I don't know what school of music this guy went to
Most judges aren't musicologists either.
but he is forgetting all about rests, whole notes, sixteenth notes, thirty second notes, etc. This increases the number of possible distance vectors between notes.
The standard for copying in U.S. copyright law is not an exact match but rather "substantial similarity". The short/medium/long scale can easily be interpreted as quarter/half/whole or sixteenth/eighth/quarter for a particular piece.
What I want to know is where on earth does it say that we are limited only to four note melodies???
Read the beginning of the article There was a case involving the "Hallelujah Chorus" by Handel and "Yes! We have no bananas!" by Frank Silver. Handel's publisher won that one, setting a legal precedent that four notes can easily be enough to establish substantial similarity.
I have personally played many eight note melodies
Two eight note melodies that match in four notes may be considered substantially similar.
I'm Joe Sixpack, not a geek, why would i know about the EULA and rejection mechanism prior to handing over the consideration?
The existence of the EULA, along with the way to reject it, was printed on the outside of the box for crying out loud. You "reasonably should have known".
I knew what grandparent was talking about. "Solaris hardware" is "hardware with the Solaris(tm) mark on it", which in turn is "hardware certified by Sun Microsystems as tuned especially for running the Solaris(tm) operating environment". Sun SPARC workstations and servers are examples of such hardware. Think of it as analogous to "a Windows machine" that has the "designed for [big swastika] Windows XP" sticker.
Italy had it right in the 13th Century. The Venetian equivalent of patents... had 10 year lifespans.
The U.S. equivalent of patents nominally has a 20 year lifespan after filing. There are effectively 17 years of protection because it typically takes three years or so to get a patent approved.
<devilsadvocate>
What makes you think a 10-year patent term is so much better than a 17-year term? And what makes people think that the 19-year term suggested by Thomas Jefferson for both patents and copyrights is better than life plus 70, which sounds more like a prison sentence?
</devilsadvocate>
They basically load the level/area into memory and you play, for hours sometimes in the same area, very little disk access until you load the next area or if you have too little memory.
What about continuous-world games such as Half-Life? The whole game is one area. Not all of us have 1 GB of RAM to keep a whole 700 MB CD-ROM disc cached, plus whatever the game needs. On every system I've tried it on, Half-Life freezes momentarily when "seamlessly" teleporting from one map to the next.
Unlike the first generation SDRAM, which sent a word whenever the clock signal went from low to high, DDR (standing for double data rate, or Dance Dance Revolution, or East Germany) sends a word whenever "phi" (the clock signal) goes low to high or high to low, that is, whenever it inverts. QBM adds a 90 degree phase shift, which lets it send a word 1/4 of a clock after phi rises or falls.
I search groups.google.com and if I do not find the answer, I go ask in the relevant newsgroup.
Most users, after searching Google Web and Google Groups, ask Slashdot because it's easier to have lurked on Slashdot for two weeks than to have lurked on a particular newsgroup for two weeks. If you don't lurk for two weeks, you may inadvertently ask a question that isn't answered in the group's official FAQ page but is still considered a "dumb question".
Most "Ask Slashdot" questions are so simple that just typing in 1-2 keywords gets what you need - if your query is more complicated, chances are Ask Google still works, you just need a more complicated query to extract the right data.
How does a fellow learn to formulate such more complicated queries that produce relevant results?
Read the damn howto as well
What if a fellow has trouble understanding the text of the recognized howto?
if the only resource you know is ask slashdot then you really need to spend a bit more time with your favorite search engine
In practice, How many different queries should a fellow reasonably run, searching through the first 50 results and not finding anything relevant, before giving up and trying the next option?
the truth is if GCC was supported and was a functional on windows as it is on Unix
MinGW, a port of GCC to Windows, can compile just about any non-MFC app that MS Visual C++ can.
The graphics race is a little harder, but gain if there were versions of gimp, imagemagick, and Blender that worked as well in windows as in Unix there might be more of a horse race there too...
Blender works on Windows. So does GIMP, at least at the level of Paint Shop Pro. So does ImageMagick. (However, last time I tried IM, it claimed to read XCF but could not read its alpha channels.) So does a free (LGPL) office suite.
