* The OS Product or OS Components contain components that enable and facilitate the use of certain Internet-based services. You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer.
They regularly fuck over the shareholder with dilution from stock based option compensation anyway, so fucking the shareholder is nothing new.
That doesn't make it right. Regardless, shareholders get to vote directors on and off the board, so there is accountability should the shareholders wish to make use of it.
Your post is the antithesis of the open source philosophy. By your logic, no company would ever write for open source software because it benefits their competitors as much as it benefits them. You can see that isn't the case with many companies these days, betting more and more on open source.
Of course, you assume that I should take the "open source philosophy" as personal dogma. As it happens, though, my post is entirely in line with open source as I understand it. What I said was that corporations should not screw over shareholders, not that they shouldn't adopt open standards. I actually raised the possibility that shareholders might benefit from a common standard.
I think what you're failing to infer from my post is that if a store owner wants to give away stock to charity and the employees do so in line with the owners directions, then that's just fine by me.
Perhaps because the shareholders own the corporations, and corporations are chartered to serve the interests of the shareholders? Imagine if you owned a store, only to find that the employees were giving away your stock to charity. Sure it would be a nice gesture, but it's not exactly the right thing to do.
You could argue that it would be in the shareholders' best interest that ATi and nVidia cooperate on a standard, but it would be unethical for either corporation to deliberately flaunt the interests of the shareholders.
Solution (for the U.S.A.): A non-controlled copy of any access-controlled work must be supplied to the Library of Congress, who will safeguard the work during the copyright term, then provide copies to the public domain upon expiration of copyright.
So the Library of Congress has to store every single encrypted creative work? If I make an eight hour video of my cat sleeping and slap a cheap encryption on it, the LoC has to archive it? And your tax dollars will pay for it? The nice thing about current copyright laws is that they happen automatically with no government intervention until there's an actual dispute.
In a perfect world, that seems reasonable. When corporations start pushing through laws that extend their own copyrights, it becomes an issue. They have too much power to be trusted with ownership. In my mind, it's kinda the same thing as socialism, at least on a more focused scale.
Seeing as how we're trying to establish what the laws ought to be, the point is moot. An evil rich corporation could use its influence to have copyright laws changed, giving corporations the right to own copyrights. Furthermore, I don't think a corporation is any more trustworthy than an individual, and there are plenty of individuals worth more many than plenty of corporations. I don't buy that the problem is with corporations themselves.
My other beef is that if a corporation (or any body that didn't orginate the work) has the copyright on something that you contributed too, you yourself lose the rights you should have to that work. See any arguments between bands and their labels for reasons why this is a bad thing.
The problem here is with the contracts bands sign with the record company. If a band doesn't sign over a copyrighted work, the company does not own the copyright. The lesson here is not that there's something wrong with corporations owning copyrights. It's that people should read the contracts they sign.
Re:Here's mine...
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
-All copyrights must be held by a private individual. No corporate entity may hold a copyright.
-Copyright terms may vary up to a period of 17 years (depending on content type -- To Be Specified), with a single renewal for the same period of time
-Copyright expires upon the death of the copyright holder.
-Copyrights cannot be assigned to another entity
All this seems unnecessarily complicated. Why not just a flat copyright term which can be transfered to any individual or corporation? Is there a reason a copyright should become less valuable toward the end of a person's life? Let it act like property; the copyright passes to the next of kin. Moreover, except for the death clause, I don't see any real difference between corporate and private ownership of a copyright, unless you just decide that you don't like corporations.
-If a work has some form of access control, that access control must be disabled when the work enters public domain
By who, exactly, if the author has just died? I don't think there should be an extra burden placed on anybody who creates an original work, even if they decided to encrypt it before releasing.
-A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)
Disagree here, too. What about the clever inventor who has a brilliant idea but doesn't have the money to implement it? How does he keep venture capitalists from simply stealing his idea? The whole idea of patents is to provide an incentive for people to publish their ideas without the fear of having them stolen. This restriction encourages people to keep them secret until they are able to provide a (potentially very costly) implementation.
