There's insignificant cost to running the compiler twice as often
Unless, as several people commented in this story, management demands that you run antivirus software with the following policy: every time you run the compiler, you also run the virus scanner on the compiler binary, and the virus scanner takes twice as long as the compiler itself.
or looking something up in a manual or on the web.
Not if the CBDTPA passes, free software is declared illegal, and the operating system vendor makes its NDA'd developer manuals pay-per-read.
(or the processor understands javacode, which is highly unlikely, Probability --> 0)
Talk to Transmeta. Transmeta's Crusoe processor runs programs through dynamic recompilation of bytecode. Current products emulate Intel x86 bytecode, but the Code Morphing recompiler is a piece of software and can be easily replaced with one that understands Java bytecode or.NET MSIL bytecode.
not running VB on solaris might as well be a security feature opf Solaris as it protects it from run away programs and HORRIBLY coded apps...
Actually, a VB compatible interpreter runs on the Solaris operating environment. What protects the system from runaway VB apps is not a lack of VB but the presence of working permissions on the system.
What this means is that I can take a software patent and distribute my own patented software under the GPL with the only obligations on my patent that any software that implements my patent must be GPL'ed itself. This would not violate the GPL.
What would the implications of this be for something like PlusV? According to PlusV's patent license: "In addition to the other terms and conditions of this License, use of the Patented Process is permitted, without fee or royalty, when used by software licensed under the GPL. Free use in mass production audio playback devices is explicitly not approved within this license" (emphasis by yerricde). Given that Free firmware for pocket audio players is now available, how is this restriction legal?
For one thing, some TVs don't properly blank the VBlank portion of the signal. For another, mothers want to make durable copies of Dreamworks animated movies so that the originals don't get scratched up.
basically about.com is pulling the content and pushign it back to you
That's a proxy, and this About page is no proxy. On my machine, I have goatse.cx and www.goatse.cx assigned in.../etc/hosts to an Apache server on 127.0.0.1 (otherwise known as localhost), which mirrors pineight.com. I didn't see the ass but rather the front page of pineight.com, which means that my computer requested the content.
Nintendo... will sue anyone who tries to release 'unlicensed' software for their platforms
But if the defendant has the resources to mount a defense (for example, if the EFF picks up on the legal defense), Nintendo will lose handily because of the Sega v. Accolade precedent. This will be easier on the Game Boy Advance platform where the protection lies merely in the presence of 156 bytes of logo data.
You're deriving value from a product you didn't pay for.
I didn't pay for the wheel and axle, yet I derive value from it. I didn't pay for a Bach composition, yet I derive value from it. Did I steal that invention or that musical work?
How is it different from, say, stealing a book?
Stealing a book derives the original owner of the book. Making a copy of the book, on the other hand, deprives nobody, especially if the author has already received a substantial return on the investment of time and effort put into writing the book. Assuming copyright law when making a case for copyright law is called "begging the question."
but if you try to convince yourself it's not stealing, then you're only fooling yourself.
Larceny and copyright infringement are considered separate crimes under the United States Code and the laws of the individual states.
The CD was supposed to make the whole process cheaper, lowering prices for the consumer. But that never happened. Instead, the prices went up (which they justified by saying that new technology costs money) and they stayed up.
It costs money to produce and promote music, and the dollar cost of "people time" has gone up, not down, in the last two decades. This is called "inflation".
On the other hand, the price of a CD has remained constant in the face of inflation. if you measure costs not in dollars but in multiples of the Consumer Price Index, in (say) 1983 U.S. dollars, you find that the price of a CD has fallen from $17 in 1983 to $9 in 2002. If a CD costs the same number of dollars as before, but CD buyers earn more dollars per week than before, then each CD represents a smaller portion of the average weekly paycheck.
Besides, legislators may require that DRM opens the work at the expiry of copyright.
They already have. In the United States, the DMCA's circumvention ban (17 USC 1201) applies only to "a work protected under this title". A work that has fallen out of copyright is no longer "a work protected under this title". Therefore, now that Mickey Mouse is public domain due to faulty copyright notice, and some 1900s and 1910s silent films (PD due to copyright term expiration) have hit DVD, DeCSS software is now legal when marketed to be used only with such titles.
He can code a little universe but making a simple homepage with a form that collects the info he needs is too difficult?
Unless you go to SourceForge.net (remember the "OSDN is dying" scare?), you can't really get inexpensive hosting that includes server-side dynamic content. If your provider allows only static pages, then how does it respond to an HTTP POST from a <form>? That's right: "Method Not Supported".
