One of the big things that is said about the beauty of open source is that it allows for a lot of people to see the code and weed out the bugs. So, on a smaller project such as this, how has the level of interaction with users and development been? Do you find you get lots of useful feedback and bug fixes or is it mostly you at the helm just trying to make a good piece of software?
In the last year or so we have seen a tremendous excalation in the quantity and size of political protests against globalization and the rising power of corporate multi-nationals. Do you believe that these people have reason to be concerned? If you do believe that they have reason for concern, what steps would you take as president to deal with their concerns?
What do you consider to be the top three contributing factors to violent behavior in our society? If you were elected president, what would you try to do to see that these three contributing factors are eliminated or reduced.
I have an idea. If somebody out there thinks this is a plausible idea and knows of some government agency that could get it implemented, PLEASE DO SO. Anyhow, on to the idea.
The problem with any ban such as this is that parents who have no problem with their children playing violent video games get screwed. When I was a kid, once I was mature enough, my mom had no problem with me seeing rated R movies. In order for me to see the movie though she had to actually sit there and watch the movie with me. Frequently she didn't even want to see the movie so in theory I would miss cool movies because she didn't want to go. In reality I snuck in of course but that's another issue entirely.
Okay, so here's the trick. How do we empower parents to control their children properly. The way you do this is rather than basing a restriction like this entirely on an arbitrary age, you base on the parents desires (and age should they conflict). Set up a system where a parent can go to a federal agency and identify themselves as the parent. Then they can sign a document allowing their child to see R-rated movies and play violent video games without them needing to be in attendance.
The child is then issued an ID card which is effectively a permission slip. They can go to theaters, etc, and the ID will get them in those places that are deemed to be parentally controlled.
Ideally this system would use a smart card that was hooked up to a centralized system run by the government which would allow parents, once identified and registered, to adjust their childs permissions as necessary (through phone or web site?). So, if the mom decides that little johnny should be punished by not being able to go see the new violent movie, she turn off his movie permission. Furthermore, if she restricted video games for a while and then decides that they are okay she can fix it with a few clicks. It would certainly be worth the investment by theaters and arcades to hook up a smart card reader at their entrances.
The other nice thing about providing a centralized database like this is that if a law is added you need not worry about reissuing a bunch of ID's to accomodate it. You can give parents the option on the card as to what their default permission is.
Laws like this are annoying because it makes three assumptions. The first is that a parent is willing to sit through the video games or movies that they deem their child to be mature enough to see (which considering how many more two income families their are now this is obviously ludicrous). The second is that the age of a child is directly correlated with the maturity of the child. The third is that a child, upon reaching the age of 18, magically develops the maturity to handle these horrible things that they didn't posess before. We've got the technology, why don't we make a system that puts the power back in the hands of parents? I mean personally I prefer a country where there aren't laws like this and people have the time and motivation to keep an eye on their kids but we don't live in a world like that anymore.
The big mills and factories of the Industrial Revolution meant an end to social customs and community, to personal status and individual freedom
I think that a large amount of the people who consider themselves Neo-Luddites are concerned about these same issues. It isn't about dangerous labor in a dank and smelly factory, but it is about fearing the destruction of communities, social customs, privacy and individual freedom. Furthermore, modern luddites are very afraid that technology is spiraling out of control and will destroy us very soon.
Do you think the Unibomber was going out and blowing people up out of some grab for power? He was doing it because he was angry with the way technology was dominating our lives and ruining our planet. Far be it for me to trumpet the beliefs of a terrorist but I think he clearly illustrates the real issues and fears involved here.
Now, I grant you, there are many politicians and power hungry figures who are using Luddism as a tool to power. It's the same thing that Hitler did with racism in Germany before WW2. It's just a matter of playing off of fears, and manipulating people.
Personally I believe that technology is merely a double edged sword. I think it posses great power to help us, and also great power to destroy us. One side cures disease, one side inflicts it. One side generates limitles clean power, the other side creates new weapons of mass destruction. We need the luddites to be out there to help keep us from using the wrong edge of the sword.
