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The one issue is that Roy Orbison (The Big Bopper) passed away a long time ago

Which means his music won't come out of copyright until 71 years after such "long time ago." And the courts have upheld Congress's power to extend that by 20 years every 20 years.

Well, if your name is "CATS" and you live in "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US",

If your name is Katz (of which Cats is a variant spelling), then you write op-ed for Slashdot and all the trolls hate you.

IMO, if a build process is difficult or buggy, especially if it is an open source product that most people are expected to compile, then it reflects very badly on the quality of the code.

GNOME is designed for POSIX conforming systems with an X11 server. However, some systems that claim to conform don't in practice (such as AIX and Pains).

But IMO, there is NO EXCUSE for difficulty compiling a desktop.

Unless you're trying to compile it on a "weird" platform or a platform whose unit price is out of the typical consumer PC price range (that is, anything that's not built around a single PowerPC or x86).

from the cats on mars dept

This can be taken either of two ways:

• Zero Wing 2: Mars.
  CATS: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
• Don't you mean Katz on Mars?

clicked on the link at work and it resembled gay porn

Well at least it wasn't Goatse.cx.

I was more concerned about the infringement of unixsex.com on The Open Group's UNIX® trademark.

cardoso sent us a ridiculous flash app where you can control dancers

On the same note, yerricde hereby sends you another ridiculous shockwave app where you can control dancers.

Dude ... music is enormously expensive to record

Bull. All you need to record techno are a computer, a tracker, a sample set (start with GM.dls that comes with recent Windows), a player that writes wav (Winamp), and a Vorbis encoder.

modify the last few bars of Beethoven's Ninth to include the Coca-Cola jingle

This is already happening. Witness "Summer Girls" by LFO (the "Abercrombie and Fitch" song). But jingles don't even have to mention the product name anymore; witness licensing of popular songs in commercials such as "Da Da Da" by Trio (used in a VW commercial) and various golden oldies used in Burger King commercials.

Why don't you just pay the artists so it doesn't have to come to this?

Because the labels don't provide an efficient way to buy the two good songs on the album without buying the ten filler songs.

What if they where to the protection it locally on your PC?

It would not work, as clients cannot be trusted in a secure situation (e.g. Quake cheating). Fifty bucks says there will, within two days of the release, be either a patch that disables DRM encoding in the client or a clone client that doesn't even do DRM.

If you want to be nearly immune to RIAA lawsuits, set up a private OpenNap server and use Napigator to tap into it. No copyrighted information is flowing over your server (except perhaps trademarks such as BILLY JOEL® and *NSYNC® but those aren't the same as copyrights anyway).
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

if the idea is to keep people from burning MP3s to CDs, there's nothing to keep them from writing dummy device drivers as an intermediate step.

SBLive already has this (What-U-Hear); I'd think InterTrust (contracted by Napster to provide restrictions management) would have thought of this already. Anyway, Windows ME and Windows XP contain a Secure Audio Path that only drivers signed by Microsoft can use. And to be signed, a driver must disable all digital outputs (spdif, what-u-hear, write to .wav) when the Secure Audio Path is open.

what if the mp3 is encrypted with a key that has to be checked out of a centralized server?

One word: OpenNap. OpenNap servers will use one well-known key. If you trade MP3s over OpenNap instead of Napster Inc's network, you already have the key to descramble them.

See also Pinocchio's comments on Napdot to see why a restricted Napster just won't work.

Subject: I can only afford an amber monitor, pander to me

You may have a point there. Games should be accessible to those with color-deficient vision and to those playing on high-quality grayscale monitors (often found in places that do dead-tree publishing). This is why, even though many puzzle games use color to distinguish puzzle pieces, newer ones also use brightness and shape (think Columns, Tetris® Attack, or Dr. Mario on Game Boy and graphing calculators).

I'm assuming you mean an original IBM XT and not an XT clone. If I'm to take full advantage of the raw speed provided by it's 8mhz 8-bit processor

The XT used an 8086, a fully 16-bit processor with 16-bit registers and a 20-bit address bus.

bzip2 pipe the traffice

Most newer games' network packets are already compressed before they're encrypted. bzip2 won't help. The real problem is latency. Even 3 Mbit of bandwidth (dual T1) won't help if you have 500 ms ping time to a server on the other side of the Internet.

in 1999

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year.

the theme only affects the window manager, not the windows being managed

Except the step from "changing the behavior of titlebar widgets" to "changing the behavior of widgets inside the window's content region" might not pass the "non-obvious" test in patent law. But then again, with our corrupt USPTO...

According to 17 USC 105, "works of the United States government" are not under copyright restriction. U.S. government works are defined as a "work for hire" prepared by a federal employee.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Let's dissect this and see what Apple is really trying to kill:

a processor yadda yadda yadda

Athlon.

a display blah blah blah

X11 and your video card and monitor.

a plurality of theme engines

These are called Enlightenment, Sawfish, IceWM, Blackbox, Window Maker, etc. Any themable window manager can be considered a "theme engine" under this patent.

