If TFA is correct (though I doubt that it is) then the issue is that YouTube/Google isn't paying licensing fees. They, through a financial trick, gave media companies a few dozen million (fifty millions is thrown about, but who knows) to sic them on competitors without actually licensing any content.
So even if the idea of copyright exclusivity restrictions is valid, then that isn't what's going on here, because those copyright restrictions holders didn't release their restrictions to Google. Because that would have, you know, meant paying the artists.
This is all assuming that the article is correct, and I very seriously doubt any of it is. But for the sake of argument, it's not IP at work anyway.
The same good it does us to pay the "Ford Tax" or "Chevy Tax" on items *they* patented and others are using. We do that ALL THE TIME. You make it sound like sour grapes. They failed so they should give up their intellectual property?!?!?
No, not specifically them. Anyone who has an innovation from which they gained by being first to market shouldn't get a patent to hold back competitors- from where those competitors would have reached anyway- for 20 years. Being first to market is all the incentive that's needed for companies in the area of computer graphics to innovate. Therefore patents, which have the express and exclusive purpose of promoting progress, do not need to be granted at all in that area (or in business methods, software, etc. In other areas, like medicine, being first to market isn't enough.).
People are missing the forest for the trees. You do not have to have patents on every last thing in order to get progress, and just resign yourself to put up and shut up with all the harmful trolling, all in the name of progress. It's well within Congress's power to mandate that the USPTO only grant patents in fields where they are necessary for progress. We just need a better Congress to decide this.
What? Why should content aggregators (or anyone) have to take proactive steps to avoid stepping on people's toes when they put it online in syndicated RSS feeds, which have the effective purpose of being aggregated?
If they were really so upset over having their content show up in other places on the interwebs, my question is, why don't the content producers remove the offending material? After all, that would be the most immediate and effective action if you don't want people 'stealing' your revenue.
The tendency to litigate indicates to me that the outrage is simply faked- they're after money like every other trigger-happy lawyer.
It would be interesting, but, in the long run, ultimately futile.
I for one do not beleive patents are in and of themselves a bad thing. The problem with patents is that the best way to use them, business-wise, is to patent obvious things, obfuscate that in your application, and then sue, sue, sue. There are ways to reward innovation that do not encourage this model, however, and that is what we should adopt.
So, how? I would argue that we should use a method in which patents are universal, that is, a patent holder can either keep everyone from using his patent, or no one. Thus, the impetus is on the filer to file a good patent, so that a company or a consortium of companies (or, potentially, the USPTO if they weren't such a mess) would buy/liberate/open the patent. At that point, it would be open competition on the free market. Companies would no doubt try and pay as little as possible for patents, but that's the case as well today. The gains would be well worth it: Patent litigation would center on only issues of innovation and prior art, not on licensing follies. Innovating companies could continue to do full-time innovation, and the public would see dramatically reduced prices.
I'm sure I'm missing things, of course, so feel free to point them out...
Thirded. I used to use IE7 at work as the HTML editor for our ticketing system was IE only, and *I*, a computer power-user who has been using MS products since I could type, worked for a week before finding the menubar, quite by accident. When this gets pushed out via WU, millions of people will have no idea how to find the menubar, and I can't blame them.
I ended up using Portable FF with the IEtab extension enabled for the one site I need IE for. Much nicer. I get to maximize screen real estate, keep most sites rendering correctly (IE7's rendering of the school's homepage is messed up- something to do with CSS, ironically enough), and have the extensions I live off of. And I have a menubar.
Neither does a VPN, but that's not what this article is about. This article is about compromises in between the antenna on your laptop/mobile phone and the internet.
But see, that's my definition of Free as well, which is why I will use the GPL if/when I write any non-trivial software.
And yes, in a way I'm imposing it on others. I don't want anyone to use my code to sue someone for copyright infringement, ever, when all they did was tinkering. The BSD license allows this kind of litigation nonsense by allowing restrictive copyrighting of derivative works. The GPL does not, and therefore conforms to my definition of Freedom.
Actually, your metabolism goes UP when you're cold. Double-whammy.
But if you burn through all your glucose, your level of energy goes way down, and you end up tired for a long time, probably burning very few calories.
Okay, to follow up on your hard drive example, lets say that you hear from some random person on the internet that XYZ hard drives are made from the souls of orphans, not unlike this case, except in this hypothetical example it's definitely false. The orphan-soul theory is, however, the preponderance of evidence that has been presented to you. Which is the better outcome:
1)XYZ sues the random person on the internet; (you might believe it or not, doesn't matter)
2)You use your critical thinking skills to judge for yourself whether you believe the internets or not.
You're right, in some ways: to many people, the first impression they have of a company or person will stay with them a long time, even if it's from a known unreliable source. Wouldn't it, however, be better to let society do the critical thinking and decide for themselves if they're going to believe everything they hear? Plus, that way, you don't get into messy free speech issues when slander is used as excuse for suppressing opposing speech.