I would suggest to you that in a sense politics is already dead. Politics, in this sense, being the conflict of different ideas being worked out in a public forum. This politics has been dead for a little while now.
That politics has been replaced by a frightening monolith of government that has no room for real political conflict anymore. If you look at the current presidential campaign it is nothing but an endless series of promises to fix things that aren't actually broken and accusations that the other party broke it. They keep going on about how we have to save Social Security. BULL! Social Security survived worse than the coming tide of elderly in its past, the only reason it looks worse now is because they changed how they measure their projections to be ultra-conservative.
The problem is that while they are sitting their puting on a play for the constituents, the Republicrats are sucking from the tete of corporate money and doing anything to keep their supply from running dry. So we get horrible laws like the DMCA, that totally kiss that collective butts of the corporate media empires. We also get laws that pander to those few who still care about the elections, creating a new government enforced morality.
Politics is not a ghost fading into the distance. Politics is a rotting corpse in a very poorly ventilated room. We all sit around smelling it, and being nauseated by it, but none of us wants to touch it. So we sit there in our disgust, trying not to think about it, and wait for somebody else to clean it up.
As I read this article I tried to think of any piece of software where there was any sort of warranty. Most software comes with a warranty on the actual media should it be deffective, and some provide limited technical support. But most of the "warranty" attached to software says something to the effect of, "if this breaks and you lose a bunch of money because of it, it isn't out problem."
I mean look at how big Microsoft is when they release software that is notoriously buggy. People seem to be quite content to have unguaranteed occasionally buggy software. OSS doesn't need a guarantee, it's guarantee is that if you have the skill and knowledge you can fix your own damn bugs yourself. It's guarantee is that if you e-mail the makers of the software and ask them nicely, they'll probably fix your problem (if its significant). Ultimately it isn't really a "guarantee" but those OSS products that grow and thrive generally have this feature.
As a developer I have worked with many products that were deffective. That is to say, they made claims about what they were capable of doing that were blatantly wrong. With one product I even ran into a situation where I told them that it didn't work with another product that they said it did. Rather than fixing it, they simply modified their website to no longer claim that it worked that way. Generally these products are black box commercial software, and if they break I can't do a damn thing to fix them. If I'm lucky the fix pack for the software will come out a couple months down the line and fix it, but I may have to wait until the next version.
On the other hand, with products like Tomcat, Apache, Linux, etc, I can dig in and look at what's wrong. I don't have to wait for a bloody fix pack or new version (if I know what i'm doing). And I have to say that despite having no guarantees of anything, I've found that the most responsive and helpful technical support I've ever gotten has been through an OSS mailing list and I didn't have to pay a dime for the software or the support. After working with all OSS stuff in college (like I could afford commercial software), I found it tedious and frequently ineffective to try to get phone support from a commercial vendor.
I was thinking about a system for handling this, and I came up with the notion of a copyright complaint system. Essentially if a person feels that they are having their copyright violated, they can file to have the article removed. If the author is anonymous it will be removed automatically. If they are not anonymous, then the complaint would be forwarded to them and they would be given the ability to remove their own article. If they don't respond in a reasonable period of time (i.e. they gave a false e-mail address), the article would be removed automatically.
The big hole in this plan that I can see is that if the person has an anonymous e-mail account (i.e. there's no real way to associate their e-mail with a legal name), then they can just ignore the complainer. At that point the complainer might seek relief from me because they can't get it from the poster.
If the FCC mandated that all digital VCR's, etc, had copy controls that wouldn't be all that bad a thing, except for the fact that they are also mandating that everything be digital. Frankly I think most broadcasters would be perfectly content to continue broadcasting analog as they always have, but the FCC is forcing them to go digital. Of course in going digital they open themselves up to the "perfect copy" problem so they want protection and soon we end up with fair use not existing.
I have a proposal. It's not a perfect solution, but it seems better than what I've seen so far. Right now there seems to be the option of no copy controls whatsoever, or these iron fisted copy controls. What I would propose is to apply an analog world concept to the digital realm, that of copy degradation.
