Umm... No. Read my post closely. I cannot increase the number of copies of a work in circulation by selling copies. However, since I own my copy of the work (both the pages and the "words"), I'm perfectly free to sell that copy to someone else. As the transferal of ownership does not increase the number of copies in circulation. (In case you missed that concept.)
I do not own the copyrighted work, the text of the work. I own the materials that make up this specific copy of the work. This gives me the right to do whatever I want with my copy of the work. I can paint all the pages blue and stick feathers on the covers. I can then sell my Stephen King case-mod.
This is not correct. When I buy a book, I buy a copy of that book. Which means I own both the pages and the words printed on them, though its unclear that such a distinction should be made. However, because of copyright law, I cannot legally create and distribute copies of this work. Copyright law grants the author of a work a temporary (well, in theory) monopoly on the introduction of new copies into the market. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly, just like patents. Nothing more, nothing less. No ownership is involved. As the name says, it is the right to make (and distribute) a copy.
He's talking about himself in the third-person in an amusingly self-deprecating way. If we can't make fun of ourselves, who else is left?
George W. Bush, of course.;)
Re:They'll never get me
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 2
How the hell did the parent get +5, Insightful?
It did not take him half an hour to learn how to add a user under OSX. It took him half an hour to learn how to add a user under OSX without physical access to the machine. Since OSX does not use X, he cannot use any of the graphical tools without using VNC. (as he said) And from what he said, the provided command-line tools are woefully inadequate.
Especially for a server, physical access to the machine is not always feasable. As foreign as this may seem to Windows and Mac users, I routinely do work on machines I've never even been in the same country as. The only impediment to my ability to do meaningful work with them is network lag.
Don't just blame the clients for designing websites accessible to only the "majority" of web users. Underexperienced developers. One (pen-and-paper) gaming company whose products I like recently "upgraded" their website. To some horrible thing with IE-only Javscript menus. When asked why, their representative claimed that:
Everyone they'd interviewed (who? No-one on any of their public mailing lists can stand the design) liked the new site better.
Users of other browsers are a minority of their customers.
Designing the site for universal access would have cost more money.
Its mainly the last point that's the problem. "Web designers" often have no skills or training whatsoever. They just throw together some "hot technology", a photoshop-generated image or fifty, and hand in a huge bill. When asked to design a simpler site that presents the information better and which more people can access, they present a larger bill. Why? It means they actually have to do the job they were hired for.
Yes, but olds are what people pay for from news services. Think about it. CNN - reports stuff people already know, but tries to make them feel good about it. NBC - does the same. Practically any newspaper - same.
Occasionally they include some true news, but then again, so does Slashdot.
If anything, Slashdot is about as bad (good?) as most "reputable" news sources. IOW, they fuck up on a regular basis, report on things that are out-of-date, and spin stories to fit their personal biases.
Go figure, they're human. I dare you to do better.
The definitions provided by the FSF have to be vague. The FSF has no other choice in the matter.
See, "Derivative Work" is a term defined by copyright law. Its up to copyright law and/or the US court system to decide if and when a work is a derivative work. Static linking seems like a reasonable "derivative work" definition, if what you're distributing is the statically linked binary. (As you then need the permission of the original copyright owner to distribute their works, which are part of your binary) Dynamic linking's a lot trickier, as anyone could (in theory) drop in a replacement library that's not GPL'd. And invocation of functionality through IPC/RMI/whatever-TLA-it-is-this-week is even more difficult - though I believe RMS has stated that the GPL does not cover this. (Think about what the side effects would be on the Internet!)
However, the US court system may not uphold this. Or it may decide that both static and dynamic linking are derivative. Or Microsoft might pay them off, and they might decide that everything on the same hard disk as a GPL'd program is GPL'd, and therefor the GPL must be banned from use in America. Who knows?
The problem is that Blizzard's going after the wrong guys. The bnetd authors have deliberately not built WC3 support into their software. However, some beta tester leaked their copy. (boohoo for Blizzard, they didn't build in ways to detect who leaked what) And some warez kiddies, deciding that they wanted to play multiplayer, hacked bnetd to support the beta.
Now Blizzard's just lashing out at the originators, not catching on that these guys have nothing to do with their problem.
