I'm glad the Asian bootleggers exist. Now if the movie studios started making region free dvds then I wouldn't have any need of them.
If I legally purchase a dvd in North America and want to play it on a dvd player in asia, how exactly is it wrong for me to go buy a bootleg copy of it?
the hard part of both problems involve sending equipment into deep space. having the technology to divert asteroids and comets would be an important part of terraforming mars. A lot of water in comets and a lof of minerals in asteroids... divert a few of them to mars before we have any people there, and look at that, we've got some water and building materials on the surface of Mars. And we have lots of experience in diverting asteroids and comets.
The MPEG-LA can't simply add anyone's patents to their pool. They have to have permission of the patent holder. Since On2 wrote their codec specifically to get around the patents in H.264, it wouldn't make any sense for them to allow MPEG-LA to add their patents to their pool.
I'm more worried about this from a libertarian perspective. Once the cost of "imprisoning" someone is low enough, then its a lot easier to increase sentences and criminalize a lot more stuff.
"It seems you're missing a tail light... the penalty for that is being tagged for 20 years."
Even as expensive as prisons are now, the US has almost 2.5 million people imprisoned. Make it cheap and how long will it be before anyone busted for possession of weed in their early 20's has to to be tagged until they're well into their 40s?
It wouldn't take too long before you'd have a sizable underclass which would have no rights, but still be able to do various manual labour jobs. It wouldn't very much different than slavery.
Yes prisons are expensive, but in a way thats a good thing. That means there is a cost to making all sorts of stupid laws that everyone is in violation of sometime in their lives. Or have you never smoked a joint, pirated a song, attended an anti-government demonstration, or drove over the speed limit?
I agree. I kinda wish we had a bit more subtlety in writing now. Not matter how good an artist can draw blood and gore, it can't compete with the reader's imagination.
If for example you start your book off with your hero going to the scene of a crime. Its a brutal murder. How do you get that across to the reader? The easy way is to make a big splash page with some mangled bodies, walls covered in blood, etc. Now tell the writer he can't do that. Well now he's gotta show you the hero's reactions when he comes on the scene, but not actually show you, the reader, whats going on. Now you see the hero, shocked, angry, determined to find the person responsible. Tells you a lot about the character. You didn't see what he saw, but you can imagine it based on the hero's reaction.
Now that writers dont' have as many restrictions, they seem to focus on shocking the reader instead of show superheroes being, you know... heroic. Every story has to be bigger, more extreme than the last.
I do this, but I also made a couple of scripts: one that backs up the current cookie file and another that restores the cookie file. I have the shortcut to my browser (chromium, but it'd work for firefox too) restore the last back up and then start. Then if there is a site I want to keep logged in, log in and then run the back up script. Next time I start the backed up cookie file gets restored and it will have the info needed to authenticate.
I used an extension for firefox called cookie monster that worked pretty well, but for some reason some sites require cookies (not just session cookies) to work. The way I'm doing things now seems to work ok, but some sites I can naever stay logged into (facebok for example) across session. But I just use the save password feature for that.
I really wish there was an extension that would give a simple button to click to mark a cookie as "persistent". Then have the browser wipe all cookies, except the ones set "persistent" every time I exit.
And really browsers have gotten pretty good at detecting when I've entered a username and password. By default I think browsers should only keep cookies for sites where the user actually enters information into a form, all other cookies should be cleared when the browser is closed. Sort of like the phishing protections, but a sort of privacy protection. Websites shouldn't be allowed to set data on a user's computer unless the user has at least sent POST data to that website.
The "Block all third party cookies" in chrome seems to work well too. If I go to example.com, then only example.com can set a cookie, and adserver.com isn't allowed. I haven't seen any problems using it.
Yeah the good guys inform the company of the hack. The question is how many bad guys were aware of this before now, and for how long?
It took these guys two months in a university lab to figure this out. How long do you suppose it took the NSA (and their counterparts in other countries) who have much bigger budgets?
This research proves that if you're using these devices, the NSA has your data.
not really. You seem to be confusing copyright law with trademark law.
