intents and purposes) lossless, CD-quality recordings of digital music.

MP3 begins to approach CD quality only at 192 Kbps VBR with LAME or Fraunhofer (the best encoders AFAIK). But most of the files on Napster are 128 Kbit, which screams "tape" to my ears.

If you tape a CD, then the tape is invariably lower quality, acoustically, than the original.

If you encode a CD at 128 Kbit (especially with a bad encoder like Xing but there are lots of bad tape decks too), then the MP3 is invariably lower quality, acoustically, than the original.

If your TOC-based AIM client can't send files to other AIM users, try sending them via industry-standard HTTP with an AIM addon called Apache Server. Now available for Windows 9x and NT.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Think of F*ckedcompany.com as a shell pattern. It matches Fuckedcompany.com, Fizzuckedcompany.com, Flackedcompany.com... Are they all for sale?
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Information on the Sonny Bono Act can be found here.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Information on the Sonny Bono Act can be found here.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Capcom lost the Fighter's History suit.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Too many pranksters were changing the first letter of the name "Puck-Man" on the cabinet. "Pac-Man" sounds a lot nicer than "Fuck-Man," don't you think?
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

The rest of the world manages to create new content everyday without ripping off other peoples ideas.

Does Puff Daddy create original content?

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Federal Express truck carrying DVD-ROM discs. Sure, it's 24-hour latency (next day delivery), but it's a heck of a lot more bandwidth than you get.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

If the regulators say you need a license to surf, they'll will probably require you to be an adult before you can get on, negating any need for Web content filtering software.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Some ISPs (cough) with policy routing to the caching HTTP proxies have such bad routing that news sites like Slashdot have day-old headlines.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

The difference is Leonardo Da Vinci was copyrighted before perpetual copyright, while Hasbro's works were copyrighted after perpetual copyright, which started on January 1, 1923.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

The difference is Leonardo Da Vinci was copyrighted before perpetual copyright, while Hasbro's works were copyrighted after perpetual copyright, which started on January 1, 1923.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

...the people get slack.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I wrote up a piece on the Sonny Bono Copyright Theft Act.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I wrote up a piece on the Sonny Bono Copyright Theft Act.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Only trademarks must be enforced to survive. Your legal term "abandonment of copyright" means "releasing into the public domain" which requires an action on the copyright holder's part.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

...but lost the war on appeal.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

One other question...what kind of precidence does this set for a game like Arkanoid? I know there are litteraly hundreds of clones like Breakout and SuperBreakout on the market.

Breakout was an Atari (now Hasbro) game before Arkanoid, even before arcade games ran on general-purpose 8-bit microprocessors (Taito's Space Invaders was one of the first). Arkanoid (adding very nice graphics and loads of powerups) was from Taito.

Is xgalaga a "rip off" of the arcade classic "Galaga"?

Yes (Galaga is a trademark) but a quick `mv' can change that.

other companies said "woah, good idea" lotus tried to sue them for incorperating "lotus-like menus". Fortunatly Lotus lost, or the suit was dropped or something. (I forget which)

Lotus won, but it was overturned.

Every known NES ROM can be found at Tobbe's.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!