Pointing to definitions in online dictionaries is pointless. Do you think legal standards are established via reference.com?
More to the point, physicality is not needed before something can be stolen. E.g., if I crack your bank account and transfer all you money to my accounts, am I not a thief? If I steal the proofs of a forthcoming novel by a famous author and start selling copies, have I not stolen from the author the money he would otherwise receive?
You said "profit", not me. The benefit due a work's creator could include the pleasure derived from giving it away, from putting the sole copy in a desk drawer and not telling anyone, or making a deal with a publisher to market it and try to make as much profit as possible. In all cases, it is the work's creator who has the exclusive right to decide how copies are made and how they are distributed.
The Constitution mentions copyright in response to theft-by-publishers common at the time. Yes, it does promote progress, but it does that by ensuring that a work's creator, and only that creator, has the "exclusive right" to their creations. That includes selling it to make a profit and preventing anyone else from doing the same.
Finally, the reason you should care if people get paid is because they will stop producing anything if they don't make money doing it. If you believe otherwise, you need an education in human nature.
Yes, the store has already paid for the CD's, but the distinction seems, to me, a bit academic.
As for the Justice Department raiding homes, I don't see why alleged practictioners of this particular crime should be exempt from the same procedures appllied to anyone else. If you're dishing up a zillion copyrighted files out of your basement, it isn't all that difficult for someone to figure that out and get a warrant. Seems like they were after people who were running industrial-size operations. Sure, there's an emotional response to hearing that someone's house was "raided" (the word is emotionally charged and conjures up images of boots kicking down doors and all that...probably why it was in the headline), but it's not as if they're after someone's grandmother baking pies for a church social.
>> The Dos/Windows command prompt was, is, and always will be a joke. It feels like it was written by someone who never had to be productive at a command prompt.
To be fair, DOS was originally created for hardware that barely had enough memory to support a single app, much less a versatile shell and an app. A tiny shell was a necessity. When more memory became the norm, no commerical incentive existed to improve the shell. Vendors like MKS proved it was possible to create a Unix-like shell for DOS, but their target was a tiny niche of the DOS market.
Unix, on the other hand, was created by programmers for use by programmers. Little, if any thought, was given to the needs and interests of non-engineers. That has rather a lot to do with the fact that most people would still not be using Unix even if Microsoft had never existed.
OK, them we'll send the copyright lawyers out on terrorism patrol. That'll work...
You seem to be suggesting that all other law enforcement should be suspended in order to combat terror. Or, is it the case that you're just using this as a strawman to harp about your favorite pet peeve?
What a perverse and selfish little argument: When you buy something you don't like, you want the manufacturer prosecuted as a thief.
Nonsense. They may have played you for a sucker, but they aren't thieves. You paid for a CD with digitized content. That's what you got. "Crappy" is in the ear of the listener.
IF you illegally deprive me of the potential to benefit and profit from the exclusive control of the distribution and marketing of my copyrighted work, you have, in fact, stolen something that I have a right to possess. As I've said elsewhere, you don't need to steal a physical object to be a thief.
Copyright exists to protect the right of a work's author to benefit from the distribution and marketing of that work. Copyright, in modern form, exists precisely because publishers commonly sold an author's work without the author's permission or knowledge and did not compensate the author in any fashion.
Your assertion that copyright exists to benefit society or to encourage people to publish is incorrect, then, and reflects your aspirations about how society should be organized.
The argument about whether or not copyright infringement equates to theft is pointless. You do not need to steal a physical object to be a thief.
Copyright infringement illegally reduces the potential benefit that the work's creator might otherwise receive from the work's distribution. LIkewise, someone who steals CD's from a store illegally reduces that store's potential benefit derived from selling those CD's.
In the latter case, physical items are involved; in the former, they are not. But, the theft at issue is not the burglary of physical items. The theft at issue is the illegal acquistion, via copyright infringement, of the ability to benefit from distribution of another's work and the illegal reduction or elimination of the work's creator's ability to benefit from the work's distribution and marketing.
