Yup, unfortunately. It depends on where the jurisdiction of the law is, but it requires some court (usually the Supreme Court) to overturn it before its actually invalid.
According to the United States Constitution, section 6.2, "This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof... shall be the supreme law of the land." Unconstitutional statutes are not "laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof." Furthermore, "the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." Thus, as a matter of law, any judge (not just the Supremes) must reject any unconstitutional statute or regulation.
None of the money that you pay for a CD goes directly to the musicians. (Unless, of course, you listen to indie bands, like sensible people.)
Indie bands, or any other bands that write their own music such as Metallica. Out of every CD you buy, 75 cents goes to mechanical royalties for the underlying musical work; songwriters typically split them about evenly with their publishers. That's $38,000 directly into the pockets of the songwriters from a CD that sells a hundred thousand units; not a bad deal, especially without all the "advance" bullsh**.
Go import some limited edition Suicune, Celebi, Hello Kitty, and Yomiuri Giants GBAs. I'm quite happy with my own LE models, particularly the Suicune model. (oooooh...shiny bluuuuue...)
To clarify: Unlike DVD and Nintendo TV-top consoles, Game Boy platforms have never been region locked.
The rub is that people will have to get the new one, since the GBA's screen is horrible.
It's not horrible, just dark. The gamma of the Game Boy Advance display is 4. Gamma-correcting a game's graphics before running it on the hardware will fix the display, especially if you have a cover light or a worm light. The Doom Advance developers knew this and cranked up the brightness, and the game looks wonderful (even though it may look washed out in magazines that assume that all screenshots have a gamma of 2.2 like a CRT). The fact that Castle of the Moon 1.0 didn't gamma correct is a bug that may be fixed in later printings.
In my opinion it's one thing to be biased against a company due to their business ethics/tactics but it's wrong to be biased against something because a lame ass store hooked the product up to the cheapest TV they could get.
Unless Microsoft forced the stores to either agree to such a condition (Xbox on best TV) or receive zero Xbox units.
Mario Kart64 does, but that's because the piece of shit game cheats.
All the Mario Kart series games cheat:
Super Mario Kart gives computers more items per lap than there are sets of item boxes and also gives computers items that players cannot get (notably the shrinking mushroom).
Mario Kart 64 doesn't cheat as much; it would give the same powerups to human players who fall into the same back-of-the-pack position as it gives to the computers.
In Mario Kart Super Circuit, when you damage a computer opponent, it does not lose coins. Thus, a computer opponent will (and, in 150cc, usually does) kamikaze you to damage your kart without taking damage to its own kart.
Adding one new feature, namely the ability to replay the race from the point of view of any Grand Prix computer player, would force the developers to concentrate on making the computer follow the same rules as human players.
The big deal, really, is that the FBI shouldn't be writing virii.
They're not going to be writing "virii," because "virii" is not the plural of "virus." It would be the plural of a hypothetical Latin term *virius. How hard is it to say "viruses" fellas?
Software yes; software for a digital computer not necessarily. I roughly define "software" as "a set of instructions and data that a piece of electronic hardware uses to do something useful," and movies on VHS constitute a set of instructions (the control track) and data (audio and video tracks) that a VHS VCR uses to reproduce picture and sound.
Of course I'll claim that software on DVDs is software. I will not claim that all data on DVDs is software, though.
The menu programs on DVDs of even Hollywood feature films contain computer instructions; therefore, virtually all DVDs have some computer software. Now, if only we could get the DMCA amended to explicitly exempt circumvention that does not result in copyright infringement, we'd have backup rights under 17 USC 109 and 17 USC 117.
And burning a CD image is definitely copying the Software, and since you've changed it a little bit, it's probably a "derivative work".
Derivative, but not infringing. 17 USC 117 gives software users in the United States the right to "make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner". IANAL, but I'd consider deleting CheckForOSX (perhaps on a GNU/Linux box so you never have to agree to any quasi-enforceable Apple EULA in the process) to count as "an essential step."
Apple's licensing agreement gives you rights, because accepting it is an implicit part of the contract of buying the software
IANAL, but I seem to remember that US federal and state contract law requires that all parties know the terms of the contract before the exchange of consideration (that is, before the sale).
and if they don't agree to a contract, you get the default rights for using software that doesn't belong to you (namely, zero rights at all).