The whole idea of a trademark is that a name is associated with a product or service. It makes it a lot easier for the consumer to compare products if they have names. So I can ask "how does Ubuntu compare to Windows?" instead of having to ask "how does the the operating system produced by Canonical Group Limited, 21-24 Millbank, London, SW1P 4QP, United Kingdom compare to the operating system produced by Microsoft Corporation, 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-8300, US?". That would be a real pain in the ass wouldn't it?
So you use an existing word (like Windows or Ubuntu), invent a word (Google) or stick a couple of words together (FaceBook) then market it so that people associate that word with your product.
The name is really arbitrary. The value of the name comes from all the time and money spent getting people to associate that name with your product. The name "facebook" didn't have much value as the unofficial name of a newsletter at some prep school. It does have value now that its associated with the most popular website on the internet. If facebook was called something else, it would still be just as popular. Its not like they became popular only because everyone loved the name "facebook".
set up a search engine called "doogle" and see how long it takes to hear from google's lawyers.
"But I'm giving you free advertising" isn't a good argument. Yeah when you say "go google somthing" thats good for google. But if you set up a competing product that has a similar name to google, how is that helping them?
When you create a product and name it similarly to a competing product, expect to hear from their lawyers. Thats the penalty for being unoriginal when naming products.
if they just "live with that" then they lose their trademark. If they defend their trademark and *book becomes a generic term anyway they still keep their trademark.
If you want scotch tape part of a trademarked name onto your name is not quite an obvious trademark infringement as xeroxing the whole name, but if you google for it, you'll find they are in the wrong. I'll give them a kleenex when they cry about it, but just because a trademarked word is in common usage doesn't mean you can slap it any product you want.
those are not going to cause people to use facebook as a generic term.
The test is, will people ever say "my addressbook is a facebook for storing my contacts?" No. So those are poor examples, that only show you have no concept of what a trademark is.
Calling a social networking site *book does cause confusion. People might think teachbook is affiliated with facebook, because the name is similar and they provide a similar service.
When you hear the name teachbook, you think one of two things, a website that is selling books for teachers, or a site that is a facebook for teachers. They aren't selling books and if they were choosing teacherbooks would be a better name.
When you choose a name for a website you try to come up with a name indicating what your site does. If there was no such thing as "facebook", would the name "teachbook" indicate what this site does? No. People would just think it was some people with poor grammar trying to sell books for teachers. The name teachbook wouldn't work without the name facebook. So they are using the awareness of name facebook, which is trademarked, to describe what the function of their site is.
Would addressbook be called addressbook if facebook didn't exits? Yes. Would yearbook be called that if facebook didn't exist? Yes. Would teachbook be called that if facebook didn't exist? No.
there are plenty of countries in africa with child soldiers. So why don't you just move there? Or are you too much of a pussy to live in a country with child soldiers?
its just not something you think of when programming, and even if you did, there is no easy fix. 23:59:60 is 99.99% persent of the time an invalid time. Even if you though to test for that, you don't know in advance what days that that time is valid for.
So you have to write a program to occassionally check NTP somehow so that you know when you can make that exception. Maybe you can make a call to the OS to do this? Thats a lot of searching docs. And what if the OS on your client machine is not aware of the leap second, but the server is? The server checks with NTP often, but I have to write some software for some network aware devices that connect to the server. Does the embedded OS I'm running on that device support leap seconds? What do I do if it doean't? I guess I have to add a check for any data that it gets from the server that has a time field, and if the second part of the time is 60, change it to 59. But thats not a good solution because If I use that time to "SELECT * FROM table WHERE time=@time" and I've made an alteration to the time varible I'm setting the parameter to, its not going to work. So I guess I have to create a new class to store time. But if I ask the user to enter a time do I allow him to enter 60 in the seconds field? It might be valid, but I have to have this device keep using network resources so it knows when leap seconds are valid.
You're talking about a lot of resources, time and effort to make time correct.
