*snip* "It's cool to release something that costs $18,000," said Mr. Grimes, the DrinkorDie member from Arlington, Tex. "Basically, if it wasn't for us, you would never see this piece of software." *snip*
I understand how they figure that companies "lose money" whenever they're software is pirated. But do they figure into those billions of lost dollars statements like the one above? Seems to me it's hard to find out just how much money the software companies are really losing because not all people who pirate their software are people who would ever pay for it.
If we define
R:= real lost revinue the company would have gotten were it not for copyright violators P:= profit per copy of software company makes when it is purchased legally. This isn't the same as the retail price, as Id probably makes domething less than the $30.00 sticker price of a retail copy of Quake, for example. N:= Number of copies obtained illegally and C:= Ratio of people who would have paid for the software had they not gotten an illegal copy over the total number who got a copy illegally (value 0.0 - 1.0),
then
R:= C * P * N
C is a value between 0.0 and 1.0, and probably almost never equals 1.0. E.g. if out of 500 copyright violators 250 would have bought the program otherwise, while the other 250 would have done without, C = 0.5
Still, the worst part is that because software piracy is so rampant, it enables people who would (can?) pay for proper licensing for software to obtain illegal licenses.
Actually, the value of money lost probably approaches $0.00 the more expensive the software becomes. I suspect C is quite high for really cheap software that is copied illegally, while it approaches 0.0 for really expensive software copied illegally.
Two factors play a significant role in this: (1) commercial entities almost always want to have their licensing in order (due to audits, liability, etc.) and (b) individuals have very limited budgets (comparitavly speaking).
I doubt very much a single copyright violator of an $18,000 program would have purchased it legally had it not been available on the internet. Indeed, I suspect C = 0.0000 in that particular example.
On the other hand, illegal copies of a $50.00 program (e.g a game) probably do mean that some percentage would have gone out and spent $50.00 on it had they not obtained it, so C is probably higher.
For a $2.00 piece of software (assuming its really easy to find and pay for), C probably approaches 0.9 or higher.
Of course, even this equation ignores the effect of advertising (someone copies the $18,000 program, then finds a need for it in their professional life and talks their employer into purchasing one or more copies), as well as the 'bleedoff' effect (a kid copies one $50.00 game, but goes and spends the $50.00 he would have spent on the first game on another game instead, perhaps by the same company, perhaps by a competitor. Statistically, assuming both games are roughly the same popularity, this is a wash, and neither company loses anything despite the kids having twice as many games as they could have afforded). It also ignores the very common practice of 'try before you buy', where people will in fact borrow a friend's copy of a commercial package, use it, get used to it, then quite often chose to buy a copy (for the documentation, for support, etc.).
I think it is obvious even to the IP zealots out there that the real losses due to copyright violations are tiny fractions of the amounts being deceitfully presented to the FBI and the courts, and in some cases (e.g. Napster) copyright violations have been shown to have the opposite effect, and even increase sales.
For your education, of course, I wasn't using circular reasoning, I was demonstrating the tautological fact that one takes something because one wants it. Are claiming that you copy other people's work because you don't want it?!
No. You were defining taking (or copying) something because you want it as theft, then using that definition to 'prove' that taking something because you want it is theft. Classic circular reasoning, and a sure sign of a very limited intellect.
You are correct, though, you are making tautologies right and left... another form of fallacy you should educate yourself about. Do you even know what a tautology is?
tautology
1.
1. Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy.
2. An instance of such repetition.
2. Logic. An empty or vacuous statement composed of simpler statements in a fashion that makes it logically true whether the simpler statements are factually true or false; for example, the statement Either it will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow. [Reference]
People download (ie. copy) things for a variety of reasons. Desire, curiosity, even by mistake, to name just three of a dozen or more common reasons. So not only is your definition circular, it ignores huge swaths of reality in the process (as most tautologies tend to do).
Even replicating something you earnestly desire does not, and never has, equalled "theft" or "stealing" in the English language, or under U.S. law.
In other words, you can't think of a reason why you should be allowed to ignore my requirements for copying while I have to honour yours (as enshrined in the GPL) so I must be a troll again.
Your GPL ignorance is astounding. Either you are a troll (most likely) or you are woefully ignorant and should do a little research before displaying such ignorance for all too see.
The GPL is an imperfect attempt to insure freedom in a society, and within a legal regime, that is designed to destroy freedom when it comes to sharing so-called intellectual property. As such, it is only required because there is copyright, and is a countermeasure against said restrictions. Get rid of copyright and you get rid of the need for a license such as the GPL.
But you probably already knew this. If not, 3 seconds on google (or slashdot's search facility) would have made this clear, had you bothered.
Your last sentence clearly identifies you as a troll, as does your posting history (as another pointed out). I only respond this one last time to hopefully insure the idiocy you display does not mislead another. As for reasoning, I've already pointed you toward a resource where you can remedy your sore lack of education and understanding. As with the proverbial horse being led to water, no one can force you to drink.
Now go educate yourself, troll. While you've provided me with a good, hearty laugh over lunch, I am not your teacher, and I'm through feeding you. Drink, or don't drink and remain ignorant... I doubt the world will care at all in either event.
It's not a potential sale, it's an actual one. You wanted to use the product (that's why you stole it), you took it, you didn't pay. Theft.
Your need of remedial education is even more severe than I first believed.
Hint: The above is circular reasoning. Look it up. ("You wanted to use the product, that is why you stole it, therefor it is theft"?)
As for your GPL troll... your ability to remain ignornant on that subject while reading slashdot indicates a level of deliberate obtuseness normally reserved for Microsoft astroturfers and Trolls, a level of intelligence beneath that of the average non-human primate, or both.
Imagine if Coors Lite was called "American Beer", and "I Am American" was trumpeted as a commercial slogan in commercials for an inferior product!
I don't need to imagine it. I've lived overseas a number of times, and we Americans have the emberressment of "Budweiser, King of Beers" being promoted (successfully) in such places as the UK, Germany, and elsewhere as (a) the quitisential American beer (despite our numerous excellent brews (especially our Micro-brews), this is the bottled urin most of the world associates with American beer.
What makes it even more emberrassing is that the label closely resembles the 'true' Budweiser of Czech fame, Budweiser Budvar, which in contrast to the American pisswater variety is one of the finest Pilsners on the planet. Only Corporate American arrogance could ever lead to such a situation, where a nasty, cheap knockoff of arguably one of the world's finest pilsners has the audacity to call itself the King of Beers and even try to displace that which it mimics so poorly in that product's native markets.
Kind of sheds an interesting light on the psychology of the Corporate Moghuls fleecing our economy and driving into the ground these days (cf Enron, Xerox, Worldcom, and a whole bunch more coming soon to a courtroom near you).
You realize ".tm" would only be meaningful to people who use the English word "Trademark" don't you? If we're really trying for a valid, international solution, it won't depend on abbreviations of English legal terms.
Unless you would like to push for Esperanto as the Official Language of the Internet (I would support you in this argument, even though it would mean I'd have to learn Esperanto from scratch), I think you are going to have to concede, and live with the fact, that English is the defacto language of the internet, and that for the domain system to work at all we have to accept that, to some degree.
Thus,.tm would be the best approach.
However, it isn't as simple as that, because, with more than one root authority to choose from, China could, for example, have//china//domain.tlds and reserve a TLD for chinese trademarks that ends in some chinese character(s) I can't type here. Ditto for any other language purists out there.
