Actually, this is incorrect. By posting them on his web side, he has given an implicit license to view in a browser and download and archive for future viewing. What he has not implicitly permitted is REdistribution or derivative works.
The Apple camp exists in a silo, as usual. Music purchased at the iTunes Music Store is only playable in iTunes, and only natively transfers to an iPod family portible.
Or, you know, playable in any standard CD audio device. Of which there are a hell of a lot more of than digital music players of any description. This alone is going to keep Apple on top for a long, long time. As I don't see Microsoft opening up a "hole" like that in their iron Digital Rights Infringement scheme.
Not only that it was obtaining the funding, but that Microsoft had asked SCO to slander Linux to attempt to slow down its domination of the operating system market. Something that's not just blatant anti-trust violation, but very probably illegal in any number of ways.
Not that it'll get persecuted while King Bush's on the Oval Throne, but one can never tell...
What's really amazing is that the Clone Wars animated shorts are better than the last two movies. There's no particular reason - they just feel more like the Star Wars we're used to. And there's definitely "Who's gonna fly it?" lines. Hell, ANAKIN gets a couple. (Like the sequence where he's zipping back and forth dogfighting with that Sith chick over Obi-Wan's head while Obi-wan lectures at him)
Essentially, because internal IT is a cost center.
But you said it yourself - internal IT is fundamental to their business. Internal IT is what makes them money. Why? Because internal IT is what lets the things that make them money (the call centers) make money. And before you say that that means its not important - that's exactly the same function that marketing and management both serve.
Internal IT for these people isn't a cost center. Its a piece of critical infrastructure, one that has to be carefully tied and responsive to their core business.
I wouldn't say get rid of calculators entirely. They can be very useful when doing certain kinds of maths. However, students should always learn the basics and do them without a calculator for long enough for the concepts to be driven home. For example, introduce basic arithmetic as soon as they start school. Start letting them use basic calculators for numerical calculations when they move into algebra. That sort of thing.
Who said anything about that? Take, for example, everyone's favorite company, Softare Monolith M. Now, M's got this problem with company A - specifically, A's eating into their profits and causing problems by blocking off other markets they want to expand into. M is too used to being a monopoly, and so their corporate structure simply can't handle competition.
Fortunately, there are anti-spam laws in place in the country where M and A reside. These laws, as the original poster suggested, mandate penalties - either per-e-mail or per-batch - for any company who spams. So, M goes and pays a bunch of companies in foreign country R to send off a huge amount of spam mail, claiming to be from A about their product. M makes sure that this spam is targetted so as to be sure to attract the attention of those in charge of enforcing said law.
Now, as far as anyone can tell, company A was responsible for this mail. Neither A nor the spammer would be expected to keep detailed records, as spam is illegal in A's home country. M, of course, wouldn't keep any records. All the e-mail system knows is that this spammer sent all this mail advertising stuff for company A. So, in the eyes of the above law, A is guilty of spamming. Since company M, with pocket change, has bought enough spam for the fines to put A out of business, M disposes of a competitor without getting their hands dirty or even adversely affecting their own finances.
See what that kind of law's dumb now? You either have to assume they're guilty because there's spam advertising their product, or assume they're innocent and wind up with a totally worthless law.
You know what one of the top methods of spamming is now? Pick a couple thousand servers with open SMTP ports at random. Randomly generate a couple million "likely" addresses. Send your spam to all these addresses.
Cost to you: minimal. Cost to recipient: substantial. Chances of nailing several million active addresses: pretty damn good. Expected sales: around a hundred.
And if the server bounces on invalid addresses - all the better. A simple set difference gets you a list of active addresses. Rinse and repeat for about a month and you've got a list of a couple million active addresses.
The problem with fining the companies offering the products/services is that you've then handed their competition a great way to get rid of them. Having trouble beating a rival in the market? Hire a direct marketer in Russia, say, to send out ten million mails, carefully targetted to include government and law enforcement officers in their jurisdiction claiming to be selling their service. Watch them implode under the fines.
