While it does appear that he could be wrong legally, he is quite right from an ethical perspective. There is a lot of great work being done by the BSD folks and it would be quite impolite to tell them, "Hey thanks for your code, but you won't get anything back from us".
The statement of intent made by using the BSD license is "You may use this code however you want, and you don't have to give us anything back". It may not be desperately generous to do exactly what they said and not give anything back, but there's nothing particularly unethical or impolite about it. It is not unethical to fail to give something away when you don't have to. Remember that in ethics, there is a very wide stretch of neutral ground that is neither good nor bad, which covers the vast majority of things people do. This is clearly one of them.
If you're very worried about your improvements being close-sourced, perhaps it would be better to write your driver from scratch, rather than cutting off one part of the community.
I'm sorry, did you just suggest that rather than cut off part of the community by building on their work, they should cut off that same part of the community by reimplementing their work? That makes no sense. There would be no observable difference in the result.
A tiff between the BSD and GPL camps is the last thing we need.
Where have you been? This is how it always is. The GPL side doesn't think that the freedom to make non-free code is desirable, and seeks to prohibit it (although they don't have a serious problem with people who don't seek to prohibit it); the BSD side thinks that the freedom to make non-free code is essential, and hates the idea of prohibiting it. They are diametrically opposed on a point of fundamental principle. It's amazing that they ever manage to agree on anything.
However, simply because I respect someone doesn't mean that I must consider whatever ridiculous crap they happen to believe in to be valid or correct
Note the subtle distinction between considering the ridiculous crap that they believe in to be correct, and considering the ridiculous crap that you believe in to be more correct than theirs.
I do not claim that you have to accept their crap in order to respect someone, merely that you cannot respect them if you believe that your crap is somehow better. The important thing to understand is that no belief is any more valid than any other, and that by definition beliefs cannot be correct - if they were correct, they would be facts, not beliefs.
Go outside and yell "The government sucks!" three times, then post conspiracy theory crap everywhere. Did they suppress you? No?
In China? No, you just disappear. Maybe the government did it. Maybe the mafia did it because you owed them money. Maybe you ran away with a girl. Maybe you're escaping after committing a crime. That's why they do it that way - people go missing all the time, and nobody can be sure which ones were government work. It makes it very easy for people to believe that the government isn't actually doing anything wrong, and that's part of how they convince the citizen that he's free.
Realistically though, the Chinese government does not tend to do anything about the kind of behaviour you describe. They don't actually care what you do - they just pay attention to the effect you have. Anybody who creates an effect that they don't like tends to disappear. Ineffectual people are left alone.
USA is still in pretty good shape, certainly miles ahead of countries like china.
When you have to draw comparisons with China in order to say that a country is in "good shape", it's time to put it out of its misery. It's like saying "Yeah, so he kidnaps somebody every few years, and one or two of them died, but at least he's not shooting random people in the street every day".
There is no such thing as an acceptable level of oppression.
It involves teaching your kids correct principles when they are young and being a good parent
Ah, and I suppose that your principles are the correct ones.
They involve teaching a kid to respect themselves and others.
Yes, you obviously respect others greatly. That'll be why you summarily dismiss their beliefs as being wrong.
Respecting others means accepting that many people enjoy both creating and watching porn, and that no particular harm comes to any of them in the process. It means learning to understand these people, how they think, and why they believe what they do. If you do not understand, you cannot respect.
Respecting others also means accepting that your opinions and beliefs are no more valid than theirs. If you think that your beliefs are somehow better than another person's, then you do not respect that person.
1. Need support for the most diffused platforms (most you can get on Windows is a supposedly non-performing Cygwin version)
2. Need support for actual user interfaces other than "command line"
This is a tool for developers. Developers who "need" these things are quite frankly irrelevant, as nothing they produce will still be in use in five years time, so unless you're trying to make a quick buck by selling them some shiny junk, their "needs" can and should be ignored.