I can understand wanting to keep time accurate, but wouldn't a leap minute be much more sensible? when time is off by around 60 seconds, they could announce that in ten years time, there will be a leap minute. Then at least we know well in advance that on a certain date, there will be an extra minute. we can write in the code if "date = xx/xx/xxxx then 23:60 is valid. And if someone does miss something its only going to cause an issue two or three times a year, not once or twice a year.
Re:Not remotely similar to the Microsoft situation
on
The Case For Oracle
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· Score: 4, Interesting
or Dalvik?
Actually you never see Google say "Java" without it being immediately followed by either "Programming Language" or "Language Compiler". Anytime there's mention of "virtual machine" its always immediately preceded by "Dalvik".
I'm not an expert on trademark law, but I'm sure Google has checked with people who are, so it seems that saying "Android has Java" would be a violation, but saying "Android has Dalvik which uses the Java programming language" is not.
But I guess thats for the courts to decide.
Re:By this logic SCO was right
on
The Case For Oracle
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They don't offer the embedded version of java for free. And there are a lot of requirements to to get the patent exemptions, ie. cannot implement a subset or a superset of the features in Sun's VM.
Google basically just wanted to implement a language that a lot of developers were familiar with. Pretty much all the developers of phone apps were familiar with Java, so they implemented a VM similar to Java.
Java has some similarities to the C++ syntax. They made the Java syntax similar to the C++ syntax because developers were familiar with it. Same goes for C#. If someone owned some patents on C++, should they be allowed to sue Oracle and MS?
This does not bode well for makers of software development tools. By saying Oracle is allowed to sue anyone for making anything similar to Java means that no one can make a language with similar syntax to Java, and they can't implement libraries similar to Java's. So everyone has to check with a lawyer before they make software tools now. And that may not be enough since I'm sure Google did check with there lawyers while developing Dalvik, and made their best effort to build it so as not to infringe on patents. And they're still getting sued. What hope does anyone else have?
I know I'm going to steer clear of Java from now on..Net and Mono seem much safer than Java at this point. At least MS hasn't sued anyone for implementing libraries too similar to what they've implemented.
Putting the Sunnis in charge of Iraq wasn't an oversight, it was intentional. The Sunni sect is more moderate than the Shia and thus easier for the British to deal with.
And Iraq is a Arab nation on the Tigris and Euphrates river system. Iran is a Persian nation. If you somehow combined the Shia part of Iraq with Iran, you'd end up with a nation with a Persian majority and an Arab minority.
anytime the legalise pot discussion comes up, the US ambassador to Canada starts making threats of trade sanctions. Since canada does more than 90% of its trade with the US, these sanctions would put us into a recession.
So yeah, pot is illegal in Canada entirely because of the US. Its like this in most countries.
Yeah but what about those of us that enjoy the ever more immersive worlds? Why should we be denied that just because some people get depressed and spend all their time on it? If you ban all video games people will still be getting depressed and not going out and spending all their time watching TV. Or drinking. Should a guy that spends all his time watching TV be allowed to sue the television networks?
People who are depressed will avoid going out and fill their time with unproductive activities. Removing one activity available to them doesn't address the root problem. The guy is depressed.
Nah they don't often put the pot growers in jail here. Unless the grower happens to be in the field when the cops come around or there is a clear path to the growers house (or in one case the grower has a water hose going from his house to the field, lol) they can't really prove who planted the pot. Unless its obvious, they make little effort to track down grower, though if rumours are to believed, this may change soon.
In canada they mostly just put the gps coordinates of the pot fields in a database, then raid them all just before harvest time. This way the grower spent all season tending the plants but has nothing to show for it at the end.
This is why these guys got the bears there. They can protect their fields without actually being there in person very often.
Really the whole thing is stupid. How much canadian taxpayer money is being spent to destroy pot fields, when the majority of canadians want it legalised? And why don't we legalise it? Blame AMERICA.
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I'm glad the Asian bootleggers exist. Now if the movie studios started making region free dvds then I wouldn't have any need of them.
