Real books are effectively copy-protected, in that copying them costs about as much (and is a lot more of a pain in the ass) than buying another copy. This doesn't seem to bother people, so why should it bother them for e-books?
As long as the copy-protection does not prevent lending, I don't think most people will have a problem.
I hate to say it, but the earth has gone through a variety of climate changes in its history, and it will continue to go through plenty of climate changes regardless of whether we eject terawatts of thermal energy into the atmosphere or not
The same argument could be made about the economy and interest rates. By your reasoning, a 0.5% rise in interest rates should have no serious effect on the economy, because that is smaller than the normal range of interest rate variation.
Similarly, by your reasoning, a small permanent rise in the birth rate would not have much effect on population, if the birth rate has a normal variation higher than the small permanent rise.
How well does that work? I noticed that after I cut out the sheet for my Treo 650, there is enough left over for a regular iPod, but the iPod screen is flush with the rest of the faceplate, so I'd expect the screen protector to easily get peeled off. On the Treo, the screen is recessed, and so the edges of the protector are not exposed.
Yea, don't you know that you're supposed to report all the unknown bugs to the developers as well as the known ones?!:)
I see the smiley, but this is a good place to point out that it is possible to estimate how many unknown bugs are in a program, from the distribution of bugs that have already been found.
So, for example, if someone says they think that all bugs in TeX have been found, there is a good chance they are right. If someone says all bugs in Sendmail have been found, they are probably wrong.
I've seen two different alleged transcripts of the emails, and they differ on both the names of the women, and the location of the sandwich (levels 19/20 in one, 22/23 in the other).
Who would really be interested in Captain France? A guy that dresses up like a croissant, runs away from German bad guys and blames all his problems on Captain America
Hey, if it weren't for the French, we'd all be living under German rule now. The French serve as bait, luring the Germans into attacking early, before they are really ready, and so the Germans lose in the end.
Because of the French, the Germans are the Kzin of Europe, and the world is safe.
You're an idiot if you listen to the RIAA/MPAA's lies about how "distributing copyright material is illegal". It's only illegal if you don't have permission
And you're an idiot if you think anyone believes that you didn't know that he was talking about distributing copyrighted material that people don't have permission to distribute.
Still no negotiation. Still imposed at the point of sale. Still someone trying to control an item that has been sold after the fact
They offered two versions of the cartridge, one for the normal price, that you could do with as you please, and one for 20% off, with restrictions on how you can dispose of it when it is empty. Nothing is being imposed on anyone at the point of sale. Lexmark is making an offer, with consideration, and the buyer can accept it, or reject it and buy the regular-priced cartrdige.
There's nothing bogus or unusual about this.
Go read the actual decision, instead of the misleading story summary.
Because those are Diktats, not contracts. There is no consideration, no negotiation, only a "take it or leave it" that is entirely inappropriate at the retail point of sale
Wrong. There was consideration in the form of a 20% discount on the price of the cartridge, and cartridges without this contract were available.
This is covered near the start of the court's ruling.
They do now; they didn't before, because "box-wrap" patent licenses have AFAIK never previously been held to be enforceable, and instead the vendor would have had to get the purchaser to sign a contract.
Nope. Contracts of sale rarely require a signature. See the appropriate sections of the UCC. (If you want to know what sections are appropriate, go read the court ruling, since they are cited there).
That may be Lexmark's "understanding", but it's not mine, and until now it didn't have the force of law. In the past, if they wanted to make sure I returned the spent cartridge to them, they would have had to get me to sign a contract.
They do have a contract. You'd know this if you had actually read the ruling. Is it really that hard to read a short, clearly-written, court ruling before submitting a story to slashdot?
If the business model isn't working, Lexmark doesn't necessarily have a legal recourse.
Myabe you should actually read the ruling. The business model is working, and Lexmark doesn't need nor did they seek legal recourse.
It was Lexmark that was sued, because the people that want to sell third-party remanufacturered cartridges are having their business hurt by Lexmark's success with this program.
If the cartridge was not my property, I could understand this ruling
You could probably also understand the ruling if you read it, which is something the story submitter obviously did not do.
Here is what the Court actually said:
Appellant Arizona Cartridge Remanufacturers Association
("ACRA"), an association of wholesalers that sell remanufactured printer cartridges, appeals the grant of summary judgment to cartridge maker Lexmark on claims that Lexmark
engaged in deceptive and unfair business practices in violation of California law. The dispute arises from Lexmark's
advertising of its "Prebate" program, under which it gives
purchasers an upfront discount in exchange for their agreement to return the empty cartridge to Lexmark for remanufac-
turing -- a form of post-sale restriction on reuse. ACRA
claims that Lexmark's advertising and promotional materials
mislead customers into thinking the post-sale restriction is
enforceable and that they actually receive a discounted price
for the special cartridges. We agree with the district court that
ACRA has not offered evidence that Lexmark's advertisements constitute deceptive or unfair business practices and
affirm the grant of summary judgment in favor of Lexmark.
