The prosecution in a court of law would have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you had Knowledge and Intent
You're mistaken here. The "beyond reasonable doubt" standard (which became a household word during the Simpson trial) is from criminal law. The vast majority of copyright cases fall under civil law, where there has to be "a preponderance of evidence" (51%) that there was intent or just negligence. Failure to set up a strong firewall (e.g. OpenBSD patched every couple weeks) could be considered negligence.
The one issue is that Roy Orbison (The Big Bopper) passed away a long time ago
Which means his music won't come out of copyright until 71 years after such "long time ago." And the courts have upheld Congress's power to extend that by 20 years every 20 years.
IMO, if a build process is difficult or buggy, especially if it is an open source product that most people are expected to compile, then it reflects very badly on the quality of the code.
GNOME is designed for POSIX conforming systems with an X11 server. However, some systems that claim to conform don't in practice (such as AIX and Pains).
But IMO, there is NO EXCUSE for difficulty compiling a desktop.
Unless you're trying to compile it on a "weird" platform or a platform whose unit price is out of the typical consumer PC price range (that is, anything that's not built around a single PowerPC or x86).
Bull. All you need to record techno are a computer, a tracker, a sample set (start with GM.dls that comes with recent Windows), a player that writes wav (Winamp), and a Vorbis encoder.
modify the last few bars of Beethoven's Ninth to include the Coca-Cola jingle
This is already happening. Witness "Summer Girls" by LFO (the "Abercrombie and Fitch" song). But jingles don't even have to mention the product name anymore; witness licensing of popular songs in commercials such as "Da Da Da" by Trio (used in a VW commercial) and various golden oldies used in Burger King commercials.
Why don't you just pay the artists so it doesn't have to come to this?
Because the labels don't provide an efficient way to buy the two good songs on the album without buying the ten filler songs.
What if they where to the protection it locally on your PC?
It would not work, as clients cannot be trusted in a secure situation (e.g. Quake cheating). Fifty bucks says there will, within two days of the release, be either a patch that disables DRM encoding in the client or a clone client that doesn't even do DRM.
If you want to be nearly immune to RIAA lawsuits, set up a privateOpenNap server and use Napigator to tap into it. No copyrighted information is flowing over your server (except perhaps trademarks such as BILLY JOEL® and *NSYNC® but those aren't the same as copyrights anyway). All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
if the idea is to keep people from burning MP3s to CDs, there's nothing to keep them from writing dummy device drivers as an intermediate step.
SBLive already has this (What-U-Hear); I'd think InterTrust (contracted by Napster to provide restrictions management) would have thought of this already. Anyway, Windows ME and Windows XP contain a Secure Audio Path that only drivers signed by Microsoft can use. And to be signed, a driver must disable all digital outputs (spdif, what-u-hear, write to.wav) when the Secure Audio Path is open.
what if the mp3 is encrypted with a key that has to be checked out of a centralized server?
One word: OpenNap. OpenNap servers will use one well-known key. If you trade MP3s over OpenNap instead of Napster Inc's network, you already have the key to descramble them.
See also Pinocchio's comments on Napdot to see why a restricted Napster just won't work.
Subject: I can only afford an amber monitor, pander to me
You may have a point there. Games should be accessible to those with color-deficient vision and to those playing on high-quality grayscale monitors (often found in places that do dead-tree publishing). This is why, even though many puzzle games use color to distinguish puzzle pieces, newer ones also use brightness and shape (think Columns, Tetris® Attack, or Dr. Mario on Game Boy and graphing calculators).
Most newer games' network packets are already compressed before they're encrypted. bzip2 won't help. The real problem is latency. Even 3 Mbit of bandwidth (dual T1) won't help if you have 500 ms ping time to a server on the other side of the Internet.
the theme only affects the window manager, not the windows being managed
Except the step from "changing the behavior of titlebar widgets" to "changing the behavior of widgets inside the window's content region" might not pass the "non-obvious" test in patent law. But then again, with our corrupt USPTO...
According to 17 USC 105, "works of the United States government" are not under copyright restriction. U.S. government works are defined as a "work for hire" prepared by a federal employee. All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Let's dissect this and see what Apple is really trying to kill:
a processor yadda yadda yadda
Athlon.
a display blah blah blah
X11 and your video card and monitor.
a plurality of theme engines
These are called Enlightenment, Sawfish, IceWM, Blackbox, Window Maker, etc. Any themable window manager can be considered a "theme engine" under this patent.
IANAL, but here's my educated opinion. Take it with a grain of salt; only your attorney can give legal advice.
Clauses 1-5 and 7 look equivalent to the X11 and BSD2 licenses (non-copyleft license; no warranty; include the copyright notice in all copies). But clause 6 seems to kill GNU GPL compatibility:
This License Agreement shall be governed by and interpreted in all respects by the law of the State of California, excluding conflict of law provisions.
