Thomas Jefferson invented his own gravity powered clock for use in his home. It is build around the front door and uses American Revolution cannonballs for weights. If you tour Monticello you will see it.
Like it or not 99% of the content on p2p services is copyrighted.
Probably true, but remember that the Ubuntu ISO you see is also copyrighted, but is being shared legally. How much p2p content is being shared illegally? Or, how much is being shared that would have been purchased had p2p not been around? I bet that last percentage is quite small. And finally, how much extra money is made because people sharing are being exposed to works they never heard of before, and end up buying more?
To look at illegal sharing, what if you are sharing an album that was made 30 years ago? Haven't they had enought time to make money on their work? Thanks to copyright, their work can't be easily reused in another work. We also can't even share it legally.
Face it, copyright law in its current form is unjust and unfair, as copyrights last virtually forever. Copyright is supposed to be a compromise between the public and artists/authors. The authors get a temportary control of their work, and the public gets more in the public domain in the near future, when that temporary control is up. (As a note, in the UK (unlike the US, where I am from), there is also a "moral right" to profit from creating works, which is the country we are talking about here.) That comprise is unbalanced right now; the public isn't getting a good deal out of it anymore. We need to rethink copyright.
So maybe we should hold off a little bit on sharing the latest stuff from the last few years, but everything else should really be fair game. If the politicians weren't bought off in the first place, these works would happily be in the public domain for all to share and (re)use.
its the mass casual piracy that is really hurting.
Do you have evidence of this, provided by someone without a conflict of interest? I doubt it is hurting anyone financially (digital stores are probably the ones shutting down brick-and-mortar stores). However, it is definitely helping readers/listeners/viewers/players/users who now have more available to them than they ever had before.
I have given up on explaining the morality behind not using pirated copies
You mean something like buying a peice of software and installing it on several machines instead of only one, even though some people don't want you to do that. Just because it may happen to be illegal doesn't make it wrong.
I don't quite understand what you are trying to say. It is naive to think that I can't send data in or out of the country without the government being able to read it or even know that I did it? When done properly, there are many ways to share information with other people where it is either extremely difficult or impossible for middle parties to read that information. Add in onion routing, and now it is nearly impossible to tell who is talking to who.
Just as 1+1=2, with a properly handled one-time-pad, it is impossible for anyone to read your cyphertext. This is a mathematical truth.
Should the border officials be allowed to copy data? Actually, maybe so. Crosing national borders isn't like moving about the streets freely;
This makes sense, until someday in the future computers inside the US are connected to computers outside the US in some kind of global international network, where the government cannot possibly know about or read everything that goes across this network. If this system existed, anyone wanting to transfer data without border gaurds snooping would use this global computer network and some kind of encryption software, onion routing, and/or steganography (once all this is invented too), and this border "security" would just be some kind of snake-oil, security theater bullshit.
I can't wait for this global network to exist so they don't have to copy laptop data at the border!
BSD existed long before GNU. In fact, all GNU did for the most part was hack on BSD tools and release them under a license that effectively forbade the new code from being rolled back in.
True, BSD was around before GNU, but the GNU project didn't touch BSD code for a long time (not for 16 years at least) due to two problems. First, the BSD code was in a legal limbo, thanks to copyright problems with AT&T. Using it would be dangerous.
Second, the original BSD license had an annoying advertising clause making it incompatable with the GPL. This clause wasn't removed until 1999, after Richard Stallman convinced Berkeley to remove it. This finally allowed GPL and BSD code to be mixed. The GNU project was already well established by then.
So, no, the GNU project wrote their software from scratch. They didn't just hack the BSD tools.
unless your BIOS has encryption support (which it doesn't), you can't have an encrypted boot partition. [...] Note that bios limitations can also be circumvented with linuxbios;)
Of course, then your BIOS isn't encrypted, so you encrypt it and need another one below that to decrypt it, but then that bottom one isn't encrypted.
The big problem with touch screens is Gorilla Arm,
After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized -- the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards.
I don't see any obvious terms in the GPL prior to version 3 that prevent revocation [...]
In the comments for this article, a lot of people seem to keep missing this part of the the GPLv2. The GPLv2 is explicit about the license being irrevocable, right here in section 4:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program
except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt
otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is
void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under
this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such
parties remain in full compliance.
