as I understood it, China has control over the vast majority of media- would the population even need a reason more than whatever the govt told them? eg. they are taking our resources... why bother with copyright?
realizing they will have no legal pretext to sue or invade if we start pirating their technology, unless they start obeying the "law" now.
I didn't think China needed a legal reason to do whatever it wants outside of its borders... especially if it indeed does become the dominant economy on the planet... presumably that entails the strongest military and really if they wanted to invade some country at that point there probably wouldn't be much the world would do about it.
well said- MS may be hurting its self big time by cracking down on the pirates- its probably the easiest way they could have created an MS centric Chinese software market. Now people have a better reason to use FOSS based OSes than under a Chinese Windows pirating culture.
how many does it take to run a website? p2p network? the number of people can be very small considering that electronic data can be copied cheaply and for all intents and purposes infinitely with little effort.
either that or the BSA found a few of the higher ups in the govt. and decided to send them a fruit basket. BSA gives them a gift for nailing these guys for infringement, China gets to look more responsible in so far as copyright law and the population get one more reminder who is boss. it's a win for everyone but the Chinese people.
I wondered why China would bother upholding the copyright of a foreign country now when CHina has a history of lax copyright enforcement in the past until the BSA got involved that is:
In June last year, the Business Software Allianceâ"a business coalition campaigning against commercial piracyâ"complained to Chinese authorities, and Hong and his colleagues were arrested later in the year.
have you ever actually played SC on WINE? most of the menus don't render properly if at all, game speed takes a dive [more than it should], patches and lacking msstcorefonts causes the game to crash when connecting to Bnet without fiddling around [it's annoying nothing more] to me it seems that if these are so easy to fix for us nerds then it shouldnt be all that difficult for blizzard to streamline the process for newer *nix users who have a fair chance of being gamers as well. frankly, when some indie game developers are capable of creating a WINE compatible version or at least providing the needed dlls then there isn't a good reason other than sloth why Blizzard couldnt do so as well.
unfortunately I suspect that SCII is in such an unfinished state that Blizzard decided to cut testing out LAN play in favour of Battlenet in order to get SCII out the door in an otherwise finished state ASAP rather than let it become SC Ghost all over again. The question is, why? SC fans have been waiting a decade and change for SCII or *something* expanding on the SC storyline so what is a few months extra testing out LAN for the release?
Anyway to bring this back on topic, to the SCII team: is there any possibility of WINE support in the next three chapters of SCII in order to run the games on alternative platforms such as LInux/BSD etc?
Orion [the original project] was never designed to reach orbit from Earth but in fact was only meant for space travel owing to its use of nuclear weapons being detonated behind the ship sequentially.
The real Orion unfortunately can't exist due to the cold war era treaty banning nuclear tests in space. Orion based on closed nuclear reactor designs on the other hand may do the trick. Even using a decent sized reactor to power either plasma or ion engines would likely get around the treaty restriction.
it very well sounds like the goal here isn't so much to actually "treat" people so much as to make large sums of money by catering to those of us who have access to lots of cash.
Chinese manufactured products are only a problem if you're not enforcing the "produce the parts to the specified quality or I'll go elsewhere" clause in the contract. The problem is MS' mentality toward quality not the origin of the parts. If MS wanted to enforce a quality standard on Chinese corps I doubt they would jeopardise a contract with a buyer in these quantities just like everyone else.
The actions of the sheriff's office demonstrate quite clearly that they are not willing to abide by the law and therefore seem to have decided the case already against themselves.
Good point. I did not think of it that way. Although technically all three groups fulfill differing niches that overlap to a varying extent. Windows by default, Mac for high-end and Linux/FOSS for freedom. As long as several entities don't compete explicitly with each other in the same niche the system will likely be stable.
self interest governs the behavior of business. So even though restricting what can be done with software in of its self is not the goal of business, if by self-interest the business can make more by doing so it will. In the case of the GPL, it makes sense for a buisiness to cannibalize code already under the GPL if doing so saves on software development from scratch [red hat, novell, canonical etc.] or taking a piece of code that is troublesome to maintain but useful to the company and GPLing it to reap the benefits of collaborative work while reducing costs. It doesn't make sense to GPL code that is cheap to maintain and is also critical to business as is.
The GPL makes the user a distributor and if your business model depends on restricting what the user can do it is no surprise that you wouldn't base your creations on the license, GPL is a license that protects those who use and modify the software from their predecessors, BSD is open code with the ability to conceal the source. The two among others are for different purposes and saying that there is one license to do the work of all is just as absurd as saying the GPL is dead. Until we see alternative OSes based on alternative licenses take a bigger spot than LInux, the GPL is in no danger. Furthermore, the goal of FOSS is more than just the GPL, it is the expansion of freedom to share and modify code and as long as FOSS as a whole is growing GPL or not it's a good thing.
a fairly large sized battery is useful for storing energy generated by an internal combustion engine as this can allow the engine to run at the most efficient RPM changing the battery. it's a form of load balancing and frankly if we are forced to use gasoline as a fuel rather than pure electric then this is a good way to increase efficiency.
you would think that if everyone knew it all was a bubble including the FED then there would e a lot more pitchforks and torches at the white-house right now to force a change in how things are done. no.. I suspect there are more people who do not understand how the economy works than those who do- even among economists. anyway, back to the topic- along the same lines I think that anyone that really has any understanding of history and technology knows that the future is going to e practical and mundane. normally the knowledge of if or when the bubble was going to collapse wouldn't have much effect on what the future looked like [the economy recovers after all] but in this guy's case, it might bring his abilities into question now that I think about it..