As long as Trademark nonsense is reserved for.tm style domains, and kept out of the mainstream domains the rest of us use, I really couldn't care less if there is one, or a 100, such little domains, or what language the TLD characters are taken from.
Your argument only works if the price of the thing stolen is so high that a single sale would cover the cost of making it and if that sale had already occured. Pretty stupid argument.
Once again, you demonstrate why a modicum of education on intellectual property would be very useful before people begin banging away on their keyboards when discussing, or in your case, trolling, this particular subject.
Lost potential sales does not, and never has, equaled theft, either in law, or in common use of speech (outside of rhetoric deliberately employed by copyright and intellectual property cartels, which hardly counts as it is intended to change the language to their political advantage).
Your argument requires that deprivation of potential sales would equal theft (which in fact would make every act of competition equal to "theft."). A pretty stupid argument.
Oh, and by the way, I do make my own literature, art, and movies available, freely, under a GPL-like license, so unlike trolls like yourself I actually do put my money where my mouth is.
In some jurisdictions perhaps (and this would be an area where states might want to be responsible for their own state.us.tm, and other countries for their country.tm domains), but when I registered a trademark in Illinois it was for a particular area of business in the entire state. Hence:
trademark.area-of-business.state.country.tm is sufficient to uniquely identify my trademark.
Had I registered a national trademark, then
trademark.area-of-business.us.tm would have been enough.
It seems that microsoft.org is owned by a very large company (Microsoft) and isn't even being used. Could they be holding out to sell it to the highest bidder? Or, is this just another example of Cybersquatting?
In one of my responses to the "What We Need" thread, I briefly outlined a name dispute resolution standard that would, in fact, consider Microsoft.org to be cybersquatting (unless it resolves to a real machine in some protocol, like ftp.microsoft.org, or http://microsoft.org/, etc).
Since we're dealing with profoundly corrupt corporate shills in ICANN (including controlling intersts by the MPAA and RIAA... what a coup d'etat that was) that make Enron, Xerox, and WorldCom look pristine in comparison, I doubt you'll ever see cybersquatting proceeding taken against a corporate interest such as Microsoft, at least not until we start using an alternative root authority such as Opennic instead.
The problem is, more than one entity can detain the same trademark in different juridictions, or even in the same juridiction if the markets are sufficiently different.
The solution is relativley trivial.
You have a trademark on textiles, in Illinois, for SweatShopSweats, but no national (or international) trademark? Fine, you get:
sweatshopsweats.textile.il.us.tm
That is the only domain name you are legally entitled to have. Any other domain names you get, such as sweatshopsweats.com, etc. are yours if you get 'em first, but you have no legal right to the name. Ditto with, say 'sweatshopsweats.tm'... as a.tm domain, you can fight that out in court with sweatshopsweats.com of New York or New Delhi, just as you would any other trademark clash in the real world.
You agree to this, in your contract, when you register your domain name with 'somefreenic' TLD authority.
Let the.tm domain be the sole domain for such festering nonsense. Everything else is on a 'first come, first serve' basis, (with a reasonable anti-squatting procedure in place... i.e. if you've owned a domain name for X time, but not made use of it, you become a candidate for dispute resolution proceedings if anyone else wants it).
Trademark disputes should be completely removed from every non-.tm domain space, period, for the very reasons you cite (among others).
A lot of (heavily tech impaired) users have trouble understanding that there are TLD's besides ".com"
Yes.
It is absurd for us to hold ourselves to the least common denominator. A degree of literacy is required to make use of the internet and the web. Claiming otherwise, or even claiming that pandering to illiteracy would be a good thing, is akin to arguing for the replacement of text in all the books in all our libraries with color pictures because the "reading-impaired" can't understand all those big words.
The sooner we divest ourselves of these sorts of idiotic fallacies and begin educating people so that they can make sensible use of technology, the sooner people will begin to have a positive, useful computing experience (rather than the constant frustration most people are confronted with today).
Note that this doesn't mean everyone needs to understand what
find / -type f -exec grep blah {}/dev/null \;
means, nor does it mean that so-called "user friendly" interfaces are a bad thing (when properly implimented to facilitate knowledge and understanding, not obscure it) but basic concepts such as IP addresses, domain names, registrars, root authorities, filesystems, network connections, system memory, system storage, are something anyone wishing to use a computer should be required and expected to understand.
A modern computer connected to the internet has a lot more in common with a library than it does a toaster, and it is time we started treating it as such.
Michael, you guys are so two-faced, it's unbelievable. You people will go on and on about you guys aren't stealing music and other IP, but go apeshit when the evil, nasty corporations are stealing domain names (another form of IP).
Nonsense. When someone violates copyright they are not stealing anything. Neither the original creator, nor those who comply with the creator's copyrights, nor those others who do not, are being deprived of anything. Hence, by the very defintion of the word 'stealing,' no theft is taking place. This is why the law clearly differentiates between theft and copyright violation, and a remedial understanding of this should be required before idiots like yourself start banging away on their keyboards.
As to domanin names, the original holder of the domain name is most definitely being deprived of that name, i.e. the name is being taken away from them.
Does this make it theft? Arguably so, since this is being done in an extralegal fashion (not via a court of law). It is arguable that it isn't, since virtually every registrar has a clause in the contract you sign basically saying "you're paying for this, but we can deprive you of it anytime we like, for any reason we like, and you agree to this." However, it remains to be seen whether or not such contract clauses are in fact enforcable (in any other industry they would clearly not be enforcable). If it turns out that this notion of 'we can deprive you of the service you've paid for anytime we like' is in fact an illegal stipulation, then that portion of the contract is void, and depriving a party of the domain name for which they paid would in fact arguably be "theft" of a sort. Certainly more so than most of the things people around here like to label "theft."
Either way, it is in no way analogous to copyright violation, bandwidth misuse, or any number of other things which are constantly, and erroneously, being called theft around here.
What we need is to dump ICANN. However, it isn't feasable to do this in one fell swoop, at least not yet.
So, instead, we need DNS resolution in our libraries (glibc, etc.) and our internet applications (browsers, ftp & ssh clients, etc.) that include the concept of multiple root authorities, with easilly settable defaults.
Need to go to ICANN's unix.org? Fine, click a pulldown tab in your Mozilla 2.0 browser and select ICANN, or better yet, type http://icann//unix.org/ . Otherwise, stick with http://freenic//unix.org/ or (if opennic ever decides to dump ICANN peering) http://opennic//unix.org/
Obviously, old nomenclature would remain in place, using the system default for root authority (presumably Opennic and not ICANN).
It is only this approach, that will default to freedom but allow those of us who need to access ICANN-managed sites (most of the web today) to cross the line at will, that will enable us to free ourselves from ICANN's grip while still being able to make sensible use of the web.
Whether the alternative becomes Opennic, or some new entity ('freenic' anyone?) it needs to be constructed with a solid, equitable constitution that preserves freedom of speech above everything else, and does not favor large corporate or government interests over the rights of individuals, with an open, public, and fair judicial process for resolving name disputes. Ideally it would also include a.tm domain for trademarked names, to which trademark disputes would be confined (ie. anyone can register mtv.com, but only the owner of the MTV trademark can register mtv.tm).
What the hell is that? Anything can be broken. Sure, it might take a lot of time now - but computers in 5 years will do it in a matter of minutes,
First, even with moors law, that is an exaggeration. What was impossible within the lifetime of the universe may be reduced to years if 5 years, but it will likely take 15-20 years before it can be done in minutes, barring widespread deployment of quantum computing.
