What you're suggesting is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Being able to create execute-only segments is fine for code, but doesn't really work for the stack. A thread's stack must be readable and writable by the process, right. Therefore, on an x86, was required to be executable. Oops -- that means you can jump to an address on the stack and run code there.
Not quite. Intel purchased the StrongARM rights when DEC was dismembered. XScale is a purely Intel product.
If you need evidence, then consider the issues of time to wake from idle and average power consumption in idle. StrongARM did a fantastic job of managing them, given the clock speeds at which it ran. The earlier XScale chips...well, they just did not. Bulverde (gen 3 XScale) is finally starting to get a handle on those problems. XScale was designed to scale to high clock speeds, but not to handle many of the other issues which are argumably more important in the embedded space, where battery life is king. That isn't surprising: the Intel design team which did the PXA family understood the former, but not the latter, and it took them a while to educate themselves about them.
Technically, the defense is that the act was justifiable. There's no crime called "justifiable homicide" -- a homicide is justifiable in certain cases, but, in those cases, it isn't a crime.
But that's just echoing your point: one defense against a claim (not a charge -- this is a civil matter, not a criminal one) of infringement is "fair use". If that defense stands, then the copy is not infringing. Period.
Seeing as how IIS 6 has had no (that's right, 0) reported vulnerabilities in the year since its release, and Apache 2.0.x (core) has had on the order of eleven, I think your comparison is a bit of a broken reed.
Do you mean the Tony Martin who was a notorious racist, and harbored a public hatred towards "gipsies", believing that they should all be killed? The man who drove around at night with his headlights off, looking for intruders? The one who had fired his (illegal) sawed off shotgun several times in anger, once through the window of his brother's house?
That Tony Martin?
You mean the Tony Martin who fired from a distance of ten feet at a "filthy gipsy", hitting him three times, and killing him as he fled by shooting him in the back? Who then did not call the police or aid for the wounded sixteen-year-old victim of his murderous rage, instead leaving the child to die in the cold?
That Tony Martin?
Why, yes, I do believe that I've heard of him -- in fact, I had him in mind, in part, when I created my example. That Tony Martin was correctly and justly convicted of murder by a jury of his peers, precisely because self-defense does have limits.
As a general rule, courts look askance at any negligence lawsuit for someone who has assumed risk (e.g. being hit by a foul ball at a baseball game or smoking for a long period of time, not trying to quit, and developing lung trouble.) They look even less warmly on a lawsuit where the victim has put himself or herself in a situation illegally or by circumventing a protective mechanism. Such lawsuits are generally thrown out so fast that they bounce on the sidewalk outside. "A burglar got hurt while inside my house" suits fall into that category -- if you're trespassing, you're not protected.
The problem with that is that no two cases are the same, and you can reasonably think up a wierd edge case where the homeowner ought to be liable. If you know that kids regularly walk across your property, and you put a hidden crossbow and a tripwire there to "protect" yourself from them, and one of them gets killed -- hey, guess what, you're likely to face a charge of wrongful death, and possibly even manslaughter. You have a right to prevent trespassers, yes, but some ways are reasonable, and some ways aren't. The latter cases can, do, and should, generate lawsuits.
Problem is, you're never going to hear about the cases that get thrown out; you'll only hear about the cases that don't, and, in the cases you hear about, you won't read a headline about "Lunatic who killed five year old with boobytrap convicted, jailed", you'll hear about "Tresspassing vandal killed by homeowner -- homeowner loses house." As a result, you'll think of a broken court system, when the system actually worked, and worked well.
THe article cites Secunia, and provides a link. Secunia, in turn, provides direct linkage to an @stake advisory which discusses a remote hole in OS X arising from the handling of longer passwords, and says that the hole is exploitable. Sure sounds like pretty direct evidence to me.
I wonder what would happen if a library that was given a couple dozen PC's by Bill Gates turned around and starting running Linux on them.
Nothing at all would happen. The Gates Foundation recommends a particular configuration, but does not mandate it -- and, in fact, only about 60% of the equipment donated to libraries winds up running that configuration.
Patents are defined by the claims that are made within them. Patent claims are (largely) cumulative, and it is quite possible for me to claim "A", "A & B", and "A & B & C" and you to claim "A", "A & B", and "A & B & D". Each of us has a valid patent on the longest of these conjunctions (me on "A & B & C" and you on "A & B & D"), but at most one of us can hold the patent on "A & B". If that's you, and I'm producing something within the scope of my patent, then, yes, I'm infringing on yours.
