The GPL allows you (or anyone else) to redistribute GNU/Linux under certain specific conditions. In fact, when you're buying a Linux CD the GPL really doesn't apply to you, it only applies to the person selling you the Linux CD...
The only time the GPL would apply to you is if you give a copy of the CD to a friend or post the CD on your website, etc ad infinitum. (Which are all things you couldn't normally do according to copyright law.)
If EULA's were what protected software it would be poorly protected indeed. I might not be able to disregard the letter of the contract, but all I have to do is give a copy to a 13 year old and suddenly they can post it online no questions asked.
Copyright is an old bargain and it makes sense. EULA's, UCITA and the like are a modern invention meant to bilk dollars and screw with an industry.
No one has time to read these garbage contracts, and ultimately they don't matter. If you sell me a glass of water, I don't have to answer to you on what I do with it. Instead, there are standard laws governing what can and can't be done with water, gasoline or any other product that is bought or sold. However one thing there isn't is a provision for either the manufacturer or retailer to dictate use.
For software, copyright is that standard set of rules and guidelines. Anything else is over-ridden by the basic rules of commerce, by the very meaning of the word "purchase". If you ever read a commercial EULA you'll notice the first thing they have to get you to agree to is that you have not "purchased" anything instead you've done something else you've "licensed" the software. Well, based on the way merchents deal with shrink-wrap software this is merely a false-hood and as soon as the court system gets its collective head out of its ass long enough to realize this fact EULA's will be a scary fairy tale from the past.
You can flat-out copy the Wow desktop client to a machine without any keys. Do we really want to piss them off?
Um... That seems a rather cowardly way to look at things. The question should be do they really want to piss us off?
Either way, they're not the only game developer in the world, if they started doing assinine things like require the CD in the drive to run their software I'd either find a crack or quit using their stuff entirely.
I hate DRM based inconvenience and brokenness more than I hate anything, and I won't put up with an ounce of it. As Blizzard well knows, the tighter the DRM fist is sqeezed the more customers just slip through their fingers... Their lax policy is probably a major contributing factor in why WoW is currently so popular. (They whole-heartedly encourage you to copy it to your friends PC and have them use it for 10 days or whatever free.)
As to the bnetd stuff... Ya it sucks. And it sets a really scary precedent for reverse engineering. However, that's as much the government and lobbiest's fault as it is Blizzard's. Blizzard is bound to use any legal tools available to protect their corporate assets. It's just really unfortunate our country is so messed up about DRM right now... If you don't like the rules, don't hate the player, hate the game.
Just say the name of the artist and/or song you want to listen to, or even do a lyric search on a few words by speaking them into a little mic. That'd be waaay easier than arrowing through any kind of categories.
Course, then you've gotta have some processor in addition to just space on the puppy.
Could be considered a group of people. (The American people, that are really sad about 9/11, continue to think about it now and then. See doesn't sound right.)
Well... games have had drunkeness levels for years, how much different is this sanity level really? Does this mean I can patent horniness levels if I get to the patent office quick like a bunny? (And you know which kind of bunny!)
When you can answer the practice questions without looking at the multiple choice answers, and understand why your answer is correct, you're ready.
Good point, just remember the first rule of multiple choice test taking is that you read every answer before you pick one. (Otherwise ambiguous answers can really bite you in the ass.)
Also, statistically, the answer "B" is most often the correct answer (for when you have to guess). (Unless of course the test-makers are wise to that on a particular test...)
What about the labor required to "earn" that +1 vorpal snicker snack sword? Isn't the virtual item a representation of said labor?
Sure the labor isn't digging trenches, but it is still effort... If someone paid me to sit and watch TV all day, would that make it ok to steal the money, peanuts, beanie babies, or "pepsi-points" I earned at it?
There's a market to be made in paying some players to play, and charging others to play...
I mean, if you can pay folks in developing countries a low hourly wage to play "evil demi-gods" or some such in control of bots that are almost indistinguishable from real human beings, why not use them to entertain the "paying customers" instead of leaving them trying to make a living by griefing? (There could even be some kind of in-game rating system built around implicit and explicit player feedback... It'd be especially entertaining watching a paid "bad guy" messing with a really nasty griefer.)
If you were hosting a "freeshard" with about 10 of your friends regularly using it and someone got cheated that wouldn't be a very big deal.