There is a partially functional git port in Cygwin, but it doesn't really work as far as I can tell, and it certainly isn't mentioned anywhere on the Git home page. I wanted to like Git, but unfortunately it seems to not be ready for widespread use on the most popular desktop operating system in the world. I'd be happy to try it again someday when it is.
Trying to use revision control on windows is like trying to drive a car in the sea. It just doesn't make any sense. You need a real platform to build on, not a file manager with issues. Even a full cygwin environment is clumsy without a unix filesystem and network services to back it up.
Software development on unix is like working with a large box full of tools. Software development on windows is like working with a swiss army knife. There's no way to bridge that gap. If you need real revision control, you also need to get onto a unix platform, so there's little point in porting it to windows. Trying to make it work anyway will be about as effective as pushing your car along the ocean floor.
As a general rule, the SEC will not approve any bids for a large monopoly to take over one of its direct competitors, and they certainly won't approve takeover bids that are obviously trying to do an end run around the legal system.
So no, they probably can't. Given that Microsoft have been aggressively pursuing a policy of competing with everybody, they probably wouldn't get approval to take over any of the big players in the industry.
(Companies who make hostile bids for their competitors usually get told "only if you spin off your side of the business into a separate company first". Only true mergers tend to get approval for this sort of thing, and Gates would never give up control of the company or sell off Windows)
Re:No, ownership is very clear, but
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SCO Loses
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Microsoft could buy Novell, and the keys to Unix, for chump change
Only with SEC approval, which they most likely wouldn't get. You can't use a takeover bid as an end-run around the legal system.
Re:Let me fix that for you...
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SCO Loses
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Now that Novell is found to own Unix they're too small to hold it
Why? Unix isn't actually worth anything, these days. Even at the height of SCO's FUD machine, they didn't make any real money from it. This just happened to be the easiest and most painless way to flatten their claims, which were already looking to lose on the merits in the IBM case.
Unix itself (commonly referred to as SysV), as an operating system, is dead. It has been replaced by AIX, Solaris, and to some extent Linux (although Linux has mostly created new markets rather than occupying the space where Unix used to live).
Poking fun at them is only a sign of overconfidence
That would be a really insightful bit of psychobabble if it wasn't nonsense. Poking fun at somebody is usually merely a sign of amusement. It's very easy to be amused by Microsoft, because they do so stunningly badly at most things they attempt (remember that of all the thousands of projects they have attempted to make and sell, only Windows and Office have ever shown a significant profit; the rest of the company bleeds money by the billions).
IMO, the only way to reduce NP-Complete problems is using something like quantum entanglement or another similar characteristic that is not bounded by classical physics.
Photons are not bounded by classical physics, and their behaviour can only be explained by quantum physics. Whether or not this behaviour can be exploited to perform computation more efficiently than a Turing machine is unknown (and will likely remain that way until we untangle the problem of how quantum physics really works). We still do not have a complete understanding of how they behave, and much of what we think we know is unproven. This idea's pretty far out on the edge of plausibility, but even if this particular method turns out to be flawed, we don't know enough to be sure that no other similar methods could work. (We also don't know whether quantum computing can do it, which is one of the big open questions in that field)
The entire point of NP-complete problems is that they cannot be solved and verified in reasonable time using anything that has a physical limitation: a clock speed, a limited number-of-sides, a finite number of nodes in a graph, finite degrees of spin, etc.
That statement is true only under the assumption that the model of computation is a form of Turing machine. The essential property of a Turing machine is that they can compute any effectively computable function. There is no particular reason to believe that they also have the property of describing the limits of what the physical universe can compute in a given space of time, and in fact they don't for some simple problems, although we haven't found any machines that can tackle NP problems yet. Even under "classical" physics, we're uncertain whether such a machine could exist; nothing in classical physics says that they can't, so far as we know.