Second, this only applies to traditional cryptography. Anyone making use of quantum-entanglement cryptographic approaches will have effectively unbreakable encryption regardless of computing power. It is possible, it just isn't easy, or feasable with today's technologies.
Secondly, let's assume your premise is correct, that Catholicism is dominant. If the people of Africa wouldn't use condoms for fear of eternal damnation, why ON EARTH would they have premarital sex with multiple partners? If they have such strong religious beliefs in terms of sexual practice, who left out this latter core belief in their indoctrination? It just doesn't add up. If this logic was consistent, the Republic of Ireland would have 99% of their population infected.
Premarital sex is not considered nearly as serious a sin in current Catholic doctrine as using a condom, or taking birth control. The former is a minor picadello (even in the extreme case, if you are a priest molesting a child entrusted to your care. And no, this isn't a gratuitious stab at the obvious hypocracy of that particular religious order, it exemplifies the difference in severity of the "sin" as defined by that religion. Priests, and lay persons, are routinely forgiven of extreme sexual acts that even mainstream, relatively hedonistic non-religious people would balk at, and allowed to continue their church functions virtually uninterrupted, in stark contrast to using a condom), whereas using birth control is roughly eqauted with having an abortion, which in turn is roughly equated to murder.
As for your naive assumption that conditions in Ireland are in any way analogous to conditions in Africa, your entire premise falls apart. Ireland enjoys a much higher level of education than the African nations in question, and as we all know, the best, indeed the only true innoculant against religion is education.
It is not surprising that most Irish, or for that matter most American, Catholics tell their church to stuff it when told not to use condoms (though even in well-educated America there are a lot of Catholic youth scared to use condoms). To expect the same level of sophistication from countries whos populations are impoverished and largely uneducated is utterly unrelialistic.
Lastly, don't forget that the church pours big time and money into African AIDS relief efforts. And unlike many other religions, Catholic relief efforts do not necessarily mean proselytizing missions.
And I'm sure that is a great comfort to the thousands of Africans (and others) who have unnecissarilly contracted AIDS because they made the lethal mistake of taking their churche's doctrine to heart, rather than dismissing it as the foolish nonsense that it is and protecting themselves.
I respect your opinion that Catholics have a job ahead of them in terms of reform, but you're just making some mean, inaccurate conjectures to support an anti-religion stance.
Nonsense. Nothing I have said is conjecture, it is all publicly available information. You may not believe that the 30% - 60% estimates of Catholic population of these countries is accurate (though I suspect when the church is touting the "good" it does, those numbers suddenly are considered much more reliable). Having spent time in Kenya, Tanzania, and elsewhere I can tell you that the estimates are not inaccurate... Christianity is pretty dominant everywhere except along the coast (where Islam is more dominant, or at least as dominant) and in the bush (where the old Masai ways tend to be adhered to at least to some degree, though even there there is a great deal of Christian influence), and the impact on those cultures is anything but "good."
As with most places where Christianity is pushing the old culture aside, there is a mix (going to mass on Sunday and doing some pagan rituals at other times, etc., with the Christian beliefs taking on more dominance with each generation).
One thing is absolutely certain, however.
With the exception of a well educated elite, none of the normal people in these places, whether living in an old Masai village and practicing Christianity only occasionally, or living in the city and attending mass every sunday, are in any way equipped to dismiss the full authority of the church when it tells them, with all the authority it can bring to bear, that wearing condoms is a terrible sin.
We in the west take our high education, critical thinking skills, skepticism, and our resultant (relative) freedom from religious oppression for granted... most people in the world, unfortunately, lack this luxury and, as believers, are profoundly vulnerable to the depridations these sorts of idiotic policies, like the Vatican's condemnation of condoms and birth control, result in.
And, unfortunately, the number of people dying as a result reflect this ugly and unpleasant fact.
It isn't I being cruel toward the Catholic church, it is the Catholic church which is being unspeakably cruel to the poorest, most vulnerable people on the Earth, and they, and that church, and its advocates, should feel nothing but deep shame for what they are doing.
Now, go away to www.blender3d.com [blender3d.com] and read that page... and then come back and continue to read.
Yes, Blender is closed sourced, but it will be GPLed or get a similar license, with all old and new development released, hopefully this will happen soon, I long for a new dose of blender...
That is indeed good news (and I've quoted you so that those reading at +2 will see a portion of your comment and perhaps click on 'parent' to read more).
I've been periodically checking out http://blender.nl/ for news, but thus far haven't seen anything at all promising. Is there any news on how close the Free Blender Fund is to reaching its 100,000 Euro target for purchasing the sources and releasing it under a Free License?
In any event, thanks for the very informative link (and you are right, truevision is cool as well).
License isn't as bad as people make it out to be
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POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered
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· Score: 3, Insightful
While you are correct in pointing out that POV-RAY isn't free software (and probably doesn't meet the "open source" definition either), the license isn't as draconian or bad as you make it out to be.
Not only that, but the developers plan on doing a rewrite for version 4, that will allow them to release it under a more permissive license (remember, lots of people contributed to the project under the current license, so chaning it is hard).
The most restrictive part of the license has to do with using other artists' images, which really isn't too terribly different from any other modellers or renderers out there. While I support and advocate Free Media and a public commons of art for all of us to draw upon in our creativity, this restriction is on the art, not the use of the software.
From the horses mouth:
While this explanation doesn't really belong in this document, we are asked it often enough that we have decided to put it here. While the POV-Ray(TM) source code is freely available, it isn't 'open' according to the currently popular definition of the term (meaning that it isn't available to create derivative works other than fully functional versions of POV-Ray). The reasons for this are historical. Primarily, at the time that POV-Ray(TM) was originally developed (starting in about 1990), on Compuserve, it was a different environment than today. Virtually none of the developers had internet access and there wasn't a great awareness of things like the GPL. The team at that time rolled their own license - one that allowed free use of the software but attempted to prevent people taking unfair advantage of it.
As people contributed code to POV-Ray(TM) over the years - and there have been many instances of this - they contributed it to us on the understanding that it would be covered by the POV-Ray(TM) license, as it stood at the time. Now, in 2001, we find that in many cases we don't know who wrote what part of the code, or that the author is uncontactable. We simply don't have the right to arbitrarily change the terms under which their source code is distributed. Even though it was contributed to us, we feel that we must honor the terms under which it was given. Therefore, POV- Ray(TM) will remain on this existing license until we do a full re-write (which is intended for v4), at which time a new license will be instituted that is far more liberal in terms of reuse.
It seems relatively clear to me that they would like to release the next version, once it has been rewritten, under a GPL-type license (probably not a *BSD style license based on their historical experiences with people remarketing their work, which led to this somewhat restrictive license in the first place). Their license predates the GPL, and they seem to imply at several points that the GPL, or a license like it, would be sufficient to protect their concerns and guarantee the freedom of their project, which if you read the history section of the aforequoted document, is their main concern.
Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
So many modellers have the opposite problem... no (free as in freedom) rendering engine. For older versions of POV there were various modellers of various quality... none quite up to Blender or Lightwave's quality IIRC, though it's been a couple of years since I've looked for one (like you, I'm now back in the market, however).
Don't say "Blender"
I agree, but not for the same reason as you. Blender is a closed-source product that stores its data in a proprietary format...when Blender goes away, all that hard work and all those cool animations become so many random bits.
- that has to be the most obtuse UI ever programmed.