If I legally purchase a dvd in North America and want to play it on a dvd player in asia, how exactly is it wrong for me to go buy a bootleg copy of it?
why not invest in both?
the hard part of both problems involve sending equipment into deep space. having the technology to divert asteroids and comets would be an important part of terraforming mars. A lot of water in comets and a lof of minerals in asteroids... divert a few of them to mars before we have any people there, and look at that, we've got some water and building materials on the surface of Mars. And we have lots of experience in diverting asteroids and comets.
I don't think On2 was a member of the MPEG-LA.
The MPEG-LA can't simply add anyone's patents to their pool. They have to have permission of the patent holder. Since On2 wrote their codec specifically to get around the patents in H.264, it wouldn't make any sense for them to allow MPEG-LA to add their patents to their pool.
Liberal hippies?
I'm more worried about this from a libertarian perspective. Once the cost of "imprisoning" someone is low enough, then its a lot easier to increase sentences and criminalize a lot more stuff.
"It seems you're missing a tail light... the penalty for that is being tagged for 20 years."
Even as expensive as prisons are now, the US has almost 2.5 million people imprisoned. Make it cheap and how long will it be before anyone busted for possession of weed in their early 20's has to to be tagged until they're well into their 40s?
It wouldn't take too long before you'd have a sizable underclass which would have no rights, but still be able to do various manual labour jobs. It wouldn't very much different than slavery.
Yes prisons are expensive, but in a way thats a good thing. That means there is a cost to making all sorts of stupid laws that everyone is in violation of sometime in their lives. Or have you never smoked a joint, pirated a song, attended an anti-government demonstration, or drove over the speed limit?
I agree. I kinda wish we had a bit more subtlety in writing now. Not matter how good an artist can draw blood and gore, it can't compete with the reader's imagination.
If for example you start your book off with your hero going to the scene of a crime. Its a brutal murder. How do you get that across to the reader? The easy way is to make a big splash page with some mangled bodies, walls covered in blood, etc. Now tell the writer he can't do that. Well now he's gotta show you the hero's reactions when he comes on the scene, but not actually show you, the reader, whats going on. Now you see the hero, shocked, angry, determined to find the person responsible. Tells you a lot about the character. You didn't see what he saw, but you can imagine it based on the hero's reaction.
Now that writers dont' have as many restrictions, they seem to focus on shocking the reader instead of show superheroes being, you know... heroic. Every story has to be bigger, more extreme than the last.
I do this, but I also made a couple of scripts: one that backs up the current cookie file and another that restores the cookie file. I have the shortcut to my browser (chromium, but it'd work for firefox too) restore the last back up and then start. Then if there is a site I want to keep logged in, log in and then run the back up script. Next time I start the backed up cookie file gets restored and it will have the info needed to authenticate.
I used an extension for firefox called cookie monster that worked pretty well, but for some reason some sites require cookies (not just session cookies) to work. The way I'm doing things now seems to work ok, but some sites I can naever stay logged into (facebok for example) across session. But I just use the save password feature for that.
I really wish there was an extension that would give a simple button to click to mark a cookie as "persistent". Then have the browser wipe all cookies, except the ones set "persistent" every time I exit.
And really browsers have gotten pretty good at detecting when I've entered a username and password. By default I think browsers should only keep cookies for sites where the user actually enters information into a form, all other cookies should be cleared when the browser is closed. Sort of like the phishing protections, but a sort of privacy protection. Websites shouldn't be allowed to set data on a user's computer unless the user has at least sent POST data to that website.
The "Block all third party cookies" in chrome seems to work well too. If I go to example.com, then only example.com can set a cookie, and adserver.com isn't allowed. I haven't seen any problems using it.
the cricumstance that caused this is the fact that divorce is illegal in the philippines. So you either get an anulment or stay married.
Yeah the good guys inform the company of the hack. The question is how many bad guys were aware of this before now, and for how long?
It took these guys two months in a university lab to figure this out. How long do you suppose it took the NSA (and their counterparts in other countries) who have much bigger budgets?
This research proves that if you're using these devices, the NSA has your data.
not really. You seem to be confusing copyright law with trademark law.