Stealing and making umpteen zillions of copies of a copyrighted work is illegal. The issue of how many copies you need to make before you jump from civil to criminal law doesn't interest me. I don't like the Bush adminstration's grandstanding about all this, but people who deliberately establish servers for the express purpose of copying and distributing material they have no right to copy and distribute need to have the full force of the law applied to them. The corporation producing that copyrighted material may or may not be scum, but upholding the principle of copyright takes precedence.
Corporations are private entities owned by a finite number of private citizens. They have legal obligations to the public, just like we all do. But, they are not intended or obligated to give priority to the public interest.
Stealing copyrighted material is illegal. Don't allow your fears of corporatism to excuse criminal behavior.
For a while now, the SUSE manuals have included a section on ergonomics, presumably in response to requirements in their European market. People do need to pay more attention to this, as well as using simple commonsense. You can buy a comfortable chair for less than $600, and even the most expensive desk will give you a backache if your monitor isn't at the right height.
As they say, this isn't rocket science. Sticking a book under a monitor is a lot cheaper than a new desk.
Concur. Once upon a time when I worked for the feds, the local shop had some end-of-year money it needed to spend. (You know the drill...if you don't spend it, you obviously over-budgeted, so you'll be cut next year.)
They bought Aerons for a bunch of people. Nice chairs. I wish I had one now.
That said, you still need to sit up straight, put the monitor in the right place, and raise or lower the desk to the right height for you and your keyboard.
I remember writing something to aggregate and analyze the results of a survey conducted by the weekly newspaper where I worked at the time. I wrote it at home, in my kitchen, on my trusty Commodore 64 using the BASIC Commodore bought from Microsoft. I.e., one of the predecessors to GWBASIC. It was also, effectively, the OS for the C64. Lotsa line numbers. (Once I got the survey code working, guess who got to do the data entry?)
>>"Visual Basic was meant to be easy, for the masses"
First, there's nothing wrong with a language being easy to learn and easy to use. Power and ease of use are not mutally exclusive.
Second, what's with this stuff about languages "for the masses"? VB programmers are programmers. No one's running down to the local curb store for a loaf a bread and a $400 box of VB.net. MS hasn't included Basic, Visual or otherwise, with its operating systems since,I dunno, DOS 3.3?
>>"Is it time to pay more attention to end-users?(who aren't geeks)"
The fact that such a question can even be asked tesitifies to the arrogant lameness of many (not all) F/OSS hangers-on and developers who whine about Microsoft's enduring popularity yet continue to produce or extol software that only a geek would use.
If you make something people don't like using, why are you surprised when people don't use it?
Of course, if they started writing software for real people, the tinfoil brigade would have to abandon its two favorite excuses for the failure of F/OSS to take over the world's desktops: 1) The great Microsoft corporate conspiracy; and, 2) Stupid Users.It is much easier to posture as a victim of both Microsoft and users who are too dumb to use your software than it is to start paying attention to other people.
Re:Try it out -- SUSE Is Appropriate for Newbies
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 1
SUSE 9.1's installation and setupare at least as good as anything else in the industry. If you buy it, you get several hundred pages of professional documentation that is likely to answer any question a newbie might pose. If not, SUSE's online, free, support site is excellent. ANd, there are the usual mailing lists.
Like any other distribution that is dependent on a packaging scheme and a dependency resolver, there is potential risk in installing "foreign" software. Since almost all distributions use a dependency resolver, this issue is almost universal.
>>"...social, financial, and political position are key considerations when the issue of "ownership" is considered."
That's the communal fantasy part. You are, I think, attempting to argue that someone other than the creator of a "thing" can own that thing absent theft or the creator's transfer of rights.
Corporations are not cheating inventors when they enforce the terms of their employment contracts. Why would an employee who deliberately signs away rights to his inventions expect his employer to ignore its own interests and to void that contract? If an employee believes the company is acting beyond the terms of the contract, he can raise a legal challenge, just as he would for any other alleged contract violation.
In essence, the obligation of the parties to a contract to adhere to the terms of that contract is an ethical and legal responsibility that trumps any latter day opinions about what one of the parties ought to do.
>> "It's all right there in the employee agreement and all the legal papers are in order where all patents are transferred to the company"
You've buttressed my point. You cannot sign away your rights to your inventions unless, of course, it is assumed by all concerned that you actually would own your inventions.
