I do think they should say something like "The design of this site was modeled after linux.com" or something of the sort but if the site admin dosent want to, what can you really do.
Seriously, how can you copyright a website layout? Anyone ever notice all gaming related websites(like UGO) look EXACTLY the same, with the trendy left-side navigation in a really small font?
Copyrighting a general concept like left-side navigation is silly. However, copying the entire site down to the images/colors and just changing the name (like from Slashdot to FishFriends News) is definitely wrong. Even worse is stealing the HTML, then changing the images to "SRC=http://slashdot.org/_img_path_name", since/. then pays for your site in the bandwidth dept.
So the copyrightability should depend on the specificness of things. What would computing look like if Bell Labs had copyrighted the idea of having an OS kernel? -- LoonXTall
Disclaimer: I just started my second year at the local community college.
The way I see it, doing anything outside of class is the way to go. I learned more about ANSI C (stdin/stdout/stderr, #define, malloc/free, buffering, and '\n' character translations under DOS) in a week of playing with a text filter than I could learn in a month of a computer course at college. Of course, the "Computer Organization" course I'm taking this semester might change that, as we are expected to do this type of stuff (cgi-bin controlled robot, serial port communications program) as part of the curriculum.
For related classes, the suggestions of logic, philosophy, etc. are probably good. You need to be able to come up with an idea/algorithm before you can possibly express it (in any language).
What is even more interesting is that so many people, particularly/. readers slam these economic models as unfair. Yet there was a fair bit of support for the suggestions that were made by myself and others about how the RIAA could put all the music ever made into a streamable database and charge people $20 a month to access it rather than having to buy cds.
No solution to a particular problem is going to cover all similar situations (or all people). Take free information, for instance: would you like to have thousands of people post your medical or credit info because one website was prevented from doing it?
As for the RIAA, I'd rather buy a CD because I have the portable hardware to play them, I don't have to wait for them to download at 14.4 Kbps, and I don't spend $20 a month on CDs already.
Error: You define "EV" as a "zero emissions vehicle", then use the term to mean "electric vehicle". If you stretch the point, bikes are "zero emission".
Correct: There will never be a (non-human-powered) ZEV and probably won't be 100% electric cars. Hybrids are the way to go... you can optimize the engine part for maximum efficiency because you know the load. Also, you can power the engine with various fuels... hydrogen, alcohol, and methane come to mind. Or you can build a totally different type of engine... how about a Stirling engine?
As far as range of hybrids go, the Toyota Prius gets 55 highway/47 city mpg and has a 556 mile range[1]. Assuming they do all city driving to get the range, that's about a 12 gallon tank, which means fast fillups.
Incorrect: Transformers lose a negligible amount of energy... counting them as a "conversion" is stretching. Once you're done rambling, figure out your ideal efficiency; if it's greater than 36% (another ideal figure), you're ahead of your car.
1. At least, that's what their advertisement says.
FALSE: There is nothing we can do about it. Some actions will stem the tide. Being a large corporation with a lot of money, the only option the RIAA can see is a lawsuit. If I could get the albums for $5 instead of $15 I would actually buy several (instead of none). DVD piracy isn't nearly as bad; how much of that is due to connection speed/filesize, and how much to price? (Disclaimer: the $4 price in my mind for the cost of a DVD movie came from Slashdot, so there is an 83% chance it's wrong.)
Uh-oh... what will the next patent be? For using a keyboard to accept user input, using a wheel to control the direction of the car, or using paper to print on?
For example, the Riken/Columbia/BNL supercomputer at Brookhaven National Laboratory uses a bazillion cards with RAM, a TI DSP, and a custom gate connecting it to its neighbors in the x, y, z, and t directions of the calculation. (It was custom-built for doing quantum field theory.) Best described as "massively parallel processing" (MPP).
The other side of optimizing for the latest and greatest is that software must remain compatible with the majority of users' computers, or you won't sell very much. For example, I can't use anything that requires AGP, MMX, or an internet connection faster than 14.4 Kbps.