I think that [the postal "notary"] is/was a valid form of copyright that many aspiring musicians use.
Nowadays, copyright protects both unpublished and published inventions for life + n years. (Currently n = 70 in the United States and the European Union and 50 in the rest of the Berne Convention world, but most Slashdot readers who have replied to my comments believe that life plus 70 is much too long, and there are efforts in the U.S. court system to change the term.) If you register a copyright with the Library of Congress, you get more power against alleged infringers.
However, no copyright registration can save you from the fact that some publisher is going to sue you, claiming that the song you think is original is actually "substantially similar" to an existing copyrighted musical work. U.S. federal courts have found substantial similarity in four notes. And even if they lose, the cost of legal representation has bankrupted you.
Before you turn over your invention to unicron, you should definitely have your lawyer write a non-disclosure agreement. If you disclose your invention to the general public, you quickly become ineligible for a patent in the United States. Only something that's currently a trade secret can be patented.
Besides that, I would presume (since Sony is one of the core members of DVD Forum) that this will automagically region code any video-format DVDs' you create, unless such coding is already required in the writable DVD specifications.
Each DVD Video title contains a set of flag bits that determine whether to block playing the title on a particular region. If your encoder software requires you to specify a region set, tell it to encode for the following set of regions: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}.
unless such coding is already required in the writable DVD specifications.
DVD Video is an application of DVD. I don't think the writable DVD specifications say anything about the applications, except that the Key Area (used to hold digital restrictions management keys) shall be burned with 0 bytes during manufacture.
It sucks that for DVD's there won't be a company that can readily capitalize on the market and the product like MP3.com did with music
That's because the price of producing a feature film still hasn't fallen to consumer level. (Music arrived when 16-channel trackers and wave editors came out.) Very few Flash movies you can find on the Internet are feature-length.
Download it? High-speed Internet access isn't available in my area, and in order to get to another area, I'd have to move house. That has its own drawbacks. And even if it is available, it may be capped so that it takes a week to download a distribution.
Get the CD? How can I know the quality of a product I'm purchasing sight unseen? No, I don't want to have to spend $30 each on 10 distributions of free operating systems every release cycle.
Very few people pay for software licenses with currency and coins rather than checks or charge cards. If people start doing that to circumvent EULAs, Microsoft will require software retailers to accept a signature.
Even then, a signature may not be necessary, as the existence of the EULA (offer) and the rejection mechanism (acceptance) were known to you when you handed over the cash (consideration).
nothing in the DMCA eliminates rights under copyright law, and the judge's ruling was based on rights under copyright law.
That's not how the DMCA has been interpreted. Had the DMCA been interpreted the way you suggest, the right to possess and use DeCSS for fair use purposes might have been upheld in court. But it wasn't. Even though you have that defense under copyright law, you don't have that defense under circumvention law, which is just as separate from copyright law as patents or trademarks are.
<sarcasm>
If changing your cable company is worth that much to you, yes. You should have considered the practices of a cable company and the availability of alternate sources of television before settling down in your current location. The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee you a right to good, cheap entertainment.
</sarcasm>
Seriously though, if anybody else has a solution to cable monopolies, please stand up.
Books, you know? Nice, analog, books. No mod chip required.
What if the books you are required to use for school, etc., are available only in a digital, encrypted, pay-per-view format? Then you have Richard Stallman's dystopic short story, "The Right to Read".
Slashdot Mirror
Also, migrating between databases is not *that* hard, it's all SQL after all.
But does PostgreSQL, Oracle's closest free competitor, scale to an 18 TB database under the loads they're testing?
I don't know what school of music this guy went to
Most judges aren't musicologists either.
but he is forgetting all about rests, whole notes, sixteenth notes, thirty second notes, etc. This increases the number of possible distance vectors between notes.
The standard for copying in U.S. copyright law is not an exact match but rather "substantial similarity". The short/medium/long scale can easily be interpreted as quarter/half/whole or sixteenth/eighth/quarter for a particular piece.
What I want to know is where on earth does it say that we are limited only to four note melodies???
Read the beginning of the article There was a case involving the "Hallelujah Chorus" by Handel and "Yes! We have no bananas!" by Frank Silver. Handel's publisher won that one, setting a legal precedent that four notes can easily be enough to establish substantial similarity.
