And for every looter there's about 50 honest people who are not looting.
You can't prove anything about human nature by using the extremes like Stalin and looters in a city.. you have to look at the whole - and in general we do tend to act for the good of society (which is a good evolutionary trait btw.).
For a start schools don't teach children how to use office packages (not in the UK at least). You go to night school as an adult for that.
Secondly those schools are on a budget and do *not* upgrade unless they absolutely have too.. I've never seen a school with anything newer than office 97.
Thirdly when these children start work the interface will have changed so much it won't be relevant anyway (have you taken a look at the clusterfuck that is the new office application? Try using that with only knowledge of office 97).
Fining a company 100% of turnover wouldn't achieve any goal other than bankcrupting the company. MS would pull out of europe before paying such a fine.
OTOH 10% of turnover is enough to hurt, but nowhere near enough to make it unprofitable to stay in the EU.
The EU isn't a government it's a collection of unrelated governments bound by treaty.
Similarly the EU court (which is separate) is also a product of the same treaty. It has some power over member states but only to enforce already agreed EU law - it couldn't unilaterally alter copyright status of Windows.
Governments would get involved. It would get very messy.
Most of the world is already somewhere between distrustful and hostile to the US... for some countries that would be enough to start chucking diplomats out.
*one* ISP (BT) has implemented that.. and not because the government told the too either (they wouldn't dare, even if they could understand what cleanfeed was). It was a PR move 2 years ago that backfired spectacularly.
If I want to buy Heroin with my credit card then the bank is only concerned with my credit rating. They are not remotely liable for what I do with the money.
If you're talking about stopping them refusing doing business with the CC processors that allofmp3 use (including Paypal!) well there's a shitload of law stopping the government restricting trade like that.
A lot of ISPs here make great noises about how they do *not* filter traffic (and many of them are uncapped also).
There's simply no framework to require them to filter it - they don't filter anything else, why this?
A friend who used to work at an ISP says the reason UK ISPs are so against filtering is it would jepoardise their common carrier status - at the moment they're not legally liable if someone accesses kiddie porn over their connection.. once they have filtering in place it one judgement to remove their immunity and force them to filter *everything* that could get them into trouble.
"Scientists predict that the pill to cure cancer will be available in about 5 years" "Scientists predict that the flying car will be available in the shops in about 5 years" etc. etc.
Papers like the daily mail take a few random facts and build an entire mythology around them... unfortunately they don't just do it for their science pieces - the daily mail is legendary for doing it with political issues too (google for the 'daily mail island' sketch.. still as funny now as it was then). Of course they're in a competition with the daily express for who can be most outrageously right wing (the mail - the paper that supported hitler just prior to WW2 - as a *massive* head start though).
At a show a debian guy handed me a copy of debian. He did *not* offer me source at that time. Is he in violation? Is debian breaking GPL by distributing their CD at shows without training their people to make offers of the source to everyone they meet?
Every month a magazine has a distro on the cover. They also ship other GPL apps, compiled. They do *not* normally supply source, just a credit to the original website and author. Are they in violation?
If you take it to extremes like you are trying to do it just means it'll kill GPL use.. nobody will be able to get free distros any more.
Billable hourly rate *is* a physical cost of distribution.
My time is not free. If I had to retrieve the source to 1000 packages and burn 20 DVDs full of it, then post it to another country it's going to take me a couple of days *and* the postage is a bitch.
$100 an hour is not an unreasonable price for that. 2 days.. 16 hours, $1600, plus another $200 postage and packaging.
Slashdot Mirror
And for every looter there's about 50 honest people who are not looting.
You can't prove anything about human nature by using the extremes like Stalin and looters in a city.. you have to look at the whole - and in general we do tend to act for the good of society (which is a good evolutionary trait btw.).
This is why some schools switched to Linux networks last year (don't think it was that many - schools don't change unless they have to normally).
Of course they're probably still running on overpriced Research Machines hardware... sigh...
That's a silly argument.
For a start schools don't teach children how to use office packages (not in the UK at least). You go to night school as an adult for that.
Secondly those schools are on a budget and do *not* upgrade unless they absolutely have too.. I've never seen a school with anything newer than office 97.
Thirdly when these children start work the interface will have changed so much it won't be relevant anyway (have you taken a look at the clusterfuck that is the new office application? Try using that with only knowledge of office 97).
If Becta stop recommending it the schools stop using it.
Schools universally use the software/hardware that is recommended - and *only* the software/hardware that is recommended.
This is why Research Machines still exist, and schools pay 2/3 times the price for them rather than get a dell.
Fining a company 100% of turnover wouldn't achieve any goal other than bankcrupting the company. MS would pull out of europe before paying such a fine.
OTOH 10% of turnover is enough to hurt, but nowhere near enough to make it unprofitable to stay in the EU.