Hmm. That's a nice subtlety. Once on your machine, I'd invoke the "execution of a binary" exemption. However, you raise the point of whether the actual d/l itself is an infringement, which is a different issue.
I think I agree with the implicit license argument, although I might go further and suggest that there is no infringement risk whatsoever in the d/l, because the actual data sent over HTTP or any other IP protocol is controlled by the data source, not the data receiver. The receiver sends an HTTP GET, but does not compel the source to actually send. The source chooses what to send and sends it -- and large parts of the dynamic web page business depend upon the fact that the relationship between a URI target and the actual content sent is not 1-1. The semantics of GET is "send me this data so that I can make a copy for myself to display/process/whatever". The source "knows" this.
I suggest, therefore, that the data provider is not granting an implicit license, but is granting an explicit license to make a copy of the data on the client machine.
Actually, it is different, at least in the US. One of the portions of the 1996 Copyright amendment was a clause which covers exactly the case of copying data into memory in order to execute it. Making a copy in memory for that purpose is NOT an infringement. (But don't get all excited; the exemption is very carefully circumscribed.)
Didn't RTFA, did you, guy? The Gates Foundation does not specify the software the libraries must run on the computers they buy with the money, and, in fact, only 83% of recipients use the recommended package.
I don't see anywhere that the original poster said it would cure ball sweat. In fact, I saw him mention it as an alternative for ball sweat, and, you know, I do think that wiring up my balls with a couple of alligator clips and a string of 9 V batteries probably would make them sweat.
Sorry, that simply isn't true. Copyright covers both distribution and copying -- you do not have the right to make multiple copies of a work you own for your own private use. In the US, the controlling statutes are in Title 17 of the US Code. Title 17, Chapter 1, section 106 defines the scope of copyright protection (see http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/106.html for a better copy of the text):
Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission
Here the key item is the first. The right to make copies is expressly reserved to the copyright holder.
[I]t's acceptable to tape a movie off of HBO onto one (1) tape and one tape only - but not legal to make a copy of said tape?
Technically, yes. The only demonstrated legal use of the VCR provided as evidence during the _Sony_ trial was the issue of time-shifting: taking a program which had been played at a particular time and shifting it, in whole, to a different time.
What the fuck kind of sense does that make?
Legal sense. Something is true only if it's demonstrated at trial, either through stipulation or jury decision. Nothing else is legally true. That fact is a key point of all jurisprudence: no two cases are alike, and any seemingly trivial fact may provide a key difference between two apparently identical cases.
In thie case, making one copy and distributing it to one person is still distribution, and, yes, is still illegal, no matter what "most people" may think. The studios price that into their fee models for over-the-air boradcasters, however, so they don't try to recoup that loss directly. (Also, those copies are of lower fidelity than the originals, so the studios don't worry too much about them.) The mass copying can't be priced in, since it would punish honest consumers too much, so the studios go after the thieves who do it.
By the way, the movie being redistributed isn't the thing which is stolen. It's the fee that they should be paying to redistribute the movie. The distributor still has that fee, and the producer doesn't. That's the theft, not the infringement itself. The infringement is merely the menas by which the theft is happening.
I didn't get that impression, though. They do talk about gifts or lending, after all, which are equally free of personal monetary expenditure. Beside, I think most people understand that there are things which have non-monetary prices: we talk about the price of freedom, and about the value of love.
You ask a really good question: Have you stolen the contents of the harddrive on your Linux box?
I don't know: are you planning on redtristributing them in binary form without providing access to the source or in some other fashion violating the GPL under which you hold a license to copy and redistribute them? If so, then, yes, you have stolen them. If not, then no, you haven't.
Payment need not be in monetary form, after all; it can be in services rendered, or in services witheld from a third party.
There are two problems with your response. First, you didn't read what I wrote: I was talking about support services when I said "disgusting", not engineering or development. Second, you edited what I wrote, by cutting out the second half of the sentence which starts "The latter..." Hiring offshore workers who will do equivalent work for less money may make business sense, but that does not make it right.