I have personally played many eight note melodies
Two eight note melodies that match in four notes may be considered substantially similar.
I'm Joe Sixpack, not a geek, why would i know about the EULA and rejection mechanism prior to handing over the consideration?
The existence of the EULA, along with the way to reject it, was printed on the outside of the box for crying out loud. You "reasonably should have known".
although Solaris hardware is a bit fallacious...
I knew what grandparent was talking about. "Solaris hardware" is "hardware with the Solaris(tm) mark on it", which in turn is "hardware certified by Sun Microsystems as tuned especially for running the Solaris(tm) operating environment". Sun SPARC workstations and servers are examples of such hardware. Think of it as analogous to "a Windows machine" that has the "designed for [big swastika] Windows XP" sticker.
Why should I give a rat's ass what Intel "authorizes".
Because you can't get warranty service from a company that's been sued out of existence for patent infringement.
Italy had it right in the 13th Century. The Venetian equivalent of patents ... had 10 year lifespans.
The U.S. equivalent of patents nominally has a 20 year lifespan after filing. There are effectively 17 years of protection because it typically takes three years or so to get a patent approved.
<devilsadvocate>
What makes you think a 10-year patent term is so much better than a 17-year term? And what makes people think that the 19-year term suggested by Thomas Jefferson for both patents and copyrights is better than life plus 70, which sounds more like a prison sentence?
</devilsadvocate>
They basically load the level/area into memory and you play, for hours sometimes in the same area, very little disk access until you load the next area or if you have too little memory.
What about continuous-world games such as Half-Life? The whole game is one area. Not all of us have 1 GB of RAM to keep a whole 700 MB CD-ROM disc cached, plus whatever the game needs. On every system I've tried it on, Half-Life freezes momentarily when "seamlessly" teleporting from one map to the next.
How could you forget inverting the polarity?
Unlike the first generation SDRAM, which sent a word whenever the clock signal went from low to high, DDR (standing for double data rate, or Dance Dance Revolution, or East Germany) sends a word whenever "phi" (the clock signal) goes low to high or high to low, that is, whenever it inverts. QBM adds a 90 degree phase shift, which lets it send a word 1/4 of a clock after phi rises or falls.
I search groups.google.com and if I do not find the answer, I go ask in the relevant newsgroup.
Most users, after searching Google Web and Google Groups, ask Slashdot because it's easier to have lurked on Slashdot for two weeks than to have lurked on a particular newsgroup for two weeks. If you don't lurk for two weeks, you may inadvertently ask a question that isn't answered in the group's official FAQ page but is still considered a "dumb question".
How did I find it? Like this [google.com]. Note the search words; battery powered ethernet hub.
In the future, do you believe submissions to Ask Slashdot should include a list of Google queries that failed to produce anything relevant?
Most "Ask Slashdot" questions are so simple that just typing in 1-2 keywords gets what you need - if your query is more complicated, chances are Ask Google still works, you just need a more complicated query to extract the right data.
How does a fellow learn to formulate such more complicated queries that produce relevant results?
Read the damn howto as well
What if a fellow has trouble understanding the text of the recognized howto?
if the only resource you know is ask slashdot then you really need to spend a bit more time with your favorite search engine
In practice, How many different queries should a fellow reasonably run, searching through the first 50 results and not finding anything relevant, before giving up and trying the next option?
and find others
What others?
the truth is if GCC was supported and was a functional on windows as it is on Unix
MinGW, a port of GCC to Windows, can compile just about any non-MFC app that MS Visual C++ can.
The graphics race is a little harder, but gain if there were versions of gimp, imagemagick, and Blender that worked as well in windows as in Unix there might be more of a horse race there too...
Blender works on Windows. So does GIMP, at least at the level of Paint Shop Pro. So does ImageMagick. (However, last time I tried IM, it claimed to read XCF but could not read its alpha channels.) So does a free (LGPL) office suite.
because most movies are bigger than the 4.7 GB of space you get on a blank DVD recordable.
I realized this two minutes after I submitted the comment. However, you'll still find a lot of single-layer (4.7 GB) DVD movies out there.
Or you could get one of those players that plays MPEG-4 movies, such as a PlayStation2 console or this set-top DivX player.