The X bug only crashes your machine if you browse to a malicious web site. The malicious person can't do anything to your machine if they can't induce you to go to their web site
Do you think you have control over what web sites you "go to"? If the malicious person sticks the exploit code in a pop-up ad window, then every innocent site on the ad network becomes a vector for the attack.
Also i really wonder why it should take two weeks to put a patch on a webserver and write a brief documentation about it, especially since they've enough time to put together documentation while doing internal testing (they need that anyway for customer testing).
Because not all Windows system administrators are fluent in the Seattle dialect of the American English language. Microsoft needs to hire translators to localize the advisory and any new GUI elements that the patch introduces. This takes time and money.
Not correct either. You only have to provide the source code to a licensee
Grandparent was correct. Section 3 of the GNU GPL requires the offer for source code to be valid for "any third party" because according to Section 6, any third party can become a licensee by receiving binaries.
how can there be any argument that a copyright term based on "life span plus years" of the creator is not in effect unlimited for the creator and thus in direct violation of the Constitution.
I'm anti-Bono, and I don't consider statutory monopolies as property, but I'll play devil's advocate here to show you what you're up against:
One of the rights associated with private property under the common law is the right to specify how it is used after you have died, in a legal instrument called a "last will and testament", or "will" for short. Under current United States law, the term of copyright granted to those persons specified in the author's will is strictly "limited" to seventy years plus any remaining time until the end of the calendar year.
Bull. The sheeple will tend to vote for whomever the TV tells them to vote for. Worse, the copyright industry essentially gives incumbents free advertising: incumbent votes for a law, media company gives incumbent a monetary kickback, incumbent returns money to media company by spending it on a TV commercial.
Does it write its own maximum time period for copyright law even though the founders didn't?
The Supreme Court should consider other writings by the Founding Fathers when attempting to discern the spirit of the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson proposed a copyright term of 19 years. I'd be happy with the 28-year term of the 1790 act.
A world where everyone has to pay $15 to buy any book because Public Domain ceased to exist is a damn sight better than a world where those books don't exist.
The argument currently being made that the laws are not specifying a limited time because Congress will just extend it in the future is very shaky legally.
Hypothetical law: "Resolved, That it is the policy of the Congress of the United States to enact a 20-year copyright term extension every 20 years." Legal or illegal?
nothing legally binds you to keep your word that the work is unencumbered by copyright restrictions
Except for language in the typical nearly-public-domain free software license. If Alice can't get a license from you, she can get a license from Bob: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of... the Software to deal in the Software without restriction... and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so" (emphasis by yerricde). The GNU GPL (a popular copyleft license for software) says it a different way: "Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor". Unlike with a submarine patent, once this type of contract is in place, you can't just revoke the licenses at any time.
Except now, consoles are getting Internet access and hard disks, how long before history repeats?
Don't worry. It is the user's expectation that a single-player or split-screen console game will be relatively bug-free out of the box. If Super Mario 9 for PostCube crashes when little Chester gets to level 12, you bet Chester's mom will be taking the game back to the store rather than tying up the phone line for a whole day to download a patch. I can see a system where players can buy new characters for Smash Bros. 3 or something, but I don't see Nintendo risking its brand name by pushing Zelda 11 out the door and dismissing the bugs with "We'll patch around them."
Not everybody has the broadband to download a 500 MB patch for an Xbox game. And given Microsoft's track record with respect to automatic updates, you'll have to download the patch from Xbox Update onto every system you play the game on (which may mean packing up your Xbox and taking it to the home of a friend who subscribes to compatible broadband) unless Microsoft distributes patches on DVDs at cost (as has been done for Windows Update).
And how do you expect to fit a large storage device into a handheld system like Game Boy Advance? Are you going to do like the Game Park system does, make the game cartridges partially rewritable?
(This is tangential, marked as such in the subject, and posted without bonus.)
How is [prohibiting selling copies above cost] a big deviation from the GPL?
Red Hat Linux is sold above cost. The only restriction that Section 3 of the GNU GPL imposes on distribution is that if you make binaries available apart from source code, you must make source code available at cost. If, on the other hand, you sell both source and binaries in a single package, you can charge as much as you want.
Slashdot Mirror
There's insignificant cost to running the compiler twice as often
Unless, as several people commented in this story, management demands that you run antivirus software with the following policy: every time you run the compiler, you also run the virus scanner on the compiler binary, and the virus scanner takes twice as long as the compiler itself.
or looking something up in a manual or on the web.
Not if the CBDTPA passes, free software is declared illegal, and the operating system vendor makes its NDA'd developer manuals pay-per-read.