By legally distributing the source code under GPLv2, he has already said to everyone that he cannot revoke the license. It is right there in plain wording.
There is also the issue that you don't even need to accept the GPL to use or have a copy of the software. Only those modifying and distributing the software need to accept the license. If you don't modify or distribute, there is no license to revoke. So, if there is some crazy call in the courts that ends up incorrectly allowing him to revoke the GPL, there are still all these people that may be using the software that are still unaffected, as they never needed the license in the first place.
Nowhere in GPL 2.0 does it state that the license can NOT be revoked.
*ahem*
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program
except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt
otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is
void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under
this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such
parties remain in full compliance.
Well bucko's, I hate to tell you this, you dont! The law makes it quite clear that you DO NOT have any right to do so and in point of fact doing so is a violation of said LAW and in knowingly violating said LAW you damn well deserve whatever happens to you either as a result of a criminal case or civil case brought against you.
Just because something is against the law doesn't make it wrong. For example, in countries that have more unjust laws than the US, such as China, do the journalists who break the law when they make negative reports about the government "deserve whatever happens" to them?
The purpose of copyright is not to make anyone money. It is to expand the public domain for the good of the public. Copyright law is meant to serve the public. The constitution says nothing about artists deserving to make any kind of money. It is all about benefitting the public. Current copyright law actually does the opposite of its original purpose: as copyright gets stretched, works never fall into public domain. It is an unjust law that should be broken. As long as politicians are paid off, this unjust law will only get worse. Because of this, I would even argue that it may even be our duty to break copyright law.
Sharing our own culture is our right. This has been taken away from us.
You can whine and snivel all you want, but the law is the law. You don't like the law? Then form a group, a coalition, raise money to hire the best K's streeters you can afford to lobby congress to get it changed, That is how the system works, use it.
When it comes to music, music that does not have a Free License is not allowed on the campus networks.
Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of music with a free (as in speech) license out there. The only thing that comes to mind is something like the Nexiuz (or other free software) soundtrack.
Most of the "free" music out there comes under the not-so-free Creative Commons non-commercial license. It is semi-free.
I am not so sure that it can really be called a fad. Today I dug out a old Chinese Checkers board game from the basement. On the box was a sticker that said something like "Our Products Save The Earth", which said that for every (wooden) game board sold, they were planting a tree. They were helping the environment. To see what year this was, I looked at the front of the box for a copyright notice. The year was 1987. The box showed that this "green" thing dates back at least 21 years.
One of the big problems with genetically modified food is this (from memory here):
* Monsanto modifies corn to be immune to Roundup pesticide. Monsanto patents the modified corn.
* Some farmer who wasn't aware of the consequences purchases Roundup-ready corn seed and plants it in his field. (He will also continue buying more seed each year from Monsanto because the corn will not provide it for him, like the old corn did)
* Over time, weather and animals cause his crops to pollinate his neighbor's farms crops. Farmer is now growing patented, modified corn and is unaware of it. Nor can he do anything about it.
* Monsanto sends someone by to tresspass on the farmer's property to test his crops for their patented corn. Bingo, they find Monsanto's corn and the neighbor farmer loses his farm to Monsanto for patent infringement.
I guess this particular case is really another patent issue than a modified food issue.
Actually, not in Sweden. They are breaking no laws there.
Copyright violation is a violation of someone's property rights.
Copyright has nothing to do with property rights.
no one has the right to just take something of mine for free that I only offered them for sale. That's just theft.
What about when your work enters the public domain?
It isn't enough justification to say you were "acting in the artists best interests" when you downloaded their music.
Copyright isn't about artist's interests, but reader's interest. Copyright's purpose is to benefit the public, not make money for authors. Making money is just a means to an end.
Commander Keen FTW! Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy! was the first game I ever played as a child. I had such hard time and I don't think I ever beat it without my dad's help. Today, I can beat the game in probably about an hour.
We also had a couple freeware/shareware collection CD called Games People Play (this was before the web, so they never had a website). It had tons of DOS games, including the original Warcraft demo, which I went on to play the full version once I found it in a store for 5 bucks. Some of my other favorites on there were Jetpack, Doom, Maddog Williams, and Cyberdogs.