The trademark search engine is not relevant here.
Really? Once the inventor gets a patent, (s)he still needs a product brand name under which (s)he can market the technology to industry.
I think that [the postal "notary"] is/was a valid form of copyright that many aspiring musicians use.
Nowadays, copyright protects both unpublished and published inventions for life + n years. (Currently n = 70 in the United States and the European Union and 50 in the rest of the Berne Convention world, but most Slashdot readers who have replied to my comments believe that life plus 70 is much too long, and there are efforts in the U.S. court system to change the term.) If you register a copyright with the Library of Congress, you get more power against alleged infringers.
However, no copyright registration can save you from the fact that some publisher is going to sue you, claiming that the song you think is original is actually "substantially similar" to an existing copyrighted musical work. U.S. federal courts have found substantial similarity in four notes. And even if they lose, the cost of legal representation has bankrupted you.
Before you turn over your invention to unicron, you should definitely have your lawyer write a non-disclosure agreement. If you disclose your invention to the general public, you quickly become ineligible for a patent in the United States. Only something that's currently a trade secret can be patented.
Besides that, I would presume (since Sony is one of the core members of DVD Forum) that this will automagically region code any video-format DVDs' you create, unless such coding is already required in the writable DVD specifications.
Each DVD Video title contains a set of flag bits that determine whether to block playing the title on a particular region. If your encoder software requires you to specify a region set, tell it to encode for the following set of regions: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}.
unless such coding is already required in the writable DVD specifications.
DVD Video is an application of DVD. I don't think the writable DVD specifications say anything about the applications, except that the Key Area (used to hold digital restrictions management keys) shall be burned with 0 bytes during manufacture.
It sucks that for DVD's there won't be a company that can readily capitalize on the market and the product like MP3.com did with music
That's because the price of producing a feature film still hasn't fallen to consumer level. (Music arrived when 16-channel trackers and wave editors came out.) Very few Flash movies you can find on the Internet are feature-length.
So how exactly does one duplicate commercial DVD's?
Step 1: Move to Canada. (This has its own drawbacks.)
Step 2: Get a CSS descrambler.
Step 3: Follow the directions in the documentation to rip VOB and IFO files.
Step 4: Burn all files ripped from the DVD to a new blank DVD.
Step 5: Enjoy your backup. DO NOT distribute it to a third party.
Why don't you find out yourself?
Download it? High-speed Internet access isn't available in my area, and in order to get to another area, I'd have to move house. That has its own drawbacks. And even if it is available, it may be capped so that it takes a week to download a distribution.
Get the CD? How can I know the quality of a product I'm purchasing sight unseen? No, I don't want to have to spend $30 each on 10 distributions of free operating systems every release cycle.
And if I pay cash?
Very few people pay for software licenses with currency and coins rather than checks or charge cards. If people start doing that to circumvent EULAs, Microsoft will require software retailers to accept a signature.
Even then, a signature may not be necessary, as the existence of the EULA (offer) and the rejection mechanism (acceptance) were known to you when you handed over the cash (consideration).
nothing in the DMCA eliminates rights under copyright law, and the judge's ruling was based on rights under copyright law.
That's not how the DMCA has been interpreted. Had the DMCA been interpreted the way you suggest, the right to possess and use DeCSS for fair use purposes might have been upheld in court. But it wasn't. Even though you have that defense under copyright law, you don't have that defense under circumvention law, which is just as separate from copyright law as patents or trademarks are.
The only problem is, why wasn't 2600's lawyers able to use it?
2600's lawyers tried using the "adversely affected" clause, but the Librarian of Congress rejected 2600's pleas in his first subparagraph (C) report.
So I'm supposed to uproot my family [...]
<sarcasm>
If changing your cable company is worth that much to you, yes. You should have considered the practices of a cable company and the availability of alternate sources of television before settling down in your current location. The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee you a right to good, cheap entertainment. </sarcasm>
Seriously though, if anybody else has a solution to cable monopolies, please stand up.
Books, you know? Nice, analog, books. No mod chip required.
What if the books you are required to use for school, etc., are available only in a digital, encrypted, pay-per-view format? Then you have Richard Stallman's dystopic short story, "The Right to Read".