(or the processor understands javacode, which is highly unlikely, Probability --> 0)
Talk to Transmeta. Transmeta's Crusoe processor runs programs through dynamic recompilation of bytecode. Current products emulate Intel x86 bytecode, but the Code Morphing recompiler is a piece of software and can be easily replaced with one that understands Java bytecode or .NET MSIL bytecode.
not running VB on solaris might as well be a security feature opf Solaris as it protects it from run away programs and HORRIBLY coded apps...
Actually, a VB compatible interpreter runs on the Solaris operating environment. What protects the system from runaway VB apps is not a lack of VB but the presence of working permissions on the system.
VB is good if you need to produce something quickly to use it just one time.
Perl is good for one-off scripts as well, especially with its regular expression support.
Yet I still run a system with windows 2000 on it so I can play video games.
Is that windows 2000 the full retail version, or is it the cut-down version in the Xbox BIOS?
What this means is that I can take a software patent and distribute my own patented software under the GPL with the only obligations on my patent that any software that implements my patent must be GPL'ed itself. This would not violate the GPL.
What would the implications of this be for something like PlusV? According to PlusV's patent license: "In addition to the other terms and conditions of this License, use of the Patented Process is permitted, without fee or royalty, when used by software licensed under the GPL. Free use in mass production audio playback devices is explicitly not approved within this license" (emphasis by yerricde). Given that Free firmware for pocket audio players is now available, how is this restriction legal?
I would much rather simply lend the disc to someone
Who will scratch it up.
what's the point of VHS if you've got DVD quality
For one thing, some TVs don't properly blank the VBlank portion of the signal. For another, mothers want to make durable copies of Dreamworks animated movies so that the originals don't get scratched up.
basically about.com is pulling the content and pushign it back to you
That's a proxy, and this About page is no proxy. On my machine, I have goatse.cx and www.goatse.cx assigned in .../etc/hosts to an Apache server on 127.0.0.1 (otherwise known as localhost), which mirrors pineight.com. I didn't see the ass but rather the front page of pineight.com, which means that my computer requested the content.
It's URL redirection in a frame.
Nintendo ... will sue anyone who tries to release 'unlicensed' software for their platforms
But if the defendant has the resources to mount a defense (for example, if the EFF picks up on the legal defense), Nintendo will lose handily because of the Sega v. Accolade precedent. This will be easier on the Game Boy Advance platform where the protection lies merely in the presence of 156 bytes of logo data.
You're deriving value from a product you didn't pay for.
I didn't pay for the wheel and axle, yet I derive value from it. I didn't pay for a Bach composition, yet I derive value from it. Did I steal that invention or that musical work?
How is it different from, say, stealing a book?
Stealing a book derives the original owner of the book. Making a copy of the book, on the other hand, deprives nobody, especially if the author has already received a substantial return on the investment of time and effort put into writing the book. Assuming copyright law when making a case for copyright law is called "begging the question."
but if you try to convince yourself it's not stealing, then you're only fooling yourself.
Larceny and copyright infringement are considered separate crimes under the United States Code and the laws of the individual states.
Why do you want a game that plays for you to watch when you can be playing and competing on your own level?
Two words: potty break.
Two more: Progress Quest.
There is no way you can split apart the definition except by pretending there are no natural rights and law defines rights, which is utter BS.
There is no natural right to police protection of your person or of your property either. Taxes pay for that.
The CD was supposed to make the whole process cheaper, lowering prices for the consumer. But that never happened. Instead, the prices went up (which they justified by saying that new technology costs money) and they stayed up.
It costs money to produce and promote music, and the dollar cost of "people time" has gone up, not down, in the last two decades. This is called "inflation".
On the other hand, the price of a CD has remained constant in the face of inflation. if you measure costs not in dollars but in multiples of the Consumer Price Index, in (say) 1983 U.S. dollars, you find that the price of a CD has fallen from $17 in 1983 to $9 in 2002. If a CD costs the same number of dollars as before, but CD buyers earn more dollars per week than before, then each CD represents a smaller portion of the average weekly paycheck.
Besides, legislators may require that DRM opens the work at the expiry of copyright.
They already have. In the United States, the DMCA's circumvention ban (17 USC 1201) applies only to "a work protected under this title". A work that has fallen out of copyright is no longer "a work protected under this title". Therefore, now that Mickey Mouse is public domain due to faulty copyright notice, and some 1900s and 1910s silent films (PD due to copyright term expiration) have hit DVD, DeCSS software is now legal when marketed to be used only with such titles.
He can code a little universe but making a simple homepage with a form that collects the info he needs is too difficult?
Unless you go to SourceForge.net (remember the "OSDN is dying" scare?), you can't really get inexpensive hosting that includes server-side dynamic content. If your provider allows only static pages, then how does it respond to an HTTP POST from a <form>? That's right: "Method Not Supported".