Today, it is still fun to fire up DOSBox, mount the CD on drive D: (hardcoded drive for by so many old programs, including the CD game menu), and have fun.
Slashdot Mirror
When I need to expand my arrays I just use realloc().
Thomas Jefferson invented his own gravity powered clock for use in his home. It is build around the front door and uses American Revolution cannonballs for weights. If you tour Monticello you will see it.
So calling the basement is long distance now? The phone company is ripping you off, man.
Probably true, but remember that the Ubuntu ISO you see is also copyrighted, but is being shared legally. How much p2p content is being shared illegally? Or, how much is being shared that would have been purchased had p2p not been around? I bet that last percentage is quite small. And finally, how much extra money is made because people sharing are being exposed to works they never heard of before, and end up buying more?
To look at illegal sharing, what if you are sharing an album that was made 30 years ago? Haven't they had enought time to make money on their work? Thanks to copyright, their work can't be easily reused in another work. We also can't even share it legally.
Face it, copyright law in its current form is unjust and unfair, as copyrights last virtually forever. Copyright is supposed to be a compromise between the public and artists/authors. The authors get a temportary control of their work, and the public gets more in the public domain in the near future, when that temporary control is up. (As a note, in the UK (unlike the US, where I am from), there is also a "moral right" to profit from creating works, which is the country we are talking about here.) That comprise is unbalanced right now; the public isn't getting a good deal out of it anymore. We need to rethink copyright.
So maybe we should hold off a little bit on sharing the latest stuff from the last few years, but everything else should really be fair game. If the politicians weren't bought off in the first place, these works would happily be in the public domain for all to share and (re)use.
its the mass casual piracy that is really hurting.Do you have evidence of this, provided by someone without a conflict of interest? I doubt it is hurting anyone financially (digital stores are probably the ones shutting down brick-and-mortar stores). However, it is definitely helping readers/listeners/viewers/players/users who now have more available to them than they ever had before.
You mean something like buying a peice of software and installing it on several machines instead of only one, even though some people don't want you to do that. Just because it may happen to be illegal doesn't make it wrong.
I don't quite understand what you are trying to say. It is naive to think that I can't send data in or out of the country without the government being able to read it or even know that I did it? When done properly, there are many ways to share information with other people where it is either extremely difficult or impossible for middle parties to read that information. Add in onion routing, and now it is nearly impossible to tell who is talking to who.
Just as 1+1=2, with a properly handled one-time-pad, it is impossible for anyone to read your cyphertext. This is a mathematical truth.
This makes sense, until someday in the future computers inside the US are connected to computers outside the US in some kind of global international network, where the government cannot possibly know about or read everything that goes across this network. If this system existed, anyone wanting to transfer data without border gaurds snooping would use this global computer network and some kind of encryption software, onion routing, and/or steganography (once all this is invented too), and this border "security" would just be some kind of snake-oil, security theater bullshit.
I can't wait for this global network to exist so they don't have to copy laptop data at the border!
True, BSD was around before GNU, but the GNU project didn't touch BSD code for a long time (not for 16 years at least) due to two problems. First, the BSD code was in a legal limbo, thanks to copyright problems with AT&T. Using it would be dangerous.
Second, the original BSD license had an annoying advertising clause making it incompatable with the GPL. This clause wasn't removed until 1999, after Richard Stallman convinced Berkeley to remove it. This finally allowed GPL and BSD code to be mixed. The GNU project was already well established by then.
So, no, the GNU project wrote their software from scratch. They didn't just hack the BSD tools.
Of course, then your BIOS isn't encrypted, so you encrypt it and need another one below that to decrypt it, but then that bottom one isn't encrypted.
It's encrypted boot code all the way down!
Yes, it would be a shame if something were to happen to the RIAA's knees.
In the comments for this article, a lot of people seem to keep missing this part of the the GPLv2. The GPLv2 is explicit about the license being irrevocable, right here in section 4:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.By legally distributing the source code under GPLv2, he has already said to everyone that he cannot revoke the license. It is right there in plain wording.