Rather than saying, you can't make a copy, what about having it so that you can make copies, but that those copies, in transfer are degraded. So, if you copy your DVD to your computer, it degrades it so that it's only VCR quality. That way the fear of perfect digital copies goes away and it still provides for fair use of the information.
So, if you make a copy of your Magic Digital Media Disc, your friend can play the copy on his machine at VCR quality. If he makes a copy for somebody else it gets a little worse, maybe it's only mono sound now or a bit grainy. People will still make copies, but it will create an incentive to go out and buy the originals (which is what the media companies are so pissed about).
I think the FCC and the government need to start actively defending fair use, rather than selling us down the river to these corporate gluttons. There is a middle ground if somebody will try to stake it out.
I wonder if the Internet access will be filtered? I can just picture some parent getting on the plane, getting lost in the in-flight movie and then turning to find little Johnny looking at nekid girls on the Internet.
Perhaps the end result of this will be that the question of "filtered" or "non-filtered" will be asked at the counter as a replacement to the old smoking vs. non-smoking.
Woops! Okay, scratch some of what I said then. It still comes down to the fundamental question of what is your credibility worth. It does however change the scope of what you have to consider. If there is the potential of a lawsuit, then that opens you up to a lot more risk than just quitting a job would.
Before you make any decisions you might want to talk to an attorney to see what risks you face. It will depend a lot on what agreements you commited to while you worked there, and what you might have signed when leaving.
I think that is the fundamental question here. IF you sign this application, then you are attaching your credibility and respect to it. So how much is that worth to you?
If you believe that your credibility is priceless, then you have a simple solution: don't sign it. If you don't sign it, you may risk being unemployed, but if your credibility is priceless then it's a pretty black and white issue.
If it is more of a grey area (and I would assume it is considering that you posted this), then think about what it is really worth to you. Would you be willing to sacrifice some pay or some options to defend your credibility? How much? If your skills are in demand, then making a stand is easier if you know you've got other options. Furthermore, if your skills are in high enough demand, refusing to sign the patent may not get you fired (although it may make you future in that company much more unpleasant).
Before you decide whether to make a stand you might want to talk to a head hunter or see what's out there on dice or monster board. If you can quickly move to another job with little damage to salary then it might not be worth fretting over.
An all too common problem in trying to predict future trends is falling for the fallacy of taking trends to their logical extreme. In this case, you take the trend that people are showing more drone like behavior and extending it to the extreme that we will all become drones.
Historically trends are cyclical. Stretches of group think are followed by stretches of individualistic rebellion. Look at what's happening right now. We see countless protests being staged by people who are fet up with corporatism and globalization. Are these people becoming drones?
I think you are way underestimating the desire to be an individual in human beings. There is a desire to be part of a community and to identify with others, but there is also an ego driven desire to distinguish yourself from the crowd.
I'm using version 0.9.2 of GAIM and I'm not having a single problem with it right now. Perhaps they just haven't gone to block out previous versions yet. So, if you want to connect up you might want to try using an older version of GAIM for now. I also noticed a new release of GAIM came out today so you might want to consider upgrading to solve the problem.
Honestly, what is the harm of this system? If the campus gets a useful system which makes life easier for administrators and students, is it so bad that it happens to have some advertising on it? The money that the University isn't dumping into this intranet system can be put into other things that will ultimately benefit students.
The risk to watch out for is when commercial interests are interfering with academic liberty. When commercial interests are asking universities to keep controversial professors quiet is when you should be worrying. Frankly I don't see that potential here because the intranet service is just as much in need of the university's positioning as the university is in need of the intranet software. Seems like a mutually beneficial relationship overall.
There was an interesting article I read recently that discussed a lot of the writings of some guy whose name totally elludes me right now on democracy. This is of course from way back in the early 1800's, but one the interesting things he pointed out about democracry was that it naturally tended toward a relativist environment.
Basically the fundamental principal of Democracy is that we are all sovereign and that we bequeath that soveriegnty unto our chosen government officials. As an extension of this is the notion that we are all equal. From this has evolved a strong relativistic view point on the world that says nobody's right and nobody's wrong.
