When exactly did the clueless train get permanently parked at slashdot?
Anything you do that has some sort of tangible (or semi-tangible) form can be copyrighted. If you use a chainsaw to carve an ice sculpture, you can copyright that (even if you borrowed the chainsaw!, imagine that!). If you use photoshop to create an image, you can copyright it. If you use Dreamweaver to create a web page, bang copyrighted. If you create an image or an essay or report or whatever, and you convert it to.ps or.pdf form, bang copyrighted.
And, under modern US copyright law all it takes to copyright something is to say something akin to "I assert copyright protection for this work". That's it and it's done. If someone disputes that then you can go to court and wrangle over it, but you don't have to send away or buy a copyright, copyright's are free. It's kinda like a mining claim for the information universe.
Now, in this case, it would seem that if you offer your services for hire, then the contractor owns the copyrights to your work (unless a contract stipulates contrariwise). Also, the "artist" can still create similar works (since the "look and feel / design" was not Patented), but he can't use any of the original work (i.e. no copy/paste).
No, it means that if you're in the US, "the book is yours do with it as you wish" and, if you are in the UK, "the book is ours mothah fsckah, we're just loaning it to you, don't spill stuff on it or you are dead!".
Re:It's YOU that has paid for it.....
on
Can I Lend DVDs?
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· Score: 1
Sheesh, here's a dollar, buy a clue will ya? please?
Maybe you don't mind living in (luckily a fictional, but only mildly so) Orwellian world where every aspect of your life is subject to some sort of EULA, but I do.
You can't just blindly think that people will give up the simple freedom of being able to loan a friend a book or a DVD or a CD. And you can't expect all of humanity to start wearing one bracelet on their right hand that says "WWMD" (What Would the MPAA Do?), and one on their left hand for "WWRD" (What Would the RIAA Do?).
Humanity will always over-rule "legality" when they collide. When that stops being the case, run, run like the wind!
You can find the GPL copyleft agreement at gnu's site. I believe this to be the pertinent part, under section 2.
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
Dude, I suggest you not use Dos and Windows 3.1 as your points of attack against Microsoft. Try to aim at something a little more current, even NT 3.5 would be a better target.
Hah! I love linux and Unix as much as the next guy but Microsoft still has a very very very....very big edge. In entrenched usage, market share, awareness, and in development. And, quite frankly, there are still several things that windows does a lot better than linux, and it will be a long time before that changes.
It's really not the "64-bit" that makes it better / faster (although it does help a bit with the wider datapath and all). What is really cool about the IA-64 instruction architecture is the extremely sophisticated use of ILP (instruction level parallelism). In ILP terms, the Itanium (and other IA-64 processors) uses a hybrid of various ILP architectures to achieve maximum utilization of all the sub components of the processor. The IA-64 architecture is designed to give information that allows the processor to run certain instructions at the same time or before other instructions have completed, etc. Moreover, the IA-64 architecture is not locked in to one specific processor make-up (as some other advanced architectures are). Thus, you can make an IA-64 chip with say 3 integer units, 2 floating point units, and 4 fetch / store units and it can use the exact same programs and instruction set as an IA-64 chip with 5 integer units, 4 floating point units and 20 fetch / store units (for example). Also, IA-64 is designed to be enormously compatible with IA-32 (modern x86) code so that you don't have to get all new versions of every program.
In comparitive terms, the Itanium is to the P6 core what the P6 core was to the original Pentium (P5) core. The Pentium brought ILP to the x86 line in a very big way and blew away the 486 with it's Superscalar architecture, and the P6 blows away the Pentium with it's speculative execution and other features, etc. The Itanium will be about as big a change. The disadvantage though is that to fully take advantage of the processor, programs and OS's need to be recompiled, though hopefully this won't be too big of a problem.
What I always wondered is why people would spend all that time and effort to learn something like Esperanto when they could be learning a REAL language.
I've got plenty of languages on my "to learn" list, and I've made some significant progress on at two of them already, but Esperanto isn't anywhere on that list. Why would I want to learn Esperanto? What country would I want to visit where knowledge of esperanto would enhance the experience? What literature would I gain access to from learning esperanto?
Ummm, pretty much like a bad programming language you mean?
