My local movie theater purchases a license to put on a public performance of a movie. Well, too bad, that's more liberal than copyright law (otherwise they wouldn't have purchasd it, would they?), so all movie ever show to an audience are now public domain.
The local amateur theater, you guessed it, purchases a license to show plays. Tada, all plays are public domain, except those that have never been performed. (Technically, they could have been performed entirely by the author, I guess, but that's a bit absurd.)
I have in front of me an Ace book that says quite clearly 'Published by arrangement from the author'. That arrangement? More liberal then copyright law. All books that have copies that are created in any way other than the direct action of the author, aka, all of them printed at a publishing house, are public domain.
You know those thigns called 'radio stations' that send out songs over the RF spectrum? Good news for you MP3ers out there...they just public domained all songs ever played on the radio!
Forget software, this argument would basically destroy all copyright, unless the author was the only person to ever make copies or put on public performances. Which is absurd, no author has that kind of time or money.
And it's rather absurd to pretend the Fair Use provisions are intended to restrict the end users, anyway. They're clearly intended to give more rights to the end users.
Well, if I'm donating my food, and I'm the one standing in line handing it out, and a dozen guys from a local resturant keep coming back through the line and asking for more soup, which they keep dumping in a pot instead of eating, and I know they're going to sell it at the resturant....yeah, I'll stop serving them.
Damn, your example was stupid. When I donate things to the needy, I damn well expect only the needy will take them, and that businesses won't claim to be 'needy' and run off with them and resell them. As does, I have to claim, everyone else who donates to the needy. Otherwise the middleman would have been cut out and we all be making charity donations to large corporations.
All of witches were guilty, or at least found guilty, of the crimes they were convicted of, that's the meaning of the word 'convicted'.
It's really sad the word 'witchhunt' has come to mean 'wrongly looking for problems that do no exist'. A much better lesson to take away from the witchhunts is that everything was done exactly correct and proper, and people were found guilt under the law of being witches.
McCarthyism, to explain farther, wasn't really a witchhunt, as quite a bit of it didn't happen under the law. And think what you will about boycotting suspected communists on random hearsay, it's a lot worse when they can convict you on random hearsay of it.
Like, oh, under the DMCA, where the ISP is legally required to take down your website on random hearsay.
No kidding. This is basically akin to saying 'He has mud on his tires. It might have rained last night. Hence I will inform everyone he got a speeding ticket last night.', and that's not even your car!
I mean, they're making assertations you're a criminal with absolutely no grounds for it. They didn't do the slightly fact checking at all.
Yes, informing one person that someone else is a copyright violator isn't a very big libel, in the greater scheme of things, but I think that would be countered out by the complete lack of bothering to do the slightest checking whatsoever before said accusation.
Trade secret laws do not protect themselves from their own stupidity or incompetence.
Unless you're the one who gave the the virus, you can do whatever you want. (In fact, you can do whatever you want even if you did, you'll just be sued. But even a lawsuit cannot stop you from sending out the information, it is completely impossible for the courts to stop you from doing that.)
You always have the rights to use software, including instaling it and copying it into memory t run it, you just don't have the right to otherwise copy it without a license of some sort.
If you don't want to stop email from spamming ISPs, don't use SPEWs. Duh. Those of us who do will continue to use it.
Honestly, I have no idea who these people are who are idiotic using SPEWs but don't want to block spam from spam supporting ISPs. That's the point of SPEWs.
Instead, SCO is just sitting there, watching the damage to increase automatically, while on the other hand threatening people with pay-or-sue kind of words.
You are mostly correct, but not here. The damages do not increase in any way until people have actually been notified of the infringment, and even given a chance to fix it.
So, basically, if what SCO was claiming is true was true, they are acting completely incompetently. If it was true that Linux infringed, and couldn't be easily fixed, it's in their best interests to notify everyone of the actual infringing code, and then take them to court if they didn't fix it.
The court absolutely will not allow a company to 'rack up' damages by refusing to stop someone else from harming it, period. Until SCO produces the code, absolutely no one can possible be liable for their failure to stop using the code.
And even after that, they get a reasonable amount of time to fix it. Distros would have to stop selling the code, or distributing it, and then issue an offical recall to replace the code as soon as they rewrite it.