OTOH The EU *can* impose import tarrifs, and has done for specific products.
Simply put a $10,000 tax on every copy of Vista. MS can still sell it, but they won't get many takers.
The EU isn't a government it's a collection of unrelated governments bound by treaty.
Similarly the EU court (which is separate) is also a product of the same treaty. It has some power over member states but only to enforce already agreed EU law - it couldn't unilaterally alter copyright status of Windows.
Can you imagine the fines if that happened?
Governments would get involved. It would get very messy.
Most of the world is already somewhere between distrustful and hostile to the US... for some countries that would be enough to start chucking diplomats out.
*one* ISP (BT) has implemented that.. and not because the government told the too either (they wouldn't dare, even if they could understand what cleanfeed was). It was a PR move 2 years ago that backfired spectacularly.
It's more the things we take for granted.. mobile phones, microwaves, dishwashers...
But do you need a company that's too cheap to advertise properly and has to plant stories on slashdot *and* get people to astroturf for them?
Wouldn't touch such a company with a bargepole.
There's no way that'll work either.
If I want to buy Heroin with my credit card then the bank is only concerned with my credit rating. They are not remotely liable for what I do with the money.
If you're talking about stopping them refusing doing business with the CC processors that allofmp3 use (including Paypal!) well there's a shitload of law stopping the government restricting trade like that.
That's even less likely. The BPI don't have even close to the power to fuck with the banks.
The government wouldn't do it either.
Basically, the BPI is powerless.. this is just a headline grabber not a real suit.
A lot of ISPs here make great noises about how they do *not* filter traffic (and many of them are uncapped also).
There's simply no framework to require them to filter it - they don't filter anything else, why this?
A friend who used to work at an ISP says the reason UK ISPs are so against filtering is it would jepoardise their common carrier status - at the moment they're not legally liable if someone accesses kiddie porn over their connection.. once they have filtering in place it one judgement to remove their immunity and force them to filter *everything* that could get them into trouble.
Those agreements usually say competitors, customers or supplies.
Burker king counts!
ssh... you're dangerously close to adding facts to this discussion. Stop it! This is slashdot!
It's usually 5 years in my experience..
"Scientists predict that the pill to cure cancer will be available in about 5 years"
"Scientists predict that the flying car will be available in the shops in about 5 years"
etc. etc.
Papers like the daily mail take a few random facts and build an entire mythology around them... unfortunately they don't just do it for their science pieces - the daily mail is legendary for doing it with political issues too (google for the 'daily mail island' sketch.. still as funny now as it was then). Of course they're in a competition with the daily express for who can be most outrageously right wing (the mail - the paper that supported hitler just prior to WW2 - as a *massive* head start though).
Seems a bit lame TBH... No proper games and the FAQ shows it to be woefully underpowered:
mp3:
"The GP32 can play many MP3s as long as they are renamed to 8.3 characters,"
"bitrate is limited to around 128/192 kbps"
"No VBR support"
divx:
2 available..
moviepark: "supports 10 frames per second"
GPDivX "no sound"
Plus a read of the emulator support reveals them to be buggy, slow and incomplete... certainly none are release quality yet.
TBH I'll look again in a couple of years when they have a product worth buying.
Yeah.. completely nonfunctional on 1.5.0.4 here.
Yes.
Patches contain parts of the original source therefore the patch is covered by GPL too.
Of course this means that distribution of patches is pointless.. you have to distribute the source *anyway* or you'll have the FSF on your back.
At a show a debian guy handed me a copy of debian. He did *not* offer me source at that time. Is he in violation? Is debian breaking GPL by distributing their CD at shows without training their people to make offers of the source to everyone they meet?
Every month a magazine has a distro on the cover. They also ship other GPL apps, compiled. They do *not* normally supply source, just a credit to the original website and author. Are they in violation?
If you take it to extremes like you are trying to do it just means it'll kill GPL use.. nobody will be able to get free distros any more.
$50/hour is really cheap.
I would start at $100 and some of the commercial jobs I've done have been more like $500/hour.
If they want to start making me bundle up endire debian distros because I happened to burn a copy for a friend then fine... but I charge by the day.
Billable hourly rate *is* a physical cost of distribution.
My time is not free. If I had to retrieve the source to 1000 packages and burn 20 DVDs full of it, then post it to another country it's going to take me a couple of days *and* the postage is a bitch.
$100 an hour is not an unreasonable price for that. 2 days.. 16 hours, $1600, plus another $200 postage and packaging.
So if you hand someone a Redhat CD you *must* also give them the Redhat source CDs even though they don't want them otherwise you violate GPL?
Heh. There can't be a person on slashdot that isn't in violation at some point.
that only applies to written offers to supply the source code at cost in physical form.
Wrong.
The GPL specifies 'a medium commonly used for software interchange'.
The internet is such a medium.
Therefore a written offer to send them a URL is fine.