That is, you can't assign rights you don't have.
If you don't want to assign those rights, don't take that kind of job. Whatever you do, don't expect the rest of us to feel sorry for you.
If you want to challenge a patent, plenty of lawyers are available to help you.
I'm not being facetious, or arguing that the Patent Office doesn't award wacky patents. I am arguing that if a software developer uses something that is actually patented and he believes that patent is not justified, then his recourse is to challenge that patent. Likewise, if that developer invents a new way to do something and wants to patent it, he should do so.
The most effective way to eliminate bogus patents to to challenge them, not to wage war against the notion of patents.
Restricting patents to "novel ideas" requires that someone or something act as an arbiter of "novel". If that isn't a patent office, why should anyone believe the new arbiter would behave differently?
Besides, if someone patents "software for delayed reaction to user input" using a Perl implementation, what's to stop someone else from patenting an "improved" version written in Python?
You can't patent an idea, you need to show an implementation.In software, there are a zillion ways to get something done.
As for the threat of suits: If developers aren't prepared to play in the big leagues, they ought to stay away.
If a patent bothers some GPL types, why don't they invent a better way to get the job done, patent it, and move along?
That would seem a positive approach, as opposed to the existing compulsion to posture as victims of the patent system. If someone's motivation is to become a victim, they aren't likely to create useful software.
On the other hand, if the real objective is political -- abolish patents -- then come clean. Not that there's a Fat Chance of patents going away. People own what they invent or create. The only place that isn't true is in some sort of airhead communal fantasy.
I've done that on OS X, and used Brickhouse, too. A number of Linux distributions take a similar route.
Yes, it's easy. But there's often more to security than activating a firewall. More importantly, most users are in blind "trust me" mode. They have no way of judging the effectiveness of a firewall. Better, then, to just turn the thing on by default, and let the savvy users turn if off if they wish, not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
Pointing to definitions in online dictionaries is pointless. Do you think legal standards are established via reference.com?
More to the point, physicality is not needed before something can be stolen. E.g., if I crack your bank account and transfer all you money to my accounts, am I not a thief? If I steal the proofs of a forthcoming novel by a famous author and start selling copies, have I not stolen from the author the money he would otherwise receive?
You said "profit", not me. The benefit due a work's creator could include the pleasure derived from giving it away, from putting the sole copy in a desk drawer and not telling anyone, or making a deal with a publisher to market it and try to make as much profit as possible. In all cases, it is the work's creator who has the exclusive right to decide how copies are made and how they are distributed.
The Constitution mentions copyright in response to theft-by-publishers common at the time. Yes, it does promote progress, but it does that by ensuring that a work's creator, and only that creator, has the "exclusive right" to their creations. That includes selling it to make a profit and preventing anyone else from doing the same.
Finally, the reason you should care if people get paid is because they will stop producing anything if they don't make money doing it. If you believe otherwise, you need an education in human nature.
Yes, the store has already paid for the CD's, but the distinction seems, to me, a bit academic.
As for the Justice Department raiding homes, I don't see why alleged practictioners of this particular crime should be exempt from the same procedures appllied to anyone else. If you're dishing up a zillion copyrighted files out of your basement, it isn't all that difficult for someone to figure that out and get a warrant. Seems like they were after people who were running industrial-size operations. Sure, there's an emotional response to hearing that someone's house was "raided" (the word is emotionally charged and conjures up images of boots kicking down doors and all that...probably why it was in the headline), but it's not as if they're after someone's grandmother baking pies for a church social.
>> The Dos/Windows command prompt was, is, and always will be a joke. It feels like it was written by someone who never had to be productive at a command prompt.
To be fair, DOS was originally created for hardware that barely had enough memory to support a single app, much less a versatile shell and an app. A tiny shell was a necessity. When more memory became the norm, no commerical incentive existed to improve the shell. Vendors like MKS proved it was possible to create a Unix-like shell for DOS, but their target was a tiny niche of the DOS market.
Unix, on the other hand, was created by programmers for use by programmers. Little, if any thought, was given to the needs and interests of non-engineers. That has rather a lot to do with the fact that most people would still not be using Unix even if Microsoft had never existed.