But, if you open up a large legitimate for-pay server and the same thing happens, that's a little like having someone cheat in a large casino. Does the casino owner get to decide what is and isn't against the law with regards to cheating?
I certainly wouldn't have marked either of your posts as troll, but I'm a little unclear on some of your numbers.
I'd posited two numbers, one based on the cost of litigation for this case and a guess at $50 as a common spam price-point. As I understand it, one of those would have been a 1% success rate, and the other would have been a.1% success rate. I don't see where you're getting 10% from anything I said in my post. (Of course, it was pointed out by an AC I was mixing up dollars and sense so the first number should have been.01% instead of 1%, making spam appear much more lucrative even given the lawsuits.)
Also I don't wholly agree with: You're not getting spam because some script kiddie compromised an email server
Compromised hosts makes filtering a lot more difficult, and I use filtering therefore I get *more* spam in my inbox due to those compromised hosts...
I would like to see more alternatives to jail; I feel like physical restraint is only appropriate for violent crimes.
That's fine, after we find good alternatives to jail for fraud, theft and shoplifting we can talk about doing the same for spammers. Until then, lock the bastards up.
Richter has sent "billions" of spams. Say, that's 2,000,000,000 to be conservative. If he's merely been fined $7,000,000 that works out to less than 1/2 a cent per spam sent.
If he can make one $50 sale per 100 emails, then he's still in the green. Just how teachable do you think the dumbest 1% of people are? (And actually... judgements like this will probably kill spam, because it probably takes more like 1,000 emails to make that one sale given filtering and noise ratios...)
Actually... tons of comments and explicit companion documentation are not the only methods of providing readability. Good variable names, consistent structure, and an easy to read coding style can be just as important. So, even if sometimes you run out of time, or throw together some throw-away code without proper header comments and full docs, you're likely to maintain your typical coding habits in the mean-time because by now they just come naturally.
Keep in mind... "good" doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as "experienced". She may still be very bright even though she's new to programming, in which case she's still "good", she just has a lot to learn.
After all, none of us were born with C compilers embedded in our skulls...
Of course it does. Especially if you remember that the Sonny Bono term extension act was mostly passed to "get the US in line" with the EU and the Berne Convention. Creating a new agreement and passing it back the other direction with increased requirements is a perfect way to create an un-ending copyright term extension loop.
(50 years after creation + 70 years after publication is longer than anything I've heard of before, though it is only applicable under specialized circumstances... But that doesn't necessarily make it less useful for forcing other methodologies to simply extend all their limits to meet it.)
The computer scientists have written more than 100,000 lines of code to tell Stanley what to do.
Made it sound like the journalistas thought that was a *lot* of code. I was just thinking that didn't sound like much at all, given the team-size and project scope. Maybe 10,000,000 or 100,000,000 would be a lot. 100,000? That's about a typical mid-sized software project. (Depending on the environment of course)
For an end-user that's true... But I'd expect any software developer running windows to have an MSDN subscription. In which case, you've already got a license, at least for your work computer.
From what I've seen, Windows XP is just fine for a gaming OS anyways...
As for 64-bit Windows. I don't think I'd run that except where I'm working with 64-bit apps. So, at this point in time it'd be a spare/sometimes workstation at best.
already been done
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And, P2P aside, if it were that easy, it would already have been done.
Web comics, like Sluggy Freelance for example, seem to make their authors a decent living based entirely off of merchandising and compilations of free on-line content. So, the question isn't whether money can be made on this kind of open model, just whether it's enough to support movie production as opposed to say comics.
Basically, this new model requires producers to accept a (possibly) lower gross income per viewer in order to achieve distribution costs of almost nothing.
Of course, as you imply, 10,000 dedicated viewers is nothing for TV and movies. But just because this particular show didn't drum up more interest in this one instance doesn't mean the model is a failure. It just means there aren't enough people willing to both bother finding BitTorrents and cross the infringement boundary to make it worth while. An officially sponsored torrent link and open distribution model would likely do a whole lot better.
Hmm... speaking of merchandise, I think I'm giong to go buy that iSophagus shirt I've been eye-balling right now.
While I agree with almost everything you say, I have to disagree with this
Unauthorized use of software somebody has created with the idea of supporting himself through selling it most certainly is theft.
