It seems pretty clear to me after reading the thread including http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/01/msg00 757.html -- Gervase says in that message that the whole thread is about using the trademark without the official logo. Did you miss that thread?
Now, the Mozilla Corporation is coming back a year later and invalidating that agreement. Debian isn't likely to try any "legal fight" to keep the name Firefox; if no agreement can be reached, they'll just rename everything and be done with it. But trying to claim they never had permission (or only "weak"ly had permission) is misstating the case.
I remember my own days in public school. Bored as above, I was quietly reading a textbook on another subject when my teacher came up behind and smacked me in the back of my head.
I must have had better teachers, they just learned to leave me alone. OTOH, it didn't give me much incentive to pay attention when I would never get called on ("He always knows the answer, no point in asking him" was probably the thinking).
The worst was in reading/"literature" class in elementary school, the teacher would have each student read one paragraph from the story. I would always have to turn back several pages to find where we were, then I would read as fast as possible to get it over with.
Since these are computers, and they deal primarily with binary internally, why not store the numerical value and the 2nd power instead? Oh, and since we generally need more bits of accuracy in the numerical value than the exponent (do you often deal with numbers 2**(2**32)?), why not allocate a "reasonable" number of bits to the exponent and leave more for the numerical value.
Uh oh, we just re-invented floating point. Oh well, nice try.
If you were just trying to get better accuracy by using base 10 rather than base 2, you're just hiding the problem (and making the hardware quite a bit more complex). If you want true accuracy, abandon floating point and use a bignum system.
... or maybe it's because I graduated after the big crash. Or probably some of both, and some environmental factors (massive IBM layoffs in the area and no social network at all), but even with a CS degree it took me years to get into a computer-related job. Every opportunity I could find wanted degree plus several years experience, most wouldn't even bother to call me back.
Any anecdotes from anyone else who didn't get started when everyone and their dog could get hired by a dot-com startup?
They won't tell you. Like so much else at Microsoft, they use security-through-obscurity for their spam filter too. Pretty much all they do is suggest paying money and screwing around with your DNS.
I think the Bushies are already planning for that. I wouldn't be surprised to see referenda on ballots all across the country calling for 2/3 of state legislatures to call for this gay marriage amendment, in the same manner as in 2004. Then play around for 2 years and play it again for the elections in 2008.
And as has already been noted, are the probable replacements likely to be much better?
My degree (closest to a "software engineer") was labeled as "BS in Computer Science". I had classmates getting degrees labeled "BA in Computer Science", the only difference being that they had to fulfill the general requirements of the "College of Arts & Sciences" instead of the "College of Engineering".
As with your school, those with a Computer Enginnering degree (through the Electrical & Computer Engineering department, rather than the Computer Science department) dealt with hardware rather than software.
Perfection doesn't seem to be the goal of the ZSNES/SNES9x devs.
Wrong. For example, I happen to know that a near-future version of snes9x (1.44 probably) will have an almost-completely rewritten renderer to finally do many things correctly. I don't know about those Sega systems, but correct SNES emulation is very complex...
And yes, the info is being shared with the zsnes devs too. And any other emu devs who want it and ask in the right places.
including a "lockout chip" (really a hardware dongle), and modifying the games to prevent or trick the code to avoid the lockout chip checking would result in a copyright, patent and/or license violation.
Sorry. The lockout chip is completely in hardware, intended to prevent hardware piracy: the basic idea was so no one could make a NES or SNES compatible cart without buying the chip from Nintendo to put inside it. The lockout functioned basically by not releasing the system (in the SNES, it acts like the reset button is being held) until the chip in the console finished its handshake with the chip in the cart.
The game itself knows nothing of this lockout chip, expecially since if the game gets to run the chip is already satisfied. It's not even a hardware dongle, it's a key needed to turn the hardware on.
And since the SNES, N64, etc (though not the GB, as far as I am aware) include a copy protection chip
The SNES does not include a copy protection chip. To copy the vast majority of SNES carts, you just have to drive the address lines and read the data lines (and supply the power lines, etc) just as the SNES does. Some of the special chip carts may be more involved.
