Sounds perfect for me. I've got an old IZone that (before the film ran out) produced pictures about that size. I'd use the optional sticky-back film and take photos of my family and friends, then use them as playing pieces for various games. A pre-digital version of avatars, if you will. No matter how drunk we got, there was never any confusion about who was using which piece. I found a bunch of them in a shoe box in my closet just a few weeks ago. I suppose I should scan the images and post them to flickr or something.
Perhaps most importantly, is it even legal for them to force an existing employee into new terms of employment in his jurisdiction?
During the dot-com era, I worked somewhere that had everyone sign a non-compete agreement when they were hired. After a couple of years, two people (we'll call them Jack and Jill) left to go into business for themselves. They were very careful to follow the letter of the non-compete that they'd signed. For example, in one section everyone had promised not to engage in any competitive activity within fifty miles of Gotham City, where we were located; they started their company in Metropolis, where the first branch office had been opened. Sure enough, our next set of stock options were conditional upon signing a revised non-compete that closed that loophole. After that, every set of stock options had one or more revised agreements for us to sign; the employees called them "Jack and Jill" revisions because they usually were due to the ongoing legal actions against the two people who'd left.
Suppose I build a custom car, I bought a sound system say, from JVC, for it, it doesn't quite fit so I take it apart to change its proportions. Does JVC have a ground to sue me for trademark violation?
If you peel off the JVC logo and stick it on your mod, then yes, they do have grounds to sue you. You need to look back to the OpenSSL/Debian debacle. Yeah, maybe you're "merely changing the case", but what if your change causes a minuscule scratch on a CD whenever it gets ejected? For a while, error-correction hides the damage, but eventually you've got a stack of shiny coasters. Meanwhile, your friends who own similar cars have asked you to do the same mod for them, and you've been putting JVC's logo on the modified versions. Two years down the line, who will your victims call when their media stops playing?
That's why JVC doesn't want to you put their trademark on case mods, and that's why Firefox doesn't want their name on someone else's code.
DNS provides human-friendly names that map to collections of IP addresses. Trademarks provide human-friendly names that map to collections of cryptographically signed code. Any questions?
But at the same time, free software is, by definition, meant to be modified and redistributed. Do we want every piece of software in every *nix distribution to have a different name? "I'm pretty sure Kommunikator is Konqueror-based, but I can't remember what Net-Browser really is. And is Internet Iguana an actual fork of Firefox or just a couple little distro-specific changes?"
If everyone took trademark enforcement as seriously as Mozilla, the Iceweasel/Icedove thing would be multiplied by every software suite and for every distro that needed to make even the slightest changes to improve the software or just make it fit into the distro better. I'm not sure which would be worse: the same software having a different name in each distro, or everyone else using Iceweasel/Icedove/whatever other less restrictive trademark to rebrand the software, which could lead to the original trademark being worthless and putting us back at square one.
Name spaces are pretty big, so I don't think that having a different name for forked software is a bad thing. Nominative use provisions allow all of the things that you've mentioned. "Kommunikator, based on Konqueror" is permitted in the "About..." box, as is "Iceweasel, a deriviative of Firefox".
Debian felt that they needed to make the slightest change to either improve OpenSSL, or just make it fit into the distro better, and introduced a bug. If Debian had been forced to call their modified product "DebianSSL, a deriviative of OpenSSL" then I would have known a lot faster if I was at risk.
Trademarks are a requirement for FOSS, since otherwise you cannot be sure about whose product you're using. Craftsmen and artisans have long used trademarks for this purpose, and I thought that they were who most of us are modeling ourselves after.
Look at it this way. DNS provides human-friendly names that map to collections of IP addresses. Trademarks provide human-friendly names that map to collections of cryptographically signed code. Is DNS harmful to FOSS?
I don't remember the title and hope someone here does, but there was a book that explained Einstein's Principles of Relativity. The book started out with some thought experiments then talked about a box floating in space to help explain relativity. Further on it explained the mathematics behind relativity. All one needed was a good understanding of first year calculus.
In that article, they predicted brownouts in two years, i.e. November of 2009, so really they've just moved the timeframe back a few months. On the other hand, Bob Metcalfe thought the Intertubes would collapse in 1996. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Incorrect_predictions
This is just Gen-1. I can imagine an array of small buttons, closely spaced, that can be raised en masse to simulate larger buttons. Use a piezoelectric fan to provide the air to the buttons one at a time, just like you direct electrons to a CRTs phosphers.
Imagine we sent out a message announcing our presence and saying hello:
"Hello? This is humanity, we are [blah, blah - lots of info about us and Earth]..."..........