Actually, its not contract law that applies here, but copyright law. The contract says "derivative works are also bounded by the GPL or they cannot be distributed", which is a perfectly valid and unambiguous statement. After all, although you retain copyright over any derivative works you make of someone else's copyrighted work, you cannot distribute it without their prior permission.
Where things get shaky is what, exactly, a derivative work is. The FSF's lawyers have one opinion, the BSD bozos another, and the unwashed Slashdot masses about another billion. However, from what I've read, its quite unclear, especially in the case of software. Copyright law as it applies to software is generally written assuming that only binaries will be distributed, thanks to extensive lobbying by proprietary software firms in the '70s and '80s. How, exactly, the notion of a derivative work interacts with source code and binaries is unknown.
Well, to some degree. Its pretty obvious that if you take program P and rewrite a portion of it, then that's a derivative work of P. But a program compiled by compiler C is NOT a derivative work of the compiler, no matter what Microsoft or anyone else may try to claim. (Yes, they do, or did, claim this in one of the.Net licensing agreements - basically, they said "any program compiled with this compiler cannot be GPL'd".) Where the ambiguity comes into play is libraries.
What he's saying was that the comment about the iTMS making little profit was referring to them having sold enough songs to cover the fixed costs - the initial costs of buying hardware, developing the store software, and running ads. As they're making about 30 cents a song, unit costs included, the store will make a profit - most likely quite a large one.
It hasn't provided a profit so far because all the money made went to paying off the initial investment. Now that that's (close to) done...
Huh? Free when RMS uses it isn't "free for anyony to get and use", whoever anyony is. Free when RMS uses it is free as in freedom, a meaning that many in the proprietary software community seem to have conveniently forgotten.
Nice theory. Shame it doesn't work that way in practice. If you haven't noticed, either the big companies are the ones with all the patents, or the patents cover something so bloody obvious that anyone who spends ten seconds thinking about the field can come up with it. So you either wind up with a big company crushing all innovation and enforcing their status quo, or a single asshole wiping out an entire industry because he happened to get a patent on "sifting flour" or "adding parsley".
Flip this around and imagine that I decide to circumvent the GPL by taking a piece of GPL software and using its source in piece of closed source commercial software. Wouldn't like that now, would you?
This argument is not only invalid, its stupid. How many times does it have to be repeated? The GPL is a valid contract because the copyright holder is using it to give you rights you would not ordinarily have. No-one's legal rights are being curtailed by the GPL. The Apple iTMS license, on the other hand, attempts to curtail rights granted to you by law, which makes it an unenforcable contract.
Also... This is just another big example of how the media cartels refuse to adapt to changing circumstances, or even admit that circumstances are changing. Instead of commercial breaks, they could have a constant ad bar (not that that would be any less annoying) or some such alternative means of delivering commercial content.
And if a truck or something had hit and killed Janklow when Janklow was driving recklessly, you can bet that his family would have the driver declared a terrorist and dragged off to Guantamo Bay.
Classic ones are really good, yes. And even some more modern ones are good, especially the more theoretical books. But as soon as you start moving into the practical, Microsoft dominates very effectively. At the university I'm finishing up a CS degree at, the CS department does indeed use Unix (Solaris, in fact) servers for all their work...
But most of the desktops are now Windows. This is a recent thing - the new Dean signed a deal with Microsoft almost as soon as he started, and started phasing out the old Sun workstations. Combine this with the fact that many of the professors for the first- and second-year classes don't bother to teach any of the more interesting features of typical Unix shells (IE, piping and I/O redirection) and that a lot of the professors tend to portray Unix as a "acadamic" OS or "learning tool"...
Well, I'm sure you get the picture. Microsoft's "Use Windows because Windows is what's used" marketing has been more effective than a lot of people think.