You're thinking of the CIC lockout chip, which does nothing to prevent copying. By analogy: the CIC chip is like the DVD region code, while 'copy protection' would be more like what DVD CSS was trying to do.
The decompression chip used by both is the S-DD1 (also spelled SDD1 or SDD-1), which has only recently been emulated. The SPC7110 chip also does compression, and this one hasn't been (publicly) emulated yet.
SNES did have region locking, of a sort. IIRC there were 2 versions of the CIC lockout chip, one used in US/Japan and one for Europe. Further, as you noted the US and Japan units had different shapes.
Of course, the CIC could be bypassed and the tabs could be filed off (or an adapter could be easily constructed). The SNES has no BIOS or anything, at power on the CPU just jumps to whatever address is pointed to by the word at $00:FFFC (which is mapped to the cart anyway), so each ROM must do its own region locking. And the console didn't have any "country code" register to check, the best that could easily be done was to check if the console was PAL or NTSC.
If those games were Mega Man X2 or X3 for the SNES, it could be the C4 chip which really is a custom DSP. That chip was partially emulated (playable, but with glitches) by the zsnes team, and later some snes9x and zsnes developers figured out enough so the games seem to work right.
Ultimately, the enforceability of a EULA relies on the ignorance of the parties involved.
That and the imbalance of money in the situation. When it's "challenge them, 'win' after two years but end up hugely in debt" versus "give up, deal with the inconvenience but keep your time and money", most people pick the latter...
it's been horrible to begin with, so why did he back it?
Because he either didn't read it, or didn't understand it? Probably he was bribed with "campaign contributions" and a less-than-accurate summary... IIRC, he has publicly admitted that he doesn't understand anything about computers.
Used college textbooks sell for 1/2 to 2/3 of the price of new texts, even if they're the same edition and only a single semester old, for this reason: by applying your edits to the book, you're decreasing its value to anyone but yourself.
So they're decreasing the value of the movie to anyone but themselves. Woo-hoo, big deal. What's that have to do with the legality of it?
IANAL, of course. On slashdot, it seems that should be understood unless someone says they ARE one... anyway...
I don't see anything in the USC that limits modification of a particular copy to "private use". First sale (USC Title 17, Sec 109) just says that you can sell or otherwise dispose of any copy you own, nothing in there about commercial versus private use. So if it's legal for Clean Flicks to make the edits in the first place, it's legal for them to sell the edited copy.
Copyright includes the right to make "derivative works" (definition at Title 17, Sec. 101, limitation at Title 17, Sec. 106(2)), which might include making these edits. On the other hand, there is no provision allowing any derivative work to be created for private use, or for making the derivative if you don't resell it. It just says creating derivitives is an infringement.
So, either Clean Flicks is allowed to do what they do, or no one (besides the copyright holder, of course) is allowed to do what they are doing whether for profit or not and whether for private use or for resale. Now, i may be wrong, but if you want to claim i am i hope you support your argument.
BTW, "it should be" isn't a valid argument. We're discussing whether it is or not. So feel free to express your "it should be"s, but don't claim i'm wrong because of them;)
This seems to be covered under USC Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 106A(a)(2), since that would be prejudicial to your reputation. Under that clause, they couldn't claim you authorized that edited version.
I just wish that there was more understanding among developers just how much of a problem patents will cause in the near future.
But what can we actually DO about them? Software patent lawyers are pushing for everything to be patentable, and big corporations are jumping in because their competitors will kill them if they don't. And the both of them have the money to buy their own pet congresscritters to make all this 'legal'. And the rest of us get screwed.
P.S. I'm sure you'd suggest a "patent pool" or something like that. The problem is that the vast majority of us have neither the time nor the money (both for the patent application and the paying of laywers) to try patenting everything.
Re:Counterfeiting, Dark Taxis, and Natioanl Image
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 1
The only thing I don't like about the idea of brightly colored bills is what every other person seems to like about it, the fact that you can so easily tell the difference between denominations. What happens when you're getting your money out of an ATM machine at night? It certainly makes it easier for crooks to target you.