Copywrites and Patents can be selectively enforced without losing the rights to them. Trademarks cannot.
A corporation must defend whatever monopoly it has if the corporation wants to try to create value for its shareholders and not risk a lawsuit from shareholders.
No, they dont. Thats trademarks - this is (c)opyright
However, a corporation's shareholders will take its board of directors to court if the corporation does not act in such a manner as to create value for the shareholders.
Remember that little End User License Agreement that you clicked "agree" to?
Is a click-through EULA even a contract? Where's the consideration on both sides? Did I click 'agree', or did my dog? Some courts have been known to overturn contracts where a party has little or no bargaining power as to the terms of the contract.
That may very well be, but one should be ranting againts pointless animations and stupid timewasting intros, not about Flash an sich.
Many jurisdictions require businesses to accommodate those with disabilities. If a site uses Macromedia Flash technology for its main presentation, how will people with visual disabilities read it?
Accessibility to users of assistive technology
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I'm not equating "innovation" with "masturbatory graphic design" - I'm saying that there is room for rich web interfaces using images, flash, CSS, DHTML, or whatever.
Macromedia Flash technology currently provides little or no support for assistive technologies designed to help those with disabilities. Images without a textual alternative also give little help to visually impaired users who "see" the Web through the synthesized voice of Cats. On the other hand, well-written CSS will gracefully degrade (except on nutscrape-4.x).
Talking about useless Flash intro pages
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· Score: 1
In any case you couldn't have a useful shopping or gaming site without [colors, graphics, etc].
Do you claim that useless Flash intro pages, Flash sites with flyspeck text that don't have a useful HTML alternative, and big flashing X10 popups make a site useful?
Part of the purpose of a site is to also convey the brand or meaning, and frankly you are very hobbled in doing this using Jokob's rules.
What does branding require other than a PNG or JPEG logo at the origin of a page and gratuitous mentions of a company's product and brand names in the body text?
Sections" and "Topics" are confusing. I have yet to find a good reason why both subgroupings need to exist. Also, the fact that some Sections and Topics have different page colors than the homepage while others don't is annoying and confusing.
Newspapers also have sections: news, business, sports, and lifestyle. Each Slashdot section has its own color scheme. Sections and topics are many-to-many; a story with topic 'GNOME' could be put under 'developers' for a release or 'your rights online' if somebody with lots of dollars is suing a developer.
The "Reply" is a button... Need to get rid of that button so that I'll have the usual options of opening my reply in another tab/window, etc.
This problem can be fixed at the HTML level (change it to a link) or at the client level (make context menus work as well for forms as for links). Kuro5hin and other Scoop sites follow the former approach; it took me a while to find the Reply button after months of Slashdot participation. Bug 17754 in Bugzilla covers the other approach, opening form submissions in a new window. IE, on the other hand, does not have a public bug tracker; if it did, I'd be all over it.
I just ask because I'm stuck with Netscape 4.7 on my Sun at work, and it loads lots of pages very slowly because its HTML rendering engine is super slow (and sucks especially with tables).
Have you tried Mozilla 0.9.6? Or is your filesystem quota set by a non-you, non-flexible administrator too small? Unlike Netscape 4.x and IE, Mozilla's Gecko engine renders pages incrementally; you can force Mozilla to render the part of a page that it has downloaded so far by right-clicking anywhere on the page.
I count seven distinct fields on the top of the/. homepage and several more as you scroll down. I have been using/. for several years and have never used any of sidebars except "Freshmeat."
Actually, your beef with the right side of the is not that there are so many Slashboxes but that there's no way close by to turn them on or off. You have to go into your preferences to do that. In fact, you can even disable Slashboxes entirely.
Gamecube's launch in North America was full of sub-par remake titles (a few fun multiplayer games, but no system sellers), which are now having to compete with a very impressive PS2 selection.
If Super Monkey Ball isn't a system seller, Super Smash Bros. Melee (whose box unfortunately looks nothing like this) surely is.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, unfortunately. It depends on where the jurisdiction of the law is, but it requires some court (usually the Supreme Court) to overturn it before its actually invalid.