Re:Full List of April Fools Web Sites
on
Introducing RMS-Lint
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
http://www.userfriendly.org/ - SCO joke, parodying Illiad's usual April Fool's joke.
True. On the other hand, this would allow you to release songs that wouldn't ordinarily go on your records AND give you actual data (lots of people downloaded this song and e-mailed me to tell me they liked it) to use to fight the record company. Which is another reason why they're scared of P2P. They're afraid that artists wouldn't have to rely on their nebulous marketing data and might actually have some say in their music.
It is, in fact, not stealing. Nothing is being stolen. It IS copyright infringement. Whether it SHOULD be copyright infringement is another question.
But it is not stealing. Get it through your head.
If it is stealing, please point out to me what the person downloading the song now has that the record company lacks. And at the relevant part of the criminal code that defines it as thieft. (As opposed to copyright infringement)
Yes, but most conservatives are going to wind up picking Bush. Why? He'll blame all the problems caused by his administration on the Democrats, and will successfully tar and feather Kerry as a Massachusetts Liberal. Not that its hard to do. The only way the Democrats could've picked a worse candidate was by choosing Joe "I'm not just Bush Lite, I'm Bush PLUS!" Lieberman.
In fact, squeezing often means cutting back on "small government for the people" programs, like real Medicare or Veterans' Care while, carefully and clandestinely, increasing welfare for your corporate buddies. Which is, amazingly enough, exactly what Bush has been doing.
And please use the proper terminology. This isn't a part of the conservative playbook. Its part of the playbook of the neo-conservatives or, if you actually look at their policies and match it up to traditional political parties, the fascists.
Name one project that GWB's actually proposed spending government money on during his term, other than Iraq.
That's right. Nothing. He's left a long trail of unfunded mandates, or mandates whose cost will only be felt by his successors. Makes him look suitably visionary, and sabotages the government of the next generation. What a President.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is incorrect. By posting them on his web side, he has given an implicit license to view in a browser and download and archive for future viewing. What he has not implicitly permitted is REdistribution or derivative works.
The Apple camp exists in a silo, as usual. Music purchased at the iTunes Music Store is only playable in iTunes, and only natively transfers to an iPod family portible.
Or, you know, playable in any standard CD audio device. Of which there are a hell of a lot more of than digital music players of any description. This alone is going to keep Apple on top for a long, long time. As I don't see Microsoft opening up a "hole" like that in their iron Digital Rights Infringement scheme.
Not only that it was obtaining the funding, but that Microsoft had asked SCO to slander Linux to attempt to slow down its domination of the operating system market. Something that's not just blatant anti-trust violation, but very probably illegal in any number of ways.
Not that it'll get persecuted while King Bush's on the Oval Throne, but one can never tell...
So tell me, then... What's the medium?
What's really amazing is that the Clone Wars animated shorts are better than the last two movies. There's no particular reason - they just feel more like the Star Wars we're used to. And there's definitely "Who's gonna fly it?" lines. Hell, ANAKIN gets a couple. (Like the sequence where he's zipping back and forth dogfighting with that Sith chick over Obi-Wan's head while Obi-wan lectures at him)
Essentially, because internal IT is a cost center.
But you said it yourself - internal IT is fundamental to their business. Internal IT is what makes them money. Why? Because internal IT is what lets the things that make them money (the call centers) make money. And before you say that that means its not important - that's exactly the same function that marketing and management both serve.
Internal IT for these people isn't a cost center. Its a piece of critical infrastructure, one that has to be carefully tied and responsive to their core business.
I wouldn't say get rid of calculators entirely. They can be very useful when doing certain kinds of maths. However, students should always learn the basics and do them without a calculator for long enough for the concepts to be driven home. For example, introduce basic arithmetic as soon as they start school. Start letting them use basic calculators for numerical calculations when they move into algebra. That sort of thing.
