The GNU GPL has a clause against this
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Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 3, Informative
It would be hard to write an anti-obsucation clause I imagine
Not that hard; in fact, it's already been done. The GNU GPL, section 3, states: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it." I don't think any reasonable U.S. district court judge would consider robo-obfuscated C to count as the "preferred form" for that purpose. See #3117740 for another explanation.
That's just begging for someone to write a wrapper for Gecko and drop it in place of shdocvw.dll and/or mshtml.dll.
Problem: Bug 74201 (implement IE DOM extensions) is VERIFIED WONTFIX. Apps that expect mshtml.dll expect the document.all JS API to be available. The Mozilla Organization is strongly opposed to implementing document.all.
Well, it depends on whether you believe that a law has it's meaning based on the words in it or based on a courts interpretation of those words. What a court finds to be legal is what is enforced, it may or may not be correct.
Under modern common law systems (such as the legal systems of the United States and of every state except Louisiana), the courts are free to make decisions that set precedent, provided that they stay within 1) the Constitution and 2) the statutes that conform to the Constitution. Thus, a court's interpretation of the law in effect becomes the law. If a court makes a precedent, the precedent enters the body of case law, and it takes an additional statute to throw out that precedent.
Ya cause MS pays for that license to distribute the JRE.
Are you sure? J2SE 1.4 (not the SDK) is free as in beer to redistribute with other programs. Read the "Supplemental License Terms" that begin halfway down the license agreement.
I'm sure that some new file-sharing network will spring up some day soon that forces you to share (and does check). That service would grow sharply in popularity because there would be more files available.
But if you force users to share, you introduce an entry barrier. Assuming that you cannot download unless you are sharing at least one resource, how do you get that first resource?
There is no clause in fair use, there never has been one, that allows fair use for anything other than: (1) criticism and comment, (2) parody and satire, (3) scholarship and research, (4) news reporting and (5) teaching. To qualify for consideration under the fair use defence, your use must fall into these categories. You don't even get to argue the "negligible impact" until you've shown that you qualify. There is no case zero. There is no case six. Personal/friends/family use is not one of the five cases.
Bull. You completely misinterpret the "such as" wording of the law. According to 17 USC 101, "The terms 'including' and 'such as' are illustrative and not limitative" (emphasis by yerricde). The fair use law (17 USC 107) opens by stating: "the fair use of a copyrighted work... for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright" (emphasis by yerricde). Nowhere does it limit what may be considered as fair use. It then goes on to list the four factors that figure into a fair use defense. The judge in a fair use case must base her decision primarily (if not solely) on those factors. This non-limitation of fair use explains why the Sony v. Universal decision "contradicts [your] black and white stance a little."
Additionally, your CBS v. DNC quote may pose an argument against encryption of non-subscription broadcast television.
(OT) Java OS and the true cost of Visual Basic
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C
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· Score: 1
Maybe I'll write an efficient embedded OS in Java... oh, wait.
Wait no longer. J2ME is here. Yes, I understand what you're saying (C tends to be more efficient than some other popular languages for writing stuff that directly bangs on the hardware), but an embedded Java OS does exist.
Alrighty, then. I'll write my large, distributed database system in Java. Hey, that'll work! Too bad Visual Basic would cut my development time in half.
Time is money, and money is time. The Java tools are available for almost free as in beer (Mandrake CD + Internet conn for downloading J2SDK). Visual Basic, on the other hand, costs much more per seat (Windows XP Pro license + Visual Studio license + Windows licenses for all the testers' machines), money that somebody has to earn. Does your estimate take into account the opportunity cost of the time you spend working to make up the cost of expensive software licenses?
(OT) You were that lame once too.
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C
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· Score: 1
The alternative is that he is so lame as to not be worth discussing (which may also be true).
At one time, we were all that lame. Be nice.
(OT) So what are the standard libraries in C++?
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C
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· Score: 1
STL is part of the standard library. They are not the same thing.
Other than STL, iostream, and the C library, what libraries does the C++ standard define?
That's precisely why I use Mac OS X. It can perfectly mirror my production environment - Apache with mod_perl - and run Photoshop and Flash, on one machine, at the same time.
I understand that, but what if your server platform has quirks that Mac OS X doesn't, or vice-versa?
The artical is talking about China banning spamming outright which is a lot more then any leader in the US is even willing to think about.