Gasp! Those links are to software that's not endorsed by a Giant Corporation, and allow you to play any music you could possibly want to! How can you even consider giving Consumers that kind of choice? Its evil, I tell you, pure evil!
For those moderators lacking a sense of humor: The above is satire, and intended to be funny. Moderate accordingly
Can't they just be happy with owning the PC desktop?
No, because that means they must stop growing. Which means that they'll have unhappy shareholders on their hands, who might finally demand some of those dividends Microsoft has been withholding for years.
And besides, as soon as they stop growing, they stop being a moving target. If they concentrate on owning the PC desktop, then they aren't integrating "new" products all the time anymore. And if they aren't integrating "new" products, then someone else could match their existing feature set. So the instant they stop trying to grab every market in sight, they're dead.
Nah, it'll be ten times that. Just like when the BSA reports on the value of "pirated" software they've confiscated from their latest raid on some charity or mom-and-pop business.
Hmm... That's something I hadn't previously considered. Though user preference is a big part of what interface they'll choose. Windows types don't like Mac or X interfaces, and vice-versa, because they're used to the way their old environment does things. They thus find the new one hard to use, because it doesn't conform to their preferences/expectations.
So now, people have obviously been trained to prefer GUIs. And then, its possible they were drawn to it because it felt "new", or conformed better to their idea of what a computer should work right. Remember, too, that those interfaces were far simpler than modern ones.
Yes, but almost all modern GUIs attempt to use them as a replacement. Or as the primary, with text as the suppliment. That's one thing W2K/KDE/GNOME are doing right with their menus - the text with the tiny icon beside the text is much easier to use than just text alone or icons alone. It'd be a good thing if most functions were removed from the toolbars, since the marketing types can now put the pretty icons in the menus. (And yes, the marketing types were the ones driving the attempted switch to icon-packed toolbars)
In fact, icons are pretty much the only part of a "GUI" that's graphical. The rest is just putting a nice image on top of an older interface concept. (Scrollbars, buttons, menus...)
Also, note that most users eventually wind up using primarily the keyboard, even in a mouse-enabled interface. If the interface lets me (this is one thing I did not like about GNOME), I will use it exclusively.
Simple solution to this problem: Don't allow copyright to apply to compiled/object code. Only allow companies to sell source code if they want to have copyright protection on their work. Remove some of the sillier statements about dervied works. And get rid of the current unlimited-duration copyright. Cut it back down to twenty years, or maybe even ten.
After all, the point of copyright is to encourage authors to publish their works so that others may learn from them. Its not to give a company a huge pool of perpetual "intellectual property" (a term invented by, you guessed it, copyright lawyers to insure their future employment) from which to make money.
the vast majority of GUIs make simple tasks much easier. If you think that arcane text codes and comands are easier than just clicking the Underline button, then you're a/etc/conf hacker, not someone working in an office relying on Word to get the memo done.
with a gui, you dont NEED to be a "sysadmin, programmer, typesetter, etc." to get work DONE. You just get work done. In a CLI you have to be all these things and more.
Umm... No, this fallacy is correct. GUIs take just as long to learn as command-linet ools do. A GUI won't magically make you into a sysadmin, programmer, or typesetter. It may make it seem like you can do all those things, but the resulting product is inevitably of lower quality. Even for mundane tasks, the GUI provides little that plain text does not.
Icons, for example, were promised to revolutionize computer interfaces. No more would we ever need text. The user could look at an Icon and magically determine what it did. Unfortunately, this isn't true. All but the most common icons (new, open, save, and print) are virtually meaningless. Most users wind up using menus, which are not only text, but a particular variety of text presentation that has been around since the much-malinged days of the command line.
In general, text can present ideas more clearly and compactly than images can. At best, images are useful as a suppliment to text, not a replacement.
The problem is the idea that they don't need to understand the technology or the terminology. You can bet that secretaries in the past, while they may not have needed to know all the details of how their typewriter worked, knew the general principles. And, when something broke, they were at least able to give the repairman a general idea of what had gone wrong. As opposed to "My computer stopped working".
So my original point was right. The American console gaming industry is dead. (Having played both GTA3 and Halo, I consider neither to be great games. GTA3 is far less fun than GTA2, and as for Halo... "Whoo! Its the same room again! No, wait, its not... Yes it is...")