Who said anything about that? Take, for example, everyone's favorite company, Softare Monolith M. Now, M's got this problem with company A - specifically, A's eating into their profits and causing problems by blocking off other markets they want to expand into. M is too used to being a monopoly, and so their corporate structure simply can't handle competition.
Fortunately, there are anti-spam laws in place in the country where M and A reside. These laws, as the original poster suggested, mandate penalties - either per-e-mail or per-batch - for any company who spams. So, M goes and pays a bunch of companies in foreign country R to send off a huge amount of spam mail, claiming to be from A about their product. M makes sure that this spam is targetted so as to be sure to attract the attention of those in charge of enforcing said law.
Now, as far as anyone can tell, company A was responsible for this mail. Neither A nor the spammer would be expected to keep detailed records, as spam is illegal in A's home country. M, of course, wouldn't keep any records. All the e-mail system knows is that this spammer sent all this mail advertising stuff for company A. So, in the eyes of the above law, A is guilty of spamming. Since company M, with pocket change, has bought enough spam for the fines to put A out of business, M disposes of a competitor without getting their hands dirty or even adversely affecting their own finances.
See what that kind of law's dumb now? You either have to assume they're guilty because there's spam advertising their product, or assume they're innocent and wind up with a totally worthless law.
Yeah, people are stupid, and you're among them.
You know what one of the top methods of spamming is now? Pick a couple thousand servers with open SMTP ports at random. Randomly generate a couple million "likely" addresses. Send your spam to all these addresses.
Cost to you: minimal. Cost to recipient: substantial. Chances of nailing several million active addresses: pretty damn good. Expected sales: around a hundred.
And if the server bounces on invalid addresses - all the better. A simple set difference gets you a list of active addresses. Rinse and repeat for about a month and you've got a list of a couple million active addresses.
The problem with fining the companies offering the products/services is that you've then handed their competition a great way to get rid of them. Having trouble beating a rival in the market? Hire a direct marketer in Russia, say, to send out ten million mails, carefully targetted to include government and law enforcement officers in their jurisdiction claiming to be selling their service. Watch them implode under the fines.
Actually, its not contract law that applies here, but copyright law. The contract says "derivative works are also bounded by the GPL or they cannot be distributed", which is a perfectly valid and unambiguous statement. After all, although you retain copyright over any derivative works you make of someone else's copyrighted work, you cannot distribute it without their prior permission.
Where things get shaky is what, exactly, a derivative work is. The FSF's lawyers have one opinion, the BSD bozos another, and the unwashed Slashdot masses about another billion. However, from what I've read, its quite unclear, especially in the case of software. Copyright law as it applies to software is generally written assuming that only binaries will be distributed, thanks to extensive lobbying by proprietary software firms in the '70s and '80s. How, exactly, the notion of a derivative work interacts with source code and binaries is unknown.
Well, to some degree. Its pretty obvious that if you take program P and rewrite a portion of it, then that's a derivative work of P. But a program compiled by compiler C is NOT a derivative work of the compiler, no matter what Microsoft or anyone else may try to claim. (Yes, they do, or did, claim this in one of the .Net licensing agreements - basically, they said "any program compiled with this compiler cannot be GPL'd".) Where the ambiguity comes into play is libraries.
Huh?
What he's saying was that the comment about the iTMS making little profit was referring to them having sold enough songs to cover the fixed costs - the initial costs of buying hardware, developing the store software, and running ads. As they're making about 30 cents a song, unit costs included, the store will make a profit - most likely quite a large one.
It hasn't provided a profit so far because all the money made went to paying off the initial investment. Now that that's (close to) done...
Seriously. Take a basic economics class.
Huh? Free when RMS uses it isn't "free for anyony to get and use", whoever anyony is. Free when RMS uses it is free as in freedom, a meaning that many in the proprietary software community seem to have conveniently forgotten.
