Gun manufactueres.. this is not as clear cut.... but to say that they should have none of the blame is rediculous; where do they think all their weapons of death go? many of them KNOW that their guns are ending up with gangs and kids, and they DO NOT CARE. That's negligence.
I get so tired of arguments like these. By the same rationale, car companies, model paint and glue companies are all negligent, because they produce a product that can be misused. We are a safer society because of gun ownership - just ask the folks in the UK who have effectively had the right to defend themselves against criminals taken away from them, or look at violent crime statistics in states that have right to carry laws.
Gee that proves it. If you'd opened the book (after paying for it and taking it home) and found a licensing agreement requiring you to give the author and the publisher blowjobs on alternate wednesdays, would you be bound by that too? If so, I've got stuff to sell you....
Dammit... me without moderator points again... thank you, I needed that chuckle... blowjobs on alternate Wednesdays... hee...
Maybe because in this day and age, some folks don't have the attention span to read a press release, but they will play a game that even vaguely seems "kewl"... even if it is just to see the outcome. There's typically more than one way to get your message across... and online advertisers have found that they get better click-through rates with little games that are also advertisements in some markets, so maybe the EFF is on to something. I'm sure that the information communicated in the game is available in more condensed form on the EFF website, for those folks who don't like to wander around in a game for a while.
My only complaint with the Zaurus is battery life... it is a complete and utter pig with the backlight in use... I'm lucky if I get two hours use out of it.
The primary problem is that in order to play a DVD, you have to decrypt the content, and hence run afoul of the DMCA. IANAL, and I am not an expert on DVD technology, but I suspect that the way the law would be read is that any tool or technology that is used to get around what a vendor classifies as "copyright controls" - be it the encryption of the content, restricting the content to use/viewing only in certain regions of the globe, etc. - will run you afoul. If you can copy it, but not use it, they don't care... because they're not losing any revenue as a result. And that is what they really care about.
All that being said, there are only two ways I can see this getting fixed. (1) Joe American decides he/she gives a damn about loss of fair use rights, and enough of him/her contacts their congrescritter saying that "If you don't fix this, I'll vote someone in who will". I'm not holding my breath that there will be some kind of meaningful boycott of the media in question, because this is a country of consumers - especially of entertainment. (2) A case fighting the DMCA goes to the Supreme Court, and we get a ruling in favor of the people instead of the copyright holders is made. I think we could actually see something good come out of this, but I don't know what it is going to take to get it there.
Yeah, it would requiring installing additional software, but according to the EFF's HTML page for this report http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequen ces.html, GhostScript with GSView (which is free - as in beer - software) for Win, Mac or Unix can be used to view PDFs. Didn't know that, and will have to give it a spin myself.
And to diverge into a rant some, Python is a screwup waiting to happen. Friends don't let friends use whitespace as a control structure.
Truer words have never been spoken. I sat in on a presentation by the author of Python earlier this year, where he went through an introduction to the language, and covered its "strengths". I just sat there thinking to myself "Please tell me he isn't serious? The last language I used that cared about column spacing was COBOL!!". And what is this crap about not having an explicit begin and end delimiters/statements for blocks of code being a "good thing"? Blank lines as terminators of blocks of code is just terminally brain damaged - it is just one more thing to make the code hard to read, and to piss me off in the interpreter because I hit a blank line when I didn't want to. No thank you - I'll stick to languages with more mature syntactical structures.
I'm going to have to beg to disagree with you - I don't think the assessment is harsh at all, because I was not knocking the quality of the products produced (well, ok, maybe in M$ case I will). What I _am_ knocking is the mindset that getting to market with one of the first standards-compliant, hopefully high quality due to familiarity with the standard, product will not secure their revenues, and therefore the standards process must be perverted or circumnavigated in the name of the almighty buck. And it isn't the consumer they are after in the long run - it is locking out any possible competition. And keep in mind that if you own the technology that everyone is using, and can charge people for their use or derivative works, you often times have no motivation to innovate further.
Many of the people I know who have been involved in international standards efforts (I've been a senior engineer with a number of large telcos over the years) were involved in it for one major reason: they wanted the interoperability that these standards brought, because it ultimately allowed them to do their jobs better. All that the worker bee types typically got from this was recognition that they had been instrumental in making a specific standard happen - and this was enough. I don't see where the corporations would be any worse off by taking this stance, and reaping the benefits of being there to shape the standards and show publicly that they helped shaped the standards. Except perhaps they might have to continue putting forth effort to invent, innovate and produce, rather than just sitting back and siphoning money from anyone who wants to go look up a web service in a UDDI directory.
The main question I would have is why hasn't there been a move a-foot to standardize the following for Linux across the board:
Package formats
Package database systems
Dependency database systems
Dependency resolution (i.e., apt-get-*)
Creation of installation packages when building from tar balls
Graphical front ends to distribution installations
Graphical front ends to basic configuration tasks, such as configuring X beyond default parameters, or configuring the network, or even hardening systems a'la Bastille?
Yeah, I know... RH has its "technical capital" invested in RPM, while Debian has its "technical capital" invested in deb/apt. And what I am asking about is non-trivial. However, if there were some interest, maybe this is a worthwhile project to undertake.
Actually, is it unreasonable to consider methods for encouraging the review and possible revision of the current patent process? Yes, I know that the monied interests would probably fight efforts to revamp a system which at the very least does not restrain their efforts to lock up ideas. The real question is (and if this has been covered somewhere, just point me in the direction of the appropriate URL, and I will go quietly;-) ), are there any provisions in the USPTO's charter/what-have-you for review of the whole patent process? Or does is the only method for dealing with the broken patent process to continually litigate?