Out of this relativistic perspective is born the notion of tolerance. Basically if nobody is right or wrong then we should accept other people's beliefs. But it isn't a pure tolerance. If one was to be purely tolerant, one would even tolerate intolerance. But in fact what happens is that we believe everybody should be tolerant and open to others beliefs.
As a result, we find that people are actually very intolerant despite their claim of tolerance. They are only tolerant of those who are tolerant and relativistic as well. To be intolerant or to have an absolute belief in certain fundamental truths is considered arrogant.
To further the problem many people who believe in these truths have incorporated in their beliefs the notion that they must help others find the truth that they know. To relativists, this comes off as pig headed and pushy. How can you know the truth? What makes you better than everybody else?
Now, having said all that, I consider myself a relativist. But I think there's an important consideration people need to make in relativism. One can say that nobody has an iron grip on what the right answers are, but that doesn't mean you can't find truths that work within your own life. And it doesn't mean you can't respect people for the truths that they find in their life that make them happy.
If somebody tries to tell you that Christ is your savior, don't hate them for it. They are doing it because they think that if you don't believe that, you are going to suffer. They are doing it because they love you as a human being. Respect that fact, even if you disagree with them. Don't hold them in contempt if they found a belief that makes them happy. Respect them for it and move on to find what makes you happy.
That sounds like a rather interesting approach to the problem. By giving stock options Sega would accomplish three things:
1) Buy off the pirate for a cost much lower than lawyer fees
2) Establishes a motivation for the pirate to want Sega to make money (and thus reducing the motivation to undercut them through piracy)
3) Sets up a nice legal argument should he ever reneg. Basically they can include in the contact under which the Options are given a clause that makes it very easy to prosecute for huge penalties (relying on contract law rather than the vaugeries of current copyright law).
Now having said that, this seems a lot like paying terrorists to give back hostages. This creates an incentive for people to be pirates because if they do so, they can get some options. If this became a common practice, everybody and their grandmother would be distributing ISO's just to get some options.
It will be interesting to see if this turns out to be legit...
Technological skills are not what makes it possible for indivudals to act as free agents. What makes it possible is a matter of supply and demand. If there are a million jobs and only 500,000 people to fill them, it means that any person can change jobs without thinking about it.
If the gap were to close and it ended up with 500,000 jobs and a million tech workers, free agency wouldn't be quite so appealing as it is now. Bouncing from job to job would be a serious risk where as now, it is almost to the point that not bouncing is the risk (for you look stagnant).
The ability to do this is not a function of the skills involved or the portability of those skills, but rather the job environment. If there was high demand for short order cooks and nobody to fill the positions, you'd see short order cooks leaping from job to job and making a ton of money too.
To understand what was going on with these barcode scanners I decided to try going to Radio Shack and see what I could do and what restrictions were placed upon me. I went down to the store, greeted the clerk and asked for one of the barcode readers. He went in back, grabbed one and asked for my name (as they always do at radio shack). He scanned in the barcode reader, a copy of the free catalog and then handed them to me and wished me a nice day.
When I got home, I opened the plastic bag, plugged the scanner into my laptop and loaded up an editor. I then proceeded to scan an ISBN on a book nearby, and sure enough a bunch of characters spewed out onto my editor screen.
Now, what is there to reverse engineer here. All I have to do is figure out what those characters mean. I haven't signed anything that said I wouldn't try to figure that out and it's debatable whether such a contract would be legally binding anyhow. As far as I can tell, these guys do not have a legal leg to stand on because I have not in any way been obligated to keep anything a secret.
How do these legalities work for independent contractors? I mean, if you are essentially operating as a company, do you have to be paid minimum wage if you choose not too?
Also, what about taxes? I mean if you do a bunch of work and get a bunch of free hardware out of it, is that income (or more to the point, taxable income)?