RMS claims that the GPL doesn't allow "choice of venue clauses" (so as not to bring GPL'd software produced entirely outside the U.S. under the insane U.S. patent system).
As much as I want to like this (I used to be a Pippi Longstocking fan), it looks like I won't be able to embed Python in my Palm OS applications.
Games are about real-time object/constraint puzzles
Except too often, the object can be shown to be isomorphic to a red key, and the constraint to a red door. I've never really liked "red key, red door" gameplay. I believe there was a Game Boy title called "Mysterium" that poked fun at that style of gameplay by letting the player use alchemy to change the colors of the keys, but in that case, the chemicals became the real keys.
To be honest, I don't recall ever seeing a 2D game on N64. Was the hardware not capable of it??
You've obviously never played Mischief Makers, Yoshi's Story, Kirby 64, or The New Tetris. You can do a 2D game in APIs such as OpenGL/Mesa3D, Direct3D, and whatever the N64 and GAMECUBE consoles use; simply draw each sprite as a quad. A few of the later Super NES games with Super FX (notably Yoshi's Island) used this technique.
And $90 for a cartridge didn't turn my crank either.
More like $50-$70 for a cartridge. And million-seller "Player's Choice" games were marked to $40 anyway.
But cartridges are right out, due to cost, time to manufacture, and limited space.
Then why did Nintendo choose cartridges for Game Boy Advance (a portable 32-bit console that's about as powerful as Super NES), even when GAMECUBE uses a DVD-like medium? Why is the Neo-Geo Pocket Color cart-based instead of CD-based like newer Neo-Geo consoles? Answer: Cartridges don't skip when the game is played in a moving vehicle on a bumpy road. Cartridge reading hardware is cheaper (handheld consoles MUST be inexpensive to be attractive) and doesn't break as easily (remember early CD consoles?).
Just before the Street Fighter clone craze was the Tetris derivative craze. During 1989-1993, new falling puzzle pieces games were released at an alarming rate. But for some reason, this genre is still popular, especially among soft-core gamers.
Slashdot Mirror
The prosecution in a court of law would have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you had Knowledge and Intent
You're mistaken here. The "beyond reasonable doubt" standard (which became a household word during the Simpson trial) is from criminal law. The vast majority of copyright cases fall under civil law, where there has to be "a preponderance of evidence" (51%) that there was intent or just negligence. Failure to set up a strong firewall (e.g. OpenBSD patched every couple weeks) could be considered negligence.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
The one issue is that Roy Orbison (The Big Bopper) passed away a long time ago
Which means his music won't come out of copyright until 71 years after such "long time ago." And the courts have upheld Congress's power to extend that by 20 years every 20 years.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Well, if your name is "CATS" and you live in "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US",
If your name is Katz (of which Cats is a variant spelling), then you write op-ed for Slashdot and all the trolls hate you.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
IMO, if a build process is difficult or buggy, especially if it is an open source product that most people are expected to compile, then it reflects very badly on the quality of the code.
GNOME is designed for POSIX conforming systems with an X11 server. However, some systems that claim to conform don't in practice (such as AIX and Pains).
But IMO, there is NO EXCUSE for difficulty compiling a desktop.
Unless you're trying to compile it on a "weird" platform or a platform whose unit price is out of the typical consumer PC price range (that is, anything that's not built around a single PowerPC or x86).
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
from the cats on mars dept
This can be taken either of two ways:
CATS: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
clicked on the link at work and it resembled gay porn
Well at least it wasn't Goatse.cx.
I was more concerned about the infringement of unixsex.com on The Open Group's UNIX® trademark.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
cardoso sent us a ridiculous flash app where you can control dancers
On the same note, yerricde hereby sends you another ridiculous shockwave app where you can control dancers.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Dude ... music is enormously expensive to record
Bull. All you need to record techno are a computer, a tracker, a sample set (start with GM.dls that comes with recent Windows), a player that writes wav (Winamp), and a Vorbis encoder.
modify the last few bars of Beethoven's Ninth to include the Coca-Cola jingle
This is already happening. Witness "Summer Girls" by LFO (the "Abercrombie and Fitch" song). But jingles don't even have to mention the product name anymore; witness licensing of popular songs in commercials such as "Da Da Da" by Trio (used in a VW commercial) and various golden oldies used in Burger King commercials.
Why don't you just pay the artists so it doesn't have to come to this?
Because the labels don't provide an efficient way to buy the two good songs on the album without buying the ten filler songs.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
What if they where to the protection it locally on your PC?
It would not work, as clients cannot be trusted in a secure situation (e.g. Quake cheating). Fifty bucks says there will, within two days of the release, be either a patch that disables DRM encoding in the client or a clone client that doesn't even do DRM.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
If you want to be nearly immune to RIAA lawsuits, set up a private OpenNap server and use Napigator to tap into it. No copyrighted information is flowing over your server (except perhaps trademarks such as BILLY JOEL® and *NSYNC® but those aren't the same as copyrights anyway).