OK, them we'll send the copyright lawyers out on terrorism patrol. That'll work...
You seem to be suggesting that all other law enforcement should be suspended in order to combat terror. Or, is it the case that you're just using this as a strawman to harp about your favorite pet peeve?
What a perverse and selfish little argument: When you buy something you don't like, you want the manufacturer prosecuted as a thief.
Nonsense. They may have played you for a sucker, but they aren't thieves. You paid for a CD with digitized content. That's what you got. "Crappy" is in the ear of the listener.
Caveat emptor, remember?
IF you illegally deprive me of the potential to benefit and profit from the exclusive control of the distribution and marketing of my copyrighted work, you have, in fact, stolen something that I have a right to possess. As I've said elsewhere, you don't need to steal a physical object to be a thief.
Copyright exists to protect the right of a work's author to benefit from the distribution and marketing of that work. Copyright, in modern form, exists precisely because publishers commonly sold an author's work without the author's permission or knowledge and did not compensate the author in any fashion.
Your assertion that copyright exists to benefit society or to encourage people to publish is incorrect, then, and reflects your aspirations about how society should be organized.
The argument about whether or not copyright infringement equates to theft is pointless. You do not need to steal a physical object to be a thief.
Copyright infringement illegally reduces the potential benefit that the work's creator might otherwise receive from the work's distribution. LIkewise, someone who steals CD's from a store illegally reduces that store's potential benefit derived from selling those CD's.
In the latter case, physical items are involved; in the former, they are not. But, the theft at issue is not the burglary of physical items. The theft at issue is the illegal acquistion, via copyright infringement, of the ability to benefit from distribution of another's work and the illegal reduction or elimination of the work's creator's ability to benefit from the work's distribution and marketing.
Stealing and making umpteen zillions of copies of a copyrighted work is illegal. The issue of how many copies you need to make before you jump from civil to criminal law doesn't interest me. I don't like the Bush adminstration's grandstanding about all this, but people who deliberately establish servers for the express purpose of copying and distributing material they have no right to copy and distribute need to have the full force of the law applied to them. The corporation producing that copyrighted material may or may not be scum, but upholding the principle of copyright takes precedence.
Corporations are private entities owned by a finite number of private citizens. They have legal obligations to the public, just like we all do. But, they are not intended or obligated to give priority to the public interest.
Stealing copyrighted material is illegal. Don't allow your fears of corporatism to excuse criminal behavior.
So, you wanna give free rein to thieves while we're chasing terrorists?
I don't care what you may believe ought to happen, explain to me why you think people who steal things ought not to be punished?
>>...both administrations...
What??!
For a while now, the SUSE manuals have included a section on ergonomics, presumably in response to requirements in their European market. People do need to pay more attention to this, as well as using simple commonsense. You can buy a comfortable chair for less than $600, and even the most expensive desk will give you a backache if your monitor isn't at the right height.
As they say, this isn't rocket science. Sticking a book under a monitor is a lot cheaper than a new desk.
Concur. Once upon a time when I worked for the feds, the local shop had some end-of-year money it needed to spend. (You know the drill...if you don't spend it, you obviously over-budgeted, so you'll be cut next year.)
They bought Aerons for a bunch of people. Nice chairs. I wish I had one now.
That said, you still need to sit up straight, put the monitor in the right place, and raise or lower the desk to the right height for you and your keyboard.
Yeah, your're right. My braincells were dozing.
I remember writing something to aggregate and analyze the results of a survey conducted by the weekly newspaper where I worked at the time. I wrote it at home, in my kitchen, on my trusty Commodore 64 using the BASIC Commodore bought from Microsoft. I.e., one of the predecessors to GWBASIC. It was also, effectively, the OS for the C64. Lotsa line numbers. (Once I got the survey code working, guess who got to do the data entry?)
>>"Visual Basic was meant to be easy, for the masses"
First, there's nothing wrong with a language being easy to learn and easy to use. Power and ease of use are not mutally exclusive.
Second, what's with this stuff about languages "for the masses"? VB programmers are programmers. No one's running down to the local curb store for a loaf a bread and a $400 box of VB.net. MS hasn't included Basic, Visual or otherwise, with its operating systems since,I dunno, DOS 3.3?