So, basically this ruling is saying that's it's OK for Lexmark to pay people to agree to return the cartridges.
Note, by the way, that Lexmark did not bring this action. Lexmark was sued by ACRA, who was upset that Lexmark's program to pre-buy back used cartridges was successful.
What specific gripes do you have with Open Office? What does MS Office do for you that Open Office doesn't?
Note: I've just used the release versions, not the beta versions, of OO.
The real biggie in the word processor is no outliner. A word processor should be useful for more than just writing formatted text--it should be a tool to help you create your document in the first place. Yes, I know about OO's navigator--that is not an outliner.
For the spreadsheet, it is all the interface glitches. For example, if you paste text that is a URL into a cell, sometimes it figures it out and makes it clickable and sometimes it doesn't. When it does make it clickable, it can be very difficult to edit that URL. It seems to get very confused at times over whether clicking is mean to select or activate.
I also ran into a fair number of focus issues in the spreadsheet, and highlighting issues (e.g., incorrectly highlighting the selection, so when you type, you don't overwrite what you think you are going to overwrite). (NOTE: I use "focus follows mouse" instead of "click to focus" like most people use on Unix systems, and so maybe that is part of the problem).
Basically, it's the little things in OO. One or two would be OK, but it gets so many of the little things wrong that it ads up to one big tedious, frustrating, experience. Example: the "sort" dialog for spreadsheets has the drop-downs for selecting what columns to sort by on one tab, and the checkbox to tell it you have a heading row that should not be included in the sort on another tab. These should be on the same tab.
Yet a restricted security model (sandbox, etc.) would give you a greater level of security
However, pretty much every sandbox implemention has had exploitable bugs that allowed code running in the sandbox to get out.
So, even with a sandbox, it is wise to also avoid running code from people that you don't trust, so signing is still useful in a sandbox environment.
Also, a sandbox doesn't help with code that has to run outside the sandbox, such as device drivers, or new versions of whatever implements the sandbox.
Look at it this way: for a piece of code to do something malicious on your system, two things must happen:
the code has to run on your system with sufficient privilege or access to do its malicious deeds
the code has to actually contain something malicious
You can protect your system by making sure that at least one of these conditions does not hold. Sandboxes try to make sure the first condition does not hold. Code signing tries to make sure the second condition does not hold.
Why is this modded Flamebait? Wasn't the command shell withdrawn from LongHorn bcos of the proof-of-concept virus from F-Secure?
There was no proof-of-concept virus. There was a proof-of-concept illustration of how a virus could spread--using code that is trivially ported to bash, csh, and every other scriptable shell in the world, and also trivially portable to perl, php, and every other scripting language.
A viable virus requires two things:
A way to initially infect a system
A way to spread from one file to another once it is in the first file
The latter is trivial, and what was demonstrated. It is the former that is hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong word. Try this one: Bullshit!.
Real books are effectively copy-protected, in that copying them costs about as much (and is a lot more of a pain in the ass) than buying another copy. This doesn't seem to bother people, so why should it bother them for e-books?
As long as the copy-protection does not prevent lending, I don't think most people will have a problem.
The same argument could be made about the economy and interest rates. By your reasoning, a 0.5% rise in interest rates should have no serious effect on the economy, because that is smaller than the normal range of interest rate variation.
Similarly, by your reasoning, a small permanent rise in the birth rate would not have much effect on population, if the birth rate has a normal variation higher than the small permanent rise.
How well does that work? I noticed that after I cut out the sheet for my Treo 650, there is enough left over for a regular iPod, but the iPod screen is flush with the rest of the faceplate, so I'd expect the screen protector to easily get peeled off. On the Treo, the screen is recessed, and so the edges of the protector are not exposed.
We know they had wings...but how do we know they flew? They could have lost flight when they evolved to be so big.
So basically, you are looking for something like this?
Hypothesis: you know what the word "experiment" means.
Experiment to test hypothesis: read your post.
Result: hypothesis falsified.
Conclusion: you do not know what the word "experiment" means.
Well, isn't that appropriate for a music application?
I see the smiley, but this is a good place to point out that it is possible to estimate how many unknown bugs are in a program, from the distribution of bugs that have already been found.
