And then the Supreme Court will reach back to precedents which begin as early as 1853, but which were resoundingly established in the 1908 Bobbs Merrill Co. v. Straus decision, and throw the law out like an 80-yard touchdown pass
Nope. Bobbs Merrill was decided by the Court based purely on interpretation of the copyright statute. The only precedent that restricts Congress in this matter are cases where the Court found a Constitutional requirement. E.g., Congress could not remove the requirement for originality from copyright, because the Court has decided that originality is a Constitutional requirement.
Oh, and the first sale doctrine was codified in the Copyright Act of 1909, section 41.
and right after they pass it, a Federal court will set an NFL record for longest field goal with it
Huh? The first sale doctrine is statutory. Congress can take it away with no problem.
Ever wonder why you can't legally rent CDs, for example? Because Congress took rental of CDs out of first sale. Same with renting computer software. Congress took that out of first sale. They could take selling CDs out, too, with no problem at all.
And Eric Flint disagrees with him. But unlike Ellison, he presented proof
I'm curious how he can prove Ellison's books aren't being pirated, since simple observation proves that they are being pirated.
Same "sharing helps revenues" arguments, with numbers to prove it
Oh, he's not proving that the books aren't being pirated, but rather that its good for Ellison financially. In that case, so what? The "It's for your own good" argument stops working for most of us as soon as we are old enough to move away from Mommy and Daddy.
I work at a small anti-virus company. We license the basic scanner/fixer from someone else, and our value-added is in packaging, and in tech support (which is necessary, because no current AV product will fix the damage from all viruses).
Here's what I see, based on reading our support email.
First, there are plenty of real viruses out there. The big companies are stupid to try to spread FUD...the real viruses are scary enough already.
Second, there are a lot of people out there who really do just use their computer as an appliance, for email and web and games and music. They aren't technical at all, at least when it comes to computers. They can get through an install wizard, but after that, they pretty much run with default settings.
Third, the ability to write simple English sentences with anything approximating correct spelling and grammar is a dying art.
Fourth, the one word that comes to mind to describe many of the people who ask for help is "innocent" (in the sense of childlike or pure, not in the sense of there wasn't enough evidence to convict them:-)). It pisses me off to see so many innocent people getting hurt by Microsoft's stupidity. If life was an MMORPG, Microsoft would be deep in a dungeon somewhere.
On some Unix systems, you can do a trick to make it harder to "kill -9" a process. Arrange to have the parent of the process ptrace it. The signal will then stop the child and let the parent deal with, which can have the child ignore it, or change it to another signal. This does not work on Linux, though. There is a check in the ptrace code to let signal 9 kill the child unconditionally.
MMORPG companies should build the ability to sell a character into the game! Take a little off the top and make an auction house in-game for characters and items.
The problem with this is that it ruins that game. A large number of people play the game to get away from the real world. They want a game world where what they can acquire and accomplish is determined strictly by what they do in the game.
When someone can come in and pay a few hundred dollars real money to get items, it destroys that independence of the game from the real world.
EULA's that have the text inside the box where you can't see it until you've agreed to it aren't enforceable, that has been decided in the past (IIRC, likely someone here who remembers the exact case)
The highest court that has considered this issue, in the ProCD case, decided that they were enforceable.
I used to work at a small Unix workstation company in the 80's, Callan Data Systems. All our accounting and payroll software was running on an old Callan machine that was running CP/M. That made it much more secure from internal attacks than a Unix machine would have been...all of us systems programmers knew holes and tricks in Unix that would get us root on any Unix machine inside of 15 minutes (mid 80's Unix was not all that secure). Sit us down at a CP/M machine, however, and most of us would be completely lost, and would wonder off to go back to playing with Unix.
If KaZaA users don't understand how to know what they are sharing, they deserve the consequences.
It's well known (at least, to any programmer who has spent more than 10 minutes with any reasonable user interface book) that users tend to not read dialogs or instructions, but just trust the computer to do the right thing. Any interface that lets bad things happen to such users is a bad interface.
The blame for this rests squarly with Kazaa, not the users, because, (1) like it or not, that is the way users are, so it is irresponsible to release a product that you know will harm them, and (2) any basic usability testing would have found the problem.
Who where[sic] the experts? A company who sells virus software, who wants to break into the mac market.
I don't see how you can say that a company that has been selling Mac software (including antivirus software) since the '80s is trying to "break into the mac market".
Cable systems have much more aggregate downstream bandwidth than they do aggregate upstream bandwidth. Even with 128 Kbps upload caps per customer, it would not take many servers to saturate the aggregate upstream. When the upstream saturates, the downstream stops working well.
Until they have cable systems that were designed from the start of internet, and have symmetric upstream/downstream, the are going to restrict servers.