>>"Is it time to pay more attention to end-users?(who aren't geeks)"
The fact that such a question can even be asked tesitifies to the arrogant lameness of many (not all) F/OSS hangers-on and developers who whine about Microsoft's enduring popularity yet continue to produce or extol software that only a geek would use.
If you make something people don't like using, why are you surprised when people don't use it?
Of course, if they started writing software for real people, the tinfoil brigade would have to abandon its two favorite excuses for the failure of F/OSS to take over the world's desktops: 1) The great Microsoft corporate conspiracy; and, 2) Stupid Users.It is much easier to posture as a victim of both Microsoft and users who are too dumb to use your software than it is to start paying attention to other people.
SUSE 9.1's installation and setupare at least as good as anything else in the industry. If you buy it, you get several hundred pages of professional documentation that is likely to answer any question a newbie might pose. If not, SUSE's online, free, support site is excellent. ANd, there are the usual mailing lists.
Like any other distribution that is dependent on a packaging scheme and a dependency resolver, there is potential risk in installing "foreign" software. Since almost all distributions use a dependency resolver, this issue is almost universal.
>>"...social, financial, and political position are key considerations when the issue of "ownership" is considered."
That's the communal fantasy part. You are, I think, attempting to argue that someone other than the creator of a "thing" can own that thing absent theft or the creator's transfer of rights.
Corporations are not cheating inventors when they enforce the terms of their employment contracts. Why would an employee who deliberately signs away rights to his inventions expect his employer to ignore its own interests and to void that contract? If an employee believes the company is acting beyond the terms of the contract, he can raise a legal challenge, just as he would for any other alleged contract violation.
In essence, the obligation of the parties to a contract to adhere to the terms of that contract is an ethical and legal responsibility that trumps any latter day opinions about what one of the parties ought to do.
>> "It's all right there in the employee agreement and all the legal papers are in order where all patents are transferred to the company"
You've buttressed my point. You cannot sign away your rights to your inventions unless, of course, it is assumed by all concerned that you actually would own your inventions.
That is, you can't assign rights you don't have.
If you don't want to assign those rights, don't take that kind of job. Whatever you do, don't expect the rest of us to feel sorry for you.
So, sue Bezos. Or, admit defeat.
If you want to challenge a patent, plenty of lawyers are available to help you.
I'm not being facetious, or arguing that the Patent Office doesn't award wacky patents. I am arguing that if a software developer uses something that is actually patented and he believes that patent is not justified, then his recourse is to challenge that patent. Likewise, if that developer invents a new way to do something and wants to patent it, he should do so.
The most effective way to eliminate bogus patents to to challenge them, not to wage war against the notion of patents.
Restricting patents to "novel ideas" requires that someone or something act as an arbiter of "novel". If that isn't a patent office, why should anyone believe the new arbiter would behave differently?
Besides, if someone patents "software for delayed reaction to user input" using a Perl implementation, what's to stop someone else from patenting an "improved" version written in Python?
You can't patent an idea, you need to show an implementation.In software, there are a zillion ways to get something done.
As for the threat of suits: If developers aren't prepared to play in the big leagues, they ought to stay away.
If a patent bothers some GPL types, why don't they invent a better way to get the job done, patent it, and move along?
That would seem a positive approach, as opposed to the existing compulsion to posture as victims of the patent system. If someone's motivation is to become a victim, they aren't likely to create useful software.
On the other hand, if the real objective is political -- abolish patents -- then come clean. Not that there's a Fat Chance of patents going away. People own what they invent or create. The only place that isn't true is in some sort of airhead communal fantasy.
I've done that on OS X, and used Brickhouse, too. A number of Linux distributions take a similar route.
Yes, it's easy. But there's often more to security than activating a firewall. More importantly, most users are in blind "trust me" mode. They have no way of judging the effectiveness of a firewall. Better, then, to just turn the thing on by default, and let the savvy users turn if off if they wish, not the other way around.
...printer.
Technically, a printer is a peripheral, not a part. Whatever. All printers are evil: Too slow, too big, too expensive, too quirky. Ackk.