There is also the issue that you don't even need to accept the GPL to use or have a copy of the software. Only those modifying and distributing the software need to accept the license. If you don't modify or distribute, there is no license to revoke. So, if there is some crazy call in the courts that ends up incorrectly allowing him to revoke the GPL, there are still all these people that may be using the software that are still unaffected, as they never needed the license in the first place.
*ahem*
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.(from GPLv2)
He made a promise to each person who got his code, and he said he would keep that promise.
I don't think it unreasonable that he is required to honor that promise.
Even worse, you could write a ray-tracing program in javascript.
This would mean, of course, that he was lying about something. You know the rules: pants on fire and all. His legs would be lie detectors.
Just because something is against the law doesn't make it wrong. For example, in countries that have more unjust laws than the US, such as China, do the journalists who break the law when they make negative reports about the government "deserve whatever happens" to them?
The purpose of copyright is not to make anyone money. It is to expand the public domain for the good of the public. Copyright law is meant to serve the public. The constitution says nothing about artists deserving to make any kind of money. It is all about benefitting the public. Current copyright law actually does the opposite of its original purpose: as copyright gets stretched, works never fall into public domain. It is an unjust law that should be broken. As long as politicians are paid off, this unjust law will only get worse. Because of this, I would even argue that it may even be our duty to break copyright law.
Sharing our own culture is our right. This has been taken away from us.
You can whine and snivel all you want, but the law is the law. You don't like the law? Then form a group, a coalition, raise money to hire the best K's streeters you can afford to lobby congress to get it changed, That is how the system works, use it.This group is called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of music with a free (as in speech) license out there. The only thing that comes to mind is something like the Nexiuz (or other free software) soundtrack.
Most of the "free" music out there comes under the not-so-free Creative Commons non-commercial license. It is semi-free.
I am not so sure that it can really be called a fad. Today I dug out a old Chinese Checkers board game from the basement. On the box was a sticker that said something like "Our Products Save The Earth", which said that for every (wooden) game board sold, they were planting a tree. They were helping the environment. To see what year this was, I looked at the front of the box for a copyright notice. The year was 1987. The box showed that this "green" thing dates back at least 21 years.
The Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh currently has a robotic arm that looks just like this, but it plays basketball. It is a basketball catapult.
Unfortunately, Orbiter is not "FOSS".
So they got somebody to take that stuff? I would think all the bright-colors and cheap paper would give it away. Time to go to the toy store.
One of the big problems with genetically modified food is this (from memory here):
* Monsanto modifies corn to be immune to Roundup pesticide. Monsanto patents the modified corn.
* Some farmer who wasn't aware of the consequences purchases Roundup-ready corn seed and plants it in his field. (He will also continue buying more seed each year from Monsanto because the corn will not provide it for him, like the old corn did)
* Over time, weather and animals cause his crops to pollinate his neighbor's farms crops. Farmer is now growing patented, modified corn and is unaware of it. Nor can he do anything about it.
* Monsanto sends someone by to tresspass on the farmer's property to test his crops for their patented corn. Bingo, they find Monsanto's corn and the neighbor farmer loses his farm to Monsanto for patent infringement.
I guess this particular case is really another patent issue than a modified food issue.
Actually, not in Sweden. They are breaking no laws there.
Copyright violation is a violation of someone's property rights.Copyright has nothing to do with property rights.
no one has the right to just take something of mine for free that I only offered them for sale. That's just theft.What about when your work enters the public domain?
It isn't enough justification to say you were "acting in the artists best interests" when you downloaded their music.Copyright isn't about artist's interests, but reader's interest. Copyright's purpose is to benefit the public, not make money for authors. Making money is just a means to an end.
Commander Keen FTW! Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy! was the first game I ever played as a child. I had such hard time and I don't think I ever beat it without my dad's help. Today, I can beat the game in probably about an hour.
We also had a couple freeware/shareware collection CD called Games People Play (this was before the web, so they never had a website). It had tons of DOS games, including the original Warcraft demo, which I went on to play the full version once I found it in a store for 5 bucks. Some of my other favorites on there were Jetpack, Doom, Maddog Williams, and Cyberdogs.
Today, it is still fun to fire up DOSBox, mount the CD on drive D: (hardcoded drive for by so many old programs, including the CD game menu), and have fun.