With all this talk about foreigners, i still want to know what happens when you go from a country where, for example, red=$10 and green=$1 to one where red=$1 and green=$10?
Even in one country, i have trouble buying most of the arguments. Recognition isn't such a big deal, you go through your money and look for "5", instead of go through your money and look for "blue". The only real advantage i can see would be that you could fan your money and find "blue" slightly easier, but that still won't speed up the old people in line. This easy recognition could harm as well, if people get so used to the coloring that they accept any random wad of paper with blue patterns assuming it's a wadded $5.
As for different sized bills, i seriously doubt the "count your money in your pocket" types. Different shapes (in plastic), braille (plastic again), or some sort of other raised patterns (probably also plastic, but maybe something paper-based could be made robust enough) i could accept counting by touch, but not a bunch of similar worn-paper rectangles. This is why it works for coins, coins are rigid. If you do go with rigid dollars, be sure they'll fit in pockets and wallets without having to be folded or you'll just have more trouble. The "blind people can ID it" types have a better argument, but braille/raised patterns/anything cheaply machine readable (i.e. barcodes, those embedded strips) solves the same problem without the drawbacks (replacing all money-handling equipment, offended tradition, etc).
People who write software should take a piece of learning from those who write the code that becomes digital integrated circuits. Engineering those designs is just that - engineering - because a bug here or there is usually a very serious matter. Tremendous amounts of time are spent verifying your design works correctly. The same thing is true with most embedded systems as well, although those lines are getting blurred with system-on-chip development
You're overlooking one slight problem: we're not allowed to do that. I suspect this comes from the economics of the situation: If a chip design has bugs, it costs quite a bit of money to change the manufacturing process, make replacement chips for everyone with the buggy chip, conduct recalls, and so on. If a program has bugs, it costs next to nothing (just labor) to change the source and recompile, and next to nothing (a little bandwidth) to put a "service pack" online and tell everyone to download it.
Thus, manglement decides they can afford to release programs with bugs. They ignore the engineers, and actively hinder their efforts when someone comes up with the latest bell or whistle. They don't even base the deadlines on how long the code will take to produce, they base them on "we want this for our trade show!" or whatever other crap they'd like. And they get away with it because it doesn't really cost them anything to fix the bugs. If the engineers complain too heavily, they tend to get replaced.
Stick your IC designers with the management strategy above, and see what you end up with (besides bankruptcy, of course).
I'd also like to see a complexity comparison between a chip design and a major software product... I don't know enough about chip design to do more than guess.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems pretty clear to me after reading the thread including http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/01/msg00 757.html -- Gervase says in that message that the whole thread is about using the trademark without the official logo. Did you miss that thread?
Now, the Mozilla Corporation is coming back a year later and invalidating that agreement. Debian isn't likely to try any "legal fight" to keep the name Firefox; if no agreement can be reached, they'll just rename everything and be done with it. But trying to claim they never had permission (or only "weak"ly had permission) is misstating the case.
I must have had better teachers, they just learned to leave me alone. OTOH, it didn't give me much incentive to pay attention when I would never get called on ("He always knows the answer, no point in asking him" was probably the thinking).
The worst was in reading/"literature" class in elementary school, the teacher would have each student read one paragraph from the story. I would always have to turn back several pages to find where we were, then I would read as fast as possible to get it over with.
Since these are computers, and they deal primarily with binary internally, why not store the numerical value and the 2nd power instead? Oh, and since we generally need more bits of accuracy in the numerical value than the exponent (do you often deal with numbers 2**(2**32)?), why not allocate a "reasonable" number of bits to the exponent and leave more for the numerical value.
Uh oh, we just re-invented floating point. Oh well, nice try.
If you were just trying to get better accuracy by using base 10 rather than base 2, you're just hiding the problem (and making the hardware quite a bit more complex). If you want true accuracy, abandon floating point and use a bignum system.