Note that's all seperate from damages SCO would theortically be due because of you using the code in the first place...but everyone's already (in theory) liable for that, and there's nothing anyone can do to fix it.
Trade secrets don't work that way. Pepsi is perfectly free to use Coke's recipe all it wants.
However, it's forbidden from breaking the law, or various contracts, to gain it. It can't pay some guy under an NDA at Coke to spill the formula. It can't pay a cat burgler to break in and steal it.
However, it can reverse engineer the formula, it can read it out of a book Coke accidently left it in, (Which, BTW, has basically happened...at least the formula they were using in the fifties...they left it in a book.), they can pose as tourists and take the tour with super high-power cameras photographing everything, etc. As long as they do not violate criminal or contract law, Coke would have no grounds for anything.
Likewise, if someone else broke into Coke, and stole the formula, and posted it on Usenet, Pepsi is perfectly free to use it.
You can't 're-secret' a trade secret...if a single person stole it and used it, without telling anyone, part of the damages they agree to, when caught, might be to sign an NDA, so it might remain a trade secret. But once the cat is out of the bag, it's out of the bag. Coke could get massive damages from the person who stole it and posted it to Usenet, but that's it.
In fact, 'trade secrets' are just a logical extension of the law...they let you get damages from someone who broke the law (or your contracts) and, although they didn't 'steal' anything, still has made off with a significant advantage of yours. And that's the only person you can go after...someone who broke the law or your contracts.
Meanwhile, anyone who didn't commit the crime but ended up with the 'secrets' is perfectly free to do whatever they want.
If there were any trade secrets put in Linux, they are no longer trade secrets and are freely usably by anyone on the planet however they want.
If you had two points, in some mathmatical model, and one was going faster than the other, the faster one would overtake the slower one. That's just the way speed works. It doesn't have anything to do with the objects being 'real'.
And your last sentence makes no sense. NO paradox is correct, by defination, a paradox is a logically impossible situation. (Note in this case, what Xeno said is only half the paradox...the other half is that the runner does pass the tortise.)
At this point, I'm thinking this article should have started out with a big defination of 'paradox', since a lot of people seem to be treating it as some sort of mathmatical theory, and/or attempting to 'disprove' it, which is just plain wacky.
We know the paradox isn't true, and we know you can sum a frickin infinite series! The point is that paradox takes some common assumptions about how time and space work, that they are infinitely divisiable, and shows they cannot be correct.
And there's some reason that Planck's constants aren't normally considered a satisfactory explaination of Xeno's paradox, at least not by everyone, but I can't recall what it is right now. It was something about that not being the 'smallest unit of time', as some people seem to think it is, it's just the smallest unit of time things can happen in. It's not impossible to subdivide it smaller, it's just at that point you can't tell when events happen. So it's always been considered a rather half-assed explanation of the paradox.
I don't know what 'basic algebra' you learned, but the basic algebra I learned doesn't let you sum infinite sequences, at least not without taking a really long time. (That's a joke, BTW. You can't sum an infinite series even in an infinite amount of time, infinity doesn't work like that.)
And everyone who rightly points out you can figure out the distance with calculus is missing the point of the paradox. Any idiot can figure out when the runner passes the tortise, you don't even need algebra to figure it out. The point is if you can subdivide time infinitely, then no one can get anywhere. The math doesn't have a damn thing to do with anything.
And this guy apparently said, hey, wait, maybe you can't subdivide time infinitely, which many other people had said...but he suggested you can't do it because there is no such thing as an exact moment of time, which no one else had suggested seriously. Everyone else was operating on the assumption there was simply a point where you couldn't divide time anymore, and you could label the moment on each end of it exactly, and were just unable to label anything inside it.
Being unable to label any point exactly makes the entire paradox invalid...there is no point where the runner catches up to where the tortise was...and there wasn't even a point when the tortise was there. There are no points at all.
All that would do is make everything seem to run in slow motion. Which is a fun party gag, but not incredibly useful. It won't make you think faster or anything, in fact, you'd probably think slower, simply because you have more data to process.
I don't see how a device can correct for unknown curvature on such a small scale. Just moving the damn device would be enough to alter the shape of space, and I think those errors would show up way before you hit Planck's constant.
They aren't 'theories', they are paradoxes, and thus obviously wrong. Paradoxes are things that are impossible and self-contradictory, and thus can't be correct.