The whole idea of a trademark is that a name is associated with a product or service. It makes it a lot easier for the consumer to compare products if they have names. So I can ask "how does Ubuntu compare to Windows?" instead of having to ask "how does the the operating system produced by Canonical Group Limited, 21-24 Millbank, London, SW1P 4QP, United Kingdom compare to the operating system produced by Microsoft Corporation, 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-8300, US?". That would be a real pain in the ass wouldn't it?
So you use an existing word (like Windows or Ubuntu), invent a word (Google) or stick a couple of words together (FaceBook) then market it so that people associate that word with your product.
The name is really arbitrary. The value of the name comes from all the time and money spent getting people to associate that name with your product. The name "facebook" didn't have much value as the unofficial name of a newsletter at some prep school. It does have value now that its associated with the most popular website on the internet. If facebook was called something else, it would still be just as popular. Its not like they became popular only because everyone loved the name "facebook".
do you think they would have named it teachbook, if there was no such thing as facebook? Seriously?
set up a search engine called "doogle" and see how long it takes to hear from google's lawyers.
"But I'm giving you free advertising" isn't a good argument. Yeah when you say "go google somthing" thats good for google. But if you set up a competing product that has a similar name to google, how is that helping them?
When you create a product and name it similarly to a competing product, expect to hear from their lawyers. Thats the penalty for being unoriginal when naming products.
if they just "live with that" then they lose their trademark. If they defend their trademark and *book becomes a generic term anyway they still keep their trademark.
If you want scotch tape part of a trademarked name onto your name is not quite an obvious trademark infringement as xeroxing the whole name, but if you google for it, you'll find they are in the wrong. I'll give them a kleenex when they cry about it, but just because a trademarked word is in common usage doesn't mean you can slap it any product you want.
those are not going to cause people to use facebook as a generic term.
The test is, will people ever say "my addressbook is a facebook for storing my contacts?" No. So those are poor examples, that only show you have no concept of what a trademark is.
Calling a social networking site *book does cause confusion. People might think teachbook is affiliated with facebook, because the name is similar and they provide a similar service.
When you hear the name teachbook, you think one of two things, a website that is selling books for teachers, or a site that is a facebook for teachers. They aren't selling books and if they were choosing teacherbooks would be a better name.
When you choose a name for a website you try to come up with a name indicating what your site does. If there was no such thing as "facebook", would the name "teachbook" indicate what this site does? No. People would just think it was some people with poor grammar trying to sell books for teachers. The name teachbook wouldn't work without the name facebook. So they are using the awareness of name facebook, which is trademarked, to describe what the function of their site is.
Would addressbook be called addressbook if facebook didn't exits? Yes. Would yearbook be called that if facebook didn't exist? Yes. Would teachbook be called that if facebook didn't exist? No.
in fairness to facebook, when you hear the name "teachbook" doesn't that make you immediately think "facebook for teachers"?
If *book becomes a generic term then you're one step away from referring to any social networking site as "a facebook".
not really. The word "book" in "teachbook" is a reference to facebook. When anyone hears "teachbook" they immedaiately think "facebook for teachers".
All of those sites are references to actual books.
there are plenty of countries in africa with child soldiers. So why don't you just move there? Or are you too much of a pussy to live in a country with child soldiers?
You know laptops can still run PC games, right?
its just not something you think of when programming, and even if you did, there is no easy fix. 23:59:60 is 99.99% persent of the time an invalid time. Even if you though to test for that, you don't know in advance what days that that time is valid for.
So you have to write a program to occassionally check NTP somehow so that you know when you can make that exception. Maybe you can make a call to the OS to do this? Thats a lot of searching docs. And what if the OS on your client machine is not aware of the leap second, but the server is? The server checks with NTP often, but I have to write some software for some network aware devices that connect to the server. Does the embedded OS I'm running on that device support leap seconds? What do I do if it doean't? I guess I have to add a check for any data that it gets from the server that has a time field, and if the second part of the time is 60, change it to 59. But thats not a good solution because If I use that time to "SELECT * FROM table WHERE time=@time" and I've made an alteration to the time varible I'm setting the parameter to, its not going to work. So I guess I have to create a new class to store time. But if I ask the user to enter a time do I allow him to enter 60 in the seconds field? It might be valid, but I have to have this device keep using network resources so it knows when leap seconds are valid.