Finally, though, I quite directly answered your question. It may make business sense to replace a variable cost. It makes little or no business sense to replace a fixed cost. Offshoring engineering is replacing a fixed cost. A business which offshores a fixed cost doesn't make up any up front costs on volume; fixed costs are, by definition, amortized over the entire product run. That is, a fixed cost is payed once, up front, and then payed off incrementally as units ship.
Think of Microsoft and Windows. Each verison of Windows costs billions of dollars to develop. However, if billions of copies of a version ship, then the cost of the initial engineering investment are recouped incrementally, a tiny bit at a time. Seen that way, halving the price of development of Windows doesn't make sense, since that would not change the marginal profit on each unit in any measurable way. (Exercise for the reader: what does this say about the how "revolutionary" free software development actually is?)
Increasingly, I'm seeing reports of companies offshoring fixed expenses, such as design, engineering, or development, instead of offshoring only variable expenses, such as support services. The latter is disgusting, but could make business sense, since it's a cost duplicated by each unit sold, and so reducing that cost adds directly to the bottom line. From an economic perspective, the latter makes no sense to me. After all, if the company is amortizing a cost over millions of units shipped, then how can there be a competitive advantage in reducing that cost?
No. He's got a much more forward-looking, innovative, and fully buzzword compliant business plan.
His patent covers the intellectual content generated by, through, or with Irradiated Tin Foil Hats. If you have an idea while wearing one of his hats, or even an idea which can be shown to have been influenced by wearing one of his hats, then he is entitled to a reasonable and non-discriminatory license fee on the results of that idea.
Best: you know about licenses that promise a piece of your first born child? This product makes that literal: if you have carnal thoughts while wearing one of his creations...he gets a partial license on the outcome.
A flat income tax. What a dream. I need help with something, though.
What's income? Do you tax gross income or net income? Gross income is unfair: Boeing pays more WA state business op tax than Microsoft does, because making planes is a much lower margin business than pressing CDs. Net income is unfair, because people will game the system to take large expenses at the same time that they realize large incomes, in order to keep net income down.
Does income include changes in the present values of investments? If so, then you're discouraging investment. If not, then I can easily hide lots of income by borrowing against a marketable asset. Oh, and how do you determine if that is happening anyway?
A flat tax is a pipe dream. It works really well for extracting money from wage-earners with a single discrete income stream. It does appallingly badly with everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
What you're suggesting is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Being able to create execute-only segments is fine for code, but doesn't really work for the stack. A thread's stack must be readable and writable by the process, right. Therefore, on an x86, was required to be executable. Oops -- that means you can jump to an address on the stack and run code there.
Not quite. Intel purchased the StrongARM rights when DEC was dismembered. XScale is a purely Intel product.
If you need evidence, then consider the issues of time to wake from idle and average power consumption in idle. StrongARM did a fantastic job of managing them, given the clock speeds at which it ran. The earlier XScale chips...well, they just did not. Bulverde (gen 3 XScale) is finally starting to get a handle on those problems. XScale was designed to scale to high clock speeds, but not to handle many of the other issues which are argumably more important in the embedded space, where battery life is king. That isn't surprising: the Intel design team which did the PXA family understood the former, but not the latter, and it took them a while to educate themselves about them.
Technically, the defense is that the act was justifiable. There's no crime called "justifiable homicide" -- a homicide is justifiable in certain cases, but, in those cases, it isn't a crime.
But that's just echoing your point: one defense against a claim (not a charge -- this is a civil matter, not a criminal one) of infringement is "fair use". If that defense stands, then the copy is not infringing. Period.
Yeah -- but that isn't half as scary as the fact that he used the word paradigm correctly is.
Seeing as how IIS 6 has had no (that's right, 0) reported vulnerabilities in the year since its release, and Apache 2.0.x (core) has had on the order of eleven, I think your comparison is a bit of a broken reed.
Do you mean the Tony Martin who was a notorious racist, and harbored a public hatred towards "gipsies", believing that they should all be killed? The man who drove around at night with his headlights off, looking for intruders? The one who had fired his (illegal) sawed off shotgun several times in anger, once through the window of his brother's house?
That Tony Martin?
You mean the Tony Martin who fired from a distance of ten feet at a "filthy gipsy", hitting him three times, and killing him as he fled by shooting him in the back? Who then did not call the police or aid for the wounded sixteen-year-old victim of his murderous rage, instead leaving the child to die in the cold?
That Tony Martin?
