I'm not trying to get personal here (it comes naturally), but that's a really dumb point of view. It's lazy and selfish.
I agree that we're natural concequences of evolution and I agree that we alter our environment to suit ourselves. BUT we also manage our environment and we have changed our envronment massively.
It may be that the 'natural' chain of events is one of growth, expansion and resource depletion until we kill ourselves, and most of the planets life, off.
It's not the intelligent way to go though. The intelligent way to go is to attempt to find balance and a sustainable way of life.
I know that the evidence that global warming is caused by us, it may just be a normal earth cycle, a blip on the data, caused by solar flares, God may have chewed a chilli. That's not a good reason to be complacent and stick our heads in the sand - if we do that we may change the balance irrevocably and destroy our habitat.
The ozone issue shows this clearly - the projected recovery is a direct effect of taking action - of a global policy to reduce the production of CFCs. This is the same with other pollutants (especially fossil fuels), we need the awareness and education that the 'green view' otherwise we will probably kill ourselves slowly.
Notes is great as a collaborative groupeware solution but to provide simple mail functionality and appointment sharing exchange would be cheaper and easier to admin.
It is inherantly insecure but can be made secure (things like it being an open relay by default isn't much different from any other mail system). You'll not only need multiple servers and failover systems but you (and the rest of the admin ppl) will need some intensive training as it's not so simple to implement in a big system as it is in a single server environment!
I've been using Mozilla Build M18 for the last week and I'm well impressed - apart from occasional deaths - and I'm wondering what I'd benefit from using Netscape 6.0?
Will Netscape bw somehow more stable than the code it's built on top of? How much 'heaver' on the system will it be than Mozlla and how heavy in relation to Netscape 4.7x? Does anyone have any comparison figures yet?
Copyright should ensure that hard work is rewarded. If everything an individual/company did was up for grabs companies would spend more time investing in uncopyable software/products and less time inventing new and wonderous toys for us to play with.
Imagine what it'd be like is every piece of commercial software came with a device to allow access to the software? Some kind of optical de-scrambler (anyone remember Elite on the Speccy?). Or a device you had to connect to USB/some other port?
It'd cost us a lot more in the end. Movies costing millions of $s (which are occasionally good) wouldn't get made (imagine life with no 5th Element or Matrix if you dare).
Maybe music would benefit without the controlling megacorps and maybe we'd get used to the lack of huge mane bands (U2, Mariah or whoever).
Maybe other areas would also benefit from a lack of protection but I doubt we'd end up with certain high quality products. Open source only stands proud in the light of companies like M$, Sun and others IMHO.
Anyway, without copyright protection we wouldn't have enough articles posted to/. to pass the day... we might even end up doing some work:-)
Surely the main point is 'the letter of the Law' versus 'the Spirit of the Law'?
As someone else said, what is needed is a little common sense on the part of the copyright holders and honesty on the part of the Internet community.
As long as there are people out there who will break copyright on software being sold then the companies will have this continued knee-jerk reaction to any copyright infringement. I kind of don't blame them either. I think their attitude is often "give them an inch and they'll take a mile" which is precisely what happens. This attitude is exactly the same one that the FSF employs in order to make sure that they have a watertight position if/when they enforce infringements.
I would like to see a world where the excessive litigation gives way to more prodictive ways of people being rewarded for their labours but it's a long way off and I think things will get worse before that.
Erm, is it just me or isn't the site obligation.org a little extreme, strident, odd?
Two bits that jumped out at me were:
[pic of doom II box] Picture of ultra-violent video game taken from ZapBuys web site.
[pic of marylin manson]
ZapMe! allows children to have full access to Amazon.com. All they need is a credit card number and they can order the
most vile music and sleaziest movies.
Make no mistake - ZapMe! wants to convert children's allowance money into revenue for its advertisers. That is how they
will make money.
I know it's important to protect children from bad influences but I don't think the people who wrote the page referred to are particularly objective on this.
Not that I'm standing up for amazon but they're hardly major corrupters of children. It wouldn't suprise me if this site is against the Simpsons and Buffy!
So what actually happens when a copyright is held on one thing in two countries by two companies?
How does this get worked out internationally?
Does it break down to who can afford most lawyers? Or is there an international court for copyrights?
It seems to me that there'd be a huge risk with any system of the smaller, poorer, 'less important' nations suffering in this type of system. Especially as there are more and more ill thought out Patents/copyrights being granted.
I spent a little time in the US recently - holiday in California and buisiness in Denver, Colorado and managed to catch 2 of the 3 televised debates between Bush and Gore.
I attempted to watch them without my preconceptions coming into play (i.e. the fact that Bush is a xenphoibic fascist).
There was so little to choose from them because they both resolutely ignored the questions to score cheap political points.
In the end I fell to the tried and tested method of choosing by deciding who has the best hair (i have it on the authorith of Bill Bryson that this is how most US presidents have been chosen since the TV age came to be).