Correct me if I'm wrong lawyers in the audience, but a cease and desist letter really doesn't mean anything. That is to say, I can send you a cease and desist letter to tell you to stop drinking Pepsi. It doesn't mean I have any legal merit in a lawsuit and it doesn't mean I will sue you, but it is essentially an official threat.
Now, CueCat, I'm guessing is concerned that RadioShack will stop giving away the scanners because they can be hacked to work with competing barcodes. Thus they'll stop sending money to cue cat. But I don't see any legal basis for there case. I mean no copyrights were infringed, no licenses broken. Reverse engineering (outside of the realm of the DMCA possibly), is a long defended right. If CueCat does sue, I can't imagine they'd stand a chance.
That being said, if one cannot afford the lawyers and take the risk of being sued, then this may be a somewhat moot point (and you know cuecat is hoping for that). So, everybody get your check books ready, looks like we're gonna have to send some more funding to smack down the dumb corporations.
The pending DeCSS trial that is being prosecuted over the issues of trade secret and reverse engineering should give us a good idea of what to expect. Granted, if you are in a foreign country, the US court has no jurisdiction, but what happens to people in the US who choose to run these revere engineered servers is an entirely different matter.
As of yet I do not believe there has been any determination in the US courts as to whether it is legal or not to place restrictions on reverse engineering as part of a license. Of course if somebody can just send a piece of software off to another country to have it legally reversse engineered its rather a moot point. This seems like a pretty big loop hole. Too big, I suspect to have the court system allow it. So either they'll have to declare prohibitions of reverse engineering invalid or declare that anybody using an illegaly reverse engineered item (even if it was done in a country where legal) would be subject to the same penalties as if it had been done here.
So, apply the standard IANAL here, but if you are in a country that allows reverse engineering you can probably file those cease and desist letters in the garbage.
If you feel that it is important to protect your company from legal liability by monitoring employee use of systems, then you should make this clear to them. Time after time I hear stories about how some company was secretly monitoring employees and caught them doing something. Rather than treating it as some sort of game where you are trying to "catch" people, just tell them you are watching, how you are doing so, and also explain why.
Both carbon monoxide and the other byproducts of cigarette smoke are deadly IN SUFFICIENT QUANTITIES. If you smoke several cigarettes every day for several years, yes, it will cause damage to your lungs. If you are constantly being exposed to second hand smoke (like living in the house of a smoker), sure it will cause damage to your lungs. Show me one statistic that indicates that casual occasional exposure to cigarette smoke in public restraunts, bars, etc, are harmful to one's health. California, the People's Republic of Boulder, and all of the others are WAY overreacting.
The only fault I can see for the tobacco industry was their intentional hacking of cigarettes to make them more addictive. Otherwise, if you choose to use a product that is known to be hazardous to your health and addictive, you get what you deserve. You shouldn't be whining later about it so you can get a few million dollars.
Let us not forget that Lucas has never been much of a saint. He's the same person who sued Battlestar Galactica for ripping off Star Wars. Most of the things he sued them for were things he had ripped off from classic mythology. I like Star Wars but I have very little respect for George Lucas.
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The problem with any ban such as this is that parents who have no problem with their children playing violent video games get screwed. When I was a kid, once I was mature enough, my mom had no problem with me seeing rated R movies. In order for me to see the movie though she had to actually sit there and watch the movie with me. Frequently she didn't even want to see the movie so in theory I would miss cool movies because she didn't want to go. In reality I snuck in of course but that's another issue entirely.
Okay, so here's the trick. How do we empower parents to control their children properly. The way you do this is rather than basing a restriction like this entirely on an arbitrary age, you base on the parents desires (and age should they conflict). Set up a system where a parent can go to a federal agency and identify themselves as the parent. Then they can sign a document allowing their child to see R-rated movies and play violent video games without them needing to be in attendance.
The child is then issued an ID card which is effectively a permission slip. They can go to theaters, etc, and the ID will get them in those places that are deemed to be parentally controlled.