IANAL, but here's my educated opinion. Take it with a grain of salt; only your attorney can give legal advice.

Clauses 1-5 and 7 look equivalent to the X11 and BSD2 licenses (non-copyleft license; no warranty; include the copyright notice in all copies). But clause 6 seems to kill GNU GPL compatibility:

This License Agreement shall be governed by and interpreted in all respects by the law of the State of California, excluding conflict of law provisions.

As much as I want to like this (I used to be a Pippi Longstocking fan), it looks like I won't be able to embed Python in my Palm OS applications.

Games are about real-time object/constraint puzzles

Except too often, the object can be shown to be isomorphic to a red key, and the constraint to a red door. I've never really liked "red key, red door" gameplay. I believe there was a Game Boy title called "Mysterium" that poked fun at that style of gameplay by letting the player use alchemy to change the colors of the keys, but in that case, the chemicals became the real keys.

To be honest, I don't recall ever seeing a 2D game on N64. Was the hardware not capable of it??

You've obviously never played Mischief Makers, Yoshi's Story, Kirby 64, or The New Tetris. You can do a 2D game in APIs such as OpenGL/Mesa3D, Direct3D, and whatever the N64 and GAMECUBE consoles use; simply draw each sprite as a quad. A few of the later Super NES games with Super FX (notably Yoshi's Island) used this technique.

And $90 for a cartridge didn't turn my crank either.

More like $50-$70 for a cartridge. And million-seller "Player's Choice" games were marked to $40 anyway.

But cartridges are right out, due to cost, time to manufacture, and limited space.

Then why did Nintendo choose cartridges for Game Boy Advance (a portable 32-bit console that's about as powerful as Super NES), even when GAMECUBE uses a DVD-like medium? Why is the Neo-Geo Pocket Color cart-based instead of CD-based like newer Neo-Geo consoles? Answer: Cartridges don't skip when the game is played in a moving vehicle on a bumpy road. Cartridge reading hardware is cheaper (handheld consoles MUST be inexpensive to be attractive) and doesn't break as easily (remember early CD consoles?).

Just before the Street Fighter clone craze was the Tetris derivative craze. During 1989-1993, new falling puzzle pieces games were released at an alarming rate. But for some reason, this genre is still popular, especially among soft-core gamers.

I've used 'private urls' (at least by their description) in more than a dozen CGIs that I've written.

Did you write them before mid-1997 when the patent was filed?

And what, exactly, do they do that's better than some combination of PGP, a good VPN, and good firewalls?

Most residential DSL and cable contracts prohibit using VPNs on their network because VPNs are bandwidth hogs.

*cough* prior art *cough*

Doesn't matter unless the prior art existed before the patent was filed (in April 1997). Was Deja News around back then? (The patent is on (in plain English) "session IDs or user IDs in the URL," and Deja News uses session IDs.)

Good news: CueCat infringes.

Seriously though, the patent shows a specific example

All patents do. It's called a "preferred embodiment." All the legal force of a patent resides in the claims. Here's the first claim of the patent in question:

A document delivery system for delivering one or more documents between a sender and at least one recipient, said system comprising:

• a server that temporarily stores said documents, wherein said server generates a URL for each intended recipient of said documents, the URL unique to each recipient, and sends each of the URLs to each respective intended recipient; and
• a database which is associated with said server and which records log data describing which recipients accessed said documents;
• wherein said server sends the log data to the sender of said documents.

I even found an old password protection cgi two YEARS ago that did that

An invention has to be new and non-obvious when the patent is filed, not when it's granted. Most patents take three years to be bribed through the USPTO. Was this standard practice in 1998?

I want an embedded system. Literally. Embedded into my HEAD!

Something similar has been discussed already on Everything.

What the hell platform are you writing code on that doesn't have a debugger???

In some environments, the only debugger you have is printf() or the equivalent. How do you run GDB on an embedded system such as a cellphone or a game console? How do you debug a fullscreen application (game, media player, etc.) if you can't see GDB's window?

Unisys

Quit. Your. Job. Now.

Semiconductor mask works are protected under Title 17 of the U.S. code, the same title that contains copyright law and the DMCA. They are protected for between ten and eleven years after registration or first demonstration (e.g. at a trade show).

Patents, as usual, last for 20 years after filing.

The record companies are asking for $100,000 per copyright violation.

No, $100K per work violated, the maximum statutory damages under US law. There are likely less than 3 million unique RIAA songs available through Napster.

Plus, there's now an mp3 encoder (LAME) that is open-source, meaning that anyone can compile it and use it; gone are the days of paying Fraunhofer IIS royalties for "their intellectual property".

Fraunhofer Group still owns patents in the United States and other countries on the process of "Overlapped cosine transform plus Fourier transform encoding, followed by psychoacoustic quantization and entropy coding" which is a necessary and irreplaceable part of MP3 encoding. This is why Ogg Vorbis doesn't use a Fourier transform but instead a finer cosine transform.