I just don't get why the government can't leave well enough alone and let the people figure out for themselves that not everything they hear is true. But, then, maybe people would believing everything said by the government, and we couldn't have that:P
It's not a slap a free speech, unless you think people should be able to make unfounded accusations and damage an innocent person's reputation.
That's exactly what I think.
There is no reason my free speech rights have to pay the price for society being so gullible. Let people slander to their heart's content and maybe society will learn a little skepticism.
I'm sorry, that's not good enough. Here's how I see it: if you are "forced" to bundle adware when you ship your software so you don't starve to death or whatnot, then don't fricken ship the software.
It's really that simple. There's no excuse/justification for it.
Absolute humidity is measured in kilograms per cubic meter. A number pulled equally out of my ass and google as a possible ballpark typical one is.050 kg/m^3. 600 gallons of water is (roughly) 2200 litres, or 2200 kilograms. That means it's using 44000 cubic meters of air.
IANAAS, so I don't have any idea what that translates into real-world. Would this thing need a fan?
At the speeds that are involved with the space shuttle, absorbing impact isn't an option. A crush zone might work great for a sedan hitting another car at 60 MPH, but at 17000 mph, there are far more important factors for survivability- namely, luck.
Anything of substantial size that hits the shuttle (or ISS) is going to go right through. No honeycomb structure is going to change that- you just have to hope is stays clear of pressurized areas and such.
Dude, if they want a non-GPLd Cygwin (which is byte-for-byte identical to the GPL one, it's simply dual-licensed) then they don't want OSS products, they want proprietary software. In which case a better title for this story is "Why is proprietary software so expensive?"
If they really wanted OSS, then they could use the GPLd version. If they wanted official support, they'd be paying an arm an a leg to whoever they chose, MS, RH, or IBM. It's not surprising.
Note that MS licenses typically don't come with support, either. Comparing XP pro to RH isn't apples to apples; with XP pro your paying for the right (misfortune?) to have a copy of the software and run it on a single computer. With RH, you're paying to have it actually work.
Yes, they work, far, far more than they don't. This is the exception in that someone actually heard about it.
If lobbying weren't such an extraordinarily good investment for companies, countries or (fill-in-the-blank), they wouldn't do it.
Slashdot Mirror
As if millions of Admiral Ackbars cried out in unison, "It's a trap!" and were suddenly silenced by a flying blue chair of death.
Seriously, this is too weird for words.
If TFA is correct (though I doubt that it is) then the issue is that YouTube/Google isn't paying licensing fees. They, through a financial trick, gave media companies a few dozen million (fifty millions is thrown about, but who knows) to sic them on competitors without actually licensing any content.
So even if the idea of copyright exclusivity restrictions is valid, then that isn't what's going on here, because those copyright restrictions holders didn't release their restrictions to Google. Because that would have, you know, meant paying the artists.
This is all assuming that the article is correct, and I very seriously doubt any of it is. But for the sake of argument, it's not IP at work anyway.
What about infertility?
Alienware is AWESOME! Great! Superb! This article is FUD.
/checks mail
/checks mail again
They're still Awesome!! HELLOooO!!! Your hardware rules!
But for much of this time it was adware.
People are missing the forest for the trees. You do not have to have patents on every last thing in order to get progress, and just resign yourself to put up and shut up with all the harmful trolling, all in the name of progress. It's well within Congress's power to mandate that the USPTO only grant patents in fields where they are necessary for progress. We just need a better Congress to decide this.
What? Why should content aggregators (or anyone) have to take proactive steps to avoid stepping on people's toes when they put it online in syndicated RSS feeds, which have the effective purpose of being aggregated?
If they were really so upset over having their content show up in other places on the interwebs, my question is, why don't the content producers remove the offending material? After all, that would be the most immediate and effective action if you don't want people 'stealing' your revenue.
The tendency to litigate indicates to me that the outrage is simply faked- they're after money like every other trigger-happy lawyer.
It would be interesting, but, in the long run, ultimately futile.
I for one do not beleive patents are in and of themselves a bad thing. The problem with patents is that the best way to use them, business-wise, is to patent obvious things, obfuscate that in your application, and then sue, sue, sue. There are ways to reward innovation that do not encourage this model, however, and that is what we should adopt.
So, how? I would argue that we should use a method in which patents are universal, that is, a patent holder can either keep everyone from using his patent, or no one. Thus, the impetus is on the filer to file a good patent, so that a company or a consortium of companies (or, potentially, the USPTO if they weren't such a mess) would buy/liberate/open the patent. At that point, it would be open competition on the free market. Companies would no doubt try and pay as little as possible for patents, but that's the case as well today. The gains would be well worth it: Patent litigation would center on only issues of innovation and prior art, not on licensing follies. Innovating companies could continue to do full-time innovation, and the public would see dramatically reduced prices.