According to the United States Constitution, section 6.2, "This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme law of the land." Unconstitutional statutes are not "laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof." Furthermore, "the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." Thus, as a matter of law, any judge (not just the Supremes) must reject any unconstitutional statute or regulation.
None of the money that you pay for a CD goes directly to the musicians. (Unless, of course, you listen to indie bands, like sensible people.)
Indie bands, or any other bands that write their own music such as Metallica. Out of every CD you buy, 75 cents goes to mechanical royalties for the underlying musical work; songwriters typically split them about evenly with their publishers. That's $38,000 directly into the pockets of the songwriters from a CD that sells a hundred thousand units; not a bad deal, especially without all the "advance" bullsh**.
Go import some limited edition Suicune, Celebi, Hello Kitty, and Yomiuri Giants GBAs. I'm quite happy with my own LE models, particularly the Suicune model. (oooooh...shiny bluuuuue...)
To clarify: Unlike DVD and Nintendo TV-top consoles, Game Boy platforms have never been region locked.
The rub is that people will have to get the new one, since the GBA's screen is horrible.
It's not horrible, just dark. The gamma of the Game Boy Advance display is 4. Gamma-correcting a game's graphics before running it on the hardware will fix the display, especially if you have a cover light or a worm light. The Doom Advance developers knew this and cranked up the brightness, and the game looks wonderful (even though it may look washed out in magazines that assume that all screenshots have a gamma of 2.2 like a CRT). The fact that Castle of the Moon 1.0 didn't gamma correct is a bug that may be fixed in later printings.
In my opinion it's one thing to be biased against a company due to their business ethics/tactics but it's wrong to be biased against something because a lame ass store hooked the product up to the cheapest TV they could get.
Unless Microsoft forced the stores to either agree to such a condition (Xbox on best TV) or receive zero Xbox units.
Mario Kart64 does, but that's because the piece of shit game cheats.
All the Mario Kart series games cheat:
Adding one new feature, namely the ability to replay the race from the point of view of any Grand Prix computer player, would force the developers to concentrate on making the computer follow the same rules as human players.
( Read More... )
The big deal, really, is that the FBI shouldn't be writing virii.
They're not going to be writing "virii," because "virii" is not the plural of "virus." It would be the plural of a hypothetical Latin term *virius. How hard is it to say "viruses" fellas?
What happened to fair use rights???
They still exist, in 17 USC 107.
Do you claim that the shiny disc is software?
No, but it's a medium that contains software.
Do you claim that movies on VHS are software?
Software yes; software for a digital computer not necessarily. I roughly define "software" as "a set of instructions and data that a piece of electronic hardware uses to do something useful," and movies on VHS constitute a set of instructions (the control track) and data (audio and video tracks) that a VHS VCR uses to reproduce picture and sound.
Of course I'll claim that software on DVDs is software. I will not claim that all data on DVDs is software, though.
The menu programs on DVDs of even Hollywood feature films contain computer instructions; therefore, virtually all DVDs have some computer software. Now, if only we could get the DMCA amended to explicitly exempt circumvention that does not result in copyright infringement, we'd have backup rights under 17 USC 109 and 17 USC 117.
And burning a CD image is definitely copying the Software, and since you've changed it a little bit, it's probably a "derivative work".
Derivative, but not infringing. 17 USC 117 gives software users in the United States the right to "make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner". IANAL, but I'd consider deleting CheckForOSX (perhaps on a GNU/Linux box so you never have to agree to any quasi-enforceable Apple EULA in the process) to count as "an essential step."
Anybody can have in their possession a copy of commercial software they don't own, but they can't use it unless they have a license
Bullshit. United States copyright law states that if you lawfully purchased a copy, you have the right to copy it as necessary to use it.
you need a licence to copy it and install it.
No you don't, at least not in the United States of America.
Apple's licensing agreement gives you rights, because accepting it is an implicit part of the contract of buying the software
IANAL, but I seem to remember that US federal and state contract law requires that all parties know the terms of the contract before the exchange of consideration (that is, before the sale).
and if they don't agree to a contract, you get the default rights for using software that doesn't belong to you (namely, zero rights at all).
Not under 17 USC 117 and 17 USC 107.
Copywrites and Patents can be selectively enforced without losing the rights to them. Trademarks cannot.