No, that's not the same thing. Simple because we have an amount of time that light takes to travel the smallest distance, doesn't mean we can't precisely figure out, for example, when light starts to cover that distance and when it ends.
Wherea he's arguing there's no such thing as something happen 'precisely' at a certain moment.
Cars are a certain length. Any distance they cover on the road is, by defination, at least the length of the car. That doesn't mean we can't precisely measure the exact position they started the trip.
Of course, we can't measure the exact position 'the car' started the trip, because the start of 'the car' is a fuzzy boundary of moving atoms. So maybe my analogy works better than I thought it did, in that the start of any 'event' might be not be an exact moment.
(Yes, I know people do not emit light, but let's pretend.)
As you fall in, your image gets 'stuck' on the event horizon, where, of course, no one can see it. However, you're also 'trailing light' right before you hit it, and, due to the massive gravity, your image goes out very very very slowly, until you hit the event horizon, where it stops moving outward.
Hence, people standing outside will see the light you gave before you hit the event horizon for...well, a very long time, as the light continues to struggle out of the gravity well.
Note this isn't just an optical illusion. In a very real relativistic sense, the light cone that defines the order of events is seriously distorted, and you really are 'still' falling into the black hole the entire time.
Uh, making them both real objects doesn't fix the problem at all.
In fact, their size doesn't have any bearing on the problem. The distance is measured from the front of them.
If Achilles is one inch from the front tortise, at some point he's going to move forward that one inch. However, in that near-infinite small amount of time, the tortise will have moved forward 1/10th of an inch.
Alright, but Achilles is going to take that next 1/10th in a very short amount of time...but when he does so, he finds the tortise has moved 1/100th of an inch, so he still hasn't caught up.
There's absolutely no bearing on the size of either Achilles or the tortise. The point is that time keeps getting subdivided more and more, and Achilles never catches up.
If Achilles was trying to step on the tortise, and you were measuring from the front of the tortise, you might have a point. But if you're talking about the front, he's trying to pass it. If you're talking about him trying step on the top of it, you measure how far away he is from the back.
I don't think that follows. While we don't know the rules governing an observer outside our universe, we know the rules governing anything observed in our universe, in any way.
Of course, because of that, I don't think anyone can stand outside the 'universe' and look in, because the second they did they'd be 'in' in the universe.
No, the actual recipe cannot be copyrighted. The arrayment of the recipe and the selection of recipes can be.
But you can sit down with any recipe book, and write down how to make anything out of it, and sell it, as long as you do not use the exact words. (And, hell, half the exact words are a simple list of ingedients, which you can just blatantly copy.)
Basically, the process of making a cake is a fact, and you can't copyright facts.
Now, you could theortically patent it...but the patent office would never grant such a patent. All recipes are small modifications of very very well known concepts, that basically result in the same thing.
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My local movie theater purchases a license to put on a public performance of a movie. Well, too bad, that's more liberal than copyright law (otherwise they wouldn't have purchasd it, would they?), so all movie ever show to an audience are now public domain.
The local amateur theater, you guessed it, purchases a license to show plays. Tada, all plays are public domain, except those that have never been performed. (Technically, they could have been performed entirely by the author, I guess, but that's a bit absurd.)
I have in front of me an Ace book that says quite clearly 'Published by arrangement from the author'. That arrangement? More liberal then copyright law. All books that have copies that are created in any way other than the direct action of the author, aka, all of them printed at a publishing house, are public domain.
You know those thigns called 'radio stations' that send out songs over the RF spectrum? Good news for you MP3ers out there...they just public domained all songs ever played on the radio!
Forget software, this argument would basically destroy all copyright, unless the author was the only person to ever make copies or put on public performances. Which is absurd, no author has that kind of time or money.
Ha, you fool! You can't walk to China. There's water in the way.
And it's rather absurd to pretend the Fair Use provisions are intended to restrict the end users, anyway. They're clearly intended to give more rights to the end users.
Damn, your example was stupid. When I donate things to the needy, I damn well expect only the needy will take them, and that businesses won't claim to be 'needy' and run off with them and resell them. As does, I have to claim, everyone else who donates to the needy. Otherwise the middleman would have been cut out and we all be making charity donations to large corporations.
It's perfectly legal to copyright something and see, for example, only to teachers, or only to people wearing blue.