This question is right up there alongside "P=NP?", and has similar properties: we suspect and usually assume that such machines don't exist, but don't have anything resembling a good reason to believe this, other than "we haven't found one yet". It's not as interesting as "P=NP?" because in most cases, there is no way to prove something to be physically impossible (since you can never be sure that you have found the most fundamental laws of physics), so the question may remain unresolved forever.
You are confused about the definition of a Turing machine. A Turing machine says nothing about computational efficiency.
And yet, P and NP are defined in terms of a Turing machine. Herein lies the GPs point: it is taken as a given that the Turing machine is capable of computing any effectively computable function, but it is an open question as to whether we can build a different kind of machine which would be able to solve NP problems in polynomial time. By definition, the non-deterministic Turing machine solves NP problems in polynomial time, but we don't currently know how to build one.
Quantum computers may or may not be such a machine - we're really not sure yet (possible proofs have been advanced for both answers; the prevailing opinion is that none of them are likely to be correct and quantum computers are something entirely new that we don't understand). Other methods of computation also may exist. Our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics is grossly incomplete, so we can't tell. However, it seems unlikely that the computational capacity of the universe is adequately modelled by a Turing machine.
This relates to the question of "P=NP?" as follows: if such a machine can be built, then *some* machines can solve these problems in polynomial time. If P=NP, then *all* machines can solve these problems in polynomial time.
At the rate they're making money? Longer than their customers are likely to live.
Microsoft's xbox division has still not managed to show a profit - ever (the first xbox lost them several billion dollars over its lifespan). It doesn't matter how much you want to label the PS3 as a failure; by any reasonable business measure ("How much money have we made?"), Sony have once again come out miles ahead of Microsoft. The problem with these "market penetration" schemes is that they don't do you any good unless you can convert that penetration into profit, and Microsoft haven't yet shown any ability to do this, despite running a great many penetration schemes in a great many different markets.
Sony's strategy this time around should come as no surprise to anybody. They can't out-spend Microsoft, who are willing to lose billions and can support it with the Windows profits, so they're playing the long game and trying to out-last them, on the assumption that Microsoft's shareholders will eventually get tired of business ventures that waste money with no return.
It's not theft, but if people don't pay for an album that they would have done had they not been able to copy it digitally (and therefore flawlessly) then it's one less sale for the creator of the work.
Assume I can afford to buy one album this month. If I buy an album from artist A instead of from artist B, how is my crime against artist B less than if I had copied the album? In both cases, it's one less sale for the creator of the work.
The basic idea is: can anybody formulate an convincing ethical principle that says there is a difference between these things? The one you described here doesn't recognise there being a difference between copying an album and simply buying a different one, because in both cases, somebody has lost a sale.
If somebody steals an object, the ethical objection is obvious: the person they stole it from no longer has it. When copying information, there is no obvious ethical reason why this should be a bad thing, so far as I'm aware.
You can receive something for free in both moral and immoral situations, so clearly it is not a useful indicator of morality.
My point exactly. "Receiving something that you did not pay for" is not a valid ethical objection to copying information (or anything else).
(Note that anybody who insists that copying information without paying is wrong, while refusing to provide a reason why it should be, is merely demonstrating that they are a bigot)
There's nothing immoral about selling drugs (unless you think we should ban alcohol and tobacco, or that we've criminalised the right drugs and that growing, selling, buying and consuming cannabis somehow requires punishment), but making it possible for people to trivially pirate software is an area I believe to be a little more grey. Also, as someone who's recently been burgled and had his phone stolen, if by `unlocking` phones you're talking about changing the IMEI number so that stolen phones can be reused after they've been reported stolen, then that seems a far more serious offence, in terms of perpetuating crime and suffering, than smoking a bit of weed or taking a few trips or pills.
After somebody makes a bootlegged copy of a game, who exactly is suffering more than they were before the copy was made?
Ethically, it is extremely dubious to say that "failing to provide income to somebody" is equivalent to theft, or even that it's a bad thing at all. The problem with the idea is that there's no obvious point where you should stop - if I buy a game from company A instead of buying it from company B, how is my crime against company B any less than it would be if I had copied the game?