Ideally this system would use a smart card that was hooked up to a centralized system run by the government which would allow parents, once identified and registered, to adjust their childs permissions as necessary (through phone or web site?). So, if the mom decides that little johnny should be punished by not being able to go see the new violent movie, she turn off his movie permission. Furthermore, if she restricted video games for a while and then decides that they are okay she can fix it with a few clicks. It would certainly be worth the investment by theaters and arcades to hook up a smart card reader at their entrances.
The other nice thing about providing a centralized database like this is that if a law is added you need not worry about reissuing a bunch of ID's to accomodate it. You can give parents the option on the card as to what their default permission is.
Laws like this are annoying because it makes three assumptions. The first is that a parent is willing to sit through the video games or movies that they deem their child to be mature enough to see (which considering how many more two income families their are now this is obviously ludicrous). The second is that the age of a child is directly correlated with the maturity of the child. The third is that a child, upon reaching the age of 18, magically develops the maturity to handle these horrible things that they didn't posess before. We've got the technology, why don't we make a system that puts the power back in the hands of parents? I mean personally I prefer a country where there aren't laws like this and people have the time and motivation to keep an eye on their kids but we don't live in a world like that anymore.
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I think that a large amount of the people who consider themselves Neo-Luddites are concerned about these same issues. It isn't about dangerous labor in a dank and smelly factory, but it is about fearing the destruction of communities, social customs, privacy and individual freedom. Furthermore, modern luddites are very afraid that technology is spiraling out of control and will destroy us very soon.
Do you think the Unibomber was going out and blowing people up out of some grab for power? He was doing it because he was angry with the way technology was dominating our lives and ruining our planet. Far be it for me to trumpet the beliefs of a terrorist but I think he clearly illustrates the real issues and fears involved here.
Now, I grant you, there are many politicians and power hungry figures who are using Luddism as a tool to power. It's the same thing that Hitler did with racism in Germany before WW2. It's just a matter of playing off of fears, and manipulating people.
Personally I believe that technology is merely a double edged sword. I think it posses great power to help us, and also great power to destroy us. One side cures disease, one side inflicts it. One side generates limitles clean power, the other side creates new weapons of mass destruction. We need the luddites to be out there to help keep us from using the wrong edge of the sword.
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That politics has been replaced by a frightening monolith of government that has no room for real political conflict anymore. If you look at the current presidential campaign it is nothing but an endless series of promises to fix things that aren't actually broken and accusations that the other party broke it. They keep going on about how we have to save Social Security. BULL! Social Security survived worse than the coming tide of elderly in its past, the only reason it looks worse now is because they changed how they measure their projections to be ultra-conservative.
The problem is that while they are sitting their puting on a play for the constituents, the Republicrats are sucking from the tete of corporate money and doing anything to keep their supply from running dry. So we get horrible laws like the DMCA, that totally kiss that collective butts of the corporate media empires. We also get laws that pander to those few who still care about the elections, creating a new government enforced morality.
Politics is not a ghost fading into the distance. Politics is a rotting corpse in a very poorly ventilated room. We all sit around smelling it, and being nauseated by it, but none of us wants to touch it. So we sit there in our disgust, trying not to think about it, and wait for somebody else to clean it up.
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I mean look at how big Microsoft is when they release software that is notoriously buggy. People seem to be quite content to have unguaranteed occasionally buggy software. OSS doesn't need a guarantee, it's guarantee is that if you have the skill and knowledge you can fix your own damn bugs yourself. It's guarantee is that if you e-mail the makers of the software and ask them nicely, they'll probably fix your problem (if its significant). Ultimately it isn't really a "guarantee" but those OSS products that grow and thrive generally have this feature.
As a developer I have worked with many products that were deffective. That is to say, they made claims about what they were capable of doing that were blatantly wrong. With one product I even ran into a situation where I told them that it didn't work with another product that they said it did. Rather than fixing it, they simply modified their website to no longer claim that it worked that way. Generally these products are black box commercial software, and if they break I can't do a damn thing to fix them. If I'm lucky the fix pack for the software will come out a couple months down the line and fix it, but I may have to wait until the next version.