It's really sad the word 'witchhunt' has come to mean 'wrongly looking for problems that do no exist'. A much better lesson to take away from the witchhunts is that everything was done exactly correct and proper, and people were found guilt under the law of being witches.
McCarthyism, to explain farther, wasn't really a witchhunt, as quite a bit of it didn't happen under the law. And think what you will about boycotting suspected communists on random hearsay, it's a lot worse when they can convict you on random hearsay of it.
Like, oh, under the DMCA, where the ISP is legally required to take down your website on random hearsay.
I mean, they're making assertations you're a criminal with absolutely no grounds for it. They didn't do the slightly fact checking at all.
Yes, informing one person that someone else is a copyright violator isn't a very big libel, in the greater scheme of things, but I think that would be countered out by the complete lack of bothering to do the slightest checking whatsoever before said accusation.
Unless you're the one who gave the the virus, you can do whatever you want. (In fact, you can do whatever you want even if you did, you'll just be sued. But even a lawsuit cannot stop you from sending out the information, it is completely impossible for the courts to stop you from doing that.)
You always have the rights to use software, including instaling it and copying it into memory t run it, you just don't have the right to otherwise copy it without a license of some sort.
And your ISP is guilty.
If you don't want to stop email from spamming ISPs, don't use SPEWs. Duh. Those of us who do will continue to use it.
Honestly, I have no idea who these people are who are idiotic using SPEWs but don't want to block spam from spam supporting ISPs. That's the point of SPEWs.
You are mostly correct, but not here. The damages do not increase in any way until people have actually been notified of the infringment, and even given a chance to fix it.
So, basically, if what SCO was claiming is true was true, they are acting completely incompetently. If it was true that Linux infringed, and couldn't be easily fixed, it's in their best interests to notify everyone of the actual infringing code, and then take them to court if they didn't fix it.
The court absolutely will not allow a company to 'rack up' damages by refusing to stop someone else from harming it, period. Until SCO produces the code, absolutely no one can possible be liable for their failure to stop using the code.
And even after that, they get a reasonable amount of time to fix it. Distros would have to stop selling the code, or distributing it, and then issue an offical recall to replace the code as soon as they rewrite it.
Note that's all seperate from damages SCO would theortically be due because of you using the code in the first place...but everyone's already (in theory) liable for that, and there's nothing anyone can do to fix it.
However, it's forbidden from breaking the law, or various contracts, to gain it. It can't pay some guy under an NDA at Coke to spill the formula. It can't pay a cat burgler to break in and steal it.
However, it can reverse engineer the formula, it can read it out of a book Coke accidently left it in, (Which, BTW, has basically happened...at least the formula they were using in the fifties...they left it in a book.), they can pose as tourists and take the tour with super high-power cameras photographing everything, etc. As long as they do not violate criminal or contract law, Coke would have no grounds for anything.
Likewise, if someone else broke into Coke, and stole the formula, and posted it on Usenet, Pepsi is perfectly free to use it.
You can't 're-secret' a trade secret...if a single person stole it and used it, without telling anyone, part of the damages they agree to, when caught, might be to sign an NDA, so it might remain a trade secret. But once the cat is out of the bag, it's out of the bag. Coke could get massive damages from the person who stole it and posted it to Usenet, but that's it.
In fact, 'trade secrets' are just a logical extension of the law...they let you get damages from someone who broke the law (or your contracts) and, although they didn't 'steal' anything, still has made off with a significant advantage of yours. And that's the only person you can go after...someone who broke the law or your contracts.
Meanwhile, anyone who didn't commit the crime but ended up with the 'secrets' is perfectly free to do whatever they want.
If there were any trade secrets put in Linux, they are no longer trade secrets and are freely usably by anyone on the planet however they want.
And your last sentence makes no sense. NO paradox is correct, by defination, a paradox is a logically impossible situation. (Note in this case, what Xeno said is only half the paradox...the other half is that the runner does pass the tortise.)
At this point, I'm thinking this article should have started out with a big defination of 'paradox', since a lot of people seem to be treating it as some sort of mathmatical theory, and/or attempting to 'disprove' it, which is just plain wacky.
We know the paradox isn't true, and we know you can sum a frickin infinite series! The point is that paradox takes some common assumptions about how time and space work, that they are infinitely divisiable, and shows they cannot be correct.