You may be a robot but most of us are not. I prefer my languages to be fungible, free, artistic, and jam packed with plenty of inconsistency.
I like C++, but let me tell ya something, I MUCH prefer learning / programming in PERL. Sure you can do exactly the same thing 20 different ways in PERL, and some of them you can't even tell what's going on, but that's what makes it good. Just like you can communicate a whole paragraph of information to a friend with a look or the inflection on "eh" or "hey", you can say things that take lines of code in other languages with just the right nuance in PERL.
English has been the de facto international language for quite a long time now, and I don't see anything changing that. The growth of the internet is only cementing English's hold on the world.
Also, I would absolutely hate it if some artificial language (like, ugh, esperonto) became the international standard. That is just a horrific nightmare of a possiblity. An artificial language has no heart, no history, no soul.
Any existing language would be better than some ersatz replacement. Not just for the natural beauty of organic human language, but for all the pre-existing materials that you gain access to when you learn that language. For example, when you learn English you gain access to so much. You gain access to great works of art from Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and so much more.
You shouldn't give that up for the "advantages" of a fabricated language.
The default password issue is unimportant, although if people aren't informed that there is a default password and what that password is (in documentation), then there's something wrong. Also, anything with a default password should really change that password on installation (if it has an interactive install, great, change it then, otherwise there definitely should be something about it in the readme). Any good sysadmin should know what's on his machine, and change the default passwords, but that's no excuse for a lackadaisical attitude wrt security on the coder's part.
Nevertheless, I don't think this is an important aspect of the story. What worries me is that it is possible to run code at the webserver user level from the web. This is very NOT good. Even if you set the password, someone could still potentially guess it using a program.
Also, it is somewhat interesting how MSNBC has handled this story.
I suppose it's a little harder to find real communities out there on the internet these days than it once was with bbs's and such like. But they do exist, and I certainly have been lucky enough to find some good ones. I was never around for the BBS's way back when, but I did get into the internet relatively early ('94) and I have been able to find communities of various kinds without too great an effort. For example, newsgroups can be great places for people to hang out and talk about their interests. I've made some good acquantances there, but I think it is the extremely rare usenet experience that yields a close-nit community of friends and colleagues. Online forums (such as/. and others like it) can also potentially be places for those honest-to-goodness communities to sprout and grow, however, again, it is equally rare for such things to occur. I myself have been fortunate to recently become part of a very close community of people. I have made good acquantances as well as close friends. We've been through our share of difficulty (perhaps more), but it seems to have made us even more of a community. We're not really sure where the spark that transformed us from a group of people discussing stuff, to a true community, but we are glad it happened. If you'd like to check us out, we're at http://dualboot.net/forums. We talk about computers and tech and stuff, or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything you do that has some sort of tangible (or semi-tangible) form can be copyrighted. If you use a chainsaw to carve an ice sculpture, you can copyright that (even if you borrowed the chainsaw!, imagine that!). If you use photoshop to create an image, you can copyright it. If you use Dreamweaver to create a web page, bang copyrighted. If you create an image or an essay or report or whatever, and you convert it to .ps or .pdf form, bang copyrighted.
And, under modern US copyright law all it takes to copyright something is to say something akin to "I assert copyright protection for this work". That's it and it's done. If someone disputes that then you can go to court and wrangle over it, but you don't have to send away or buy a copyright, copyright's are free. It's kinda like a mining claim for the information universe.
Now, in this case, it would seem that if you offer your services for hire, then the contractor owns the copyrights to your work (unless a contract stipulates contrariwise). Also, the "artist" can still create similar works (since the "look and feel / design" was not Patented), but he can't use any of the original work (i.e. no copy/paste).
My work here is done.
(flies off into the sunset)
No, it means that if you're in the US, "the book is yours do with it as you wish" and, if you are in the UK, "the book is ours mothah fsckah, we're just loaning it to you, don't spill stuff on it or you are dead!".
Maybe you don't mind living in (luckily a fictional, but only mildly so) Orwellian world where every aspect of your life is subject to some sort of EULA, but I do.