This same compatibility issue is what causes our computers to pretend to be 8088's when they first start up. You couldn't leave it because nobody would buy the new thing because there'd be no software... and there we sit.
Slashdot is a good example. They make money (well at least a little), and yet their site can be set up on anyone's server that wants it.
With/., the copy would only be second best. But if I lifted a cool picture from your page and added it to mine, it would be impossible for the average Web user to tell which was first----or even that somebody had stolen it, given the number of sites out there. Napster still gives a certain amount of credit (except in cases of abuse, like the Cuckoo Egg Project), but what about my graphics? I don't really want to slap copyright notices all over the place, as that makes the image uglier on my site, then gets cropped by someone else, then that one is stolen, etc.
I think the paradigm will just be much different from what we are used to.
Many people say this, but not one of them have suggested how it might work (or I missed it when they did). You have to get around a few things first, especially the "there is no such thing as a secure system" idea. Anything client-side cannot be trusted (see also dnet's Opcode Authorization page), and servers can be hacked as well. There will always be a black market if someone can do it... but the workings of the white market will affect its size (see also DVD non-piracy).
Consider this: the very thing you are building a career on suddenly becomes almost valueless. That precious program or schematic or car or crop that you were planning on getting paid for crumbles to dust. Now what?
Just because the final product can be copied, perfectly and infinitely, does it make it right? I spent hours on the graphics on this page... what claim to control them do you have?
I loved DeluxePaint III (I still have it on a working A500)----animation and paint in one program in 2.5 MB of RAM. (My computer was upgraded.) Things I still miss on my PC:
(Anim)Brushes based on the you-can-see-it-before-you-get-it idea, without long pauses between moving the mouse and showing the brush image.
The Snowflake tool.
Tilting ovals when you draw them.
All the modes of painting, especially Smear.
[Place my biggest Win95 gripe here----no way to focus on a window that's not on top.] PCs may have reached a gigahertz, but they have yet to surpass my 68000-based machine.
It's just that the idea of bribing people with free free software is a ridiculous concept.
I can see a bribe with free-speech software: in the past, the FSF sold the GPL-protected Emacs. So giving it to the reviewer as free-beer would qualify as a bribe.
I would be much happier clicking on "NO" in a confirmation email than on the first spam. I would be even happier if Hotmail wouldn't watch where I went from my Inbox, though... it'd cut down on quite a bit of copy-Ctrl+N-pasting.
Its alot easier to just hit START, PROGRAMS, WORD,...
I don't think that's everything. It's a lot easier to type wp at a console, but consoles are dying. Much as I hate it, my friend was right when he said, "But it has to look pretty!" I always felt that the point of a 133MHz Pentium was to run DOS faster, but Microsoft disagrees...
They've made it illegal to lie to AOL about who you are?
Yup, it's been illegal to lie about who you are for quite a long time. It's called "fraud".
If AOL doesn't like it screw em. If the US legal system doesn't like it screw them too. They can't touch me anyway.
AMERICA reached into NORWAY and threw Jon Johansen into jail. Please check your attitude at the door. (No, I don't think it was right, and I hate my country for doing it. But morality doesn't change history.)
Nope. Proprietary vs. free. As Apple and Sun are trying to prove, open source != free. Open source is merely an attribute that can be attached to any program, and is often misleading because it _is_ attached to all free ones.
Slashdot Mirror
I blame Expedia for any inadequacies of my info.
The DC3 (operator US Airways) I flew to Atlanta on in August allowed "Data/Email calls" for $1.99/min. It was too expensive to play with, but there.
I do think they should say something like "The design of this site was modeled after linux.com" or something of the sort but if the site admin dosent want to, what can you really do.
Release your site under the GPL.
--
LoonXTall
Seriously, how can you copyright a website layout? Anyone ever notice all gaming related websites(like UGO) look EXACTLY the same, with the trendy left-side navigation in a really small font?