And there's some reason that Planck's constants aren't normally considered a satisfactory explaination of Xeno's paradox, at least not by everyone, but I can't recall what it is right now. It was something about that not being the 'smallest unit of time', as some people seem to think it is, it's just the smallest unit of time things can happen in. It's not impossible to subdivide it smaller, it's just at that point you can't tell when events happen. So it's always been considered a rather half-assed explanation of the paradox.
There is no such thing as a motionless object.
And everyone who rightly points out you can figure out the distance with calculus is missing the point of the paradox. Any idiot can figure out when the runner passes the tortise, you don't even need algebra to figure it out. The point is if you can subdivide time infinitely, then no one can get anywhere. The math doesn't have a damn thing to do with anything.
And this guy apparently said, hey, wait, maybe you can't subdivide time infinitely, which many other people had said...but he suggested you can't do it because there is no such thing as an exact moment of time, which no one else had suggested seriously. Everyone else was operating on the assumption there was simply a point where you couldn't divide time anymore, and you could label the moment on each end of it exactly, and were just unable to label anything inside it.
Being unable to label any point exactly makes the entire paradox invalid...there is no point where the runner catches up to where the tortise was...and there wasn't even a point when the tortise was there. There are no points at all.
All that would do is make everything seem to run in slow motion. Which is a fun party gag, but not incredibly useful. It won't make you think faster or anything, in fact, you'd probably think slower, simply because you have more data to process.
I don't see how a device can correct for unknown curvature on such a small scale. Just moving the damn device would be enough to alter the shape of space, and I think those errors would show up way before you hit Planck's constant.
They aren't 'theories', they are paradoxes, and thus obviously wrong. Paradoxes are things that are impossible and self-contradictory, and thus can't be correct.
Wherea he's arguing there's no such thing as something happen 'precisely' at a certain moment.
Cars are a certain length. Any distance they cover on the road is, by defination, at least the length of the car. That doesn't mean we can't precisely measure the exact position they started the trip.
Of course, we can't measure the exact position 'the car' started the trip, because the start of 'the car' is a fuzzy boundary of moving atoms. So maybe my analogy works better than I thought it did, in that the start of any 'event' might be not be an exact moment.
You mean during that unit of time, the runner is passing the tortise.
(Yes, I know people do not emit light, but let's pretend.)
As you fall in, your image gets 'stuck' on the event horizon, where, of course, no one can see it. However, you're also 'trailing light' right before you hit it, and, due to the massive gravity, your image goes out very very very slowly, until you hit the event horizon, where it stops moving outward.
Hence, people standing outside will see the light you gave before you hit the event horizon for...well, a very long time, as the light continues to struggle out of the gravity well.
Note this isn't just an optical illusion. In a very real relativistic sense, the light cone that defines the order of events is seriously distorted, and you really are 'still' falling into the black hole the entire time.
I was about to say you might not even notice crossing it, but the big-ass half collapsed star appear right in front of you might clue you in. ;)
In fact, their size doesn't have any bearing on the problem. The distance is measured from the front of them.
If Achilles is one inch from the front tortise, at some point he's going to move forward that one inch. However, in that near-infinite small amount of time, the tortise will have moved forward 1/10th of an inch.
Alright, but Achilles is going to take that next 1/10th in a very short amount of time...but when he does so, he finds the tortise has moved 1/100th of an inch, so he still hasn't caught up.
There's absolutely no bearing on the size of either Achilles or the tortise. The point is that time keeps getting subdivided more and more, and Achilles never catches up.
If Achilles was trying to step on the tortise, and you were measuring from the front of the tortise, you might have a point. But if you're talking about the front, he's trying to pass it. If you're talking about him trying step on the top of it, you measure how far away he is from the back.
Of course, because of that, I don't think anyone can stand outside the 'universe' and look in, because the second they did they'd be 'in' in the universe.
But you can sit down with any recipe book, and write down how to make anything out of it, and sell it, as long as you do not use the exact words. (And, hell, half the exact words are a simple list of ingedients, which you can just blatantly copy.)
Basically, the process of making a cake is a fact, and you can't copyright facts.
Now, you could theortically patent it...but the patent office would never grant such a patent. All recipes are small modifications of very very well known concepts, that basically result in the same thing.