The other common ethical justification is that copying a game is bad because the person who copied it has received something that they did not deserve. The problem with this idea is that it says charity is a bad thing.
(Note that arguments along the lines of "Who is going to pay for it if you don't?" are financial arguments rather than ethical ones, and they are a variation on the problem of "Who is going to pay to build the roads?")
Actually it doesn't have one processor. It has seven of them that the developer must use in tandem in order to achieve any level of real performance.
Reality check: the developer of the compiler must do that. The developer of the game need not do it unless they need to squeeze a bit more performance out of it. Rockstar are not going to be writing all of GTA4 in hand-crafted PS3 assembly code, the bulk of it will be generic C code. There's a reasonably good chance that they haven't even bothered doing anything special with the Cell-specific magic yet - that's the sort of thing you would do fairly late in the development process, to ramp up the performance a bit more over what the compiler can give you.
We don't know what major problems they are facing, but it's more likely to be related to the video rendering hardware - that's what usually takes most of the time when porting. My bet is that it's got something to do with the fact that the PS3 is OpenGL, while the xbox is directx, since it's always been difficult to go from one to the other.
It's an electronic lock on your door to your house. You own the house and the contents, but somebody has put a lock on the door. They've given you the key, but you're only "allowed" to use it if you agree to walk on your hands all the time that you are inside your own house.
Exactly which part of this is not insane? Why is this supposed to make you, or anybody else, feel secure?
(Most analogies fall down at the point where they don't realise that it's your stuff that's locked up, not somebody else's stuff. Not that analogies are worth the screen space they occupy, including this one)
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
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The DRM Scorecard
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Are you also of the opinion that auto industry executives hold the naive view that auto theft-deterrent systems are infallible?
The industry executives hold the well-informed view that their customers hold the naive view that the theft-deterrent systems are appreciably useful - so they include those systems because they sell more cars. It doesn't matter that the systems are useless - people are stupid enough to think that they work, and that's all that counts here.
This obviously does not apply to DRM. Nobody ever bought a piece of software because it could do less. It's not exactly that the folks who use DRM don't understand this, it's that they don't want to understand this: if DRM does not work, then they will be called upon to "do something" about the "piracy problem". It's easier to hand over the cheques to the DRM companies and tell the shareholders that you're doing a good job and deserve a bonus. All their arguments are based on this fundamental point: they don't get paid for making the right decision here, they get paid for convincing people that they're making the right decision.
I think the biggest problem in music, at least in the US, is the end of independent ownership and management of radio stations.
I'd say it's more than just that. The biggest problem in music is the end of independent ownership and management of everything related to music on any kind of large scale. You name it, it's either owned or controlled by the RIAA mob, or it's basically irrelevant to the majority of the industry. Plenty of small-scale stuff happens, all the way down to people just talking to each other about it, but none of it reaches the necessary critical mass for any of the ideas generated to travel far beyond the (social) vicinity of the place where they started.
The root cause of all this is obvious: whenever anything significant starts to happen, people start thinking about how they can make money from it, and then they start thinking about how to maximise their profits from it, and then the RIAA mob makes them an offer.
I would not consider speed of command line option processing to be bottleneck in any application, the overhead of starting of the program is far greater.
Your just experiencing this with Java, Perl or some other high overhead bloated program.
No, even with the most naive of command-line argument parsing code, it is highly unlikely that it will take a significant amount of time compared to the effort required for the kernel to fork off a new process, exec the binary, and for the dynamic loader to set it up for execution. This process typically takes several milliseconds - or more than a hundred if it has to be loaded from disk first.
Command line argument parsing is just not that hard, compared to the amount of work involved in spawning a new program.
The casinos on the other hand, not surprisingly, consider all forms of card counting, even the type that courts have ruled legal as "intelligent play" (i.e. using your brain), as "cheating". This is where it gets interesting. In Las Vegas the casinos have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason and it is not unheard of for card counters to get the back-room treatment (i.e. casino security goons try to verbally intimidate you into not coming back again and in the old days that did more than just talk if you know what I mean).