Here I disagree. For many things Blender has the easiest interface I've seen (for others things like Lightwave are better). It is different that what users of Lightwave would be used to, but it is by no means obtuse. Indeed, things like their particle system and spline animation controls are fantastic. Just because you're used to something doesn't necessarilly mean thats the best way to go about doing it (the same goes for some Blender bigots who dismiss other modellers as well... as far as I've seen none of the modellers have a monopoly on the Right Way to do things, and some manage to make things easy that the others complicate, by virtue of the GUI design choices made).
However, I too would be interested in a good modeller and animation choreographer frontend to POV. Perhaps its time for a few of us to get together and start throwing one together.:-)
Translation: "Be sufficiently cowed by my pre-emtive ad-homonim attack so as not to speak out on this important issue"
Unless I misunderstood, they are not saying that they would consider charging for IP.
This is deceptive semantics. It makes no difference whether it is the w3c charging a patent royalty, or Microsoft charging a patent royalty. If the royalty is requried to adhere to a w3c standard because the fools have incorporated patented material into the standard, then the damage is done regardless of who the web/browser authors have to pay the Vig to, and a once open and free (beer, speech) standard will have become much less open and very unfree, i.e. it will have become worse than worthless to the majority of small web publishers and free software authors, it will have become something to be actively avoided.
It appears to me that they were discussing how to handle standards proposals that included licensable, royalty work. That the normal(?) process is to break a specification into non-royalty works and royalty works in such a way that the non-royalty works would not depend on the royalty works and that the royalty works would be farmed out to another organization.
There is already a procedure in place: do not allow patent-encumbered works into open internet standards, period. As another poster pointed out, which part of No! No! No! didn't they understand the last time around? This is an attempt to change the procedure to allow something which, for very good reason, is disallowed now, i.e. the incorporation of patented procedures into w3c standards that will result in an open and free standard becoming encumbered, less open, and not free at all (in any sense).
In other words, this is yet another sordid attempt to sneak patented work into the standard through the back door, and it deserves every bit of derision and outrage it is getting.
We're paying them for our connection. Why do they care what we do with it after that?
Because their efforts to pigeonhole human beings into predictable consumers who do only what they anticipate, and nothing creative, is failing, and with it quite possibly their flawed business models.
These are the same people who misguidedly think that bandwidth is something that can be "stolen" (never mind the dictionary definition of the word) and would probably accuse you of "stealing" temperature if you went to a shopping mall to enjoy the warm air (in winter) or air conditioning (in summer) without buying anything.
The fact that you can't steal temperature, any more than you can steal bandwidth, doesn't seem to bother the purveyors of such newspeak in the least, and such nuances as the fact that you might be guilty of loitering (in the shopping mall example), or of violating the terms of your service contract (with your ISP), but not stealing, seems to be completely lost on such people.
One can only hope the FBI, who in many such instances have become judge, jury, and executioner (or at least "fine levyer" in the form of stolen, or seized, equipment) eventually catches on to this and starts putting their resources into fighting real crimes, rather than one-sidedly settling contract disputes extra-judicially.
In the meantime, expect "theft" to become an even more abused word than "terrorism," if it hasn't already.
Okay, I've heard this one to many times, and am sick of it. Information does not want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. It is just information.
"Information wants to be free!" is a geeky way of stating a rather obvious truth, one that was apparent two hundred years ago when Thomas Jefferson criticized the notion of patents and copyrights, long before the "information age" (i.e. the Intenet) ever dawned, to wit:
In the absence of profoundly draconian laws, and letigious thugs (IP lawyers) who go around over-reaching even those laws, information will almost always tend to flow widely and freely.
The entire concept of copyright was created by the British to counteract exactly this tendency by facilitating widespread and draconian censorship of the printing press (how easier can it get if you legislate printing monopolies from the outset and keep the press out of the hands of the unwashed masses... exactly analogous to what ICANN is doing here). The notion of "artists' rights" was never a part of the formation of copyright... and it was only added later, as an afterthought, in order to justify keeping the same draconian controls on information in place (to the benefit of those printing monopolists and the politicians to whome they answered, i.e the publishers. It is no coincidence that the RIAA, MPAA, and publishers profit far more than artists under the current regime... that was exactly how it was designed to work).
The founding fathers of the United States bought this justification hook, line, and sinker, empowering tremendous forces to limit and control the flow of information ever since. The free press (which isn't so free) acted as a minor counter force for a time, but as anyone whose carreer has been shitcanned by the recording industry, or anyone whose book has been privished by their publisher, will tell you, it aint much of a countering force when it puts the freedom in the same hands as those who have been granted control of the information through government fiat anyway.
Information, in its natural state, does tend to flow freely.
We've created an entire genre of draconian, invasive law (so much so that we have a different class of lawyers, who take a different bar exam, just for the genre of law. Yes, I'm talking about IP lawyers) to limit and prevent the free flow of information. The reason the laws are so complex, so pervasive, so draconian, and so invasive is precisely because information does tend to otherwise flow so freely. This has always been the case... it has merely become obvious to even the most casual observer now that we have the Internet to expose us to this process.
When I was in college I worked a couple of summers as an intern at a nuclear power station.
At the time, I naively bought into the propoganda of "clean energy, more radiation comes from the sun than a nuclear power plant," etc.
Even then, though, I'll never forget the response of one of the managers when someone asked "what about the waste?"
The reply was (paraphrased) "We can store about 20 years of waste here, on-site, but it's the government's job to find a perminent solution."
Unbelievable. An entire industry, creating some of the most toxic materials ever created by man, whose attitude was basically "don't worry, the government will clean up our mess." These are probably the same people who bitch and moan about "big government" and want less regulation, and frankly the entire nuclear storage facility is a huge government subsidy of a dangerous and economically unviable industry, demanded by said industry at the point of a radioactive gun.
As you might have guess, over the years as I've grown older, and wiser, my opinion on nuclear power has changed 180 degrees.
You are right, we have only our "decision makers" to blame for this, but lets not forget that most of those decision makers are not government politicians so much as CEOs of large utility companies that have neglected their own, most basic responsibilities throughout this entire process.
Seriously... how long would you last wearing a 'FUCK AMERICA - UBL FOR PRESIDENT' T-shirt in the US? Its the same with 'blasphemous' T-shirts in the Vatican -- except the Vatican doens't kill people who try that anymore.
First, you won't get killed in America for wearing such a T-shirt either (unless you go out of your way to get out to some obscure redneck bar on the ass of the world, somewhere in the deep south or Texas, but then, you're endangering yourself if you go hang out with such yahoos regardless, where people have been hassled for wearing a FreeBSD T-shirt because "it has the devil on it." Kind of like going to South-Central LA dressed as a Klansman, and I would warrant that if you go looking for trouble deliberately like this, you'll have similiar results in just about any country in the world. Try wearing Nazi regalia into a bar in Germany, or France, or the Netherlands, or a T-shirt with a pakistani flag on it in Delhi, etc.).
And don't be so sure and self righteous in making the claim that the vatican isn't killing people. If you talk someone into jumping off a cliff, and they reluctantly take your advice, you are most certainly a party to murder (Dr. Kavorkian in contrast never talked anyone into suicide, he just lent a hand to those who'd already decided, but I digress). The Vatican has actively been discouraging suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H believers in Africa not to use condoms, even to prevent the spread of AIDS (with the Vatican knowing full well that without condoms the disease would spread faster and wider than otherwise), threatening those poor men and women with an eternity of torment by fire if they take that small precaution against the spread of AIDS (and those poor people believe that nonsense and take the Vatican's admonitions to heart). This influence, with the full weight and authority of the church behind it, has helped fuel an epidemic which has killed millions, and as far as I'm concerned much of that blood is on the Vatican's hands. I won't go into the racial component of this atrocity, except to say that it wouldn't surprise me if some of the old, white men in the upper echelons of the Vatican weren't secretly pleased with the results of their policies.