Logical fallacy #1: Copyright infringement is a HELL of a lot less severe than rape or piracy. (The later of which used to result in a death penalty without trial. The only reason it still does not is because we've killed all the pirates.)
Logical fallacy #2: Using RMS' philosophy to support one part of your argument, while directing another part towards knocking out the foundations of said argument. Software should be free to redistribute because making an additional copy has zero marginal cost.
Logical fallacy #3: Exactly what damage is done by copyright infringement of software? My having a copy doesn't mean that you have fewer copies. Does my having a copy of your software do more damage to you than my stealing a truckful of electronics from Radio Shack does to them?
Logical fallacy #4: If said applications did not exist, and there was a need felt for them, someone would provide them. (Under contract, if necessary) If they did not exist and no need was felt for them, they are unnecessary.
The problem with Java is that it is a closed, proprietary language whose primary design criteria has become 'get Microsoft'. In the process Java has been deliberately made less useful to windows programmers, which means the vast majority.
Care to explain just how Sun is doing this? Every Java tool I've seen has either been totally platform-neutral (which I suppose can be interpreted as 'get Microsoft') or heavily biased towards Windows users. The 1.4 JVM adds a whole load of useful new stuff - again in a platform-independant way. How is this evidence of a "get Microsoft" mentality? Or making it any less useful to Windows programmer?
And network code and runtime code safety aren't two seperate issues. They're the same issue. Making sure code that's been fetched and run from a remote source, perhaps as a small part of a larger program, doesn't go on a wild romp through the system sounds pretty damn similar to a "runtime code safety" issue to me.
Finally, what exactly do you mean by "prevent firewalls from blocking Java"? Do you mean "blocking Java applets"? "blocking Javascript"? (Which is NOT Sun, BTW)
Slashdot Mirror
Umm... No. Read my post closely. I cannot increase the number of copies of a work in circulation by selling copies. However, since I own my copy of the work (both the pages and the "words"), I'm perfectly free to sell that copy to someone else. As the transferal of ownership does not increase the number of copies in circulation. (In case you missed that concept.)
I do not own the copyrighted work, the text of the work. I own the materials that make up this specific copy of the work. This gives me the right to do whatever I want with my copy of the work. I can paint all the pages blue and stick feathers on the covers. I can then sell my Stephen King case-mod.
This is not correct. When I buy a book, I buy a copy of that book. Which means I own both the pages and the words printed on them, though its unclear that such a distinction should be made. However, because of copyright law, I cannot legally create and distribute copies of this work. Copyright law grants the author of a work a temporary (well, in theory) monopoly on the introduction of new copies into the market. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly, just like patents. Nothing more, nothing less. No ownership is involved. As the name says, it is the right to make (and distribute) a copy.
Airport Security: "Excuse me sir, can you step infront of this camera? Yes, thanks. Now, please hold this in your mouth...."
And you thought boarding a flight was a pain now!
I'm guessing that the government won't need to have priority access to cnn.com if something like that happens again.
But where else would they get their intelligence data from?
He's talking about himself in the third-person in an amusingly self-deprecating way. If we can't make fun of ourselves, who else is left?
George W. Bush, of course. ;)
How the hell did the parent get +5, Insightful?
It did not take him half an hour to learn how to add a user under OSX. It took him half an hour to learn how to add a user under OSX without physical access to the machine. Since OSX does not use X, he cannot use any of the graphical tools without using VNC. (as he said) And from what he said, the provided command-line tools are woefully inadequate.
Especially for a server, physical access to the machine is not always feasable. As foreign as this may seem to Windows and Mac users, I routinely do work on machines I've never even been in the same country as. The only impediment to my ability to do meaningful work with them is network lag.
You do have a point there, and I wish Slashdot would do that a little more often.
Then again, it'd probably require some hefty modifications to Slashcode, and from what I've heard, its a miracle that Slashcode works at all. ;)
Don't just blame the clients for designing websites accessible to only the "majority" of web users. Underexperienced developers. One (pen-and-paper) gaming company whose products I like recently "upgraded" their website. To some horrible thing with IE-only Javscript menus. When asked why, their representative claimed that:
Its mainly the last point that's the problem. "Web designers" often have no skills or training whatsoever. They just throw together some "hot technology", a photoshop-generated image or fifty, and hand in a huge bill. When asked to design a simpler site that presents the information better and which more people can access, they present a larger bill. Why? It means they actually have to do the job they were hired for.