He didn't exactly see the financial meltdown coming in advance
neither did anyone investing in the market that lost any money. the ability to predict market crashes has little to do with predicting things over the long term. the market recovers and people move on. the real reason why predictions of the future are more often wrong than not is because people have a tendency to expect what they think is interesting [flying cars] rather than anything of practical use. if you want an accurate prediction make one that is the result of several small practical steps away from what exists now. for example; I predict that hybrid cars [or some offshoot of them] will make up a majority of cars within 50 years. not a very exciting prediction but it's probably more accurate than expecting flying cars any time soon.
2008 is not an old. old begins at windows ME [not that you would ever use such a POS OS] the software ran fine at least if you don't upgrade the software that is... the functionality is basically the same [surf the net, check email etc...] so why is it that since that time a new firefox is currently using 137 megs of RAM while I'm reading slashdot. A computer even ten years ago doesn't even have that much ram and yet you can surf the net with it... explain to me why all of this ram use was worth it?
the mentality of devs is that the hardware can take the bloat just give it some time and as far as I am concerned it's a cancer slowly eroding away at what software should be. quick, clean and efficient. BUt really, why shouldn't software be capable of running on hardware for over a decade- we've got a 12 year old compaq sitting in the basement that has less hard drive space than my ram is and yet it can surf the net just fine... The problem comes when devs start to think that they shouldn't be tasked with improving code efficiency because they aren't coding for older hardware. Well all I can say is maybe they should. If an old geezer compaq can hack it just fine on the internet today why can't newer versions of software that do the same basic things cope as well?
you know, not everyone has a new computer and frankly I am glad that at least some developers don't make the same assumption you just did. This is especially important considering the rising popularity of smaller notebooks that even bare Windows XP has trouble booting.
Slashdot Mirror
as I understood it, China has control over the vast majority of media- would the population even need a reason more than whatever the govt told them? eg. they are taking our resources... why bother with copyright?
I didn't think China needed a legal reason to do whatever it wants outside of its borders... especially if it indeed does become the dominant economy on the planet... presumably that entails the strongest military and really if they wanted to invade some country at that point there probably wouldn't be much the world would do about it.
well said- MS may be hurting its self big time by cracking down on the pirates- its probably the easiest way they could have created an MS centric Chinese software market. Now people have a better reason to use FOSS based OSes than under a Chinese Windows pirating culture.
how many does it take to run a website? p2p network? the number of people can be very small considering that electronic data can be copied cheaply and for all intents and purposes infinitely with little effort.
either that or the BSA found a few of the higher ups in the govt. and decided to send them a fruit basket. BSA gives them a gift for nailing these guys for infringement, China gets to look more responsible in so far as copyright law and the population get one more reminder who is boss. it's a win for everyone but the Chinese people.
I wondered why China would bother upholding the copyright of a foreign country now when CHina has a history of lax copyright enforcement in the past until the BSA got involved that is:
In June last year, the Business Software Allianceâ"a business coalition campaigning against commercial piracyâ"complained to Chinese authorities, and Hong and his colleagues were arrested later in the year.
have you ever actually played SC on WINE? most of the menus don't render properly if at all, game speed takes a dive [more than it should], patches and lacking msstcorefonts causes the game to crash when connecting to Bnet without fiddling around [it's annoying nothing more] to me it seems that if these are so easy to fix for us nerds then it shouldnt be all that difficult for blizzard to streamline the process for newer *nix users who have a fair chance of being gamers as well. frankly, when some indie game developers are capable of creating a WINE compatible version or at least providing the needed dlls then there isn't a good reason other than sloth why Blizzard couldnt do so as well.
unfortunately I suspect that SCII is in such an unfinished state that Blizzard decided to cut testing out LAN play in favour of Battlenet in order to get SCII out the door in an otherwise finished state ASAP rather than let it become SC Ghost all over again. The question is, why? SC fans have been waiting a decade and change for SCII or *something* expanding on the SC storyline so what is a few months extra testing out LAN for the release?
Anyway to bring this back on topic, to the SCII team: is there any possibility of WINE support in the next three chapters of SCII in order to run the games on alternative platforms such as LInux/BSD etc?
Orion [the original project] was never designed to reach orbit from Earth but in fact was only meant for space travel owing to its use of nuclear weapons being detonated behind the ship sequentially.