It most certainly is wrong, given a system in which we've all agreed this is an appropriate method of supporting ones-self, but it is important to remember the subtle distinctions between tangible assets and knowledge. If I chip off a little piece of a sculpture you've created to keep for my own, everyone will notice. If I wholly copy a book you've written it affects no one but myself. This is a very important economic differernce, and to ignore it is likely to create a very stupid and inefficient economy. Open and unprotected knowledge almost always benefits everyone, open and unprotected property usually just gets beaten down and worn out.
Notice how carefully Macaulay chose his terms, he equated infringement with:
pillaging and defrauding the living.
I think this is a very apt description which begins to capture the spirit of what is actually wrong with copyright infringement.
(Note: Pillaging is not the same as stealing, it's taking things just lying around on a battle-field when you don't know whether the taking will hurt anyone or not... That's already leaps and bounds closer to the meaning of copyright infringement than "stealing" or "piracy".)
Why is this important? Because the words we use and allow to pass by us helps control which the propoganda that gets accepted from either camp...
Have you read Stallman's The Right to Read (mentioned earlier in a comment). Just how far do you think a successful lock-down model has to be pushed before that world becomes a reality, especially in education.
Even beyond that, To miss out on media is to miss out on culture and become an outsider. If Hollywood gets to specify the systems, decide who gets access to them and throw developers and engineers in jail for questioning the status-quo, then they're getting control over a lot more than just entertainment. They get a free stranglehold on a whole segment of the technology sector, if not the whole thing, and they have government mandated control over distribution which starts to look a lot like censorship.
To use your analogy, they're being handed the only keys to the house by mommy because they happened to scream loud enough about a turd. You may not think those keys are important as you play off by yourself, but come dinner time when you get locked out, you're going to be mighty hungry.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL does not allow you to use GNU/Linux.
The GPL allows you (or anyone else) to redistribute GNU/Linux under certain specific conditions. In fact, when you're buying a Linux CD the GPL really doesn't apply to you, it only applies to the person selling you the Linux CD...
The only time the GPL would apply to you is if you give a copy of the CD to a friend or post the CD on your website, etc ad infinitum. (Which are all things you couldn't normally do according to copyright law.)
If EULA's were what protected software it would be poorly protected indeed. I might not be able to disregard the letter of the contract, but all I have to do is give a copy to a 13 year old and suddenly they can post it online no questions asked.
Copyright is an old bargain and it makes sense. EULA's, UCITA and the like are a modern invention meant to bilk dollars and screw with an industry.
No one has time to read these garbage contracts, and ultimately they don't matter. If you sell me a glass of water, I don't have to answer to you on what I do with it. Instead, there are standard laws governing what can and can't be done with water, gasoline or any other product that is bought or sold. However one thing there isn't is a provision for either the manufacturer or retailer to dictate use.
For software, copyright is that standard set of rules and guidelines. Anything else is over-ridden by the basic rules of commerce, by the very meaning of the word "purchase". If you ever read a commercial EULA you'll notice the first thing they have to get you to agree to is that you have not "purchased" anything instead you've done something else you've "licensed" the software. Well, based on the way merchents deal with shrink-wrap software this is merely a false-hood and as soon as the court system gets its collective head out of its ass long enough to realize this fact EULA's will be a scary fairy tale from the past.
You can flat-out copy the Wow desktop client to a machine without any keys. Do we really want to piss them off?
Um... That seems a rather cowardly way to look at things. The question should be do they really want to piss us off?
Either way, they're not the only game developer in the world, if they started doing assinine things like require the CD in the drive to run their software I'd either find a crack or quit using their stuff entirely.
I hate DRM based inconvenience and brokenness more than I hate anything, and I won't put up with an ounce of it. As Blizzard well knows, the tighter the DRM fist is sqeezed the more customers just slip through their fingers... Their lax policy is probably a major contributing factor in why WoW is currently so popular. (They whole-heartedly encourage you to copy it to your friends PC and have them use it for 10 days or whatever free.)
As to the bnetd stuff... Ya it sucks. And it sets a really scary precedent for reverse engineering. However, that's as much the government and lobbiest's fault as it is Blizzard's. Blizzard is bound to use any legal tools available to protect their corporate assets. It's just really unfortunate our country is so messed up about DRM right now... If you don't like the rules, don't hate the player, hate the game.