Yes, but olds are what people pay for from news services. Think about it. CNN - reports stuff people already know, but tries to make them feel good about it. NBC - does the same. Practically any newspaper - same.
Occasionally they include some true news, but then again, so does Slashdot.
If anything, Slashdot is about as bad (good?) as most "reputable" news sources. IOW, they fuck up on a regular basis, report on things that are out-of-date, and spin stories to fit their personal biases.
Go figure, they're human. I dare you to do better.
The definitions provided by the FSF have to be vague. The FSF has no other choice in the matter.
See, "Derivative Work" is a term defined by copyright law. Its up to copyright law and/or the US court system to decide if and when a work is a derivative work. Static linking seems like a reasonable "derivative work" definition, if what you're distributing is the statically linked binary. (As you then need the permission of the original copyright owner to distribute their works, which are part of your binary) Dynamic linking's a lot trickier, as anyone could (in theory) drop in a replacement library that's not GPL'd. And invocation of functionality through IPC/RMI/whatever-TLA-it-is-this-week is even more difficult - though I believe RMS has stated that the GPL does not cover this. (Think about what the side effects would be on the Internet!)
However, the US court system may not uphold this. Or it may decide that both static and dynamic linking are derivative. Or Microsoft might pay them off, and they might decide that everything on the same hard disk as a GPL'd program is GPL'd, and therefor the GPL must be banned from use in America. Who knows?
The problem is that Blizzard's going after the wrong guys. The bnetd authors have deliberately not built WC3 support into their software. However, some beta tester leaked their copy. (boohoo for Blizzard, they didn't build in ways to detect who leaked what) And some warez kiddies, deciding that they wanted to play multiplayer, hacked bnetd to support the beta.
Now Blizzard's just lashing out at the originators, not catching on that these guys have nothing to do with their problem.
Outlook, and IE, and "included free with this PC!" Office suites, and IIS, and...
Well, I'm sure you get the idea. Yes, you do technically pay for some and/or all of it, but Microsoft is very good at hiding the cost.
Most business customers still associate free software with shoddy shareware.
Unless, of course, the free software comes from Microsoft. In which case, its the best software in the world.
Gasp! Those links are to software that's not endorsed by a Giant Corporation, and allow you to play any music you could possibly want to! How can you even consider giving Consumers that kind of choice? Its evil, I tell you, pure evil!
For those moderators lacking a sense of humor: The above is satire, and intended to be funny. Moderate accordingly
Can't they just be happy with owning the PC desktop?
No, because that means they must stop growing. Which means that they'll have unhappy shareholders on their hands, who might finally demand some of those dividends Microsoft has been withholding for years.
And besides, as soon as they stop growing, they stop being a moving target. If they concentrate on owning the PC desktop, then they aren't integrating "new" products all the time anymore. And if they aren't integrating "new" products, then someone else could match their existing feature set. So the instant they stop trying to grab every market in sight, they're dead.
Nah, it'll be ten times that. Just like when the BSA reports on the value of "pirated" software they've confiscated from their latest raid on some charity or mom-and-pop business.
I wonder how much dfeldman got paid by the MPAA to make THAT comment? ;)
Hmm... That's something I hadn't previously considered. Though user preference is a big part of what interface they'll choose. Windows types don't like Mac or X interfaces, and vice-versa, because they're used to the way their old environment does things. They thus find the new one hard to use, because it doesn't conform to their preferences/expectations.
So now, people have obviously been trained to prefer GUIs. And then, its possible they were drawn to it because it felt "new", or conformed better to their idea of what a computer should work right. Remember, too, that those interfaces were far simpler than modern ones.
Yes, but almost all modern GUIs attempt to use them as a replacement. Or as the primary, with text as the suppliment. That's one thing W2K/KDE/GNOME are doing right with their menus - the text with the tiny icon beside the text is much easier to use than just text alone or icons alone. It'd be a good thing if most functions were removed from the toolbars, since the marketing types can now put the pretty icons in the menus. (And yes, the marketing types were the ones driving the attempted switch to icon-packed toolbars)
In fact, icons are pretty much the only part of a "GUI" that's graphical. The rest is just putting a nice image on top of an older interface concept. (Scrollbars, buttons, menus...)