The real Orion unfortunately can't exist due to the cold war era treaty banning nuclear tests in space. Orion based on closed nuclear reactor designs on the other hand may do the trick. Even using a decent sized reactor to power either plasma or ion engines would likely get around the treaty restriction.
it very well sounds like the goal here isn't so much to actually "treat" people so much as to make large sums of money by catering to those of us who have access to lots of cash.
Chinese manufactured products are only a problem if you're not enforcing the "produce the parts to the specified quality or I'll go elsewhere" clause in the contract. The problem is MS' mentality toward quality not the origin of the parts. If MS wanted to enforce a quality standard on Chinese corps I doubt they would jeopardise a contract with a buyer in these quantities just like everyone else.
The actions of the sheriff's office demonstrate quite clearly that they are not willing to abide by the law and therefore seem to have decided the case already against themselves.
Good point. I did not think of it that way. Although technically all three groups fulfill differing niches that overlap to a varying extent. Windows by default, Mac for high-end and Linux/FOSS for freedom. As long as several entities don't compete explicitly with each other in the same niche the system will likely be stable.
self interest governs the behavior of business. So even though restricting what can be done with software in of its self is not the goal of business, if by self-interest the business can make more by doing so it will. In the case of the GPL, it makes sense for a buisiness to cannibalize code already under the GPL if doing so saves on software development from scratch [red hat, novell, canonical etc.] or taking a piece of code that is troublesome to maintain but useful to the company and GPLing it to reap the benefits of collaborative work while reducing costs. It doesn't make sense to GPL code that is cheap to maintain and is also critical to business as is.
you make an interesting point. My intention was not to sound like I thought the GPL would be legally dead, but more like BSD was in the early days.
cheers
The GPL makes the user a distributor and if your business model depends on restricting what the user can do it is no surprise that you wouldn't base your creations on the license, GPL is a license that protects those who use and modify the software from their predecessors, BSD is open code with the ability to conceal the source. The two among others are for different purposes and saying that there is one license to do the work of all is just as absurd as saying the GPL is dead. Until we see alternative OSes based on alternative licenses take a bigger spot than LInux, the GPL is in no danger. Furthermore, the goal of FOSS is more than just the GPL, it is the expansion of freedom to share and modify code and as long as FOSS as a whole is growing GPL or not it's a good thing.
a fairly large sized battery is useful for storing energy generated by an internal combustion engine as this can allow the engine to run at the most efficient RPM changing the battery. it's a form of load balancing and frankly if we are forced to use gasoline as a fuel rather than pure electric then this is a good way to increase efficiency.
you would think that if everyone knew it all was a bubble including the FED then there would e a lot more pitchforks and torches at the white-house right now to force a change in how things are done. no.. I suspect there are more people who do not understand how the economy works than those who do- even among economists. anyway, back to the topic- along the same lines I think that anyone that really has any understanding of history and technology knows that the future is going to e practical and mundane. normally the knowledge of if or when the bubble was going to collapse wouldn't have much effect on what the future looked like [the economy recovers after all] but in this guy's case, it might bring his abilities into question now that I think about it..
neither did anyone investing in the market that lost any money. the ability to predict market crashes has little to do with predicting things over the long term. the market recovers and people move on. the real reason why predictions of the future are more often wrong than not is because people have a tendency to expect what they think is interesting [flying cars] rather than anything of practical use. if you want an accurate prediction make one that is the result of several small practical steps away from what exists now. for example; I predict that hybrid cars [or some offshoot of them] will make up a majority of cars within 50 years. not a very exciting prediction but it's probably more accurate than expecting flying cars any time soon.
That's just a Goa'uld mothership approaching Earth. No need for alarm at all.
2008 is not an old. old begins at windows ME [not that you would ever use such a POS OS] the software ran fine at least if you don't upgrade the software that is... the functionality is basically the same [surf the net, check email etc...] so why is it that since that time a new firefox is currently using 137 megs of RAM while I'm reading slashdot. A computer even ten years ago doesn't even have that much ram and yet you can surf the net with it... explain to me why all of this ram use was worth it?
the mentality of devs is that the hardware can take the bloat just give it some time and as far as I am concerned it's a cancer slowly eroding away at what software should be. quick, clean and efficient. BUt really, why shouldn't software be capable of running on hardware for over a decade- we've got a 12 year old compaq sitting in the basement that has less hard drive space than my ram is and yet it can surf the net just fine... The problem comes when devs start to think that they shouldn't be tasked with improving code efficiency because they aren't coding for older hardware. Well all I can say is maybe they should. If an old geezer compaq can hack it just fine on the internet today why can't newer versions of software that do the same basic things cope as well?
you know, not everyone has a new computer and frankly I am glad that at least some developers don't make the same assumption you just did. This is especially important considering the rising popularity of smaller notebooks that even bare Windows XP has trouble booting.
if someone hacks off an arm they are not going to experience anything other than pain first.