While this does happen, most Las Vegas casinos have a much simpler policy:
They keep track of how each player is doing, and any player who is consistently winning is politely but firmly escorted out of the casino ("Sir, I think you've gambled enough for today"). Their picture is recorded, and players who do this multiple times are banned from returning.
They don't care how you do it or even if it's intentional - the reasons or methods have no effect on their bottom line. They just pick out the people who are getting too far ahead of the odds and remove them from the game. It is far simpler and more effective than any methods designed to detect or prevent specific actions.
You are right that if you take their wording literally then its funny, but there is either implicit consent to copy from the owner because they are distributing it or it can be explicitly given in a license e.g. GPL software.
It's not "funny", it's "obviously designed for selective interpretation and enforcement". This policy has quite clearly been written in a way that gives users no information about what behaviour is acceptable and the administration an excuse to ban anybody for just about anything. Even if you assume that there is nothing wrong with the copyright system as it stands, disputes about what forms of infringement are legal are common and expected - and the university has just set themselves up to arbitrarily ban users when a large corporation decides to make an accusation of unlawful infringement, even if that accusation holds no weight, would lose in court, and in fact is never even taken to court.
This is not about right, wrong, law, justice, fairness, or anything like that. This is about one company (the university) offering to enforce arbitrary rules made up by another company (any media company), and in the process bypass the legal system entirely.
The law as it currently stands interprets this as meaning direct use of a patented method (such as a business method or industrial process patent), not use of a product created using a method covered by a design patent. As usual, one cannot read the statute literally and apply any interpretation that one likes, it is necessary to reference common and case law. In this case, the 'whoever' does not include end-users and the 'uses' does not include mere use.
Slashdot Mirror
The statement of intent made by using the BSD license is "You may use this code however you want, and you don't have to give us anything back". It may not be desperately generous to do exactly what they said and not give anything back, but there's nothing particularly unethical or impolite about it. It is not unethical to fail to give something away when you don't have to. Remember that in ethics, there is a very wide stretch of neutral ground that is neither good nor bad, which covers the vast majority of things people do. This is clearly one of them.
I'm sorry, did you just suggest that rather than cut off part of the community by building on their work, they should cut off that same part of the community by reimplementing their work? That makes no sense. There would be no observable difference in the result.
Where have you been? This is how it always is. The GPL side doesn't think that the freedom to make non-free code is desirable, and seeks to prohibit it (although they don't have a serious problem with people who don't seek to prohibit it); the BSD side thinks that the freedom to make non-free code is essential, and hates the idea of prohibiting it. They are diametrically opposed on a point of fundamental principle. It's amazing that they ever manage to agree on anything.
Note the subtle distinction between considering the ridiculous crap that they believe in to be correct, and considering the ridiculous crap that you believe in to be more correct than theirs.
I do not claim that you have to accept their crap in order to respect someone, merely that you cannot respect them if you believe that your crap is somehow better. The important thing to understand is that no belief is any more valid than any other, and that by definition beliefs cannot be correct - if they were correct, they would be facts, not beliefs.
In China? No, you just disappear. Maybe the government did it. Maybe the mafia did it because you owed them money. Maybe you ran away with a girl. Maybe you're escaping after committing a crime. That's why they do it that way - people go missing all the time, and nobody can be sure which ones were government work. It makes it very easy for people to believe that the government isn't actually doing anything wrong, and that's part of how they convince the citizen that he's free.
Realistically though, the Chinese government does not tend to do anything about the kind of behaviour you describe. They don't actually care what you do - they just pay attention to the effect you have. Anybody who creates an effect that they don't like tends to disappear. Ineffectual people are left alone.
When you have to draw comparisons with China in order to say that a country is in "good shape", it's time to put it out of its misery. It's like saying "Yeah, so he kidnaps somebody every few years, and one or two of them died, but at least he's not shooting random people in the street every day".