Slashdot Mirror
I get so tired of arguments like these. By the same rationale, car companies, model paint and glue companies are all negligent, because they produce a product that can be misused. We are a safer society because of gun ownership - just ask the folks in the UK who have effectively had the right to defend themselves against criminals taken away from them, or look at violent crime statistics in states that have right to carry laws.
Dammit... me without moderator points again... thank you, I needed that chuckle... blowjobs on alternate Wednesdays... hee...
Dammit!!!! And me without mod points....
Why not just send out a press release?
Maybe because in this day and age, some folks don't have the attention span to read a press release, but they will play a game that even vaguely seems "kewl"... even if it is just to see the outcome. There's typically more than one way to get your message across... and online advertisers have found that they get better click-through rates with little games that are also advertisements in some markets, so maybe the EFF is on to something. I'm sure that the information communicated in the game is available in more condensed form on the EFF website, for those folks who don't like to wander around in a game for a while.
How is this off-topic? Everyone else is chatting up their favorite distro, why can't Per?
My only complaint with the Zaurus is battery life... it is a complete and utter pig with the backlight in use... I'm lucky if I get two hours use out of it.
The primary problem is that in order to play a DVD, you have to decrypt the content, and hence run afoul of the DMCA. IANAL, and I am not an expert on DVD technology, but I suspect that the way the law would be read is that any tool or technology that is used to get around what a vendor classifies as "copyright controls" - be it the encryption of the content, restricting the content to use/viewing only in certain regions of the globe, etc. - will run you afoul. If you can copy it, but not use it, they don't care... because they're not losing any revenue as a result. And that is what they really care about.
All that being said, there are only two ways I can see this getting fixed. (1) Joe American decides he/she gives a damn about loss of fair use rights, and enough of him/her contacts their congrescritter saying that "If you don't fix this, I'll vote someone in who will". I'm not holding my breath that there will be some kind of meaningful boycott of the media in question, because this is a country of consumers - especially of entertainment. (2) A case fighting the DMCA goes to the Supreme Court, and we get a ruling in favor of the people instead of the copyright holders is made. I think we could actually see something good come out of this, but I don't know what it is going to take to get it there.
Yeah, it would requiring installing additional software, but according to the EFF's HTML page for this report http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequen ces.html, GhostScript with GSView (which is free - as in beer - software) for Win, Mac or Unix can be used to view PDFs. Didn't know that, and will have to give it a spin myself.
Truer words have never been spoken. I sat in on a presentation by the author of Python earlier this year, where he went through an introduction to the language, and covered its "strengths". I just sat there thinking to myself "Please tell me he isn't serious? The last language I used that cared about column spacing was COBOL!!". And what is this crap about not having an explicit begin and end delimiters/statements for blocks of code being a "good thing"? Blank lines as terminators of blocks of code is just terminally brain damaged - it is just one more thing to make the code hard to read, and to piss me off in the interpreter because I hit a blank line when I didn't want to. No thank you - I'll stick to languages with more mature syntactical structures.
You know, they really need moderation classes like:
- F_cking A!
- No Sh_t!
- You tell 'em!
Because Mr. Franklin's words are no less true today than they were when originally uttered/penned.
I'm going to have to beg to disagree with you - I don't think the assessment is harsh at all, because I was not knocking the quality of the products produced (well, ok, maybe in M$ case I will). What I _am_ knocking is the mindset that getting to market with one of the first standards-compliant, hopefully high quality due to familiarity with the standard, product will not secure their revenues, and therefore the standards process must be perverted or circumnavigated in the name of the almighty buck. And it isn't the consumer they are after in the long run - it is locking out any possible competition. And keep in mind that if you own the technology that everyone is using, and can charge people for their use or derivative works, you often times have no motivation to innovate further.
Many of the people I know who have been involved in international standards efforts (I've been a senior engineer with a number of large telcos over the years) were involved in it for one major reason: they wanted the interoperability that these standards brought, because it ultimately allowed them to do their jobs better. All that the worker bee types typically got from this was recognition that they had been instrumental in making a specific standard happen - and this was enough. I don't see where the corporations would be any worse off by taking this stance, and reaping the benefits of being there to shape the standards and show publicly that they helped shaped the standards. Except perhaps they might have to continue putting forth effort to invent, innovate and produce, rather than just sitting back and siphoning money from anyone who wants to go look up a web service in a UDDI directory.
Dammit!!! And me without moderator access today... mod this post up!!!
- Package formats
- Package database systems
- Dependency database systems
- Dependency resolution (i.e., apt-get-*)
- Creation of installation packages when building from tar balls
- Graphical front ends to distribution installations
- Graphical front ends to basic configuration tasks, such as configuring X beyond default parameters, or configuring the network, or even hardening systems a'la Bastille?
Yeah, I know... RH has its "technical capital" invested in RPM, while Debian has its "technical capital" invested in deb/apt. And what I am asking about is non-trivial. However, if there were some interest, maybe this is a worthwhile project to undertake.Actually, is it unreasonable to consider methods for encouraging the review and possible revision of the current patent process? Yes, I know that the monied interests would probably fight efforts to revamp a system which at the very least does not restrain their efforts to lock up ideas. The real question is (and if this has been covered somewhere, just point me in the direction of the appropriate URL, and I will go quietly ;-) ), are there any provisions in the USPTO's charter/what-have-you for review of the whole patent process? Or does is the only method for dealing with the broken patent process to continually litigate?