... or maybe it's because I graduated after the big crash. Or probably some of both, and some environmental factors (massive IBM layoffs in the area and no social network at all), but even with a CS degree it took me years to get into a computer-related job. Every opportunity I could find wanted degree plus several years experience, most wouldn't even bother to call me back.
Any anecdotes from anyone else who didn't get started when everyone and their dog could get hired by a dot-com startup?
Tried that. Didn't work, besides that I'm not using MS-sponsored technologies.
They won't tell you. Like so much else at Microsoft, they use security-through-obscurity for their spam filter too. Pretty much all they do is suggest paying money and screwing around with your DNS.
I think the Bushies are already planning for that. I wouldn't be surprised to see referenda on ballots all across the country calling for 2/3 of state legislatures to call for this gay marriage amendment, in the same manner as in 2004. Then play around for 2 years and play it again for the elections in 2008.
And as has already been noted, are the probable replacements likely to be much better?
My degree (closest to a "software engineer") was labeled as "BS in Computer Science". I had classmates getting degrees labeled "BA in Computer Science", the only difference being that they had to fulfill the general requirements of the "College of Arts & Sciences" instead of the "College of Engineering".
As with your school, those with a Computer Enginnering degree (through the Electrical & Computer Engineering department, rather than the Computer Science department) dealt with hardware rather than software.
There's plenty, it's just that most of the 'big' stuff is mostly done. But there are still a few big things and many many small details.
Wrong. For example, I happen to know that a near-future version of snes9x (1.44 probably) will have an almost-completely rewritten renderer to finally do many things correctly. I don't know about those Sega systems, but correct SNES emulation is very complex...
And yes, the info is being shared with the zsnes devs too. And any other emu devs who want it and ask in the right places.
Sorry. The lockout chip is completely in hardware, intended to prevent hardware piracy: the basic idea was so no one could make a NES or SNES compatible cart without buying the chip from Nintendo to put inside it. The lockout functioned basically by not releasing the system (in the SNES, it acts like the reset button is being held) until the chip in the console finished its handshake with the chip in the cart. The game itself knows nothing of this lockout chip, expecially since if the game gets to run the chip is already satisfied. It's not even a hardware dongle, it's a key needed to turn the hardware on.
The SNES does not include a copy protection chip. To copy the vast majority of SNES carts, you just have to drive the address lines and read the data lines (and supply the power lines, etc) just as the SNES does. Some of the special chip carts may be more involved. You're thinking of the CIC lockout chip, which does nothing to prevent copying. By analogy: the CIC chip is like the DVD region code, while 'copy protection' would be more like what DVD CSS was trying to do.
I have. Usually they connect to the PC's parallel port and plug into the SNES as well. Some also have floppy drives.
The decompression chip used by both is the S-DD1 (also spelled SDD1 or SDD-1), which has only recently been emulated. The SPC7110 chip also does compression, and this one hasn't been (publicly) emulated yet.
SNES did have region locking, of a sort. IIRC there were 2 versions of the CIC lockout chip, one used in US/Japan and one for Europe. Further, as you noted the US and Japan units had different shapes. Of course, the CIC could be bypassed and the tabs could be filed off (or an adapter could be easily constructed). The SNES has no BIOS or anything, at power on the CPU just jumps to whatever address is pointed to by the word at $00:FFFC (which is mapped to the cart anyway), so each ROM must do its own region locking. And the console didn't have any "country code" register to check, the best that could easily be done was to check if the console was PAL or NTSC.
If those games were Mega Man X2 or X3 for the SNES, it could be the C4 chip which really is a custom DSP. That chip was partially emulated (playable, but with glitches) by the zsnes team, and later some snes9x and zsnes developers figured out enough so the games seem to work right.
Certainly not all...
That and the imbalance of money in the situation. When it's "challenge them, 'win' after two years but end up hugely in debt" versus "give up, deal with the inconvenience but keep your time and money", most people pick the latter...