My big beef with patents as they stand is not the patent laws themselves, but the ways that they are enforced. It is far too easy to slip a silly patent through the USPTO and far too difficult to challenge its novelty.
Wow, you'd really do this? Even with the potential null dereference in the third line? Even if the third line was made safe, it's still an extra function call you could have avoided with lazy evaluation. Personally, I think your 'bad' example flowed much better. If you really wanted to get rid of the comment, you could use
The other two booleans are specious. The what for the source is easy to decipher; programmers know what null reference and empty string checks look like. The why is what might be unclear in an uncommented version of the first example, but all the necessary information is exposed using the above line of code.
MASSIVE bureaucracy and potential for abuse. One nice thing about copyright in its current form is that original works are automatically copyrighted. Moreover, this would give government control over created works. Don't like someone's political viewpoint? Don't grant them favorable copyright terms. I personally can't think of a better system than the original one - a limited-time monopoly. No extensions, no levels. If you create a work and choose to give up some of these privileges, more power to you.
Actually, I think the goal is to have version 1 of the spec and version 1 of the implementation released at the same time. Trying to finalize the spec first is all well and good, but creating a reference implementation can help point out the problems you didn't think of when writing the spec. It's always a good idea to know where you're going before you try to get there, but trying to completely freeze a specification before letting your hands get dirty can lead to disaster.
Re:They made a mistake on their website ..
on
Worst Buy
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· Score: 2
No, it sounds like they copied the price from the wrong product. Still a legitimate mistake. And I say that as one of the folks that got ordered one of those puppies at $129.00. The law is flexible enough that merchants won't get hammered for mistakes like this. Now, if I had placed the order and paid $129.00, I would be howling for a lawyer. Best Buy screwed up, and they tried to make it right with a bajillion $30 gift certificates. As a consumer, I don't think I have a legitimate complaint about that. Of course, none of this has anything to do with the behavior of Mr. Hill, which I find inexcusable.
No, the point is to prevent Microsoft from illegally abusing its monopoly status. The competition is supposed to have an opportunity to compete, but not a free ride in doing so. Punishing or crippling Microsoft is one possible way of approaching this goal, but it's not necessarily the best way. An ideal solution would be to not directly hurt Microsoft while still ensuring that the competition is on a level playing field.
It almost looks to me like MS is trying to get Samba to switch licenses to a BSD license. Is there something that MS wants that samba has?
That might be the key to the question of damages. Microsoft licenses you to use their technology, but if you make an open-source version, Microsoft gets to use it in their products as well. You can compete with a quid pro quo. If you take out the quid, you effectively cause damages.
I wonder if the Samba folks would consider a Microsoft Keep Out license...
Damages would be easy to prove. XXX violated the license, implemented a GPL'ed version of CIFS, and made it publicly available. This new implementation competes against Microsoft's own product, and thus hurts sales.
Of course, there are multiple ways to lose in court, and the merits of the case aren't always important. Would you be able to survive a long court battle with Microsoft, especially if court costs and lawyers' fees were on the line?
The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that international treaties hold the same weight as the Constitution. [cornell.edu] This means that if a WIPO treaty trumps the First Amendment, you're up a creek.
Not so sure about this. I'm no Constitutional scholar, but this Article says to me that federal law (including the Constitution, laws and treaties) all trump state constitutions and laws (since the next part of the text reads, "and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."). As far as the states are concerned, yes, international treaties hold the same weight as the Constitution. However, this does not mean that the treaties can trump the Constitution itself.
I especially like this suggestion which the author suggests as a paradigm shift: "Let's completely modularize each tool function (such as layout, fonts, kerning, textures, linking, math and tables) and make each a separate interactive GUI tool. Like an erector set, applications could be constructed for specific needs. And like hammers, saws, wrenches and screwdrivers in the physical realm, such tools are easier to utilize than large factories (or contemporary application programs)."
The DCMA does not directly prevent criticism, but it makes the shrink-wrapped licenses that gag you enforceable. So it's a difference of no significance.
Perhaps you're thinking of the UCITA? I don't think the DMCA has anything to do with the enforceability of shrink-wrap licenses.
