This is about patents, not copyright. It's well known (at least, inside software development circles) that software patents rules are very different among countries, unlike copyright, which has more or less been unified by the Berne Convention.
Just because lawyers try to convince us that all "IP" is equal doesnt mean it's true.
In my country we have a saying that's more or less like "a thief who robs a thief has 100 years of forgiveness". There's nothing hypocritical about judging differently someone who is bullying a bully.
Also, when exactly did Google claim it was an open company and/or that all their products were open? Fanboys might, but if I claim that e.g. Apple products are perfect, does that tell something about Apple or myself?
I'm proud that there is "a relative dearth of patent applications for the video game industry, especially considering how technology-dependent the video game industry is, and given its size in terms of annual sales."
Before issuing a condemnation, I try hard to think about it from their point of view -- the laws of the land set the rules of the game, and lawyers are deeply confused at why some of us aren't using all the tools that the game gives us.
Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah.
But in the majority of cases in software, patents effect independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement.
Why should society reward that? What benefit does it bring? It doesn't help bring more, better, or cheaper products to market. Those all come from competition, not arbitrary monopolies. The programmer that filed the patent didn't work any harder because a patent might be available, solving the problem was his job and he had to do it anyway. Getting a patent is uncorrelated to any positive attributes, and just serves to allow either money or wasted effort to be extorted from generally unsuspecting and innocent people or companies.
Yes, it is a legal tool that may help you against your competitors, but I'll have no part of it. Its basically mugging someone.
I could waste hours going on about this. I really need to just write a position paper some day that I can cut and paste when this topic comes up.
Sorry for replying to myself; I just wanted to add a link that was supposed to be on the "terrible site" part: http://w3fools.com/ and ask forgiveness for the "it's" vs "its" mistake.
Just a note: w3schools is a terrible site and furthermore, it's statistics are not from the web at larger but only from their site, which is obviously very biased towards webdevs. More reasonable samples like those from StatCounter show that IE is still the most used browser, although extrapolating the switch seems near.
Meanwhile, my instance of FF 10 has been open for days, has currently 19 open tabs and 9 active addons, and it's running fine with 625MB of used memory in a single core 1.6GHz laptop CPU.
Install encfs and create a mountpoint with the encrypted directory inside the Dropbox or GDrive directory. Then you can use the mounted directory as normal, and everything gets encrypted before it's uploaded.
Why do you need to read the EULA? Those permissions are implied by the features. How are they supposed to let you sync without hosting, storing and distribute? How are they supposed to let you search the content of images without creating that derivative work (the textual representation)? Magic?
Oh, come on, everyone makes those mistakes, even respected maintainers of important libraries. And hell, even the damn cstdlib has functions like gets(), practically inviting programmers to introduce buffer overflows in their code.
It's just irresponsible to rely on not ever making a mistake to secure your code.
More bulbs doesn't necessarily mean more light. In fact, targeted lighting can use less energy, because you don't need to shove 150w into the main light in order to illuminate every corner well enough, if those have their own lights (that are only turned on when needed).
If the Retrode suddenly had a rush of popularity, why would they just make more?
In any case, I'd try to convince people not to follow silly laws. There's nothing magical about having a copy made from your cartridge or some other. Despite what IP lawyers claim, bits don't actually have Colour.
I didn't copy my Genesis cartridge to my PC because I don't feel the need to follow silly laws, but a Retrode isn't that expensive.
As for if my comment should discourage people, I don't really care, but I don't see my position as being exactly the most widespread out there, so I don't see why should it. Well, no more than a guy should give up beer production because he met a Mormon.
Do you know Homer Simpson's quote "What's with these new bands, everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact"? Replace rock with gaming and 1974 with the 90s and you have my opinion;) Particularly having just played Streets of Rage with my younger brother.
And why is that bad? I mean, it certainly forces us to re-design our financial system that rely on population growth, but otherwise I think we could very well reduce even the number of people in the developed world.
Besides, nutrition is hardly the reason why we don't have more kids.
As far as we know, Man wasn't made to be anything. It just adapted to the conditions, but that doesn't mean we're bound to those adaptions, or we wouldn't be using/. either.
Not that I am a vegan (I don't even know any vegans), but this pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo about the purposes we were "made for" is ridiculous and annoyingly common even among non-theists.
Well, this Christmas you could get Deus Ex: Human Revolutions (fairly recent AAA game) for $10.2. Hitman: Blood Money was at $2.5 during a weekend in March. Cheap enough for ya?;)
Lack of calories are hardly the problem with McDonald's food. But not all calories are equal (or better said: they are, but the effects depend on the type of food).
Not to mention the lack of all the other stuff, the ultra high salt concentrations, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but it's an AMD. Specifically, an Athlon Neo MV-40.
This is about patents, not copyright. It's well known (at least, inside software development circles) that software patents rules are very different among countries, unlike copyright, which has more or less been unified by the Berne Convention.
Just because lawyers try to convince us that all "IP" is equal doesnt mean it's true.