On the other hand, with products like Tomcat, Apache, Linux, etc, I can dig in and look at what's wrong. I don't have to wait for a bloody fix pack or new version (if I know what i'm doing). And I have to say that despite having no guarantees of anything, I've found that the most responsive and helpful technical support I've ever gotten has been through an OSS mailing list and I didn't have to pay a dime for the software or the support. After working with all OSS stuff in college (like I could afford commercial software), I found it tedious and frequently ineffective to try to get phone support from a commercial vendor.
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The big hole in this plan that I can see is that if the person has an anonymous e-mail account (i.e. there's no real way to associate their e-mail with a legal name), then they can just ignore the complainer. At that point the complainer might seek relief from me because they can't get it from the poster.
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I have a proposal. It's not a perfect solution, but it seems better than what I've seen so far. Right now there seems to be the option of no copy controls whatsoever, or these iron fisted copy controls. What I would propose is to apply an analog world concept to the digital realm, that of copy degradation.
Rather than saying, you can't make a copy, what about having it so that you can make copies, but that those copies, in transfer are degraded. So, if you copy your DVD to your computer, it degrades it so that it's only VCR quality. That way the fear of perfect digital copies goes away and it still provides for fair use of the information.
So, if you make a copy of your Magic Digital Media Disc, your friend can play the copy on his machine at VCR quality. If he makes a copy for somebody else it gets a little worse, maybe it's only mono sound now or a bit grainy. People will still make copies, but it will create an incentive to go out and buy the originals (which is what the media companies are so pissed about).
I think the FCC and the government need to start actively defending fair use, rather than selling us down the river to these corporate gluttons. There is a middle ground if somebody will try to stake it out.
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Perhaps the end result of this will be that the question of "filtered" or "non-filtered" will be asked at the counter as a replacement to the old smoking vs. non-smoking.
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Before you make any decisions you might want to talk to an attorney to see what risks you face. It will depend a lot on what agreements you commited to while you worked there, and what you might have signed when leaving.
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If you believe that your credibility is priceless, then you have a simple solution: don't sign it. If you don't sign it, you may risk being unemployed, but if your credibility is priceless then it's a pretty black and white issue.
If it is more of a grey area (and I would assume it is considering that you posted this), then think about what it is really worth to you. Would you be willing to sacrifice some pay or some options to defend your credibility? How much? If your skills are in demand, then making a stand is easier if you know you've got other options. Furthermore, if your skills are in high enough demand, refusing to sign the patent may not get you fired (although it may make you future in that company much more unpleasant).
Before you decide whether to make a stand you might want to talk to a head hunter or see what's out there on dice or monster board. If you can quickly move to another job with little damage to salary then it might not be worth fretting over.
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Historically trends are cyclical. Stretches of group think are followed by stretches of individualistic rebellion. Look at what's happening right now. We see countless protests being staged by people who are fet up with corporatism and globalization. Are these people becoming drones?
I think you are way underestimating the desire to be an individual in human beings. There is a desire to be part of a community and to identify with others, but there is also an ego driven desire to distinguish yourself from the crowd.
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The risk to watch out for is when commercial interests are interfering with academic liberty. When commercial interests are asking universities to keep controversial professors quiet is when you should be worrying. Frankly I don't see that potential here because the intranet service is just as much in need of the university's positioning as the university is in need of the intranet software. Seems like a mutually beneficial relationship overall.
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Basically the fundamental principal of Democracy is that we are all sovereign and that we bequeath that soveriegnty unto our chosen government officials. As an extension of this is the notion that we are all equal. From this has evolved a strong relativistic view point on the world that says nobody's right and nobody's wrong.
Out of this relativistic perspective is born the notion of tolerance. Basically if nobody is right or wrong then we should accept other people's beliefs. But it isn't a pure tolerance. If one was to be purely tolerant, one would even tolerate intolerance. But in fact what happens is that we believe everybody should be tolerant and open to others beliefs.
As a result, we find that people are actually very intolerant despite their claim of tolerance. They are only tolerant of those who are tolerant and relativistic as well. To be intolerant or to have an absolute belief in certain fundamental truths is considered arrogant.