So, for example, if someone says they think that all bugs in TeX have been found, there is a good chance they are right. If someone says all bugs in Sendmail have been found, they are probably wrong.
Just the known insecurities have been found and fixed. What about the unknown ones?
Sendmail is asking for trouble, until they completely throw out the old code and rewrite it from the ground up, with security in mind.
Not for 2 gig or 4 gig flash players.
The names in one sound made-up, too.
I wonder if this is an urban legend?
Hey, if it weren't for the French, we'd all be living under German rule now. The French serve as bait, luring the Germans into attacking early, before they are really ready, and so the Germans lose in the end.
Because of the French, the Germans are the Kzin of Europe, and the world is safe.
The domain is available in all the major top levels (.com, .net, .org), so sounds good to me.
There's a very interesting and details comparision of the SQL support of several databases here.
And you're an idiot if you think anyone believes that you didn't know that he was talking about distributing copyrighted material that people don't have permission to distribute.
They offered two versions of the cartridge, one for the normal price, that you could do with as you please, and one for 20% off, with restrictions on how you can dispose of it when it is empty. Nothing is being imposed on anyone at the point of sale. Lexmark is making an offer, with consideration, and the buyer can accept it, or reject it and buy the regular-priced cartrdige.
There's nothing bogus or unusual about this.
Go read the actual decision, instead of the misleading story summary.
Wrong. There was consideration in the form of a 20% discount on the price of the cartridge, and cartridges without this contract were available.
This is covered near the start of the court's ruling.
Nope. Contracts of sale rarely require a signature. See the appropriate sections of the UCC. (If you want to know what sections are appropriate, go read the court ruling, since they are cited there).
They do have a contract. You'd know this if you had actually read the ruling. Is it really that hard to read a short, clearly-written, court ruling before submitting a story to slashdot?
Myabe you should actually read the ruling. The business model is working, and Lexmark doesn't need nor did they seek legal recourse.
It was Lexmark that was sued, because the people that want to sell third-party remanufacturered cartridges are having their business hurt by Lexmark's success with this program.
You could probably also understand the ruling if you read it, which is something the story submitter obviously did not do.
Here is what the Court actually said:
So, basically this ruling is saying that's it's OK for Lexmark to pay people to agree to return the cartridges.
Note, by the way, that Lexmark did not bring this action. Lexmark was sued by ACRA, who was upset that Lexmark's program to pre-buy back used cartridges was successful.
Note: I've just used the release versions, not the beta versions, of OO.
The real biggie in the word processor is no outliner. A word processor should be useful for more than just writing formatted text--it should be a tool to help you create your document in the first place. Yes, I know about OO's navigator--that is not an outliner.
For the spreadsheet, it is all the interface glitches. For example, if you paste text that is a URL into a cell, sometimes it figures it out and makes it clickable and sometimes it doesn't. When it does make it clickable, it can be very difficult to edit that URL. It seems to get very confused at times over whether clicking is mean to select or activate.
I also ran into a fair number of focus issues in the spreadsheet, and highlighting issues (e.g., incorrectly highlighting the selection, so when you type, you don't overwrite what you think you are going to overwrite). (NOTE: I use "focus follows mouse" instead of "click to focus" like most people use on Unix systems, and so maybe that is part of the problem).
Basically, it's the little things in OO. One or two would be OK, but it gets so many of the little things wrong that it ads up to one big tedious, frustrating, experience. Example: the "sort" dialog for spreadsheets has the drop-downs for selecting what columns to sort by on one tab, and the checkbox to tell it you have a heading row that should not be included in the sort on another tab. These should be on the same tab.
However, pretty much every sandbox implemention has had exploitable bugs that allowed code running in the sandbox to get out.
So, even with a sandbox, it is wise to also avoid running code from people that you don't trust, so signing is still useful in a sandbox environment.
Also, a sandbox doesn't help with code that has to run outside the sandbox, such as device drivers, or new versions of whatever implements the sandbox.
Look at it this way: for a piece of code to do something malicious on your system, two things must happen:
You can protect your system by making sure that at least one of these conditions does not hold. Sandboxes try to make sure the first condition does not hold. Code signing tries to make sure the second condition does not hold.
Then how come you were able to blather on for another paragraph about intangible assets?
There was no proof-of-concept virus. There was a proof-of-concept illustration of how a virus could spread--using code that is trivially ported to bash, csh, and every other scriptable shell in the world, and also trivially portable to perl, php, and every other scripting language.
A viable virus requires two things:
The latter is trivial, and what was demonstrated. It is the former that is hard.