US leaders have more than thought about it. With the junk fax law (part of the 1996 Telecom Act), the United States has already banned spam sent over a phone line.
[Broadband commercial:] "I want to download the top 40... while it's still the top 40!"
Napkin calculation: On average, it takes well under five hours to download ten songs at high quality (192 kbps MP3) over a dial-up connection, assuming two concurrent downloads plus light web browsing. Thus, four 5-hour sessions should fetch the first week's Top 40, and assuming 10 songs are replaced each week, a pirate needs only one session of Slashdot-reloading to incrementally update the playlist. Who needs cable?
I've always taken that to be telling me that I should buy a cable modem to pirate music faster.
Or to download Universal's MP3.com top 40. Or to download from eMusic, which has licensed MP3 distribution rights from some of the major labels.
uncontested by the RIAA that sharing tapes of copyrighted material isn't objectionable. I would suspect that they don't feel it cuts into their profits, and probably encourages people to but their own copies... Thus, it seems somewhat hypocritical to then claim that ripping disks from friends is HORRIBLE, sa least from the position of the RIAA
I don't see an unwarranted double standard. Each generation of an analog copy adds some noise. Each generation of a digital copy adds no noise. Mastering (dithering of 20-bit to 16-bit PCM, or compression to 192 kbps MP3 format) adds a small amount of noise, but that doesn't increase per copy generation, leading to spreading of a work on a logistic pattern (that is, exponential growth with a plateau) as it is copied from machine to machine. This explains why the copyright industry has been tougher on digital technology than on analog technology.
Please, if you believe that "rip off" stuff you must think it's pretty damn simple to make a feature film of that size...
So what if it's big? Disney still may have infringed the copyrights on Nadia and Kimba by creating a derivative work. Barring fair use (which is pretty much ruled out in commercial derivatives of fictional works except for parodies), United States copyright law considers creating a substantial derivative of a copyrighted work to constitute copyright infringement no matter how much original material was added.
The "back" button really isn't the greatest paradigm (motif) to begin with. The only purpose for its use is for sites with poor navigation, where users can tend to get lost in a maze of subpages with no clear way to get back to where they were.
If you hate 'back' so much, then how do you expect users to get back to Slashdot after reading the JGenerator page you linked to?
Go look at some professional sites instead of hanging around geekboards.
Except that the most popular commercial sites (Yahoo, MSN, Google, Amazon, etc) don't use it. Among the most popular commercial web sites, only the movie brochure sites (the matrix, the time machine, etc) use Flash to present the main content, and I find their navigation frustrating, not to mention their performance over a dial-up line.
There is going to be Flash MX development tools for unix users. They're releasing Flash MX for Mac OS X.
Your comment's reasoning implies that Mac OS X counts as a UNIX system. Mac OS X is not a UNIX® brand system.
Grandparent meant that Macromedia Flash has not been ported to any Linux, *BSD, HP/UX, or Solaris operating environment, or any other environment that uses X11 as its graphics layer. Many web developers like to develop on a system known to share some behavior with the production server.
The Flash Generator automatically duplicates all the Flash text into HTML text so that Google can find it.
It also puts the text inside comments, which the search engines ignore. It also repeats text over and over if it appears on multiple frames; search engines' anti-spam heuristics ignore text that's repeated too much. (I found these problems on animutation.com until it changed over to Newgrounds hosting.) And there's no way to get that info from the swf itself.
I disagree: they need to create versions which display anywhere. This was what HTML was meant to do. This is why it is, even now, mostly structural markup.
I agree with you that HTML is structural markup, but how do you create CSS that will work well on all devices now known or hereinafter developed?
On those rare occasions when I do need to see moving pictures on my computer, they are videos, not animations, and should be delivered (preferably as MPEGs) but I can also stand QuickTime or RealPlayer streams in a pinch.
But can MPEG, QuickTime, and RealPlayer do vector animation, or are they limited to a sequence of bitmaps? Without vectors, a high-quality digital cel animation will be an order of magnitude larger, and it'll look blurry when scaled up.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be hard to write an anti-obsucation clause I imagine
Not that hard; in fact, it's already been done. The GNU GPL, section 3, states: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it." I don't think any reasonable U.S. district court judge would consider robo-obfuscated C to count as the "preferred form" for that purpose. See #3117740 for another explanation.