40 years later and you get the response:
"Hi!"
How pissed would you be?
Not as pissed as I would be if the response was a message telling us how our civilization could grow larger, last longer, and bring more pleasure to our partners.
People love to demonize parents for not getting involved in the lives of the children but when those children are outside of their control for eight hours a day what are they to do?
I agree. There is a difference between just being attracted to others of the same sex and actively wanting to become a member of the opposite sex.
Someone I went to college with was attracted to members of the opposite sex, got married, had kids, etc. But all along, that person wanted to become a member of the opposite sex, and eventually did. Last I heard, as a couple they were still married, making them a legal homosexual union years before it was legalized.
BTW, a year or so ago, there was a story about a man who got pregnant. That person turned out to be a woman who wanted to become a man, but never underwent the complete set of surgical procedures, making the pregnancy much easier to understand; personally, I wound up regarding the whole thing as one step removed from being a hoax. I only mention this because it's my understanding that my classmate did go the whole route.
Take it to the extreme: if everyone in the world got hold of movies, music or software for free, why would artists and developers continue producing original works if they're receiving no reward for it?
You are assuming that "everyone in the world gets X for free" implies that "artists and developers receive no reward for it". That is a false assumption. Before there was even an idea of copyright, artists produced art. Busking has been around forever, with "pay what you think its worth" only the latest variation. Some artists found royal subsidies, others gave public performances while passing the hat Both of these systems exist today. Just looking at the music world, large corporations frequently sponsor concerts and art, while several musicians support themselves almost entirely from concerts. Jonathan Coulton has done both, going on concert tours and producing songs for Valve.
BTW, did you ever notice that on more than one occasion, Star Trek explicitly stated that televsion had died out sometime before the 24th Century? Many episodes instead featured people being entertained by live performances. I assume that 20th Century-style music publishing also died at the same time. I've always hoped that it was due to copyright reform, rendering it impossible for parasitic middlemen to extract value from the work of others.
Not quite. With no copyright, BSD licensing is unneeded. BSD allows you to not share any derivative works that you create and sell. GPL requires you to share any derivative works that you create and sell, and depends upon copyright law to enforce that requirement.
It was here or thereabouts. If you follow the link, then you're looking at a loading facility at a coal mine. My job was to do GW-BASIC programming on an IBM PC XT. This was before the Internet got popular, so I had to do the debugging on site, in the middle of winter. My body and the PC were the only source of heat in the silo, so I was wearing a parka, along with ski gloves when I wasn't actually typing. The nearest motel was 90 miles away, and I had to be on-site whenever a train came through, usually in the middle of the night. Outside of the administrative offices, you had to wear steel-toed boots, and a hard-hat whenever you were outdoors. Everything had a thin layer of ultra-fine coal dust on it, which wanted to contaminate your food and drink. The next tower over had a guy who looked to be well past the mandatory retirement age. His job was to manually operate the equipment that loaded the coal cars (my job involved automating his job). If he overfilled a car, they stopped the train and he went out with a big shovel to remove the excess. I only saw him do that once while I was there, but it made me glad to be doing my job and not his.
I made a similar comment on TechCrunch's site, calling it a Chumby's big brother. I'd love to see some Chumby-like widgets that would run as screen savers when the Crunchpad is being charged.
I notice that Web 2.0 devices are coalescing around a semi-standard hardware platform: WiFi, touch screen, accelerometers, stereo speakers, and a microphone; USB ports and SD slots are common additions. The Nintendo DS adds a bunch of buttons, the Wii adds Bluetooth and rumble (and loses the touchscreen), and the iPhone adds an entire cell phone (along with Bluetooth). Flash (and X11!) need to standardize interfaces to most of these ASAP so we can start writing truly portable apps.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew this seven years ago, you insensitive clod!
Sounds perfect for me. I've got an old IZone that (before the film ran out) produced pictures about that size. I'd use the optional sticky-back film and take photos of my family and friends, then use them as playing pieces for various games. A pre-digital version of avatars, if you will. No matter how drunk we got, there was never any confusion about who was using which piece. I found a bunch of them in a shoe box in my closet just a few weeks ago. I suppose I should scan the images and post them to flickr or something.
Personally, I prefer Shufuni's video thumbnails.
You make it sound like excessive choice is a good thing. I personally am fine with Apples limited product line that is all integrated.
I suggest you watch this TED video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM]
The reason people like Apple products is because you take it home and it all works together without any effort on your part.
Why link to a copy when you can link to the original?
I thought that the headline was "Scientists Create RNA From Primordial Soap", which would have been interesting in a completely different way.