So the Vatican may not kill you for beshmirching the name of a legendary, likely never-having-existed woman who sired the bastard Christian demigod Jesus (though they do apparently think nothing of violating your basic right of free expression for doing so), but they'll certainly encourage you to kill yourself via unsafe sex, especially if you're an African.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it's GNU/Warez
:)
heh! Actually, wouldn't it be GNV/L1NuX W4r3z, or is the u->v valid only when it is written in stone?
*snip*
:= real lost revinue the company would have gotten were it not for copyright violators := profit per copy of software company makes when it is purchased legally. This isn't the same as the retail price, as Id probably makes domething less than the $30.00 sticker price of a retail copy of Quake, for example. := Number of copies obtained illegally := Ratio of people who would have paid for the software had they not gotten an illegal copy over the total number who got a copy illegally (value 0.0 - 1.0),
:= C * P * N
"It's cool to release something that costs $18,000," said Mr. Grimes, the DrinkorDie member from Arlington, Tex. "Basically, if it wasn't for us, you would never see this piece of software."
*snip*
I understand how they figure that companies "lose money" whenever they're software is pirated. But do they figure into those billions of lost dollars statements like the one above? Seems to me it's hard to find out just how much money the software companies are really losing because not all people who pirate their software are people who would ever pay for it.
If we define
R
P
N
and
C
then
R
C is a value between 0.0 and 1.0, and probably almost never equals 1.0. E.g. if out of 500 copyright violators 250 would have bought the program otherwise, while the other 250 would have done without, C = 0.5
Still, the worst part is that because software piracy is so rampant, it enables people who would (can?) pay for proper licensing for software to obtain illegal licenses.
Actually, the value of money lost probably approaches $0.00 the more expensive the software becomes. I suspect C is quite high for really cheap software that is copied illegally, while it approaches 0.0 for really expensive software copied illegally.
Two factors play a significant role in this: (1) commercial entities almost always want to have their licensing in order (due to audits, liability, etc.) and (b) individuals have very limited budgets (comparitavly speaking).
I doubt very much a single copyright violator of an $18,000 program would have purchased it legally had it not been available on the internet. Indeed, I suspect C = 0.0000 in that particular example.
On the other hand, illegal copies of a $50.00 program (e.g a game) probably do mean that some percentage would have gone out and spent $50.00 on it had they not obtained it, so C is probably higher.
For a $2.00 piece of software (assuming its really easy to find and pay for), C probably approaches 0.9 or higher.
Of course, even this equation ignores the effect of advertising (someone copies the $18,000 program, then finds a need for it in their professional life and talks their employer into purchasing one or more copies), as well as the 'bleedoff' effect (a kid copies one $50.00 game, but goes and spends the $50.00 he would have spent on the first game on another game instead, perhaps by the same company, perhaps by a competitor. Statistically, assuming both games are roughly the same popularity, this is a wash, and neither company loses anything despite the kids having twice as many games as they could have afforded). It also ignores the very common practice of 'try before you buy', where people will in fact borrow a friend's copy of a commercial package, use it, get used to it, then quite often chose to buy a copy (for the documentation, for support, etc.).
I think it is obvious even to the IP zealots out there that the real losses due to copyright violations are tiny fractions of the amounts being deceitfully presented to the FBI and the courts, and in some cases (e.g. Napster) copyright violations have been shown to have the opposite effect, and even increase sales.
Sure Warez Dude!
;-)
Gentoo
Source Mage
Debian
Freshmeat - More Free Wares than you can shake a stick at.
Course, in the world of Free Software we don't need to write wares with a Z, 'cuase it's already free.
No. You were defining taking (or copying) something because you want it as theft, then using that definition to 'prove' that taking something because you want it is theft. Classic circular reasoning, and a sure sign of a very limited intellect.
You are correct, though, you are making tautologies right and left
Even replicating something you earnestly desire does not, and never has, equalled "theft" or "stealing" in the English language, or under U.S. law.
In other words, you can't think of a reason why you should be allowed to ignore my requirements for copying while I have to honour yours (as enshrined in the GPL) so I must be a troll again.
Your GPL ignorance is astounding. Either you are a troll (most likely) or you are woefully ignorant and should do a little research before displaying such ignorance for all too see.
The GPL is an imperfect attempt to insure freedom in a society, and within a legal regime, that is designed to destroy freedom when it comes to sharing so-called intellectual property. As such, it is only required because there is copyright, and is a countermeasure against said restrictions. Get rid of copyright and you get rid of the need for a license such as the GPL.
But you probably already knew this. If not, 3 seconds on google (or slashdot's search facility) would have made this clear, had you bothered.
Your last sentence clearly identifies you as a troll, as does your posting history (as another pointed out). I only respond this one last time to hopefully insure the idiocy you display does not mislead another. As for reasoning, I've already pointed you toward a resource where you can remedy your sore lack of education and understanding. As with the proverbial horse being led to water, no one can force you to drink.
Now go educate yourself, troll. While you've provided me with a good, hearty laugh over lunch, I am not your teacher, and I'm through feeding you. Drink, or don't drink and remain ignorant
It's not a potential sale, it's an actual one. You wanted to use the product (that's why you stole it), you took it, you didn't pay. Theft.
... your ability to remain ignornant on that subject while reading slashdot indicates a level of deliberate obtuseness normally reserved for Microsoft astroturfers and Trolls, a level of intelligence beneath that of the average non-human primate, or both.
Your need of remedial education is even more severe than I first believed.
Hint: The above is circular reasoning. Look it up. ("You wanted to use the product, that is why you stole it, therefor it is theft"?)
As for your GPL troll
Again, look it up.
Imagine if Coors Lite was called "American Beer", and "I Am American" was trumpeted as a commercial slogan in commercials for an inferior product!
I don't need to imagine it. I've lived overseas a number of times, and we Americans have the emberressment of "Budweiser, King of Beers" being promoted (successfully) in such places as the UK, Germany, and elsewhere as (a) the quitisential American beer (despite our numerous excellent brews (especially our Micro-brews), this is the bottled urin most of the world associates with American beer.
What makes it even more emberrassing is that the label closely resembles the 'true' Budweiser of Czech fame, Budweiser Budvar, which in contrast to the American pisswater variety is one of the finest Pilsners on the planet. Only Corporate American arrogance could ever lead to such a situation, where a nasty, cheap knockoff of arguably one of the world's finest pilsners has the audacity to call itself the King of Beers and even try to displace that which it mimics so poorly in that product's native markets.
Kind of sheds an interesting light on the psychology of the Corporate Moghuls fleecing our economy and driving into the ground these days (cf Enron, Xerox, Worldcom, and a whole bunch more coming soon to a courtroom near you).
You realize ".tm" would only be meaningful to people who use the English word "Trademark" don't you? If we're really trying for a valid, international solution, it won't depend on abbreviations of English legal terms.
.tm would be the best approach.
//china//domain.tlds and reserve a TLD for chinese trademarks that ends in some chinese character(s) I can't type here. Ditto for any other language purists out there.
.tm style domains, and kept out of the mainstream domains the rest of us use, I really couldn't care less if there is one, or a 100, such little domains, or what language the TLD characters are taken from.