There is no such thing as an acceptable level of oppression.
Ah, and I suppose that your principles are the correct ones.
Yes, you obviously respect others greatly. That'll be why you summarily dismiss their beliefs as being wrong.
Respecting others means accepting that many people enjoy both creating and watching porn, and that no particular harm comes to any of them in the process. It means learning to understand these people, how they think, and why they believe what they do. If you do not understand, you cannot respect.
Respecting others also means accepting that your opinions and beliefs are no more valid than theirs. If you think that your beliefs are somehow better than another person's, then you do not respect that person.
This is a tool for developers. Developers who "need" these things are quite frankly irrelevant, as nothing they produce will still be in use in five years time, so unless you're trying to make a quick buck by selling them some shiny junk, their "needs" can and should be ignored.
Trying to use revision control on windows is like trying to drive a car in the sea. It just doesn't make any sense. You need a real platform to build on, not a file manager with issues. Even a full cygwin environment is clumsy without a unix filesystem and network services to back it up.
Software development on unix is like working with a large box full of tools. Software development on windows is like working with a swiss army knife. There's no way to bridge that gap. If you need real revision control, you also need to get onto a unix platform, so there's little point in porting it to windows. Trying to make it work anyway will be about as effective as pushing your car along the ocean floor.
As a general rule, the SEC will not approve any bids for a large monopoly to take over one of its direct competitors, and they certainly won't approve takeover bids that are obviously trying to do an end run around the legal system.
So no, they probably can't. Given that Microsoft have been aggressively pursuing a policy of competing with everybody, they probably wouldn't get approval to take over any of the big players in the industry.
(Companies who make hostile bids for their competitors usually get told "only if you spin off your side of the business into a separate company first". Only true mergers tend to get approval for this sort of thing, and Gates would never give up control of the company or sell off Windows)
Only with SEC approval, which they most likely wouldn't get. You can't use a takeover bid as an end-run around the legal system.
Why? Unix isn't actually worth anything, these days. Even at the height of SCO's FUD machine, they didn't make any real money from it. This just happened to be the easiest and most painless way to flatten their claims, which were already looking to lose on the merits in the IBM case.
Unix itself (commonly referred to as SysV), as an operating system, is dead. It has been replaced by AIX, Solaris, and to some extent Linux (although Linux has mostly created new markets rather than occupying the space where Unix used to live).
That would be a really insightful bit of psychobabble if it wasn't nonsense. Poking fun at somebody is usually merely a sign of amusement. It's very easy to be amused by Microsoft, because they do so stunningly badly at most things they attempt (remember that of all the thousands of projects they have attempted to make and sell, only Windows and Office have ever shown a significant profit; the rest of the company bleeds money by the billions).
Photons are not bounded by classical physics, and their behaviour can only be explained by quantum physics. Whether or not this behaviour can be exploited to perform computation more efficiently than a Turing machine is unknown (and will likely remain that way until we untangle the problem of how quantum physics really works). We still do not have a complete understanding of how they behave, and much of what we think we know is unproven. This idea's pretty far out on the edge of plausibility, but even if this particular method turns out to be flawed, we don't know enough to be sure that no other similar methods could work. (We also don't know whether quantum computing can do it, which is one of the big open questions in that field)
That statement is true only under the assumption that the model of computation is a form of Turing machine. The essential property of a Turing machine is that they can compute any effectively computable function. There is no particular reason to believe that they also have the property of describing the limits of what the physical universe can compute in a given space of time, and in fact they don't for some simple problems, although we haven't found any machines that can tackle NP problems yet. Even under "classical" physics, we're uncertain whether such a machine could exist; nothing in classical physics says that they can't, so far as we know.