Also, note that most users eventually wind up using primarily the keyboard, even in a mouse-enabled interface. If the interface lets me (this is one thing I did not like about GNOME), I will use it exclusively.
Simple solution to this problem: Don't allow copyright to apply to compiled/object code. Only allow companies to sell source code if they want to have copyright protection on their work. Remove some of the sillier statements about dervied works. And get rid of the current unlimited-duration copyright. Cut it back down to twenty years, or maybe even ten.
After all, the point of copyright is to encourage authors to publish their works so that others may learn from them. Its not to give a company a huge pool of perpetual "intellectual property" (a term invented by, you guessed it, copyright lawyers to insure their future employment) from which to make money.
Fallacy 5: If It's Graphical, It's Easy
the vast majority of GUIs make simple tasks much easier. If you think that arcane text codes and comands are easier than just clicking the Underline button, then you're a /etc/conf hacker, not someone working in an office relying on Word to get the memo done.
with a gui, you dont NEED to be a "sysadmin, programmer, typesetter, etc." to get work DONE. You just get work done. In a CLI you have to be all these things and more.
Umm... No, this fallacy is correct. GUIs take just as long to learn as command-linet ools do. A GUI won't magically make you into a sysadmin, programmer, or typesetter. It may make it seem like you can do all those things, but the resulting product is inevitably of lower quality. Even for mundane tasks, the GUI provides little that plain text does not.
Icons, for example, were promised to revolutionize computer interfaces. No more would we ever need text. The user could look at an Icon and magically determine what it did. Unfortunately, this isn't true. All but the most common icons (new, open, save, and print) are virtually meaningless. Most users wind up using menus, which are not only text, but a particular variety of text presentation that has been around since the much-malinged days of the command line.
In general, text can present ideas more clearly and compactly than images can. At best, images are useful as a suppliment to text, not a replacement.
The problem is the idea that they don't need to understand the technology or the terminology. You can bet that secretaries in the past, while they may not have needed to know all the details of how their typewriter worked, knew the general principles. And, when something broke, they were at least able to give the repairman a general idea of what had gone wrong. As opposed to "My computer stopped working".
So my original point was right. The American console gaming industry is dead. (Having played both GTA3 and Halo, I consider neither to be great games. GTA3 is far less fun than GTA2, and as for Halo... "Whoo! Its the same room again! No, wait, its not... Yes it is...")
Logical fallacy #1: Copyright infringement is a HELL of a lot less severe than rape or piracy. (The later of which used to result in a death penalty without trial. The only reason it still does not is because we've killed all the pirates.)
Logical fallacy #2: Using RMS' philosophy to support one part of your argument, while directing another part towards knocking out the foundations of said argument. Software should be free to redistribute because making an additional copy has zero marginal cost.
Logical fallacy #3: Exactly what damage is done by copyright infringement of software? My having a copy doesn't mean that you have fewer copies. Does my having a copy of your software do more damage to you than my stealing a truckful of electronics from Radio Shack does to them?
Logical fallacy #4: If said applications did not exist, and there was a need felt for them, someone would provide them. (Under contract, if necessary) If they did not exist and no need was felt for them, they are unnecessary.
The problem with Java is that it is a closed, proprietary language whose primary design criteria has become 'get Microsoft'. In the process Java has been deliberately made less useful to windows programmers, which means the vast majority.
Care to explain just how Sun is doing this? Every Java tool I've seen has either been totally platform-neutral (which I suppose can be interpreted as 'get Microsoft') or heavily biased towards Windows users. The 1.4 JVM adds a whole load of useful new stuff - again in a platform-independant way. How is this evidence of a "get Microsoft" mentality? Or making it any less useful to Windows programmer?
And network code and runtime code safety aren't two seperate issues. They're the same issue. Making sure code that's been fetched and run from a remote source, perhaps as a small part of a larger program, doesn't go on a wild romp through the system sounds pretty damn similar to a "runtime code safety" issue to me.
Finally, what exactly do you mean by "prevent firewalls from blocking Java"? Do you mean "blocking Java applets"? "blocking Javascript"? (Which is NOT Sun, BTW)