The X bug only crashes your machine if you browse to a malicious web site. The malicious person can't do anything to your machine if they can't induce you to go to their web site
Do you think you have control over what web sites you "go to"? If the malicious person sticks the exploit code in a pop-up ad window, then every innocent site on the ad network becomes a vector for the attack.
Also i really wonder why it should take two weeks to put a patch on a webserver and write a brief documentation about it, especially since they've enough time to put together documentation while doing internal testing (they need that anyway for customer testing).
Because not all Windows system administrators are fluent in the Seattle dialect of the American English language. Microsoft needs to hire translators to localize the advisory and any new GUI elements that the patch introduces. This takes time and money.
Not correct either. You only have to provide the source code to a licensee
Grandparent was correct. Section 3 of the GNU GPL requires the offer for source code to be valid for "any third party" because according to Section 6, any third party can become a licensee by receiving binaries.
how can there be any argument that a copyright term based on "life span plus years" of the creator is not in effect unlimited for the creator and thus in direct violation of the Constitution.
I'm anti-Bono, and I don't consider statutory monopolies as property, but I'll play devil's advocate here to show you what you're up against:
One of the rights associated with private property under the common law is the right to specify how it is used after you have died, in a legal instrument called a "last will and testament", or "will" for short. Under current United States law, the term of copyright granted to those persons specified in the author's will is strictly "limited" to seventy years plus any remaining time until the end of the calendar year.
And the people can always throw the bums out.
Bull. The sheeple will tend to vote for whomever the TV tells them to vote for. Worse, the copyright industry essentially gives incumbents free advertising: incumbent votes for a law, media company gives incumbent a monetary kickback, incumbent returns money to media company by spending it on a TV commercial.
Does it write its own maximum time period for copyright law even though the founders didn't?
The Supreme Court should consider other writings by the Founding Fathers when attempting to discern the spirit of the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson proposed a copyright term of 19 years. I'd be happy with the 28-year term of the 1790 act.
A world where everyone has to pay $15 to buy any book because Public Domain ceased to exist is a damn sight better than a world where those books don't exist.
Possibly. However, I have two problems, both relating to overly broad protection of derivative works: First of all, parody is not copyright infringement, but such a case can often be too expensive for an individual to defend. Second, it can be proved that there exist a limited number of melodies in Western musical scales. If somebody manages to get a perpetual copyright on every single melody, then no future songwriter will be able to write anything new.
The argument currently being made that the laws are not specifying a limited time because Congress will just extend it in the future is very shaky legally.
Hypothetical law: "Resolved, That it is the policy of the Congress of the United States to enact a 20-year copyright term extension every 20 years." Legal or illegal?
nothing legally binds you to keep your word that the work is unencumbered by copyright restrictions
Except for language in the typical nearly-public-domain free software license. If Alice can't get a license from you, she can get a license from Bob: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of ... the Software to deal in the Software without restriction ... and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so" (emphasis by yerricde). The GNU GPL (a popular copyleft license for software) says it a different way: "Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor". Unlike with a submarine patent, once this type of contract is in place, you can't just revoke the licenses at any time.
Except now, consoles are getting Internet access and hard disks, how long before history repeats?
Don't worry. It is the user's expectation that a single-player or split-screen console game will be relatively bug-free out of the box. If Super Mario 9 for PostCube crashes when little Chester gets to level 12, you bet Chester's mom will be taking the game back to the store rather than tying up the phone line for a whole day to download a patch. I can see a system where players can buy new characters for Smash Bros. 3 or something, but I don't see Nintendo risking its brand name by pushing Zelda 11 out the door and dismissing the bugs with "We'll patch around them."
Not everybody has the broadband to download a 500 MB patch for an Xbox game. And given Microsoft's track record with respect to automatic updates, you'll have to download the patch from Xbox Update onto every system you play the game on (which may mean packing up your Xbox and taking it to the home of a friend who subscribes to compatible broadband) unless Microsoft distributes patches on DVDs at cost (as has been done for Windows Update).
And how do you expect to fit a large storage device into a handheld system like Game Boy Advance? Are you going to do like the Game Park system does, make the game cartridges partially rewritable?
(This is tangential, marked as such in the subject, and posted without bonus.)
How is [prohibiting selling copies above cost] a big deviation from the GPL?
Red Hat Linux is sold above cost. The only restriction that Section 3 of the GNU GPL imposes on distribution is that if you make binaries available apart from source code, you must make source code available at cost. If, on the other hand, you sell both source and binaries in a single package, you can charge as much as you want.