I'm sure I'm missing things, of course, so feel free to point them out...
Thirded. I used to use IE7 at work as the HTML editor for our ticketing system was IE only, and *I*, a computer power-user who has been using MS products since I could type, worked for a week before finding the menubar, quite by accident. When this gets pushed out via WU, millions of people will have no idea how to find the menubar, and I can't blame them.
I ended up using Portable FF with the IEtab extension enabled for the one site I need IE for. Much nicer. I get to maximize screen real estate, keep most sites rendering correctly (IE7's rendering of the school's homepage is messed up- something to do with CSS, ironically enough), and have the extensions I live off of. And I have a menubar.
Neither does a VPN, but that's not what this article is about. This article is about compromises in between the antenna on your laptop/mobile phone and the internet.
But see, that's my definition of Free as well, which is why I will use the GPL if/when I write any non-trivial software.
And yes, in a way I'm imposing it on others. I don't want anyone to use my code to sue someone for copyright infringement, ever, when all they did was tinkering. The BSD license allows this kind of litigation nonsense by allowing restrictive copyrighting of derivative works. The GPL does not, and therefore conforms to my definition of Freedom.
And, in this analogy, Linux users are still immune!
And though it's probably less popular, Sobby, the server half of Gobby.
On my laptop, Linux boot time is about equivalent to WinXP (back when I had it). On the other hand, I never had 28 days uptime with windows!
Suspend to RAM works perfectly for me, out-of-box, but I gather that's unusual...
Still, I'd be very surprised if the kernel didn't pick up support for this hybrid disk pretty quickly.
Actually, your metabolism goes UP when you're cold. Double-whammy.
But if you burn through all your glucose, your level of energy goes way down, and you end up tired for a long time, probably burning very few calories.
Super drag and Go.
Okay, to follow up on your hard drive example, lets say that you hear from some random person on the internet that XYZ hard drives are made from the souls of orphans, not unlike this case, except in this hypothetical example it's definitely false. The orphan-soul theory is, however, the preponderance of evidence that has been presented to you. Which is the better outcome:
:P
1)XYZ sues the random person on the internet; (you might believe it or not, doesn't matter)
2)You use your critical thinking skills to judge for yourself whether you believe the internets or not.
You're right, in some ways: to many people, the first impression they have of a company or person will stay with them a long time, even if it's from a known unreliable source. Wouldn't it, however, be better to let society do the critical thinking and decide for themselves if they're going to believe everything they hear? Plus, that way, you don't get into messy free speech issues when slander is used as excuse for suppressing opposing speech.
I just don't get why the government can't leave well enough alone and let the people figure out for themselves that not everything they hear is true. But, then, maybe people would believing everything said by the government, and we couldn't have that
There is no reason my free speech rights have to pay the price for society being so gullible. Let people slander to their heart's content and maybe society will learn a little skepticism.
I'm sorry, that's not good enough. Here's how I see it: if you are "forced" to bundle adware when you ship your software so you don't starve to death or whatnot, then don't fricken ship the software.
It's really that simple. There's no excuse/justification for it.
600 gallons of water a day? Impressive.
.050 kg/m^3. 600 gallons of water is (roughly) 2200 litres, or 2200 kilograms. That means it's using 44000 cubic meters of air.
Absolute humidity is measured in kilograms per cubic meter. A number pulled equally out of my ass and google as a possible ballpark typical one is
IANAAS, so I don't have any idea what that translates into real-world. Would this thing need a fan?
At the speeds that are involved with the space shuttle, absorbing impact isn't an option. A crush zone might work great for a sedan hitting another car at 60 MPH, but at 17000 mph, there are far more important factors for survivability- namely, luck.
Anything of substantial size that hits the shuttle (or ISS) is going to go right through. No honeycomb structure is going to change that- you just have to hope is stays clear of pressurized areas and such.
Dude, if they want a non-GPLd Cygwin (which is byte-for-byte identical to the GPL one, it's simply dual-licensed) then they don't want OSS products, they want proprietary software. In which case a better title for this story is "Why is proprietary software so expensive?"
If they really wanted OSS, then they could use the GPLd version. If they wanted official support, they'd be paying an arm an a leg to whoever they chose, MS, RH, or IBM. It's not surprising.
Note that MS licenses typically don't come with support, either. Comparing XP pro to RH isn't apples to apples; with XP pro your paying for the right (misfortune?) to have a copy of the software and run it on a single computer. With RH, you're paying to have it actually work.
You can indeed get a licence without support.
It's called the GNU GPL.
Yes, they work, far, far more than they don't. This is the exception in that someone actually heard about it. If lobbying weren't such an extraordinarily good investment for companies, countries or (fill-in-the-blank), they wouldn't do it.