You're talking about a lot of resources, time and effort to make time correct.
I can understand wanting to keep time accurate, but wouldn't a leap minute be much more sensible? when time is off by around 60 seconds, they could announce that in ten years time, there will be a leap minute. Then at least we know well in advance that on a certain date, there will be an extra minute. we can write in the code if "date = xx/xx/xxxx then 23:60 is valid. And if someone does miss something its only going to cause an issue two or three times a year, not once or twice a year.
you make him feel ronery, so very ronery
or Dalvik?
Actually you never see Google say "Java" without it being immediately followed by either "Programming Language" or "Language Compiler". Anytime there's mention of "virtual machine" its always immediately preceded by "Dalvik".
I'm not an expert on trademark law, but I'm sure Google has checked with people who are, so it seems that saying "Android has Java" would be a violation, but saying "Android has Dalvik which uses the Java programming language" is not.
But I guess thats for the courts to decide.
They don't offer the embedded version of java for free. And there are a lot of requirements to to get the patent exemptions, ie. cannot implement a subset or a superset of the features in Sun's VM.
Google basically just wanted to implement a language that a lot of developers were familiar with. Pretty much all the developers of phone apps were familiar with Java, so they implemented a VM similar to Java.
Java has some similarities to the C++ syntax. They made the Java syntax similar to the C++ syntax because developers were familiar with it. Same goes for C#. If someone owned some patents on C++, should they be allowed to sue Oracle and MS?
This does not bode well for makers of software development tools. By saying Oracle is allowed to sue anyone for making anything similar to Java means that no one can make a language with similar syntax to Java, and they can't implement libraries similar to Java's. So everyone has to check with a lawyer before they make software tools now. And that may not be enough since I'm sure Google did check with there lawyers while developing Dalvik, and made their best effort to build it so as not to infringe on patents. And they're still getting sued. What hope does anyone else have?
I know I'm going to steer clear of Java from now on. .Net and Mono seem much safer than Java at this point. At least MS hasn't sued anyone for implementing libraries too similar to what they've implemented.
Putting the Sunnis in charge of Iraq wasn't an oversight, it was intentional. The Sunni sect is more moderate than the Shia and thus easier for the British to deal with.
And Iraq is a Arab nation on the Tigris and Euphrates river system. Iran is a Persian nation. If you somehow combined the Shia part of Iraq with Iran, you'd end up with a nation with a Persian majority and an Arab minority.
anytime the legalise pot discussion comes up, the US ambassador to Canada starts making threats of trade sanctions. Since canada does more than 90% of its trade with the US, these sanctions would put us into a recession.
So yeah, pot is illegal in Canada entirely because of the US. Its like this in most countries.
Yeah but what about those of us that enjoy the ever more immersive worlds? Why should we be denied that just because some people get depressed and spend all their time on it? If you ban all video games people will still be getting depressed and not going out and spending all their time watching TV. Or drinking. Should a guy that spends all his time watching TV be allowed to sue the television networks?
People who are depressed will avoid going out and fill their time with unproductive activities. Removing one activity available to them doesn't address the root problem. The guy is depressed.
Nah they don't often put the pot growers in jail here. Unless the grower happens to be in the field when the cops come around or there is a clear path to the growers house (or in one case the grower has a water hose going from his house to the field, lol) they can't really prove who planted the pot. Unless its obvious, they make little effort to track down grower, though if rumours are to believed, this may change soon.
In canada they mostly just put the gps coordinates of the pot fields in a database, then raid them all just before harvest time. This way the grower spent all season tending the plants but has nothing to show for it at the end.
This is why these guys got the bears there. They can protect their fields without actually being there in person very often.
Really the whole thing is stupid. How much canadian taxpayer money is being spent to destroy pot fields, when the majority of canadians want it legalised? And why don't we legalise it? Blame AMERICA.