Copyrighting a general concept like left-side navigation is silly. However, copying the entire site down to the images/colors and just changing the name (like from Slashdot to FishFriends News) is definitely wrong. Even worse is stealing the HTML, then changing the images to "SRC=http://slashdot.org/_img_path_name", since /. then pays for your site in the bandwidth dept.
So the copyrightability should depend on the specificness of things. What would computing look like if Bell Labs had copyrighted the idea of having an OS kernel?
--
LoonXTall
Disclaimer: I just started my second year at the local community college.
The way I see it, doing anything outside of class is the way to go. I learned more about ANSI C (stdin/stdout/stderr, #define, malloc/free, buffering, and '\n' character translations under DOS) in a week of playing with a text filter than I could learn in a month of a computer course at college. Of course, the "Computer Organization" course I'm taking this semester might change that, as we are expected to do this type of stuff (cgi-bin controlled robot, serial port communications program) as part of the curriculum.
For related classes, the suggestions of logic, philosophy, etc. are probably good. You need to be able to come up with an idea/algorithm before you can possibly express it (in any language).
--
LoonXTall
What is even more interesting is that so many people, particularly /. readers slam these economic models as unfair. Yet there was a fair bit of support for the suggestions that were made by myself and others about how the RIAA could put all the music ever made into a streamable database and charge people $20 a month to access it rather than having to buy cds.
No solution to a particular problem is going to cover all similar situations (or all people). Take free information, for instance: would you like to have thousands of people post your medical or credit info because one website was prevented from doing it?
As for the RIAA, I'd rather buy a CD because I have the portable hardware to play them, I don't have to wait for them to download at 14.4 Kbps, and I don't spend $20 a month on CDs already.
--
LoonXTall
It seems to me that domain names should be considered intellectual property, and be covered by the same laws that govern trademarks and copyrights.
Since IP is dying, URLs are dying.
--
LoonXTall
Now drive that solar car in night/thunderstorms/fog/tunnels.
--
LoonXTall
Error: You define "EV" as a "zero emissions vehicle", then use the term to mean "electric vehicle". If you stretch the point, bikes are "zero emission".
Correct: There will never be a (non-human-powered) ZEV and probably won't be 100% electric cars. Hybrids are the way to go... you can optimize the engine part for maximum efficiency because you know the load. Also, you can power the engine with various fuels... hydrogen, alcohol, and methane come to mind. Or you can build a totally different type of engine... how about a Stirling engine?
As far as range of hybrids go, the Toyota Prius gets 55 highway/47 city mpg and has a 556 mile range[1]. Assuming they do all city driving to get the range, that's about a 12 gallon tank, which means fast fillups.
Incorrect: Transformers lose a negligible amount of energy... counting them as a "conversion" is stretching. Once you're done rambling, figure out your ideal efficiency; if it's greater than 36% (another ideal figure), you're ahead of your car.
1. At least, that's what their advertisement says.
--
LoonXTall
TRUE: MP3 sharing will always happen (unless Ogg Vorbis kills it...)
FALSE: There is nothing we can do about it. Some actions will stem the tide. Being a large corporation with a lot of money, the only option the RIAA can see is a lawsuit. If I could get the albums for $5 instead of $15 I would actually buy several (instead of none). DVD piracy isn't nearly as bad; how much of that is due to connection speed/filesize, and how much to price? (Disclaimer: the $4 price in my mind for the cost of a DVD movie came from Slashdot, so there is an 83% chance it's wrong.)
--
LoonXTall
Uh-oh... what will the next patent be? For using a keyboard to accept user input, using a wheel to control the direction of the car, or using paper to print on?
--
LoonXTall
For example, the Riken/Columbia/BNL supercomputer at Brookhaven National Laboratory uses a bazillion cards with RAM, a TI DSP, and a custom gate connecting it to its neighbors in the x, y, z, and t directions of the calculation. (It was custom-built for doing quantum field theory.) Best described as "massively parallel processing" (MPP).
--
LoonXTall
Funny how the FAQ doesn't say how the dual-licensing will work... IIRC, the GPL forbids the changing of its terms.