That's just begging for someone to write a wrapper for Gecko and drop it in place of shdocvw.dll and/or mshtml.dll.
Problem: Bug 74201 (implement IE DOM extensions) is VERIFIED WONTFIX. Apps that expect mshtml.dll expect the document.all JS API to be available. The Mozilla Organization is strongly opposed to implementing document.all.
Well, it depends on whether you believe that a law has it's meaning based on the words in it or based on a courts interpretation of those words. What a court finds to be legal is what is enforced, it may or may not be correct.
Under modern common law systems (such as the legal systems of the United States and of every state except Louisiana), the courts are free to make decisions that set precedent, provided that they stay within 1) the Constitution and 2) the statutes that conform to the Constitution. Thus, a court's interpretation of the law in effect becomes the law. If a court makes a precedent, the precedent enters the body of case law, and it takes an additional statute to throw out that precedent.
Ya cause MS pays for that license to distribute the JRE.
Are you sure? J2SE 1.4 (not the SDK) is free as in beer to redistribute with other programs. Read the "Supplemental License Terms" that begin halfway down the license agreement.
I'm sure that some new file-sharing network will spring up some day soon that forces you to share (and does check). That service would grow sharply in popularity because there would be more files available.
But if you force users to share, you introduce an entry barrier. Assuming that you cannot download unless you are sharing at least one resource, how do you get that first resource?
There is no clause in fair use, there never has been one, that allows fair use for anything other than: (1) criticism and comment, (2) parody and satire, (3) scholarship and research, (4) news reporting and (5) teaching. To qualify for consideration under the fair use defence, your use must fall into these categories. You don't even get to argue the "negligible impact" until you've shown that you qualify. There is no case zero. There is no case six. Personal/friends/family use is not one of the five cases.
Bull. You completely misinterpret the "such as" wording of the law. According to 17 USC 101, "The terms 'including' and 'such as' are illustrative and not limitative" (emphasis by yerricde). The fair use law (17 USC 107) opens by stating: "the fair use of a copyrighted work ... for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright" (emphasis by yerricde). Nowhere does it limit what may be considered as fair use. It then goes on to list the four factors that figure into a fair use defense. The judge in a fair use case must base her decision primarily (if not solely) on those factors. This non-limitation of fair use explains why the Sony v. Universal decision "contradicts [your] black and white stance a little."
Additionally, your CBS v. DNC quote may pose an argument against encryption of non-subscription broadcast television.
Maybe I'll write an efficient embedded OS in Java... oh, wait.
Wait no longer. J2ME is here. Yes, I understand what you're saying (C tends to be more efficient than some other popular languages for writing stuff that directly bangs on the hardware), but an embedded Java OS does exist.
Alrighty, then. I'll write my large, distributed database system in Java. Hey, that'll work! Too bad Visual Basic would cut my development time in half.
Time is money, and money is time. The Java tools are available for almost free as in beer (Mandrake CD + Internet conn for downloading J2SDK). Visual Basic, on the other hand, costs much more per seat (Windows XP Pro license + Visual Studio license + Windows licenses for all the testers' machines), money that somebody has to earn. Does your estimate take into account the opportunity cost of the time you spend working to make up the cost of expensive software licenses?
The alternative is that he is so lame as to not be worth discussing (which may also be true).
At one time, we were all that lame. Be nice.
STL is part of the standard library. They are not the same thing.
Other than STL, iostream, and the C library, what libraries does the C++ standard define?
That's precisely why I use Mac OS X. It can perfectly mirror my production environment - Apache with mod_perl - and run Photoshop and Flash, on one machine, at the same time.
I understand that, but what if your server platform has quirks that Mac OS X doesn't, or vice-versa?
The artical is talking about China banning spamming outright which is a lot more then any leader in the US is even willing to think about.
US leaders have more than thought about it. With the junk fax law (part of the 1996 Telecom Act), the United States has already banned spam sent over a phone line.
Your kid can still watch Pinocchio, Pinocchio, Pinocchio 2, or The Lion King. Too bad Atlantis hasn't been dubbed yet. Also boycott Sonny and Cher because of the Bono Act that they both supported and that Di$ney helped push through.
[Broadband commercial:] "I want to download the top 40... while it's still the top 40!"