I wonder what Metallica will say about their wanting 'control of distribution' argument now...

They'd apparently be in the $50 mil going to independent artists (the ones who own their own music).

ps it would help if you told us what the goal was. asking us for a recommendation on which hammer is best without telling us any details is useless. especialy if what you really need is a wrench

What about a web-based front-end to an email system, a user-written encyclopedia, etc.? What about a web-based personal home page creation tool (think GeoCities)?

If you've used MAME or NESTicle recently, I'm sure you realize how incredibly crappy and juvenile games like Metroid and Zelda really were.

So you see a lot of graphical problems in games played through NESticle. The problem isn't in the games; it's in the emulator. NESticle is not one of the best NES emulators; it was written to an early draft of the NES documentation and contains several detectable flaws. One of these flaws can be exploited in merely four instructions of 6502 asm code:

nestc_detect:
lda $2002 ;ppu status register bpl nestc_detect ;spin until VBL lda $2002 ;reading the status register is SUPPOSED to clear the VBL bit bmi running_on_nesticle ;but it doesn't on NESticle

NESticle also has inaccuracies with respect to Sprite 0 hit detection (causing scroll timing to be off) and mixing of VRAM writes, VRAM reads, and scroll commands. Examples of better emulators include LoopyNES, NESten, nester, RockNES, BioNES, and FCE Ultra.

I once witnessed an Win update (don't remember which) doing the update by removing the old files (known to be old Win versions) and copying in the new files. The (formerly) used (and removed) Microsoft driver was NOT among the ones listed with the new Win. Oops.

That's what happened to me. I had to reinstall my video drivers from the disk. But the point remains that you have the option not to check the box.

What if the "BuzzWordWare(tm)" company decides that this or that driver is outdated (as has happened to some of the Win9x drivers)? Then all of a sudden the whole system will stop working - no chance of keeping on using the old driver. You have subscribed, so you have to update or stop using, remember?

Windows Update does not currently work like that; driver upgrades are voluntary. (Do NOT get the NeoMagic video driver update; it'll remove all ability to use DirectDraw.) More to the point, drivers are tied to the hardware (video card, sound card, CD burner), and you don't license hardware; you buy it.

If,say, Adobe produced a pay-per-usage based Photoshop, theres a good chance they could cut piracy way down, as people like me who only occasionally need that powerful of a graphics program wouldn't need to be intimidated by the $600 up-front price.

Remember, if you don't need Photoshop's prepress capabilities (and bloat), you can always run GIMP on your GNU/Linux, BSD, Darwin, or UNIX box or WinGIMP on your winbox. It's a nice tool for web graphics (more powerful than Paint Shop Pro), and it's both free and Free.

Personal grip: I wish long distance carriers would tell you the price/minute of a call before the call is connected rather than not know the cost until it shows up on the bill.

They do. AT&T was the first, with 15c/min One Rate. Then there was an explosion of 10-10 services (10-10-321 16c/min but 50% off all calls over 10 minutes; 10-10-220 99c first 20 min 7c each addl). Then Sprint countered with A Dime Anytime. You can always look up current rates on a telco's web site.

Why pay a monthly fee when I only have to wait for some cracking group to post a fix that skips over the code that ensures my subscription is still active?

Not if the clip art, spell-check, grammar-check, thesaurus, etc. features run server-side, and the program authenticates to the server with a name and password. And if name and password are shared like serialz, the app server can easily bankick known pirated licenses.

6. Make it relatively easy to transfer licenses between computers. Once that old P3 reaches the end of its life in 4-5 years, you should be able to submit a web form, register the other computer as "killed"

You said it. If BIOS (the ROM boot code) moves to a subscription licensing model (silly but a possibility), a computer without a BIOS license really will be "killed."

Anyway, as long as this [subscription] pricing doesn't move to games, I'm not too worried about it.

It already has. It's a good thing you don't play EverQuest.

Clearly, a company needs to own all of the source code behind their product. They can't worry about a disgruntled ex-employee suddenly demanding that they pay royalties for 'his code' or any other things that might pop up.

If 'his code' is licensed under X11, BSD, or Lesser GPL terms, such a license is irrevocable, and the "submarine" tactic you're proposing is not possible.

All Your Invention Are Belong To Us
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

You can start your own company

How? What if the only field in which you are trained relies on a standard encumbered by patents, and your competitors refuse to license? What if the only field in which you are trained requires an eight-figure investment just to get started? Would you go back to school for four more years (at a cost of USD $100,000+) just to get a job?

Xoom, geo...
Content?

You seem to forget that even PinEight.com (home of the mighty TOD) is hosted on Freeservers.

Xoom, geo...
Content?

You seem to forget that even PinEight.com (home of the mighty TOD) is hosted on Freeservers.

Since I have a lousy 26400-28800 modem

56K modems are cheap now, even non-winmodems. Check pricewatch.com.

I only want INFORMATION. I don't need pictures.

Try appreciating Corbis.com or Artchive.com (or Goatse.cx ;> ) with images turned off. The images are the content.