Why, yes, I do believe that I've heard of him -- in fact, I had him in mind, in part, when I created my example. That Tony Martin was correctly and justly convicted of murder by a jury of his peers, precisely because self-defense does have limits.
As a general rule, courts look askance at any negligence lawsuit for someone who has assumed risk (e.g. being hit by a foul ball at a baseball game or smoking for a long period of time, not trying to quit, and developing lung trouble.) They look even less warmly on a lawsuit where the victim has put himself or herself in a situation illegally or by circumventing a protective mechanism. Such lawsuits are generally thrown out so fast that they bounce on the sidewalk outside.
"A burglar got hurt while inside my house" suits fall into that category -- if you're trespassing, you're not protected.
The problem with that is that no two cases are the same, and you can reasonably think up a wierd edge case where the homeowner ought to be liable. If you know that kids regularly walk across your property, and you put a hidden crossbow and a tripwire there to "protect" yourself from them, and one of them gets killed -- hey, guess what, you're likely to face a charge of wrongful death, and possibly even manslaughter. You have a right to prevent trespassers, yes, but some ways are reasonable, and some ways aren't. The latter cases can, do, and should, generate lawsuits.
Problem is, you're never going to hear about the cases that get thrown out; you'll only hear about the cases that don't, and, in the cases you hear about, you won't read a headline about "Lunatic who killed five year old with boobytrap convicted, jailed", you'll hear about "Tresspassing vandal killed by homeowner -- homeowner loses house." As a result, you'll think of a broken court system, when the system actually worked, and worked well.
THe article cites Secunia, and provides a link. Secunia, in turn, provides direct linkage to an @stake advisory which discusses a remote hole in OS X arising from the handling of longer passwords, and says that the hole is exploitable. Sure sounds like pretty direct evidence to me.
Frogive me, but that is total nonsense.
Patents are defined by the claims that are made within them. Patent claims are (largely) cumulative, and it is quite possible for me to claim "A", "A & B", and "A & B & C" and you to claim "A", "A & B", and "A & B & D". Each of us has a valid patent on the longest of these conjunctions (me on "A & B & C" and you on "A & B & D"), but at most one of us can hold the patent on "A & B". If that's you, and I'm producing something within the scope of my patent, then, yes, I'm infringing on yours.
Wow. You know, I think I'm going to invoke Godwin's Law (Microsoft form): the first person to invoke astroturfing loses the debate.
Hmm. That's a nice subtlety. Once on your machine, I'd invoke the "execution of a binary" exemption. However, you raise the point of whether the actual d/l itself is an infringement, which is a different issue.
I think I agree with the implicit license argument, although I might go further and suggest that there is no infringement risk whatsoever in the d/l, because the actual data sent over HTTP or any other IP protocol is controlled by the data source, not the data receiver. The receiver sends an HTTP GET, but does not compel the source to actually send. The source chooses what to send and sends it -- and large parts of the dynamic web page business depend upon the fact that the relationship between a URI target and the actual content sent is not 1-1. The semantics of GET is "send me this data so that I can make a copy for myself to display/process/whatever". The source "knows" this.
I suggest, therefore, that the data provider is not granting an implicit license, but is granting an explicit license to make a copy of the data on the client machine.
Actually, it is different, at least in the US. One of the portions of the 1996 Copyright amendment was a clause which covers exactly the case of copying data into memory in order to execute it. Making a copy in memory for that purpose is NOT an infringement. (But don't get all excited; the exemption is very carefully circumscribed.)
Didn't RTFA, did you, guy? The Gates Foundation does not specify the software the libraries must run on the computers they buy with the money, and, in fact, only 83% of recipients use the recommended package.
I don't see anywhere that the original poster said it would cure ball sweat. In fact, I saw him mention it as an alternative for ball sweat, and, you know, I do think that wiring up my balls with a couple of alligator clips and a string of 9 V batteries probably would make them sweat.
Your mileage may vary.
I should clarify: I was responding to an AC who claimed that copyright only applies to distribution. That's a popular misconception.
And, for the productively inactive among you, here's a clickable form of that link to the interactive legal site at Cornell: clicky clicky.
[I]t's acceptable to tape a movie off of HBO onto one (1) tape and one tape only - but not legal to make a copy of said tape?
Technically, yes. The only demonstrated legal use of the VCR provided as evidence during the _Sony_ trial was the issue of time-shifting: taking a program which had been played at a particular time and shifting it, in whole, to a different time.