Perhaps most importantly, is it even legal for them to force an existing employee into new terms of employment in his jurisdiction?
During the dot-com era, I worked somewhere that had everyone sign a non-compete agreement when they were hired. After a couple of years, two people (we'll call them Jack and Jill) left to go into business for themselves. They were very careful to follow the letter of the non-compete that they'd signed. For example, in one section everyone had promised not to engage in any competitive activity within fifty miles of Gotham City, where we were located; they started their company in Metropolis, where the first branch office had been opened. Sure enough, our next set of stock options were conditional upon signing a revised non-compete that closed that loophole. After that, every set of stock options had one or more revised agreements for us to sign; the employees called them "Jack and Jill" revisions because they usually were due to the ongoing legal actions against the two people who'd left.
Or George W.
Suppose I build a custom car, I bought a sound system say, from JVC, for it, it doesn't quite fit so I take it apart to change its proportions. Does JVC have a ground to sue me for trademark violation?
If you peel off the JVC logo and stick it on your mod, then yes, they do have grounds to sue you. You need to look back to the OpenSSL/Debian debacle. Yeah, maybe you're "merely changing the case", but what if your change causes a minuscule scratch on a CD whenever it gets ejected? For a while, error-correction hides the damage, but eventually you've got a stack of shiny coasters. Meanwhile, your friends who own similar cars have asked you to do the same mod for them, and you've been putting JVC's logo on the modified versions. Two years down the line, who will your victims call when their media stops playing?
That's why JVC doesn't want to you put their trademark on case mods, and that's why Firefox doesn't want their name on someone else's code.
DNS provides human-friendly names that map to collections of IP addresses. Trademarks provide human-friendly names that map to collections of cryptographically signed code. Any questions?
But at the same time, free software is, by definition, meant to be modified and redistributed. Do we want every piece of software in every *nix distribution to have a different name? "I'm pretty sure Kommunikator is Konqueror-based, but I can't remember what Net-Browser really is. And is Internet Iguana an actual fork of Firefox or just a couple little distro-specific changes?"
If everyone took trademark enforcement as seriously as Mozilla, the Iceweasel/Icedove thing would be multiplied by every software suite and for every distro that needed to make even the slightest changes to improve the software or just make it fit into the distro better. I'm not sure which would be worse: the same software having a different name in each distro, or everyone else using Iceweasel/Icedove/whatever other less restrictive trademark to rebrand the software, which could lead to the original trademark being worthless and putting us back at square one.
Name spaces are pretty big, so I don't think that having a different name for forked software is a bad thing. Nominative use provisions allow all of the things that you've mentioned. "Kommunikator, based on Konqueror" is permitted in the "About..." box, as is "Iceweasel, a deriviative of Firefox".
Debian felt that they needed to make the slightest change to either improve OpenSSL, or just make it fit into the distro better, and introduced a bug. If Debian had been forced to call their modified product "DebianSSL, a deriviative of OpenSSL" then I would have known a lot faster if I was at risk.
Trademarks are a requirement for FOSS, since otherwise you cannot be sure about whose product you're using. Craftsmen and artisans have long used trademarks for this purpose, and I thought that they were who most of us are modeling ourselves after.
Look at it this way. DNS provides human-friendly names that map to collections of IP addresses. Trademarks provide human-friendly names that map to collections of cryptographically signed code. Is DNS harmful to FOSS?
I don't remember the title and hope someone here does, but there was a book that explained Einstein's Principles of Relativity. The book started out with some thought experiments then talked about a box floating in space to help explain relativity. Further on it explained the mathematics behind relativity. All one needed was a good understanding of first year calculus.
Do you mean Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland? Back in the '40s and '50s, George Gamow wrote several excellent books popularizing science.
Here's a copy of the coloring book: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/graphics/pdf/femacoloringbook.pdf
I remember this from an earlier slashdot of the same group saying the same thing.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/20/0024248&from=rss
In that article, they predicted brownouts in two years, i.e. November of 2009, so really they've just moved the timeframe back a few months. On the other hand, Bob Metcalfe thought the Intertubes would collapse in 1996. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Incorrect_predictions
especially now that everyone knows what bluetooth is because of cell phone headsets (even though those make you look stupid ;) ).
You insensitive clod! Some of us think it looks stylish.
This is just Gen-1. I can imagine an array of small buttons, closely spaced, that can be raised en masse to simulate larger buttons. Use a piezoelectric fan to provide the air to the buttons one at a time, just like you direct electrons to a CRTs phosphers.
Ah, but do you remember AltaVista before they bought the altavista.com domain name?