You can't just blindly think that people will give up the simple freedom of being able to loan a friend a book or a DVD or a CD. And you can't expect all of humanity to start wearing one bracelet on their right hand that says "WWMD" (What Would the MPAA Do?), and one on their left hand for "WWRD" (What Would the RIAA Do?).
Humanity will always over-rule "legality" when they collide. When that stops being the case, run, run like the wind!
Dude, I suggest you not use Dos and Windows 3.1 as your points of attack against Microsoft. Try to aim at something a little more current, even NT 3.5 would be a better target.
Hah! I love linux and Unix as much as the next guy but Microsoft still has a very very very....very big edge. In entrenched usage, market share, awareness, and in development. And, quite frankly, there are still several things that windows does a lot better than linux, and it will be a long time before that changes.
In comparitive terms, the Itanium is to the P6 core what the P6 core was to the original Pentium (P5) core. The Pentium brought ILP to the x86 line in a very big way and blew away the 486 with it's Superscalar architecture, and the P6 blows away the Pentium with it's speculative execution and other features, etc. The Itanium will be about as big a change. The disadvantage though is that to fully take advantage of the processor, programs and OS's need to be recompiled, though hopefully this won't be too big of a problem.
What I always wondered is why people would spend all that time and effort to learn something like Esperanto when they could be learning a REAL language.
I've got plenty of languages on my "to learn" list, and I've made some significant progress on at two of them already, but Esperanto isn't anywhere on that list. Why would I want to learn Esperanto? What country would I want to visit where knowledge of esperanto would enhance the experience? What literature would I gain access to from learning esperanto?
Sorry, it just makes no sense.
Ummm, pretty much like a bad programming language you mean?
You may be a robot but most of us are not. I prefer my languages to be fungible, free, artistic, and jam packed with plenty of inconsistency.
I like C++, but let me tell ya something, I MUCH prefer learning / programming in PERL. Sure you can do exactly the same thing 20 different ways in PERL, and some of them you can't even tell what's going on, but that's what makes it good. Just like you can communicate a whole paragraph of information to a friend with a look or the inflection on "eh" or "hey", you can say things that take lines of code in other languages with just the right nuance in PERL.
Also, I would absolutely hate it if some artificial language (like, ugh, esperonto) became the international standard. That is just a horrific nightmare of a possiblity. An artificial language has no heart, no history, no soul.
Any existing language would be better than some ersatz replacement. Not just for the natural beauty of organic human language, but for all the pre-existing materials that you gain access to when you learn that language. For example, when you learn English you gain access to so much. You gain access to great works of art from Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and so much more.
You shouldn't give that up for the "advantages" of a fabricated language.
The default password issue is unimportant, although if people aren't informed that there is a default password and what that password is (in documentation), then there's something wrong. Also, anything with a default password should really change that password on installation (if it has an interactive install, great, change it then, otherwise there definitely should be something about it in the readme). Any good sysadmin should know what's on his machine, and change the default passwords, but that's no excuse for a lackadaisical attitude wrt security on the coder's part.
Nevertheless, I don't think this is an important aspect of the story. What worries me is that it is possible to run code at the webserver user level from the web. This is very NOT good. Even if you set the password, someone could still potentially guess it using a program.
Also, it is somewhat interesting how MSNBC has handled this story.
I suppose it's a little harder to find real communities out there on the internet these days than it once was with bbs's and such like. But they do exist, and I certainly have been lucky enough to find some good ones. I was never around for the BBS's way back when, but I did get into the internet relatively early ('94) and I have been able to find communities of various kinds without too great an effort. For example, newsgroups can be great places for people to hang out and talk about their interests. I've made some good acquantances there, but I think it is the extremely rare usenet experience that yields a close-nit community of friends and colleagues. Online forums (such as /. and others like it) can also potentially be places for those honest-to-goodness communities to sprout and grow, however, again, it is equally rare for such things to occur. I myself have been fortunate to recently become part of a very close community of people. I have made good acquantances as well as close friends. We've been through our share of difficulty (perhaps more), but it seems to have made us even more of a community. We're not really sure where the spark that transformed us from a group of people discussing stuff, to a true community, but we are glad it happened. If you'd like to check us out, we're at http://dualboot.net/forums. We talk about computers and tech and stuff, or whatever.