I'd have to disagree that this is such a bad thing. I expect that Yamhill is only a contingency plan in the event that Hammer chips really take off in the marketplace, which is yet to be proven. Secondly, how much are consumers going to care whether AMD came up with the instruction set first? Intel still has its brand going for it, and customers may see Yamhill as a higher quality Hammer (think market perception, not necessarily the truth of the notion).
Transmeta beat everybody to the punch with the idea of low-power processors, but Intel is still taking them to the cleaners in the marketplace, even as the johnny-come-lately. Yes, AMD is a formidable competitor, and they have been able to embarrass Intel in the past, but Intel still dominates the market.
And in closed-source software, you do not buy the software; you buy a license to use the software. You can buy RedHat off the shelf at Best Buy, just the same way you can buy Windows. I suspect most judges would treat the two situations the same way.
1. There are plenty of Office Suites out there that understand the Word Format. (StarOffice and Koffice to name two.)
Most of the Word format, anyway.
2. Microsoft has already stated they are switching to the non-proprietary XML format for their standard document format.
I'll believe it when I see it.
3. While I do like GPL and Freeware I also believe that we need to have comercialware. Let's see, if all software was free then why would anyone in their right mind want to spend money to study programming at a an instituion? Why get a degree in software engineering?
Depends on the person, but preferably not to sit around reverse-engineering proprietary formats rather than creating something useful.
How can it be a standard when nobody knows what it is and it keeps changing? If it were a standard, then there would already be "good, free implementations." Instead, software developers, open source and otherwise, have to keep writing almost-good-enough filters to load and save the documents. While RMS' political arguments typically make my eyes glaze over, it's stupid to author a document without taking into consideration whether the recipient can read it.
While the premise of your argument may be unfortunately true, the suggestion simply won't work because Microsoft won't let it work. That's why they keep changing the format and don't publish the spec in the first place.
ZeoSync has developed the TunerAccelerator(TM) in conjunction with some traditional state-of-the-art compression methodologies. This work includes the advancement of Fractals, Wavelets, DCT, FFT, Subband Coding, and Acoustic Compression that utilizes synthetic instruments. These are methods that are derived from classical physics and statistical mechanics and quantum theory, and at the highest level, this mathematical breakthrough has enabled two classical scientific methods to be improved, Huffman Compression and Arithmetic Compression, both industry standards for the past fifty years.
They just threw in a bunch of compression buzzwords without even bothering to check whether they have anything to do with lossless compression...
The problem here is that some formats 'enhance' sound quality by adding a bit of reverb or tweaking some frequency response for a more rich sound. In such cases, the reproduction may score consistently better than the original.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the next clause that's bad:
* The OS Product or OS Components contain components that enable and facilitate the use of certain Internet-based services. You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer.
That doesn't make it right. Regardless, shareholders get to vote directors on and off the board, so there is accountability should the shareholders wish to make use of it.
Your post is the antithesis of the open source philosophy. By your logic, no company would ever write for open source software because it benefits their competitors as much as it benefits them. You can see that isn't the case with many companies these days, betting more and more on open source.
Of course, you assume that I should take the "open source philosophy" as personal dogma. As it happens, though, my post is entirely in line with open source as I understand it. What I said was that corporations should not screw over shareholders, not that they shouldn't adopt open standards. I actually raised the possibility that shareholders might benefit from a common standard.
I think what you're failing to infer from my post is that if a store owner wants to give away stock to charity and the employees do so in line with the owners directions, then that's just fine by me.
You could argue that it would be in the shareholders' best interest that ATi and nVidia cooperate on a standard, but it would be unethical for either corporation to deliberately flaunt the interests of the shareholders.
Add to that the pain of seeing it delivered by an actor of Christopher Lee's caliber.
So the Library of Congress has to store every single encrypted creative work? If I make an eight hour video of my cat sleeping and slap a cheap encryption on it, the LoC has to archive it? And your tax dollars will pay for it? The nice thing about current copyright laws is that they happen automatically with no government intervention until there's an actual dispute.