Those are all dumb analogies. A hammer is a tool that is mostly used for legitimate things, only rarely used for crime. Watch the searches on a P2P network, and you'll see that most of the P2P sharing is illegal stuff, with only a tiny amount of legitimate use.
r3mix.net's myths section is dumb. E.g., they say that vinyl has a lower dynamic range than CD, which is wrong...it has a higher noise level, but with advanced signal processing (e.g., an ear and a brain), you can follow a signal well below the noise level.
The reason you still see pop-under ads
on
Pop-Under Ads Patented
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, they are annoying. However, internet advertising is very scientific. An internet advertiser can make a change, such as trying a pop-under or a pop-up or a banner, or changing wording, or whatever, and in a couple of hours have plenty of data. They can run a mix of different things. They have people with degrees in math and statistics analyzing the data.
Bottom line? They can quickly figure out what works, and what doesn't. So, when you see something stupid and annoying and wonder how the heck they can get away with offending people...it's because they've got numbers that prove that it works.
It really is like something out of those science fiction stories where big brother adjusts the propoganda and policy in real time in response to instant opinion polls.
Or when in doubt, just remember the Navy ship that totally crashed when Windows BSOD
Wrong. An application crashed because it did not handle divide by zero (exactly the same thing that happens on Linux). The ship depended on that application, and so stopped working (exactly the same thing that would have happened had they used Linux instead of NT).
...go ahead and code whatever you want and put the programs on servers overseas
Where do so many geeks get this dumb idea that if something is illegal in the US, all you have to do is take it overseas? This may come as a shock to you, but most companies that are advanced enough to have hosting companies also have similar laws, and will cooperate with the US.
Basically, the questioner is treating this as a choice between two alternatives:
Upgrade to new versions of Windows stuff
Migrate to something else, like Linux
What about the option no one seems to consider? Stick with what you have right now. It works today...it will still work tomorrow. Get out of the "gotta have the latest" mindset.
For most of what business users do, using software that is a year or two or five old is just fine.
Warning: I've not read the thing at MIT yet...just the summary in the story here, so this may be way offbase.
seti@home works because they know exactly what needs to be done and exactly how to do it. They just need more CPU cycles to actually carry out the well-defined well-understood steps.
That's not true for the kind of problems being discussed here. How do you split the problem of, say, clean water access, into a bunch of little chunks that just require someone to think about in their spare time? It seems to me that to do that, you have to already know how to solve the problem!
Isn't this exactly the same as Maxwell's Demon, which violates the second law of thermodynamics?
If you want something that would seem to be a Maxwell's Demon, search at Google for Hilsch Vortex Tube. A Hilsch tube takes a stream of compresses air, and hot air comes out one end, cold air comes out the other. (Yes, they are real).
I'm perplexed that such mythology remains-- how can people continue to think this despite the fact that the powerPC has been beating the pentium in every reasonable performace comparison for years, and at half the cost
Uhm...your clock seems to have gotten stuck in 1996. The Pentium 4 blows away Motorola PPCs in most benchmarks. Compare SPEC, for example.
This looks like a step in the right direction for Linux acceptance in the professional server market.
Huh? Every couple of weeks, there is another story in the news of some big company dumping their Suns for x86 servers running Linux. Where did you get the idea that Linux is not already accepted in the "professional" server market?
I've used OS X now for several weeks at work. It is good enough that when it is time for a laptop, I'm going to take a serious look at getting a Powerbook.
However, what is the point of a Mac server? I don't see any advantage to OS X Server over Linux, and x86 hardware is still cheaper and has better performance than PPC hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Bobbs Merrill was decided by the Court based purely on interpretation of the copyright statute. The only precedent that restricts Congress in this matter are cases where the Court found a Constitutional requirement. E.g., Congress could not remove the requirement for originality from copyright, because the Court has decided that originality is a Constitutional requirement.
Oh, and the first sale doctrine was codified in the Copyright Act of 1909, section 41.
Huh? The first sale doctrine is statutory. Congress can take it away with no problem.
Ever wonder why you can't legally rent CDs, for example? Because Congress took rental of CDs out of first sale. Same with renting computer software. Congress took that out of first sale. They could take selling CDs out, too, with no problem at all.
I'm curious how he can prove Ellison's books aren't being pirated, since simple observation proves that they are being pirated.
Same "sharing helps revenues" arguments, with numbers to prove it
Oh, he's not proving that the books aren't being pirated, but rather that its good for Ellison financially. In that case, so what? The "It's for your own good" argument stops working for most of us as soon as we are old enough to move away from Mommy and Daddy.
Here's what I see, based on reading our support email.
First, there are plenty of real viruses out there. The big companies are stupid to try to spread FUD...the real viruses are scary enough already.
Second, there are a lot of people out there who really do just use their computer as an appliance, for email and web and games and music. They aren't technical at all, at least when it comes to computers. They can get through an install wizard, but after that, they pretty much run with default settings.
Third, the ability to write simple English sentences with anything approximating correct spelling and grammar is a dying art.