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
if the idea is to keep people from burning MP3s to CDs, there's nothing to keep them from writing dummy device drivers as an intermediate step.
SBLive already has this (What-U-Hear); I'd think InterTrust (contracted by Napster to provide restrictions management) would have thought of this already. Anyway, Windows ME and Windows XP contain a Secure Audio Path that only drivers signed by Microsoft can use. And to be signed, a driver must disable all digital outputs (spdif, what-u-hear, write to .wav) when the Secure Audio Path is open.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
what if the mp3 is encrypted with a key that has to be checked out of a centralized server?
One word: OpenNap. OpenNap servers will use one well-known key. If you trade MP3s over OpenNap instead of Napster Inc's network, you already have the key to descramble them.
See also Pinocchio's comments on Napdot to see why a restricted Napster just won't work.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Subject: I can only afford an amber monitor, pander to me
You may have a point there. Games should be accessible to those with color-deficient vision and to those playing on high-quality grayscale monitors (often found in places that do dead-tree publishing). This is why, even though many puzzle games use color to distinguish puzzle pieces, newer ones also use brightness and shape (think Columns, Tetris® Attack, or Dr. Mario on Game Boy and graphing calculators).
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
I'm assuming you mean an original IBM XT and not an XT clone. If I'm to take full advantage of the raw speed provided by it's 8mhz 8-bit processor
The XT used an 8086, a fully 16-bit processor with 16-bit registers and a 20-bit address bus.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
bzip2 pipe the traffice
Most newer games' network packets are already compressed before they're encrypted. bzip2 won't help. The real problem is latency. Even 3 Mbit of bandwidth (dual T1) won't help if you have 500 ms ping time to a server on the other side of the Internet.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
in 1999
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
the theme only affects the window manager, not the windows being managed
Except the step from "changing the behavior of titlebar widgets" to "changing the behavior of widgets inside the window's content region" might not pass the "non-obvious" test in patent law. But then again, with our corrupt USPTO...
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
According to 17 USC 105, "works of the United States government" are not under copyright restriction. U.S. government works are defined as a "work for hire" prepared by a federal employee.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Let's dissect this and see what Apple is really trying to kill:
a processor yadda yadda yadda
Athlon.
a display blah blah blah
X11 and your video card and monitor.
a plurality of theme engines
These are called Enlightenment, Sawfish, IceWM, Blackbox, Window Maker, etc. Any themable window manager can be considered a "theme engine" under this patent.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
IANAL, but here's my educated opinion. Take it with a grain of salt; only your attorney can give legal advice.
Clauses 1-5 and 7 look equivalent to the X11 and BSD2 licenses (non-copyleft license; no warranty; include the copyright notice in all copies). But clause 6 seems to kill GNU GPL compatibility:
RMS claims that the GPL doesn't allow "choice of venue clauses" (so as not to bring GPL'd software produced entirely outside the U.S. under the insane U.S. patent system).As much as I want to like this (I used to be a Pippi Longstocking fan), it looks like I won't be able to embed Python in my Palm OS applications.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Games are about real-time object/constraint puzzles
Except too often, the object can be shown to be isomorphic to a red key, and the constraint to a red door. I've never really liked "red key, red door" gameplay. I believe there was a Game Boy title called "Mysterium" that poked fun at that style of gameplay by letting the player use alchemy to change the colors of the keys, but in that case, the chemicals became the real keys.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
To be honest, I don't recall ever seeing a 2D game on N64. Was the hardware not capable of it??
You've obviously never played Mischief Makers, Yoshi's Story, Kirby 64, or The New Tetris. You can do a 2D game in APIs such as OpenGL/Mesa3D, Direct3D, and whatever the N64 and GAMECUBE consoles use; simply draw each sprite as a quad. A few of the later Super NES games with Super FX (notably Yoshi's Island) used this technique.
And $90 for a cartridge didn't turn my crank either.
More like $50-$70 for a cartridge. And million-seller "Player's Choice" games were marked to $40 anyway.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
But cartridges are right out, due to cost, time to manufacture, and limited space.
Then why did Nintendo choose cartridges for Game Boy Advance (a portable 32-bit console that's about as powerful as Super NES), even when GAMECUBE uses a DVD-like medium? Why is the Neo-Geo Pocket Color cart-based instead of CD-based like newer Neo-Geo consoles? Answer: Cartridges don't skip when the game is played in a moving vehicle on a bumpy road. Cartridge reading hardware is cheaper (handheld consoles MUST be inexpensive to be attractive) and doesn't break as easily (remember early CD consoles?).
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Just before the Street Fighter clone craze was the Tetris derivative craze. During 1989-1993, new falling puzzle pieces games were released at an alarming rate. But for some reason, this genre is still popular, especially among soft-core gamers.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
I've used 'private urls' (at least by their description) in more than a dozen CGIs that I've written.
Did you write them before mid-1997 when the patent was filed?
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.