Seeing as how we're trying to establish what the laws ought to be, the point is moot. An evil rich corporation could use its influence to have copyright laws changed, giving corporations the right to own copyrights. Furthermore, I don't think a corporation is any more trustworthy than an individual, and there are plenty of individuals worth more many than plenty of corporations. I don't buy that the problem is with corporations themselves.
My other beef is that if a corporation (or any body that didn't orginate the work) has the copyright on something that you contributed too, you yourself lose the rights you should have to that work. See any arguments between bands and their labels for reasons why this is a bad thing.
The problem here is with the contracts bands sign with the record company. If a band doesn't sign over a copyrighted work, the company does not own the copyright. The lesson here is not that there's something wrong with corporations owning copyrights. It's that people should read the contracts they sign.
-Copyright terms may vary up to a period of 17 years (depending on content type -- To Be Specified), with a single renewal for the same period of time
-Copyright expires upon the death of the copyright holder.
-Copyrights cannot be assigned to another entity
All this seems unnecessarily complicated. Why not just a flat copyright term which can be transfered to any individual or corporation? Is there a reason a copyright should become less valuable toward the end of a person's life? Let it act like property; the copyright passes to the next of kin. Moreover, except for the death clause, I don't see any real difference between corporate and private ownership of a copyright, unless you just decide that you don't like corporations.
-If a work has some form of access control, that access control must be disabled when the work enters public domain
By who, exactly, if the author has just died? I don't think there should be an extra burden placed on anybody who creates an original work, even if they decided to encrypt it before releasing.
-A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)
Disagree here, too. What about the clever inventor who has a brilliant idea but doesn't have the money to implement it? How does he keep venture capitalists from simply stealing his idea? The whole idea of patents is to provide an incentive for people to publish their ideas without the fear of having them stolen. This restriction encourages people to keep them secret until they are able to provide a (potentially very costly) implementation.
My big beef with patents as they stand is not the patent laws themselves, but the ways that they are enforced. It is far too easy to slip a silly patent through the USPTO and far too difficult to challenge its novelty.
The other two booleans are specious. The what for the source is easy to decipher; programmers know what null reference and empty string checks look like. The why is what might be unclear in an uncommented version of the first example, but all the necessary information is exposed using the above line of code.
MASSIVE bureaucracy and potential for abuse. One nice thing about copyright in its current form is that original works are automatically copyrighted. Moreover, this would give government control over created works. Don't like someone's political viewpoint? Don't grant them favorable copyright terms. I personally can't think of a better system than the original one - a limited-time monopoly. No extensions, no levels. If you create a work and choose to give up some of these privileges, more power to you.
Actually, I think the goal is to have version 1 of the spec and version 1 of the implementation released at the same time. Trying to finalize the spec first is all well and good, but creating a reference implementation can help point out the problems you didn't think of when writing the spec. It's always a good idea to know where you're going before you try to get there, but trying to completely freeze a specification before letting your hands get dirty can lead to disaster.
No, it sounds like they copied the price from the wrong product. Still a legitimate mistake. And I say that as one of the folks that got ordered one of those puppies at $129.00. The law is flexible enough that merchants won't get hammered for mistakes like this. Now, if I had placed the order and paid $129.00, I would be howling for a lawyer. Best Buy screwed up, and they tried to make it right with a bajillion $30 gift certificates. As a consumer, I don't think I have a legitimate complaint about that. Of course, none of this has anything to do with the behavior of Mr. Hill, which I find inexcusable.
No, the point is to prevent Microsoft from illegally abusing its monopoly status. The competition is supposed to have an opportunity to compete, but not a free ride in doing so. Punishing or crippling Microsoft is one possible way of approaching this goal, but it's not necessarily the best way. An ideal solution would be to not directly hurt Microsoft while still ensuring that the competition is on a level playing field.
My personal fav: Romeo and Juliet (At least the Zefirelli version. Haven't seen the 1996 one)
It almost looks to me like MS is trying to get Samba to switch licenses to a BSD license. Is there something that MS wants that samba has?
That might be the key to the question of damages. Microsoft licenses you to use their technology, but if you make an open-source version, Microsoft gets to use it in their products as well. You can compete with a quid pro quo. If you take out the quid, you effectively cause damages.