This question is right up there alongside "P=NP?", and has similar properties: we suspect and usually assume that such machines don't exist, but don't have anything resembling a good reason to believe this, other than "we haven't found one yet". It's not as interesting as "P=NP?" because in most cases, there is no way to prove something to be physically impossible (since you can never be sure that you have found the most fundamental laws of physics), so the question may remain unresolved forever.
And yet, P and NP are defined in terms of a Turing machine. Herein lies the GPs point: it is taken as a given that the Turing machine is capable of computing any effectively computable function, but it is an open question as to whether we can build a different kind of machine which would be able to solve NP problems in polynomial time. By definition, the non-deterministic Turing machine solves NP problems in polynomial time, but we don't currently know how to build one.
Quantum computers may or may not be such a machine - we're really not sure yet (possible proofs have been advanced for both answers; the prevailing opinion is that none of them are likely to be correct and quantum computers are something entirely new that we don't understand). Other methods of computation also may exist. Our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics is grossly incomplete, so we can't tell. However, it seems unlikely that the computational capacity of the universe is adequately modelled by a Turing machine.
This relates to the question of "P=NP?" as follows: if such a machine can be built, then *some* machines can solve these problems in polynomial time. If P=NP, then *all* machines can solve these problems in polynomial time.
4.5 million sales, so far.
At the rate they're making money? Longer than their customers are likely to live.
Microsoft's xbox division has still not managed to show a profit - ever (the first xbox lost them several billion dollars over its lifespan). It doesn't matter how much you want to label the PS3 as a failure; by any reasonable business measure ("How much money have we made?"), Sony have once again come out miles ahead of Microsoft. The problem with these "market penetration" schemes is that they don't do you any good unless you can convert that penetration into profit, and Microsoft haven't yet shown any ability to do this, despite running a great many penetration schemes in a great many different markets.
Sony's strategy this time around should come as no surprise to anybody. They can't out-spend Microsoft, who are willing to lose billions and can support it with the Windows profits, so they're playing the long game and trying to out-last them, on the assumption that Microsoft's shareholders will eventually get tired of business ventures that waste money with no return.
Assume I can afford to buy one album this month. If I buy an album from artist A instead of from artist B, how is my crime against artist B less than if I had copied the album? In both cases, it's one less sale for the creator of the work.
The basic idea is: can anybody formulate an convincing ethical principle that says there is a difference between these things? The one you described here doesn't recognise there being a difference between copying an album and simply buying a different one, because in both cases, somebody has lost a sale.
If somebody steals an object, the ethical objection is obvious: the person they stole it from no longer has it. When copying information, there is no obvious ethical reason why this should be a bad thing, so far as I'm aware.
My point exactly. "Receiving something that you did not pay for" is not a valid ethical objection to copying information (or anything else).
(Note that anybody who insists that copying information without paying is wrong, while refusing to provide a reason why it should be, is merely demonstrating that they are a bigot)
After somebody makes a bootlegged copy of a game, who exactly is suffering more than they were before the copy was made?
Ethically, it is extremely dubious to say that "failing to provide income to somebody" is equivalent to theft, or even that it's a bad thing at all. The problem with the idea is that there's no obvious point where you should stop - if I buy a game from company A instead of buying it from company B, how is my crime against company B any less than it would be if I had copied the game?
The other common ethical justification is that copying a game is bad because the person who copied it has received something that they did not deserve. The problem with this idea is that it says charity is a bad thing.
(Note that arguments along the lines of "Who is going to pay for it if you don't?" are financial arguments rather than ethical ones, and they are a variation on the problem of "Who is going to pay to build the roads?")
Reality check: the developer of the compiler must do that. The developer of the game need not do it unless they need to squeeze a bit more performance out of it. Rockstar are not going to be writing all of GTA4 in hand-crafted PS3 assembly code, the bulk of it will be generic C code. There's a reasonably good chance that they haven't even bothered doing anything special with the Cell-specific magic yet - that's the sort of thing you would do fairly late in the development process, to ramp up the performance a bit more over what the compiler can give you.