Nice theory. Shame it doesn't work that way in practice. If you haven't noticed, either the big companies are the ones with all the patents, or the patents cover something so bloody obvious that anyone who spends ten seconds thinking about the field can come up with it. So you either wind up with a big company crushing all innovation and enforcing their status quo, or a single asshole wiping out an entire industry because he happened to get a patent on "sifting flour" or "adding parsley".
Flip this around and imagine that I decide to circumvent the GPL by taking a piece of GPL software and using its source in piece of closed source commercial software. Wouldn't like that now, would you?
This argument is not only invalid, its stupid. How many times does it have to be repeated? The GPL is a valid contract because the copyright holder is using it to give you rights you would not ordinarily have. No-one's legal rights are being curtailed by the GPL. The Apple iTMS license, on the other hand, attempts to curtail rights granted to you by law, which makes it an unenforcable contract.
Also... This is just another big example of how the media cartels refuse to adapt to changing circumstances, or even admit that circumstances are changing. Instead of commercial breaks, they could have a constant ad bar (not that that would be any less annoying) or some such alternative means of delivering commercial content.
I think this comic strip says all that needs to be said about the new Star Wars movies.
In a very sarcastic manner, of course.
And if a truck or something had hit and killed Janklow when Janklow was driving recklessly, you can bet that his family would have the driver declared a terrorist and dragged off to Guantamo Bay.
Classic ones are really good, yes. And even some more modern ones are good, especially the more theoretical books. But as soon as you start moving into the practical, Microsoft dominates very effectively. At the university I'm finishing up a CS degree at, the CS department does indeed use Unix (Solaris, in fact) servers for all their work...
But most of the desktops are now Windows. This is a recent thing - the new Dean signed a deal with Microsoft almost as soon as he started, and started phasing out the old Sun workstations. Combine this with the fact that many of the professors for the first- and second-year classes don't bother to teach any of the more interesting features of typical Unix shells (IE, piping and I/O redirection) and that a lot of the professors tend to portray Unix as a "acadamic" OS or "learning tool"...
Well, I'm sure you get the picture. Microsoft's "Use Windows because Windows is what's used" marketing has been more effective than a lot of people think.
http://www.userfriendly.org/ - SCO joke, parodying Illiad's usual April Fool's joke.
True. On the other hand, this would allow you to release songs that wouldn't ordinarily go on your records AND give you actual data (lots of people downloaded this song and e-mailed me to tell me they liked it) to use to fight the record company. Which is another reason why they're scared of P2P. They're afraid that artists wouldn't have to rely on their nebulous marketing data and might actually have some say in their music.
It is, in fact, not stealing. Nothing is being stolen. It IS copyright infringement. Whether it SHOULD be copyright infringement is another question.
But it is not stealing. Get it through your head.
If it is stealing, please point out to me what the person downloading the song now has that the record company lacks. And at the relevant part of the criminal code that defines it as thieft. (As opposed to copyright infringement)
Yes, but most conservatives are going to wind up picking Bush. Why? He'll blame all the problems caused by his administration on the Democrats, and will successfully tar and feather Kerry as a Massachusetts Liberal. Not that its hard to do. The only way the Democrats could've picked a worse candidate was by choosing Joe "I'm not just Bush Lite, I'm Bush PLUS!" Lieberman.
In fact, squeezing often means cutting back on "small government for the people" programs, like real Medicare or Veterans' Care while, carefully and clandestinely, increasing welfare for your corporate buddies. Which is, amazingly enough, exactly what Bush has been doing.
And please use the proper terminology. This isn't a part of the conservative playbook. Its part of the playbook of the neo-conservatives or, if you actually look at their policies and match it up to traditional political parties, the fascists.
Name one project that GWB's actually proposed spending government money on during his term, other than Iraq.
That's right. Nothing. He's left a long trail of unfunded mandates, or mandates whose cost will only be felt by his successors. Makes him look suitably visionary, and sabotages the government of the next generation. What a President.
Turns out almost isn't good enough.