Napkin calculation: On average, it takes well under five hours to download ten songs at high quality (192 kbps MP3) over a dial-up connection, assuming two concurrent downloads plus light web browsing. Thus, four 5-hour sessions should fetch the first week's Top 40, and assuming 10 songs are replaced each week, a pirate needs only one session of Slashdot-reloading to incrementally update the playlist. Who needs cable?
I've always taken that to be telling me that I should buy a cable modem to pirate music faster.
Or to download Universal's MP3.com top 40. Or to download from eMusic, which has licensed MP3 distribution rights from some of the major labels.
Windows is easy to break:
main(){while(printf("\t\b\b\b"));}
Instant BSOD on all NT operating systems.
uncontested by the RIAA that sharing tapes of copyrighted material isn't objectionable. I would suspect that they don't feel it cuts into their profits, and probably encourages people to but their own copies... Thus, it seems somewhat hypocritical to then claim that ripping disks from friends is HORRIBLE, sa least from the position of the RIAA
I don't see an unwarranted double standard. Each generation of an analog copy adds some noise. Each generation of a digital copy adds no noise. Mastering (dithering of 20-bit to 16-bit PCM, or compression to 192 kbps MP3 format) adds a small amount of noise, but that doesn't increase per copy generation, leading to spreading of a work on a logistic pattern (that is, exponential growth with a plateau) as it is copied from machine to machine. This explains why the copyright industry has been tougher on digital technology than on analog technology.
For chrissakes; he had three points and I was forced to make up whatever it was I could to refute his third point
You could have "granted" part of his argument.
Can you really blame me?
I wouldn't have blamed you had you used "primary" instead of "only" in your argument. I was pointing out that "only" isn't entirely correct.
Please, if you believe that "rip off" stuff you must think it's pretty damn simple to make a feature film of that size...
So what if it's big? Disney still may have infringed the copyrights on Nadia and Kimba by creating a derivative work. Barring fair use (which is pretty much ruled out in commercial derivatives of fictional works except for parodies), United States copyright law considers creating a substantial derivative of a copyrighted work to constitute copyright infringement no matter how much original material was added.
"Rip Mix Burn," indeed.
No, in the same way that an iframe is useless to anyone who doesn't use IE.
Are you claiming that Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only popular web browser that implements iframe, which is part of the HTML 4.0 standard?
If you hate 'back' so much, then how do you expect users to get back to Slashdot after reading the JGenerator page you linked to?
What major feature is GIMP missing that Photoshop Elements (i.e. Photoshop without prepress) has?
Go look at some professional sites instead of hanging around geekboards.
Except that the most popular commercial sites (Yahoo, MSN, Google, Amazon, etc) don't use it. Among the most popular commercial web sites, only the movie brochure sites (the matrix, the time machine, etc) use Flash to present the main content, and I find their navigation frustrating, not to mention their performance over a dial-up line.
There is going to be Flash MX development tools for unix users. They're releasing Flash MX for Mac OS X.
Your comment's reasoning implies that Mac OS X counts as a UNIX system. Mac OS X is not a UNIX® brand system.
Grandparent meant that Macromedia Flash has not been ported to any Linux, *BSD, HP/UX, or Solaris operating environment, or any other environment that uses X11 as its graphics layer. Many web developers like to develop on a system known to share some behavior with the production server.
The Flash Generator automatically duplicates all the Flash text into HTML text so that Google can find it.
It also puts the text inside comments, which the search engines ignore. It also repeats text over and over if it appears on multiple frames; search engines' anti-spam heuristics ignore text that's repeated too much. (I found these problems on animutation.com until it changed over to Newgrounds hosting.) And there's no way to get that info from the swf itself.
I disagree: they need to create versions which display anywhere. This was what HTML was meant to do. This is why it is, even now, mostly structural markup.
I agree with you that HTML is structural markup, but how do you create CSS that will work well on all devices now known or hereinafter developed?
On those rare occasions when I do need to see moving pictures on my computer, they are videos, not animations, and should be delivered (preferably as MPEGs) but I can also stand QuickTime or RealPlayer streams in a pinch.
But can MPEG, QuickTime, and RealPlayer do vector animation, or are they limited to a sequence of bitmaps? Without vectors, a high-quality digital cel animation will be an order of magnitude larger, and it'll look blurry when scaled up.