Voice recognition.
Just say the name of the artist and/or song you want to listen to, or even do a lyric search on a few words by speaking them into a little mic. That'd be waaay easier than arrowing through any kind of categories.
Course, then you've gotta have some processor in addition to just space on the puppy.
You mean that. Microsoft is not a person.
Could be considered a group of people. (The American people, that are really sad about 9/11, continue to think about it now and then. See doesn't sound right.)
Well... games have had drunkeness levels for years, how much different is this sanity level really? Does this mean I can patent horniness levels if I get to the patent office quick like a bunny? (And you know which kind of bunny!)
When you can answer the practice questions without looking at the multiple choice answers, and understand why your answer is correct, you're ready.
Good point, just remember the first rule of multiple choice test taking is that you read every answer before you pick one. (Otherwise ambiguous answers can really bite you in the ass.)
Also, statistically, the answer "B" is most often the correct answer (for when you have to guess). (Unless of course the test-makers are wise to that on a particular test...)
What about the labor required to "earn" that +1 vorpal snicker snack sword? Isn't the virtual item a representation of said labor?
Sure the labor isn't digging trenches, but it is still effort... If someone paid me to sit and watch TV all day, would that make it ok to steal the money, peanuts, beanie babies, or "pepsi-points" I earned at it?
There's a market to be made in paying some players to play, and charging others to play...
I mean, if you can pay folks in developing countries a low hourly wage to play "evil demi-gods" or some such in control of bots that are almost indistinguishable from real human beings, why not use them to entertain the "paying customers" instead of leaving them trying to make a living by griefing? (There could even be some kind of in-game rating system built around implicit and explicit player feedback... It'd be especially entertaining watching a paid "bad guy" messing with a really nasty griefer.)
It doesnt matter though...it's not fucking tangible.
Neither are the ones and zeros in your bank account, credit history, and social security number...
If you were hosting a "freeshard" with about 10 of your friends regularly using it and someone got cheated that wouldn't be a very big deal.
But, if you open up a large legitimate for-pay server and the same thing happens, that's a little like having someone cheat in a large casino. Does the casino owner get to decide what is and isn't against the law with regards to cheating?
I certainly wouldn't have marked either of your posts as troll, but I'm a little unclear on some of your numbers.
.1% success rate. I don't see where you're getting 10% from anything I said in my post. (Of course, it was pointed out by an AC I was mixing up dollars and sense so the first number should have been .01% instead of 1%, making spam appear much more lucrative even given the lawsuits.)
I'd posited two numbers, one based on the cost of litigation for this case and a guess at $50 as a common spam price-point. As I understand it, one of those would have been a 1% success rate, and the other would have been a
Also I don't wholly agree with:
You're not getting spam because some script kiddie compromised an email server
Compromised hosts makes filtering a lot more difficult, and I use filtering therefore I get *more* spam in my inbox due to those compromised hosts...
Good point, I should quit mixing up dollars and cents next time. Guess it's one $50 sale per 10,000 spams (that are prosecutable). yikes!
I would like to see more alternatives to jail; I feel like physical restraint is only appropriate for violent crimes.
That's fine, after we find good alternatives to jail for fraud, theft and shoplifting we can talk about doing the same for spammers. Until then, lock the bastards up.
But stop and think about the economics a bit...
Richter has sent "billions" of spams. Say, that's 2,000,000,000 to be conservative. If he's merely been fined $7,000,000 that works out to less than 1/2 a cent per spam sent.
If he can make one $50 sale per 100 emails, then he's still in the green. Just how teachable do you think the dumbest 1% of people are? (And actually... judgements like this will probably kill spam, because it probably takes more like 1,000 emails to make that one sale given filtering and noise ratios...)
Actually... tons of comments and explicit companion documentation are not the only methods of providing readability. Good variable names, consistent structure, and an easy to read coding style can be just as important. So, even if sometimes you run out of time, or throw together some throw-away code without proper header comments and full docs, you're likely to maintain your typical coding habits in the mean-time because by now they just come naturally.
Keep in mind... "good" doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as "experienced". She may still be very bright even though she's new to programming, in which case she's still "good", she just has a lot to learn.
After all, none of us were born with C compilers embedded in our skulls...