Because he either didn't read it, or didn't understand it? Probably he was bribed with "campaign contributions" and a less-than-accurate summary... IIRC, he has publicly admitted that he doesn't understand anything about computers.
So they're decreasing the value of the movie to anyone but themselves. Woo-hoo, big deal. What's that have to do with the legality of it?
I don't see anything in the USC that limits modification of a particular copy to "private use". First sale (USC Title 17, Sec 109) just says that you can sell or otherwise dispose of any copy you own, nothing in there about commercial versus private use. So if it's legal for Clean Flicks to make the edits in the first place, it's legal for them to sell the edited copy.
Copyright includes the right to make "derivative works" (definition at Title 17, Sec. 101, limitation at Title 17, Sec. 106(2)), which might include making these edits. On the other hand, there is no provision allowing any derivative work to be created for private use, or for making the derivative if you don't resell it. It just says creating derivitives is an infringement.
So, either Clean Flicks is allowed to do what they do, or no one (besides the copyright holder, of course) is allowed to do what they are doing whether for profit or not and whether for private use or for resale. Now, i may be wrong, but if you want to claim i am i hope you support your argument.
BTW, "it should be" isn't a valid argument. We're discussing whether it is or not. So feel free to express your "it should be"s, but don't claim i'm wrong because of them ;)
This seems to be covered under USC Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 106A(a)(2), since that would be prejudicial to your reputation. Under that clause, they couldn't claim you authorized that edited version.
But what can we actually DO about them? Software patent lawyers are pushing for everything to be patentable, and big corporations are jumping in because their competitors will kill them if they don't. And the both of them have the money to buy their own pet congresscritters to make all this 'legal'. And the rest of us get screwed.
P.S. I'm sure you'd suggest a "patent pool" or something like that. The problem is that the vast majority of us have neither the time nor the money (both for the patent application and the paying of laywers) to try patenting everything.
With all this talk about foreigners, i still want to know what happens when you go from a country where, for example, red=$10 and green=$1 to one where red=$1 and green=$10?
Even in one country, i have trouble buying most of the arguments. Recognition isn't such a big deal, you go through your money and look for "5", instead of go through your money and look for "blue". The only real advantage i can see would be that you could fan your money and find "blue" slightly easier, but that still won't speed up the old people in line. This easy recognition could harm as well, if people get so used to the coloring that they accept any random wad of paper with blue patterns assuming it's a wadded $5.
As for different sized bills, i seriously doubt the "count your money in your pocket" types. Different shapes (in plastic), braille (plastic again), or some sort of other raised patterns (probably also plastic, but maybe something paper-based could be made robust enough) i could accept counting by touch, but not a bunch of similar worn-paper rectangles. This is why it works for coins, coins are rigid. If you do go with rigid dollars, be sure they'll fit in pockets and wallets without having to be folded or you'll just have more trouble. The "blind people can ID it" types have a better argument, but braille/raised patterns/anything cheaply machine readable (i.e. barcodes, those embedded strips) solves the same problem without the drawbacks (replacing all money-handling equipment, offended tradition, etc).
You're overlooking one slight problem: we're not allowed to do that. I suspect this comes from the economics of the situation: If a chip design has bugs, it costs quite a bit of money to change the manufacturing process, make replacement chips for everyone with the buggy chip, conduct recalls, and so on. If a program has bugs, it costs next to nothing (just labor) to change the source and recompile, and next to nothing (a little bandwidth) to put a "service pack" online and tell everyone to download it.
Thus, manglement decides they can afford to release programs with bugs. They ignore the engineers, and actively hinder their efforts when someone comes up with the latest bell or whistle. They don't even base the deadlines on how long the code will take to produce, they base them on "we want this for our trade show!" or whatever other crap they'd like. And they get away with it because it doesn't really cost them anything to fix the bugs. If the engineers complain too heavily, they tend to get replaced.
Stick your IC designers with the management strategy above, and see what you end up with (besides bankruptcy, of course).
I'd also like to see a complexity comparison between a chip design and a major software product... I don't know enough about chip design to do more than guess.