We don't know what major problems they are facing, but it's more likely to be related to the video rendering hardware - that's what usually takes most of the time when porting. My bet is that it's got something to do with the fact that the PS3 is OpenGL, while the xbox is directx, since it's always been difficult to go from one to the other.
It's an electronic lock on your door to your house. You own the house and the contents, but somebody has put a lock on the door. They've given you the key, but you're only "allowed" to use it if you agree to walk on your hands all the time that you are inside your own house.
Exactly which part of this is not insane? Why is this supposed to make you, or anybody else, feel secure?
(Most analogies fall down at the point where they don't realise that it's your stuff that's locked up, not somebody else's stuff. Not that analogies are worth the screen space they occupy, including this one)
The industry executives hold the well-informed view that their customers hold the naive view that the theft-deterrent systems are appreciably useful - so they include those systems because they sell more cars. It doesn't matter that the systems are useless - people are stupid enough to think that they work, and that's all that counts here.
This obviously does not apply to DRM. Nobody ever bought a piece of software because it could do less. It's not exactly that the folks who use DRM don't understand this, it's that they don't want to understand this: if DRM does not work, then they will be called upon to "do something" about the "piracy problem". It's easier to hand over the cheques to the DRM companies and tell the shareholders that you're doing a good job and deserve a bonus. All their arguments are based on this fundamental point: they don't get paid for making the right decision here, they get paid for convincing people that they're making the right decision.
I'd say it's more than just that. The biggest problem in music is the end of independent ownership and management of everything related to music on any kind of large scale. You name it, it's either owned or controlled by the RIAA mob, or it's basically irrelevant to the majority of the industry. Plenty of small-scale stuff happens, all the way down to people just talking to each other about it, but none of it reaches the necessary critical mass for any of the ideas generated to travel far beyond the (social) vicinity of the place where they started.
The root cause of all this is obvious: whenever anything significant starts to happen, people start thinking about how they can make money from it, and then they start thinking about how to maximise their profits from it, and then the RIAA mob makes them an offer.
He said "impact", not "influence". A genius influences. Roadkill impacts.
No, even with the most naive of command-line argument parsing code, it is highly unlikely that it will take a significant amount of time compared to the effort required for the kernel to fork off a new process, exec the binary, and for the dynamic loader to set it up for execution. This process typically takes several milliseconds - or more than a hundred if it has to be loaded from disk first.
Command line argument parsing is just not that hard, compared to the amount of work involved in spawning a new program.
While this does happen, most Las Vegas casinos have a much simpler policy:
They keep track of how each player is doing, and any player who is consistently winning is politely but firmly escorted out of the casino ("Sir, I think you've gambled enough for today"). Their picture is recorded, and players who do this multiple times are banned from returning.
They don't care how you do it or even if it's intentional - the reasons or methods have no effect on their bottom line. They just pick out the people who are getting too far ahead of the odds and remove them from the game. It is far simpler and more effective than any methods designed to detect or prevent specific actions.
It's not "funny", it's "obviously designed for selective interpretation and enforcement". This policy has quite clearly been written in a way that gives users no information about what behaviour is acceptable and the administration an excuse to ban anybody for just about anything. Even if you assume that there is nothing wrong with the copyright system as it stands, disputes about what forms of infringement are legal are common and expected - and the university has just set themselves up to arbitrarily ban users when a large corporation decides to make an accusation of unlawful infringement, even if that accusation holds no weight, would lose in court, and in fact is never even taken to court.
This is not about right, wrong, law, justice, fairness, or anything like that. This is about one company (the university) offering to enforce arbitrary rules made up by another company (any media company), and in the process bypass the legal system entirely.
The law as it currently stands interprets this as meaning direct use of a patented method (such as a business method or industrial process patent), not use of a product created using a method covered by a design patent. As usual, one cannot read the statute literally and apply any interpretation that one likes, it is necessary to reference common and case law. In this case, the 'whoever' does not include end-users and the 'uses' does not include mere use.