Unless you would like to push for Esperanto as the Official Language of the Internet (I would support you in this argument, even though it would mean I'd have to learn Esperanto from scratch), I think you are going to have to concede, and live with the fact, that English is the defacto language of the internet, and that for the domain system to work at all we have to accept that, to some degree.
Thus,
However, it isn't as simple as that, because, with more than one root authority to choose from, China could, for example, have
As long as Trademark nonsense is reserved for
Your argument only works if the price of the thing stolen is so high that a single sale would cover the cost of making it and if that sale had already occured. Pretty stupid argument.
Once again, you demonstrate why a modicum of education on intellectual property would be very useful before people begin banging away on their keyboards when discussing, or in your case, trolling, this particular subject.
Lost potential sales does not, and never has, equaled theft, either in law, or in common use of speech (outside of rhetoric deliberately employed by copyright and intellectual property cartels, which hardly counts as it is intended to change the language to their political advantage).
Your argument requires that deprivation of potential sales would equal theft (which in fact would make every act of competition equal to "theft."). A pretty stupid argument.
Oh, and by the way, I do make my own literature, art, and movies available, freely, under a GPL-like license, so unlike trolls like yourself I actually do put my money where my mouth is.
Thank you for playing.
I'm afraid it has to be this:
e .c ity.il.us.tm
sweatshopsweats.textile.full.postal.address.her
In some jurisdictions perhaps (and this would be an area where states might want to be responsible for their own state.us.tm, and other countries for their country.tm domains), but when I registered a trademark in Illinois it was for a particular area of business in the entire state. Hence:
trademark.area-of-business.state.country.tm is sufficient to uniquely identify my trademark.
Had I registered a national trademark, then
trademark.area-of-business.us.tm would have been enough.
It seems that microsoft.org is owned by a very large company (Microsoft) and isn't even being used. Could they be holding out to sell it to the highest bidder? Or, is this just another example of Cybersquatting?
... what a coup d'etat that was) that make Enron, Xerox, and WorldCom look pristine in comparison, I doubt you'll ever see cybersquatting proceeding taken against a corporate interest such as Microsoft, at least not until we start using an alternative root authority such as Opennic instead.
In one of my responses to the "What We Need" thread, I briefly outlined a name dispute resolution standard that would, in fact, consider Microsoft.org to be cybersquatting (unless it resolves to a real machine in some protocol, like ftp.microsoft.org, or http://microsoft.org/, etc).
Since we're dealing with profoundly corrupt corporate shills in ICANN (including controlling intersts by the MPAA and RIAA
The problem is, more than one entity can detain the same trademark in different juridictions, or even in the same juridiction if the markets are sufficiently different.
... as a .tm domain, you can fight that out in court with sweatshopsweats.com of New York or New Delhi, just as you would any other trademark clash in the real world.
.tm domain be the sole domain for such festering nonsense. Everything else is on a 'first come, first serve' basis, (with a reasonable anti-squatting procedure in place ... i.e. if you've owned a domain name for X time, but not made use of it, you become a candidate for dispute resolution proceedings if anyone else wants it).
The solution is relativley trivial.
You have a trademark on textiles, in Illinois, for SweatShopSweats, but no national (or international) trademark? Fine, you get:
sweatshopsweats.textile.il.us.tm
That is the only domain name you are legally entitled to have. Any other domain names you get, such as sweatshopsweats.com, etc. are yours if you get 'em first, but you have no legal right to the name. Ditto with, say 'sweatshopsweats.tm'
You agree to this, in your contract, when you register your domain name with 'somefreenic' TLD authority.
Let the
Trademark disputes should be completely removed from every non-.tm domain space, period, for the very reasons you cite (among others).
A lot of (heavily tech impaired) users have trouble understanding that there are TLD's besides ".com"
/dev/null \;
Yes.
It is absurd for us to hold ourselves to the least common denominator. A degree of literacy is required to make use of the internet and the web. Claiming otherwise, or even claiming that pandering to illiteracy would be a good thing, is akin to arguing for the replacement of text in all the books in all our libraries with color pictures because the "reading-impaired" can't understand all those big words.
The sooner we divest ourselves of these sorts of idiotic fallacies and begin educating people so that they can make sensible use of technology, the sooner people will begin to have a positive, useful computing experience (rather than the constant frustration most people are confronted with today).
Note that this doesn't mean everyone needs to understand what
find / -type f -exec grep blah {}
means, nor does it mean that so-called "user friendly" interfaces are a bad thing (when properly implimented to facilitate knowledge and understanding, not obscure it) but basic concepts such as IP addresses, domain names, registrars, root authorities, filesystems, network connections, system memory, system storage, are something anyone wishing to use a computer should be required and expected to understand.
A modern computer connected to the internet has a lot more in common with a library than it does a toaster, and it is time we started treating it as such.
Michael, you guys are so two-faced, it's unbelievable. You people will go on and on about you guys aren't stealing music and other IP, but go apeshit when the evil, nasty corporations are stealing domain names (another form of IP).
Nonsense. When someone violates copyright they are not stealing anything. Neither the original creator, nor those who comply with the creator's copyrights, nor those others who do not, are being deprived of anything. Hence, by the very defintion of the word 'stealing,' no theft is taking place. This is why the law clearly differentiates between theft and copyright violation, and a remedial understanding of this should be required before idiots like yourself start banging away on their keyboards.
As to domanin names, the original holder of the domain name is most definitely being deprived of that name, i.e. the name is being taken away from them.
Does this make it theft? Arguably so, since this is being done in an extralegal fashion (not via a court of law). It is arguable that it isn't, since virtually every registrar has a clause in the contract you sign basically saying "you're paying for this, but we can deprive you of it anytime we like, for any reason we like, and you agree to this." However, it remains to be seen whether or not such contract clauses are in fact enforcable (in any other industry they would clearly not be enforcable). If it turns out that this notion of 'we can deprive you of the service you've paid for anytime we like' is in fact an illegal stipulation, then that portion of the contract is void, and depriving a party of the domain name for which they paid would in fact arguably be "theft" of a sort. Certainly more so than most of the things people around here like to label "theft."
Either way, it is in no way analogous to copyright violation, bandwidth misuse, or any number of other things which are constantly, and erroneously, being called theft around here.
Slashdot hypocrisy 101.
Idiocy 101, more like it.
What we need is to dump ICANN. However, it isn't feasable to do this in one fell swoop, at least not yet.
.tm domain for trademarked names, to which trademark disputes would be confined (ie. anyone can register mtv.com, but only the owner of the MTV trademark can register mtv.tm).
So, instead, we need DNS resolution in our libraries (glibc, etc.) and our internet applications (browsers, ftp & ssh clients, etc.) that include the concept of multiple root authorities, with easilly settable defaults.
Need to go to ICANN's unix.org? Fine, click a pulldown tab in your Mozilla 2.0 browser and select ICANN, or better yet, type http://icann//unix.org/ . Otherwise, stick with http://freenic//unix.org/ or (if opennic ever decides to dump ICANN peering) http://opennic//unix.org/
Obviously, old nomenclature would remain in place, using the system default for root authority (presumably Opennic and not ICANN).
It is only this approach, that will default to freedom but allow those of us who need to access ICANN-managed sites (most of the web today) to cross the line at will, that will enable us to free ourselves from ICANN's grip while still being able to make sensible use of the web.