The copyright extension clause makes sense too.
Of course it does. Especially if you remember that the Sonny Bono term extension act was mostly passed to "get the US in line" with the EU and the Berne Convention. Creating a new agreement and passing it back the other direction with increased requirements is a perfect way to create an un-ending copyright term extension loop.
(50 years after creation + 70 years after publication is longer than anything I've heard of before, though it is only applicable under specialized circumstances... But that doesn't necessarily make it less useful for forcing other methodologies to simply extend all their limits to meet it.)
Actually... the way the article phrased it:
The computer scientists have written more than 100,000 lines of code to tell Stanley what to do.
Made it sound like the journalistas thought that was a *lot* of code. I was just thinking that didn't sound like much at all, given the team-size and project scope. Maybe 10,000,000 or 100,000,000 would be a lot. 100,000? That's about a typical mid-sized software project. (Depending on the environment of course)
For an end-user that's true... But I'd expect any software developer running windows to have an MSDN subscription. In which case, you've already got a license, at least for your work computer.
From what I've seen, Windows XP is just fine for a gaming OS anyways...
As for 64-bit Windows. I don't think I'd run that except where I'm working with 64-bit apps. So, at this point in time it'd be a spare/sometimes workstation at best.
And, P2P aside, if it were that easy, it would already have been done.
Web comics, like Sluggy Freelance for example, seem to make their authors a decent living based entirely off of merchandising and compilations of free on-line content. So, the question isn't whether money can be made on this kind of open model, just whether it's enough to support movie production as opposed to say comics.
Basically, this new model requires producers to accept a (possibly) lower gross income per viewer in order to achieve distribution costs of almost nothing.
Of course, as you imply, 10,000 dedicated viewers is nothing for TV and movies. But just because this particular show didn't drum up more interest in this one instance doesn't mean the model is a failure. It just means there aren't enough people willing to both bother finding BitTorrents and cross the infringement boundary to make it worth while. An officially sponsored torrent link and open distribution model would likely do a whole lot better.
Hmm... speaking of merchandise, I think I'm giong to go buy that iSophagus shirt I've been eye-balling right now.
While I agree with almost everything you say, I have to disagree with this
Unauthorized use of software somebody has created with the idea of supporting himself through selling it most certainly is theft.
It most certainly is wrong, given a system in which we've all agreed this is an appropriate method of supporting ones-self, but it is important to remember the subtle distinctions between tangible assets and knowledge. If I chip off a little piece of a sculpture you've created to keep for my own, everyone will notice. If I wholly copy a book you've written it affects no one but myself. This is a very important economic differernce, and to ignore it is likely to create a very stupid and inefficient economy. Open and unprotected knowledge almost always benefits everyone, open and unprotected property usually just gets beaten down and worn out.
Notice how carefully Macaulay chose his terms, he equated infringement with:
pillaging and defrauding the living.
I think this is a very apt description which begins to capture the spirit of what is actually wrong with copyright infringement.
(Note: Pillaging is not the same as stealing, it's taking things just lying around on a battle-field when you don't know whether the taking will hurt anyone or not... That's already leaps and bounds closer to the meaning of copyright infringement than "stealing" or "piracy".)
Why is this important? Because the words we use and allow to pass by us helps control which the propoganda that gets accepted from either camp...
Have you read Stallman's The Right to Read (mentioned earlier in a comment). Just how far do you think a successful lock-down model has to be pushed before that world becomes a reality, especially in education.
Even beyond that, To miss out on media is to miss out on culture and become an outsider. If Hollywood gets to specify the systems, decide who gets access to them and throw developers and engineers in jail for questioning the status-quo, then they're getting control over a lot more than just entertainment. They get a free stranglehold on a whole segment of the technology sector, if not the whole thing, and they have government mandated control over distribution which starts to look a lot like censorship.
To use your analogy, they're being handed the only keys to the house by mommy because they happened to scream loud enough about a turd. You may not think those keys are important as you play off by yourself, but come dinner time when you get locked out, you're going to be mighty hungry.
Why should we pay any attention to theives when there are still murderers walking around free!!
Presumably both issues deserve some attention.
I was thinking:
Linux wants to get as many things done as possible in a forcibly open setting.
BSD wants to do a few things very well and be useable in any setting.