A corporation must defend whatever monopoly it has if the corporation wants to try to create value for its shareholders and not risk a lawsuit from shareholders.
No, they dont. Thats trademarks - this is (c)opyright
However, a corporation's shareholders will take its board of directors to court if the corporation does not act in such a manner as to create value for the shareholders.
Remember that little End User License Agreement that you clicked "agree" to?
Is a click-through EULA even a contract? Where's the consideration on both sides? Did I click 'agree', or did my dog? Some courts have been known to overturn contracts where a party has little or no bargaining power as to the terms of the contract.
That may very well be, but one should be ranting againts pointless animations and stupid timewasting intros, not about Flash an sich.
Many jurisdictions require businesses to accommodate those with disabilities. If a site uses Macromedia Flash technology for its main presentation, how will people with visual disabilities read it?
I'm not equating "innovation" with "masturbatory graphic design" - I'm saying that there is room for rich web interfaces using images, flash, CSS, DHTML, or whatever.
Macromedia Flash technology currently provides little or no support for assistive technologies designed to help those with disabilities. Images without a textual alt ernative also give little help to visually impaired users who "see" the Web through the synthesized voice of Cats. On the other hand, well-written CSS will gracefully degrade (except on nutscrape-4.x).
In any case you couldn't have a useful shopping or gaming site without [colors, graphics, etc].
Do you claim that useless Flash intro pages, Flash sites with flyspeck text that don't have a useful HTML alternative, and big flashing X10 popups make a site useful?
Part of the purpose of a site is to also convey the brand or meaning, and frankly you are very hobbled in doing this using Jokob's rules.
What does branding require other than a PNG or JPEG logo at the origin of a page and gratuitous mentions of a company's product and brand names in the body text?
Sections" and "Topics" are confusing. I have yet to find a good reason why both subgroupings need to exist. Also, the fact that some Sections and Topics have different page colors than the homepage while others don't is annoying and confusing.
Newspapers also have sections: news, business, sports, and lifestyle. Each Slashdot section has its own color scheme. Sections and topics are many-to-many; a story with topic 'GNOME' could be put under 'developers' for a release or 'your rights online' if somebody with lots of dollars is suing a developer.
The "Reply" is a button ... Need to get rid of that button so that I'll have the usual options of opening my reply in another tab/window, etc.
This problem can be fixed at the HTML level (change it to a link) or at the client level (make context menus work as well for forms as for links). Kuro5hin and other Scoop sites follow the former approach; it took me a while to find the Reply button after months of Slashdot participation. Bug 17754 in Bugzilla covers the other approach, opening form submissions in a new window. IE, on the other hand, does not have a public bug tracker; if it did, I'd be all over it.
I just ask because I'm stuck with Netscape 4.7 on my Sun at work, and it loads lots of pages very slowly because its HTML rendering engine is super slow (and sucks especially with tables).
Have you tried Mozilla 0.9.6? Or is your filesystem quota set by a non-you, non-flexible administrator too small? Unlike Netscape 4.x and IE, Mozilla's Gecko engine renders pages incrementally; you can force Mozilla to render the part of a page that it has downloaded so far by right-clicking anywhere on the page.
This assumes you haven't tried IE for Solaris.
If Mozilla is ported to GameCube, we'll see Gecko running on Gekko. Better call Geico.
I count seven distinct fields on the top of the /. homepage and several more as you scroll down. I have been using /. for several years and have never used any of sidebars except "Freshmeat."
Actually, your beef with the right side of the is not that there are so many Slashboxes but that there's no way close by to turn them on or off. You have to go into your preferences to do that. In fact, you can even disable Slashboxes entirely.
Gamecube's launch in North America was full of sub-par remake titles (a few fun multiplayer games, but no system sellers), which are now having to compete with a very impressive PS2 selection.
If Super Monkey Ball isn't a system seller, Super Smash Bros. Melee (whose box unfortunately looks nothing like this) surely is.
I've seen other unix ports about on BSD pages, when looking to 'upgrade' my Qube. (they both use a MIPS proc(i think) so thats one part out the way :)
N64 uses a MIPS processor, but GameCube uses an IBM PowerPC Gekko processor. I'm not sure G-what Mac processor Gekko compares to.