I wonder if the Samba folks would consider a Microsoft Keep Out license...
Damages would be easy to prove. XXX violated the license, implemented a GPL'ed version of CIFS, and made it publicly available. This new implementation competes against Microsoft's own product, and thus hurts sales.
Of course, there are multiple ways to lose in court, and the merits of the case aren't always important. Would you be able to survive a long court battle with Microsoft, especially if court costs and lawyers' fees were on the line?
The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that international treaties hold the same weight as the Constitution. [cornell.edu] This means that if a WIPO treaty trumps the First Amendment, you're up a creek.
Not so sure about this. I'm no Constitutional scholar, but this Article says to me that federal law (including the Constitution, laws and treaties) all trump state constitutions and laws (since the next part of the text reads, "and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."). As far as the states are concerned, yes, international treaties hold the same weight as the Constitution. However, this does not mean that the treaties can trump the Constitution itself.
What, like KParts, Bonobo, et. al.?
Perhaps you're thinking of the UCITA? I don't think the DMCA has anything to do with the enforceability of shrink-wrap licenses.
Actually, Transgaming had to create a custom version of The Sims to get it to work. Unfortunately, it's not straight emulation.
http://www.transgaming.com/gamefaq.php?gameid=9 (see the question about running the Windows version of The Sims and the one about expansion packs)
I'd have to disagree that this is such a bad thing. I expect that Yamhill is only a contingency plan in the event that Hammer chips really take off in the marketplace, which is yet to be proven. Secondly, how much are consumers going to care whether AMD came up with the instruction set first? Intel still has its brand going for it, and customers may see Yamhill as a higher quality Hammer (think market perception, not necessarily the truth of the notion).
Transmeta beat everybody to the punch with the idea of low-power processors, but Intel is still taking them to the cleaners in the marketplace, even as the johnny-come-lately. Yes, AMD is a formidable competitor, and they have been able to embarrass Intel in the past, but Intel still dominates the market.
And in closed-source software, you do not buy the software; you buy a license to use the software. You can buy RedHat off the shelf at Best Buy, just the same way you can buy Windows. I suspect most judges would treat the two situations the same way.
1. There are plenty of Office Suites out there that understand the Word Format. (StarOffice and Koffice to name two.)
Most of the Word format, anyway.
2. Microsoft has already stated they are switching to the non-proprietary XML format for their standard document format.
I'll believe it when I see it.
3. While I do like GPL and Freeware I also believe that we need to have comercialware. Let's see, if all software was free then why would anyone in their right mind want to spend money to study programming at a an instituion? Why get a degree in software engineering?
Depends on the person, but preferably not to sit around reverse-engineering proprietary formats rather than creating something useful.
How can it be a standard when nobody knows what it is and it keeps changing? If it were a standard, then there would already be "good, free implementations." Instead, software developers, open source and otherwise, have to keep writing almost-good-enough filters to load and save the documents. While RMS' political arguments typically make my eyes glaze over, it's stupid to author a document without taking into consideration whether the recipient can read it.
While the premise of your argument may be unfortunately true, the suggestion simply won't work because Microsoft won't let it work. That's why they keep changing the format and don't publish the spec in the first place.
It goes beyond bullshit into the realm of humor:
ZeoSync has developed the TunerAccelerator(TM) in conjunction with some traditional state-of-the-art compression methodologies. This work includes the advancement of Fractals, Wavelets, DCT, FFT, Subband Coding, and Acoustic Compression that utilizes synthetic instruments. These are methods that are derived from classical physics and statistical mechanics and quantum theory, and at the highest level, this mathematical breakthrough has enabled two classical scientific methods to be improved, Huffman Compression and Arithmetic Compression, both industry standards for the past fifty years.
They just threw in a bunch of compression buzzwords without even bothering to check whether they have anything to do with lossless compression...
The problem here is that some formats 'enhance' sound quality by adding a bit of reverb or tweaking some frequency response for a more rich sound. In such cases, the reproduction may score consistently better than the original.