--
LoonXTall
The other side of optimizing for the latest and greatest is that software must remain compatible with the majority of users' computers, or you won't sell very much. For example, I can't use anything that requires AGP, MMX, or an internet connection faster than 14.4 Kbps.
This same compatibility issue is what causes our computers to pretend to be 8088's when they first start up. You couldn't leave it because nobody would buy the new thing because there'd be no software... and there we sit.
--
LoonXTall
Slashdot is a good example. They make money (well at least a little), and yet their site can be set up on anyone's server that wants it.
With /., the copy would only be second best. But if I lifted a cool picture from your page and added it to mine, it would be impossible for the average Web user to tell which was first----or even that somebody had stolen it, given the number of sites out there. Napster still gives a certain amount of credit (except in cases of abuse, like the Cuckoo Egg Project), but what about my graphics? I don't really want to slap copyright notices all over the place, as that makes the image uglier on my site, then gets cropped by someone else, then that one is stolen, etc.
I think the paradigm will just be much different from what we are used to.
Many people say this, but not one of them have suggested how it might work (or I missed it when they did). You have to get around a few things first, especially the "there is no such thing as a secure system" idea. Anything client-side cannot be trusted (see also dnet's Opcode Authorization page), and servers can be hacked as well. There will always be a black market if someone can do it... but the workings of the white market will affect its size (see also DVD non-piracy).
--
LoonXTall
Consider this: the very thing you are building a career on suddenly becomes almost valueless. That precious program or schematic or car or crop that you were planning on getting paid for crumbles to dust. Now what?
Just because the final product can be copied, perfectly and infinitely, does it make it right? I spent hours on the graphics on this page... what claim to control them do you have?
--
LoonXTall
Logic 101: give examples.
I loved DeluxePaint III (I still have it on a working A500)----animation and paint in one program in 2.5 MB of RAM. (My computer was upgraded.) Things I still miss on my PC:
[Place my biggest Win95 gripe here----no way to focus on a window that's not on top.] PCs may have reached a gigahertz, but they have yet to surpass my 68000-based machine.
--
LoonXTall
It's just that the idea of bribing people with free free software is a ridiculous concept.
I can see a bribe with free-speech software: in the past, the FSF sold the GPL-protected Emacs. So giving it to the reviewer as free-beer would qualify as a bribe.
--
LoonXTall
But if your email addy is "completely free and availiable," wouldn't that promote spamming?
--
LoonXTall
I would be much happier clicking on "NO" in a confirmation email than on the first spam. I would be even happier if Hotmail wouldn't watch where I went from my Inbox, though... it'd cut down on quite a bit of copy-Ctrl+N-pasting.
--
LoonXTall
Its alot easier to just hit START, PROGRAMS, WORD,...
I don't think that's everything. It's a lot easier to type wp at a console, but consoles are dying. Much as I hate it, my friend was right when he said, "But it has to look pretty!" I always felt that the point of a 133MHz Pentium was to run DOS faster, but Microsoft disagrees...
--
LoonXTall
They've made it illegal to lie to AOL about who you are?
Yup, it's been illegal to lie about who you are for quite a long time. It's called "fraud".
If AOL doesn't like it screw em. If the US legal system doesn't like it screw them too. They can't touch me anyway.
AMERICA reached into NORWAY and threw Jon Johansen into jail. Please check your attitude at the door. (No, I don't think it was right, and I hate my country for doing it. But morality doesn't change history.)
--
It's time for an international body to govern the internet, not just America.
It'd better not be the UN. They're too close to the Articles of Confederation and the Confederate States of America, neither of which is around today.
--
This has led to several bad things:
- Underpaid and/or stupid college sysadmins disallow secure-IMAP and ssh access to their servers, leaving only plain IMAP, POP, and Telnet.
-- LoonXTall
proprietary vs. free/open source
Nope. Proprietary vs. free. As Apple and Sun are trying to prove, open source != free. Open source is merely an attribute that can be attached to any program, and is often misleading because it _is_ attached to all free ones.
-- LoonXTall