In my country we have a saying that's more or less like "a thief who robs a thief has 100 years of forgiveness". There's nothing hypocritical about judging differently someone who is bullying a bully.
Also, when exactly did Google claim it was an open company and /or that all their products were open? Fanboys might, but if I claim that e.g. Apple products are perfect, does that tell something about Apple or myself?
Insane, yet it's only 12 Instagrams.
Parasites.
by John Carmack
I'm proud that there is "a relative dearth of patent applications for the video game industry, especially considering how technology-dependent the video game industry is, and given its size in terms of annual sales."
Before issuing a condemnation, I try hard to think about it from their point of view -- the laws of the land set the rules of the game, and lawyers are deeply confused at why some of us aren't using all the tools that the game gives us.
Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah.
But in the majority of cases in software, patents effect independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement.
Why should society reward that? What benefit does it bring? It doesn't help bring more, better, or cheaper products to market. Those all come from competition, not arbitrary monopolies. The programmer that filed the patent didn't work any harder because a patent might be available, solving the problem was his job and he had to do it anyway. Getting a patent is uncorrelated to any positive attributes, and just serves to allow either money or wasted effort to be extorted from generally unsuspecting and innocent people or companies.
Yes, it is a legal tool that may help you against your competitors, but I'll have no part of it. Its basically mugging someone.
I could waste hours going on about this. I really need to just write a position paper some day that I can cut and paste when this topic comes up.
John Carmack
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745
Sorry for replying to myself; I just wanted to add a link that was supposed to be on the "terrible site" part: http://w3fools.com/ and ask forgiveness for the "it's" vs "its" mistake.
Just a note: w3schools is a terrible site and furthermore, it's statistics are not from the web at larger but only from their site, which is obviously very biased towards webdevs. More reasonable samples like those from StatCounter show that IE is still the most used browser, although extrapolating the switch seems near.
Meanwhile, my instance of FF 10 has been open for days, has currently 19 open tabs and 9 active addons, and it's running fine with 625MB of used memory in a single core 1.6GHz laptop CPU.
I don't get it.
Just because it exists doesn't mean enough people will use them to become a problem.
Install encfs and create a mountpoint with the encrypted directory inside the Dropbox or GDrive directory. Then you can use the mounted directory as normal, and everything gets encrypted before it's uploaded.
Why do you need to read the EULA? Those permissions are implied by the features. How are they supposed to let you sync without hosting, storing and distribute? How are they supposed to let you search the content of images without creating that derivative work (the textual representation)? Magic?
Oh, come on, everyone makes those mistakes, even respected maintainers of important libraries. And hell, even the damn cstdlib has functions like gets(), practically inviting programmers to introduce buffer overflows in their code.
It's just irresponsible to rely on not ever making a mistake to secure your code.
Exactly; it's "Don't be evil", not "Do no evil". And if you think about it, the difference is huge.
That's not their motto.
Yes, I'm sure a Google employee will risk their $110k+benefits job and being unemployable for life in any major tech company to gain $20k.
More bulbs doesn't necessarily mean more light. In fact, targeted lighting can use less energy, because you don't need to shove 150w into the main light in order to illuminate every corner well enough, if those have their own lights (that are only turned on when needed).
If the Retrode suddenly had a rush of popularity, why would they just make more?
In any case, I'd try to convince people not to follow silly laws. There's nothing magical about having a copy made from your cartridge or some other. Despite what IP lawyers claim, bits don't actually have Colour.
I didn't copy my Genesis cartridge to my PC because I don't feel the need to follow silly laws, but a Retrode isn't that expensive.
As for if my comment should discourage people, I don't really care, but I don't see my position as being exactly the most widespread out there, so I don't see why should it. Well, no more than a guy should give up beer production because he met a Mormon.
Do you know Homer Simpson's quote "What's with these new bands, everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact"? Replace rock with gaming and 1974 with the 90s and you have my opinion ;) Particularly having just played Streets of Rage with my younger brother.
That's what emulators and USB gamepads are for!
And why is that bad? I mean, it certainly forces us to re-design our financial system that rely on population growth, but otherwise I think we could very well reduce even the number of people in the developed world.
Besides, nutrition is hardly the reason why we don't have more kids.
As far as we know, Man wasn't made to be anything. It just adapted to the conditions, but that doesn't mean we're bound to those adaptions, or we wouldn't be using /. either.
Not that I am a vegan (I don't even know any vegans), but this pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo about the purposes we were "made for" is ridiculous and annoyingly common even among non-theists.
Well, this Christmas you could get Deus Ex: Human Revolutions (fairly recent AAA game) for $10.2. Hitman: Blood Money was at $2.5 during a weekend in March. Cheap enough for ya? ;)
Lack of calories are hardly the problem with McDonald's food. But not all calories are equal (or better said: they are, but the effects depend on the type of food).
Not to mention the lack of all the other stuff, the ultra high salt concentrations, etc.
But why would one want a license to act like an idiot?