Whether the alternative becomes Opennic, or some new entity ('freenic' anyone?) it needs to be constructed with a solid, equitable constitution that preserves freedom of speech above everything else, and does not favor large corporate or government interests over the rights of individuals, with an open, public, and fair judicial process for resolving name disputes. Ideally it would also include a
What the hell is that? Anything can be broken. Sure, it might take a lot of time now - but computers in 5 years will do it in a matter of minutes,
First, even with moors law, that is an exaggeration. What was impossible within the lifetime of the universe may be reduced to years if 5 years, but it will likely take 15-20 years before it can be done in minutes, barring widespread deployment of quantum computing.
Second, this only applies to traditional cryptography. Anyone making use of quantum-entanglement cryptographic approaches will have effectively unbreakable encryption regardless of computing power. It is possible, it just isn't easy, or feasable with today's technologies.
Secondly, let's assume your premise is correct, that Catholicism is dominant. If the people of Africa wouldn't use condoms for fear of eternal damnation, why ON EARTH would they have premarital sex with multiple partners? If they have such strong religious beliefs in terms of sexual practice, who left out this latter core belief in their indoctrination? It just doesn't add up. If this logic was consistent, the Republic of Ireland would have 99% of their population infected.
... Christianity is pretty dominant everywhere except along the coast (where Islam is more dominant, or at least as dominant) and in the bush (where the old Masai ways tend to be adhered to at least to some degree, though even there there is a great deal of Christian influence), and the impact on those cultures is anything but "good."
... most people in the world, unfortunately, lack this luxury and, as believers, are profoundly vulnerable to the depridations these sorts of idiotic policies, like the Vatican's condemnation of condoms and birth control, result in.
Premarital sex is not considered nearly as serious a sin in current Catholic doctrine as using a condom, or taking birth control. The former is a minor picadello (even in the extreme case, if you are a priest molesting a child entrusted to your care. And no, this isn't a gratuitious stab at the obvious hypocracy of that particular religious order, it exemplifies the difference in severity of the "sin" as defined by that religion. Priests, and lay persons, are routinely forgiven of extreme sexual acts that even mainstream, relatively hedonistic non-religious people would balk at, and allowed to continue their church functions virtually uninterrupted, in stark contrast to using a condom), whereas using birth control is roughly eqauted with having an abortion, which in turn is roughly equated to murder.
As for your naive assumption that conditions in Ireland are in any way analogous to conditions in Africa, your entire premise falls apart. Ireland enjoys a much higher level of education than the African nations in question, and as we all know, the best, indeed the only true innoculant against religion is education.
It is not surprising that most Irish, or for that matter most American, Catholics tell their church to stuff it when told not to use condoms (though even in well-educated America there are a lot of Catholic youth scared to use condoms). To expect the same level of sophistication from countries whos populations are impoverished and largely uneducated is utterly unrelialistic.
Lastly, don't forget that the church pours big time and money into African AIDS relief efforts. And unlike many other religions, Catholic relief efforts do not necessarily mean proselytizing missions.
And I'm sure that is a great comfort to the thousands of Africans (and others) who have unnecissarilly contracted AIDS because they made the lethal mistake of taking their churche's doctrine to heart, rather than dismissing it as the foolish nonsense that it is and protecting themselves.
I respect your opinion that Catholics have a job ahead of them in terms of reform, but you're just making some mean, inaccurate conjectures to support an anti-religion stance.
Nonsense. Nothing I have said is conjecture, it is all publicly available information. You may not believe that the 30% - 60% estimates of Catholic population of these countries is accurate (though I suspect when the church is touting the "good" it does, those numbers suddenly are considered much more reliable). Having spent time in Kenya, Tanzania, and elsewhere I can tell you that the estimates are not inaccurate
As with most places where Christianity is pushing the old culture aside, there is a mix (going to mass on Sunday and doing some pagan rituals at other times, etc., with the Christian beliefs taking on more dominance with each generation).
One thing is absolutely certain, however.
With the exception of a well educated elite, none of the normal people in these places, whether living in an old Masai village and practicing Christianity only occasionally, or living in the city and attending mass every sunday, are in any way equipped to dismiss the full authority of the church when it tells them, with all the authority it can bring to bear, that wearing condoms is a terrible sin.
We in the west take our high education, critical thinking skills, skepticism, and our resultant (relative) freedom from religious oppression for granted
And, unfortunately, the number of people dying as a result reflect this ugly and unpleasant fact.
It isn't I being cruel toward the Catholic church, it is the Catholic church which is being unspeakably cruel to the poorest, most vulnerable people on the Earth, and they, and that church, and its advocates, should feel nothing but deep shame for what they are doing.
Now, go away to www.blender3d.com [blender3d.com] and read that page... and then come back and continue to read.
Yes, Blender is closed sourced, but it will be GPLed or get a similar license, with all old and new development released, hopefully this will happen soon, I long for a new dose of blender...
That is indeed good news (and I've quoted you so that those reading at +2 will see a portion of your comment and perhaps click on 'parent' to read more).
I've been periodically checking out http://blender.nl/ for news, but thus far haven't seen anything at all promising. Is there any news on how close the Free Blender Fund is to reaching its 100,000 Euro target for purchasing the sources and releasing it under a Free License?
In any event, thanks for the very informative link (and you are right, truevision is cool as well).
Not only that, but the developers plan on doing a rewrite for version 4, that will allow them to release it under a more permissive license (remember, lots of people contributed to the project under the current license, so chaning it is hard).
The most restrictive part of the license has to do with using other artists' images, which really isn't too terribly different from any other modellers or renderers out there. While I support and advocate Free Media and a public commons of art for all of us to draw upon in our creativity, this restriction is on the art, not the use of the software.
From the horses mouth: [Reference]
It seems relatively clear to me that they would like to release the next version, once it has been rewritten, under a GPL-type license (probably not a *BSD style license based on their historical experiences with people remarketing their work, which led to this somewhat restrictive license in the first place). Their license predates the GPL, and they seem to imply at several points that the GPL, or a license like it, would be sufficient to protect their concerns and guarantee the freedom of their project, which if you read the history section of the aforequoted document, is their main concern.
So many modellers have the opposite problem ... no (free as in freedom) rendering engine. For older versions of POV there were various modellers of various quality ... none quite up to Blender or Lightwave's quality IIRC, though it's been a couple of years since I've looked for one (like you, I'm now back in the market, however).
... as far as I've seen none of the modellers have a monopoly on the Right Way to do things, and some manage to make things easy that the others complicate, by virtue of the GUI design choices made).
:-)
Don't say "Blender"
I agree, but not for the same reason as you. Blender is a closed-source product that stores its data in a proprietary format...when Blender goes away, all that hard work and all those cool animations become so many random bits.
- that has to be the most obtuse UI ever programmed.
Here I disagree. For many things Blender has the easiest interface I've seen (for others things like Lightwave are better). It is different that what users of Lightwave would be used to, but it is by no means obtuse. Indeed, things like their particle system and spline animation controls are fantastic. Just because you're used to something doesn't necessarilly mean thats the best way to go about doing it (the same goes for some Blender bigots who dismiss other modellers as well
However, I too would be interested in a good modeller and animation choreographer frontend to POV. Perhaps its time for a few of us to get together and start throwing one together.
Don't get your panties in a wad just yet
Translation: "Be sufficiently cowed by my pre-emtive ad-homonim attack so as not to speak out on this important issue"
Unless I misunderstood, they are not saying that they would consider charging for IP.