Fourth, the one word that comes to mind to describe many of the people who ask for help is "innocent" (in the sense of childlike or pure, not in the sense of there wasn't enough evidence to convict them :-)). It pisses me off to see so many innocent people getting hurt by Microsoft's stupidity. If life was an MMORPG, Microsoft would be deep in a dungeon somewhere.
On some Unix systems, you can do a trick to make it harder to "kill -9" a process. Arrange to have the parent of the process ptrace it. The signal will then stop the child and let the parent deal with, which can have the child ignore it, or change it to another signal. This does not work on Linux, though. There is a check in the ptrace code to let signal 9 kill the child unconditionally.
The problem with this is that it ruins that game. A large number of people play the game to get away from the real world. They want a game world where what they can acquire and accomplish is determined strictly by what they do in the game.
When someone can come in and pay a few hundred dollars real money to get items, it destroys that independence of the game from the real world.
The highest court that has considered this issue, in the ProCD case, decided that they were enforceable.
I used to work at a small Unix workstation company in the 80's, Callan Data Systems. All our accounting and payroll software was running on an old Callan machine that was running CP/M. That made it much more secure from internal attacks than a Unix machine would have been...all of us systems programmers knew holes and tricks in Unix that would get us root on any Unix machine inside of 15 minutes (mid 80's Unix was not all that secure). Sit us down at a CP/M machine, however, and most of us would be completely lost, and would wonder off to go back to playing with Unix.
It's well known (at least, to any programmer who has spent more than 10 minutes with any reasonable user interface book) that users tend to not read dialogs or instructions, but just trust the computer to do the right thing. Any interface that lets bad things happen to such users is a bad interface.
The blame for this rests squarly with Kazaa, not the users, because, (1) like it or not, that is the way users are, so it is irresponsible to release a product that you know will harm them, and (2) any basic usability testing would have found the problem.
Do you even need to redirect? What happens if you do img src="gopher://site.running.exploit.server"?
I don't see how you can say that a company that has been selling Mac software (including antivirus software) since the '80s is trying to "break into the mac market".
Until they have cable systems that were designed from the start of internet, and have symmetric upstream/downstream, the are going to restrict servers.
Those are all dumb analogies. A hammer is a tool that is mostly used for legitimate things, only rarely used for crime. Watch the searches on a P2P network, and you'll see that most of the P2P sharing is illegal stuff, with only a tiny amount of legitimate use.
Let's see...let's count the similarities between RH and MS. #1, RH is the biggest Linux company. #2...oops, no number 2.
What they heck are you talking about?
r3mix.net's myths section is dumb. E.g., they say that vinyl has a lower dynamic range than CD, which is wrong...it has a higher noise level, but with advanced signal processing (e.g., an ear and a brain), you can follow a signal well below the noise level.
Bottom line? They can quickly figure out what works, and what doesn't. So, when you see something stupid and annoying and wonder how the heck they can get away with offending people...it's because they've got numbers that prove that it works.
It really is like something out of those science fiction stories where big brother adjusts the propoganda and policy in real time in response to instant opinion polls.
Wrong. An application crashed because it did not handle divide by zero (exactly the same thing that happens on Linux). The ship depended on that application, and so stopped working (exactly the same thing that would have happened had they used Linux instead of NT).
Their usage comparision is interesting...I don't know how they managed to pad out the number of strokes they say T9 uses as much as they did.
Where do so many geeks get this dumb idea that if something is illegal in the US, all you have to do is take it overseas? This may come as a shock to you, but most companies that are advanced enough to have hosting companies also have similar laws, and will cooperate with the US.
What about the option no one seems to consider? Stick with what you have right now. It works today...it will still work tomorrow. Get out of the "gotta have the latest" mindset.
For most of what business users do, using software that is a year or two or five old is just fine.
seti@home works because they know exactly what needs to be done and exactly how to do it. They just need more CPU cycles to actually carry out the well-defined well-understood steps.
That's not true for the kind of problems being discussed here. How do you split the problem of, say, clean water access, into a bunch of little chunks that just require someone to think about in their spare time? It seems to me that to do that, you have to already know how to solve the problem!
If you want something that would seem to be a Maxwell's Demon, search at Google for Hilsch Vortex Tube. A Hilsch tube takes a stream of compresses air, and hot air comes out one end, cold air comes out the other. (Yes, they are real).
Uhm...your clock seems to have gotten stuck in 1996. The Pentium 4 blows away Motorola PPCs in most benchmarks. Compare SPEC, for example.
Huh? Every couple of weeks, there is another story in the news of some big company dumping their Suns for x86 servers running Linux. Where did you get the idea that Linux is not already accepted in the "professional" server market?
However, what is the point of a Mac server? I don't see any advantage to OS X Server over Linux, and x86 hardware is still cheaper and has better performance than PPC hardware.