Heck, I remeber using Archie.
Imagine we sent out a message announcing our presence and saying hello:
"Hello? This is humanity, we are [blah, blah - lots of info about us and Earth]..." ..... .....
40 years later and you get the response:
"Hi!"
How pissed would you be?
Not as pissed as I would be if the response was a message telling us how our civilization could grow larger, last longer, and bring more pleasure to our partners.
Gliese 581 e might have iron and other metals, but being so close to the star it probably has major hot spots.
Major hot spots? The place will be swarming with college students on spring break before you know it.
People love to demonize parents for not getting involved in the lives of the children but when those children are outside of their control for eight hours a day what are they to do?
Homeschool.
I agree. There is a difference between just being attracted to others of the same sex and actively wanting to become a member of the opposite sex.
Someone I went to college with was attracted to members of the opposite sex, got married, had kids, etc. But all along, that person wanted to become a member of the opposite sex, and eventually did. Last I heard, as a couple they were still married, making them a legal homosexual union years before it was legalized.
BTW, a year or so ago, there was a story about a man who got pregnant. That person turned out to be a woman who wanted to become a man, but never underwent the complete set of surgical procedures, making the pregnancy much easier to understand; personally, I wound up regarding the whole thing as one step removed from being a hoax. I only mention this because it's my understanding that my classmate did go the whole route.
When will they write it? In their spare time?
What's wrong with writing it at work? Especially if it's useful to their employer.
Will it consistently be of a high enough standard to use commercially when it's produced for anything other than money?
It will be if it's produced as part of their job.
What about when it goes wrong or becomes outdated?
Then their employer will want them to patch it.
Is there sufficient incentive for the author to update it if he's got a real job to go to?
Yes, if it is part of his job duties.
Take it to the extreme: if everyone in the world got hold of movies, music or software for free, why would artists and developers continue producing original works if they're receiving no reward for it?
You are assuming that "everyone in the world gets X for free" implies that "artists and developers receive no reward for it". That is a false assumption. Before there was even an idea of copyright, artists produced art. Busking has been around forever, with "pay what you think its worth" only the latest variation. Some artists found royal subsidies, others gave public performances while passing the hat Both of these systems exist today. Just looking at the music world, large corporations frequently sponsor concerts and art, while several musicians support themselves almost entirely from concerts. Jonathan Coulton has done both, going on concert tours and producing songs for Valve.
BTW, did you ever notice that on more than one occasion, Star Trek explicitly stated that televsion had died out sometime before the 24th Century? Many episodes instead featured people being entertained by live performances. I assume that 20th Century-style music publishing also died at the same time. I've always hoped that it was due to copyright reform, rendering it impossible for parasitic middlemen to extract value from the work of others.
Fuck the GPL. With no copyright it's unneeded.
Not quite. With no copyright, BSD licensing is unneeded. BSD allows you to not share any derivative works that you create and sell. GPL requires you to share any derivative works that you create and sell, and depends upon copyright law to enforce that requirement.
It was here or thereabouts. If you follow the link, then you're looking at a loading facility at a coal mine. My job was to do GW-BASIC programming on an IBM PC XT. This was before the Internet got popular, so I had to do the debugging on site, in the middle of winter. My body and the PC were the only source of heat in the silo, so I was wearing a parka, along with ski gloves when I wasn't actually typing. The nearest motel was 90 miles away, and I had to be on-site whenever a train came through, usually in the middle of the night. Outside of the administrative offices, you had to wear steel-toed boots, and a hard-hat whenever you were outdoors. Everything had a thin layer of ultra-fine coal dust on it, which wanted to contaminate your food and drink. The next tower over had a guy who looked to be well past the mandatory retirement age. His job was to manually operate the equipment that loaded the coal cars (my job involved automating his job). If he overfilled a car, they stopped the train and he went out with a big shovel to remove the excess. I only saw him do that once while I was there, but it made me glad to be doing my job and not his.
I made a similar comment on TechCrunch's site, calling it a Chumby's big brother. I'd love to see some Chumby-like widgets that would run as screen savers when the Crunchpad is being charged.
I notice that Web 2.0 devices are coalescing around a semi-standard hardware platform: WiFi, touch screen, accelerometers, stereo speakers, and a microphone; USB ports and SD slots are common additions. The Nintendo DS adds a bunch of buttons, the Wii adds Bluetooth and rumble (and loses the touchscreen), and the iPhone adds an entire cell phone (along with Bluetooth). Flash (and X11!) need to standardize interfaces to most of these ASAP so we can start writing truly portable apps.