This is deceptive semantics. It makes no difference whether it is the w3c charging a patent royalty, or Microsoft charging a patent royalty. If the royalty is requried to adhere to a w3c standard because the fools have incorporated patented material into the standard, then the damage is done regardless of who the web/browser authors have to pay the Vig to, and a once open and free (beer, speech) standard will have become much less open and very unfree, i.e. it will have become worse than worthless to the majority of small web publishers and free software authors, it will have become something to be actively avoided.
It appears to me that they were discussing how to handle standards proposals that included licensable, royalty work. That the normal(?) process is to break a specification into non-royalty works and royalty works in such a way that the non-royalty works would not depend on the royalty works and that the royalty works would be farmed out to another organization.
There is already a procedure in place: do not allow patent-encumbered works into open internet standards, period. As another poster pointed out, which part of No! No! No! didn't they understand the last time around? This is an attempt to change the procedure to allow something which, for very good reason, is disallowed now, i.e. the incorporation of patented procedures into w3c standards that will result in an open and free standard becoming encumbered, less open, and not free at all (in any sense).
In other words, this is yet another sordid attempt to sneak patented work into the standard through the back door, and it deserves every bit of derision and outrage it is getting.
We're paying them for our connection. Why do they care what we do with it after that?
Because their efforts to pigeonhole human beings into predictable consumers who do only what they anticipate, and nothing creative, is failing, and with it quite possibly their flawed business models.
These are the same people who misguidedly think that bandwidth is something that can be "stolen" (never mind the dictionary definition of the word) and would probably accuse you of "stealing" temperature if you went to a shopping mall to enjoy the warm air (in winter) or air conditioning (in summer) without buying anything.
The fact that you can't steal temperature, any more than you can steal bandwidth, doesn't seem to bother the purveyors of such newspeak in the least, and such nuances as the fact that you might be guilty of loitering (in the shopping mall example), or of violating the terms of your service contract (with your ISP), but not stealing, seems to be completely lost on such people.
One can only hope the FBI, who in many such instances have become judge, jury, and executioner (or at least "fine levyer" in the form of stolen, or seized, equipment) eventually catches on to this and starts putting their resources into fighting real crimes, rather than one-sidedly settling contract disputes extra-judicially.
In the meantime, expect "theft" to become an even more abused word than "terrorism," if it hasn't already.
"Information wants to be free!"
... exactly analogous to what ICANN is doing here). The notion of "artists' rights" was never a part of the formation of copyright ... and it was only added later, as an afterthought, in order to justify keeping the same draconian controls on information in place (to the benefit of those printing monopolists and the politicians to whome they answered, i.e the publishers. It is no coincidence that the RIAA, MPAA, and publishers profit far more than artists under the current regime ... that was exactly how it was designed to work).
... it has merely become obvious to even the most casual observer now that we have the Internet to expose us to this process.
Okay, I've heard this one to many times, and am sick of it. Information does not want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. It is just information.
"Information wants to be free!" is a geeky way of stating a rather obvious truth, one that was apparent two hundred years ago when Thomas Jefferson criticized the notion of patents and copyrights, long before the "information age" (i.e. the Intenet) ever dawned, to wit:
In the absence of profoundly draconian laws, and letigious thugs (IP lawyers) who go around over-reaching even those laws, information will almost always tend to flow widely and freely.
The entire concept of copyright was created by the British to counteract exactly this tendency by facilitating widespread and draconian censorship of the printing press (how easier can it get if you legislate printing monopolies from the outset and keep the press out of the hands of the unwashed masses
The founding fathers of the United States bought this justification hook, line, and sinker, empowering tremendous forces to limit and control the flow of information ever since. The free press (which isn't so free) acted as a minor counter force for a time, but as anyone whose carreer has been shitcanned by the recording industry, or anyone whose book has been privished by their publisher, will tell you, it aint much of a countering force when it puts the freedom in the same hands as those who have been granted control of the information through government fiat anyway.
Information, in its natural state, does tend to flow freely.
We've created an entire genre of draconian, invasive law (so much so that we have a different class of lawyers, who take a different bar exam, just for the genre of law. Yes, I'm talking about IP lawyers) to limit and prevent the free flow of information. The reason the laws are so complex, so pervasive, so draconian, and so invasive is precisely because information does tend to otherwise flow so freely. This has always been the case
erm, you don't have a basic right of free expression.
... yes you do, if your country is one of the signatories to the UN's charter of basic human rights, which last I checked Italy was.
Um
When I was in college I worked a couple of summers as an intern at a nuclear power station.
At the time, I naively bought into the propoganda of "clean energy, more radiation comes from the sun than a nuclear power plant," etc.
Even then, though, I'll never forget the response of one of the managers when someone asked "what about the waste?"
The reply was (paraphrased) "We can store about 20 years of waste here, on-site, but it's the government's job to find a perminent solution."
Unbelievable. An entire industry, creating some of the most toxic materials ever created by man, whose attitude was basically "don't worry, the government will clean up our mess." These are probably the same people who bitch and moan about "big government" and want less regulation, and frankly the entire nuclear storage facility is a huge government subsidy of a dangerous and economically unviable industry, demanded by said industry at the point of a radioactive gun.
As you might have guess, over the years as I've grown older, and wiser, my opinion on nuclear power has changed 180 degrees.
You are right, we have only our "decision makers" to blame for this, but lets not forget that most of those decision makers are not government politicians so much as CEOs of large utility companies that have neglected their own, most basic responsibilities throughout this entire process.
Seriously... how long would you last wearing a 'FUCK AMERICA - UBL FOR PRESIDENT' T-shirt in the US? Its the same with 'blasphemous' T-shirts in the Vatican -- except the Vatican doens't kill people who try that anymore.
First, you won't get killed in America for wearing such a T-shirt either (unless you go out of your way to get out to some obscure redneck bar on the ass of the world, somewhere in the deep south or Texas, but then, you're endangering yourself if you go hang out with such yahoos regardless, where people have been hassled for wearing a FreeBSD T-shirt because "it has the devil on it." Kind of like going to South-Central LA dressed as a Klansman, and I would warrant that if you go looking for trouble deliberately like this, you'll have similiar results in just about any country in the world. Try wearing Nazi regalia into a bar in Germany, or France, or the Netherlands, or a T-shirt with a pakistani flag on it in Delhi, etc.).
And don't be so sure and self righteous in making the claim that the vatican isn't killing people. If you talk someone into jumping off a cliff, and they reluctantly take your advice, you are most certainly a party to murder (Dr. Kavorkian in contrast never talked anyone into suicide, he just lent a hand to those who'd already decided, but I digress). The Vatican has actively been discouraging suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H believers in Africa not to use condoms, even to prevent the spread of AIDS (with the Vatican knowing full well that without condoms the disease would spread faster and wider than otherwise), threatening those poor men and women with an eternity of torment by fire if they take that small precaution against the spread of AIDS (and those poor people believe that nonsense and take the Vatican's admonitions to heart). This influence, with the full weight and authority of the church behind it, has helped fuel an epidemic which has killed millions, and as far as I'm concerned much of that blood is on the Vatican's hands. I won't go into the racial component of this atrocity, except to say that it wouldn't surprise me if some of the old, white men in the upper echelons of the Vatican weren't secretly pleased with the results of their policies.
So the Vatican may not kill you for beshmirching the name of a legendary, likely never-having-existed woman who sired the bastard Christian demigod Jesus (though they do apparently think nothing of violating your basic right of free expression for doing so), but they'll certainly encourage you to kill yourself via unsafe sex, especially if you're an African.