What the fuck kind of sense does that make?
Legal sense. Something is true only if it's demonstrated at trial, either through stipulation or jury decision. Nothing else is legally true. That fact is a key point of all jurisprudence: no two cases are alike, and any seemingly trivial fact may provide a key difference between two apparently identical cases.
In thie case, making one copy and distributing it to one person is still distribution, and, yes, is still illegal, no matter what "most people" may think. The studios price that into their fee models for over-the-air boradcasters, however, so they don't try to recoup that loss directly. (Also, those copies are of lower fidelity than the originals, so the studios don't worry too much about them.) The mass copying can't be priced in, since it would punish honest consumers too much, so the studios go after the thieves who do it.
By the way, the movie being redistributed isn't the thing which is stolen. It's the fee that they should be paying to redistribute the movie. The distributor still has that fee, and the producer doesn't. That's the theft, not the infringement itself. The infringement is merely the menas by which the theft is happening.
I didn't get that impression, though. They do talk about gifts or lending, after all, which are equally free of personal monetary expenditure. Beside, I think most people understand that there are things which have non-monetary prices: we talk about the price of freedom, and about the value of love.
You ask a really good question: Have you stolen the contents of the harddrive on your Linux box?
I don't know: are you planning on redtristributing them in binary form without providing access to the source or in some other fashion violating the GPL under which you hold a license to copy and redistribute them? If so, then, yes, you have stolen them. If not, then no, you haven't.
Payment need not be in monetary form, after all; it can be in services rendered, or in services witheld from a third party.
No, that's only true in the Northern hemisphere. It's the other way around down South.
There are two problems with your response. First, you didn't read what I wrote: I was talking about support services when I said "disgusting", not engineering or development. Second, you edited what I wrote, by cutting out the second half of the sentence which starts "The latter..." Hiring offshore workers who will do equivalent work for less money may make business sense, but that does not make it right.
Finally, though, I quite directly answered your question. It may make business sense to replace a variable cost. It makes little or no business sense to replace a fixed cost. Offshoring engineering is replacing a fixed cost. A business which offshores a fixed cost doesn't make up any up front costs on volume; fixed costs are, by definition, amortized over the entire product run. That is, a fixed cost is payed once, up front, and then payed off incrementally as units ship.
Think of Microsoft and Windows. Each verison of Windows costs billions of dollars to develop. However, if billions of copies of a version ship, then the cost of the initial engineering investment are recouped incrementally, a tiny bit at a time. Seen that way, halving the price of development of Windows doesn't make sense, since that would not change the marginal profit on each unit in any measurable way. (Exercise for the reader: what does this say about the how "revolutionary" free software development actually is?)
Increasingly, I'm seeing reports of companies offshoring fixed expenses, such as design, engineering, or development, instead of offshoring only variable expenses, such as support services. The latter is disgusting, but could make business sense, since it's a cost duplicated by each unit sold, and so reducing that cost adds directly to the bottom line. From an economic perspective, the latter makes no sense to me. After all, if the company is amortizing a cost over millions of units shipped, then how can there be a competitive advantage in reducing that cost?
Can you explain what the advantage is?
No. He's got a much more forward-looking, innovative, and fully buzzword compliant business plan.
His patent covers the intellectual content generated by, through, or with Irradiated Tin Foil Hats. If you have an idea while wearing one of his hats, or even an idea which can be shown to have been influenced by wearing one of his hats, then he is entitled to a reasonable and non-discriminatory license fee on the results of that idea.
Best: you know about licenses that promise a piece of your first born child? This product makes that literal: if you have carnal thoughts while wearing one of his creations...he gets a partial license on the outcome.
A flat income tax. What a dream. I need help with something, though.
What's income? Do you tax gross income or net income? Gross income is unfair: Boeing pays more WA state business op tax than Microsoft does, because making planes is a much lower margin business than pressing CDs. Net income is unfair, because people will game the system to take large expenses at the same time that they realize large incomes, in order to keep net income down.
Does income include changes in the present values of investments? If so, then you're discouraging investment. If not, then I can easily hide lots of income by borrowing against a marketable asset. Oh, and how do you determine if that is happening anyway?
A flat tax is a pipe dream. It works really well for extracting money from wage-earners with a single discrete income stream. It does appallingly badly with everyone else.