To further the problem many people who believe in these truths have incorporated in their beliefs the notion that they must help others find the truth that they know. To relativists, this comes off as pig headed and pushy. How can you know the truth? What makes you better than everybody else?
Now, having said all that, I consider myself a relativist. But I think there's an important consideration people need to make in relativism. One can say that nobody has an iron grip on what the right answers are, but that doesn't mean you can't find truths that work within your own life. And it doesn't mean you can't respect people for the truths that they find in their life that make them happy.
If somebody tries to tell you that Christ is your savior, don't hate them for it. They are doing it because they think that if you don't believe that, you are going to suffer. They are doing it because they love you as a human being. Respect that fact, even if you disagree with them. Don't hold them in contempt if they found a belief that makes them happy. Respect them for it and move on to find what makes you happy.
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1) Buy off the pirate for a cost much lower than lawyer fees
2) Establishes a motivation for the pirate to want Sega to make money (and thus reducing the motivation to undercut them through piracy)
3) Sets up a nice legal argument should he ever reneg. Basically they can include in the contact under which the Options are given a clause that makes it very easy to prosecute for huge penalties (relying on contract law rather than the vaugeries of current copyright law).
Now having said that, this seems a lot like paying terrorists to give back hostages. This creates an incentive for people to be pirates because if they do so, they can get some options. If this became a common practice, everybody and their grandmother would be distributing ISO's just to get some options.
It will be interesting to see if this turns out to be legit...
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If the gap were to close and it ended up with 500,000 jobs and a million tech workers, free agency wouldn't be quite so appealing as it is now. Bouncing from job to job would be a serious risk where as now, it is almost to the point that not bouncing is the risk (for you look stagnant).
The ability to do this is not a function of the skills involved or the portability of those skills, but rather the job environment. If there was high demand for short order cooks and nobody to fill the positions, you'd see short order cooks leaping from job to job and making a ton of money too.
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When I got home, I opened the plastic bag, plugged the scanner into my laptop and loaded up an editor. I then proceeded to scan an ISBN on a book nearby, and sure enough a bunch of characters spewed out onto my editor screen.
Now, what is there to reverse engineer here. All I have to do is figure out what those characters mean. I haven't signed anything that said I wouldn't try to figure that out and it's debatable whether such a contract would be legally binding anyhow. As far as I can tell, these guys do not have a legal leg to stand on because I have not in any way been obligated to keep anything a secret.
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Also, what about taxes? I mean if you do a bunch of work and get a bunch of free hardware out of it, is that income (or more to the point, taxable income)?
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Now, CueCat, I'm guessing is concerned that RadioShack will stop giving away the scanners because they can be hacked to work with competing barcodes. Thus they'll stop sending money to cue cat. But I don't see any legal basis for there case. I mean no copyrights were infringed, no licenses broken. Reverse engineering (outside of the realm of the DMCA possibly), is a long defended right. If CueCat does sue, I can't imagine they'd stand a chance.
That being said, if one cannot afford the lawyers and take the risk of being sued, then this may be a somewhat moot point (and you know cuecat is hoping for that). So, everybody get your check books ready, looks like we're gonna have to send some more funding to smack down the dumb corporations.
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As of yet I do not believe there has been any determination in the US courts as to whether it is legal or not to place restrictions on reverse engineering as part of a license. Of course if somebody can just send a piece of software off to another country to have it legally reversse engineered its rather a moot point. This seems like a pretty big loop hole. Too big, I suspect to have the court system allow it. So either they'll have to declare prohibitions of reverse engineering invalid or declare that anybody using an illegaly reverse engineered item (even if it was done in a country where legal) would be subject to the same penalties as if it had been done here.
So, apply the standard IANAL here, but if you are in a country that allows reverse engineering you can probably file those cease and desist letters in the garbage.
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The only fault I can see for the tobacco industry was their intentional hacking of cigarettes to make them more addictive. Otherwise, if you choose to use a product that is known to be hazardous to your health and addictive, you get what you deserve. You shouldn't be whining later about it so you can get a few million dollars.
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