Whilst ADO may provide a common interface to all the DB implementations the datasources do not all support the same features - you would struggle to use an Access datasource for any 'real' db application, it's just too limited.
JDBC is almost identical to ADO in alot of its functionlity and the drivers supplied by various vendors seem more coherent than using ODBC connections through ADO. You often get many errors when using JDBC via ODBC and so far I have yet to see one which is a limitation of the Java side of things!
All in all I'm sure that there must be a better way of handling database access than through either ADO or ODBC... if only someone would ocme up with it!
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that we're natural concequences of evolution and I agree that we alter our environment to suit ourselves. BUT we also manage our environment and we have changed our envronment massively.
It may be that the 'natural' chain of events is one of growth, expansion and resource depletion until we kill ourselves, and most of the planets life, off.
It's not the intelligent way to go though. The intelligent way to go is to attempt to find balance and a sustainable way of life.
I know that the evidence that global warming is caused by us, it may just be a normal earth cycle, a blip on the data, caused by solar flares, God may have chewed a chilli. That's not a good reason to be complacent and stick our heads in the sand - if we do that we may change the balance irrevocably and destroy our habitat.
The ozone issue shows this clearly - the projected recovery is a direct effect of taking action - of a global policy to reduce the production of CFCs. This is the same with other pollutants (especially fossil fuels), we need the awareness and education that the 'green view' otherwise we will probably kill ourselves slowly.
"We expect that figure to grow incredulously over the next few months," Nacomms general manager Siobhan Dooley told ZDNet.
I just don't believe it either.
It is inherantly insecure but can be made secure (things like it being an open relay by default isn't much different from any other mail system). You'll not only need multiple servers and failover systems but you (and the rest of the admin ppl) will need some intensive training as it's not so simple to implement in a big system as it is in a single server environment!
There's an explanation of Gene patenting linked from that article that explains many of the issues in a form that even I can understand!
Will Netscape bw somehow more stable than the code it's built on top of? How much 'heaver' on the system will it be than Mozlla and how heavy in relation to Netscape 4.7x? Does anyone have any comparison figures yet?
Copyright should ensure that hard work is rewarded. If everything an individual/company did was up for grabs companies would spend more time investing in uncopyable software/products and less time inventing new and wonderous toys for us to play with.
Imagine what it'd be like is every piece of commercial software came with a device to allow access to the software? Some kind of optical de-scrambler (anyone remember Elite on the Speccy?). Or a device you had to connect to USB/some other port?
It'd cost us a lot more in the end. Movies costing millions of $s (which are occasionally good) wouldn't get made (imagine life with no 5th Element or Matrix if you dare).
Maybe music would benefit without the controlling megacorps and maybe we'd get used to the lack of huge mane bands (U2, Mariah or whoever).
Maybe other areas would also benefit from a lack of protection but I doubt we'd end up with certain high quality products. Open source only stands proud in the light of companies like M$, Sun and others IMHO.
Anyway, without copyright protection we wouldn't have enough articles posted to /. to pass the day... we might even end up doing some work :-)
Iain
As someone else said, what is needed is a little common sense on the part of the copyright holders and honesty on the part of the Internet community.
As long as there are people out there who will break copyright on software being sold then the companies will have this continued knee-jerk reaction to any copyright infringement. I kind of don't blame them either. I think their attitude is often "give them an inch and they'll take a mile" which is precisely what happens. This attitude is exactly the same one that the FSF employs in order to make sure that they have a watertight position if/when they enforce infringements.
I would like to see a world where the excessive litigation gives way to more prodictive ways of people being rewarded for their labours but it's a long way off and I think things will get worse before that.
Iain
- [pic of doom II box] Picture of ultra-violent video game taken from ZapBuys web site.
- [pic of marylin manson]
ZapMe! allows children to have full access to Amazon.com. All they need is a credit card number and they can order the
most vile music and sleaziest movies.
Make no mistake - ZapMe! wants to convert children's allowance money into revenue for its advertisers. That is how they
will make money.
I know it's important to protect children from bad influences but I don't think the people who wrote the page referred to are particularly objective on this.Not that I'm standing up for amazon but they're hardly major corrupters of children. It wouldn't suprise me if this site is against the Simpsons and Buffy!
Thank goodness this is in America!
How does this get worked out internationally?
Does it break down to who can afford most lawyers? Or is there an international court for copyrights?
It seems to me that there'd be a huge risk with any system of the smaller, poorer, 'less important' nations suffering in this type of system. Especially as there are more and more ill thought out Patents/copyrights being granted.
I wonder if you can get adrenaline poisoning?
You wouldn't need coffee for weeks after doing this would you?
I spent a little time in the US recently - holiday in California and buisiness in Denver, Colorado and managed to catch 2 of the 3 televised debates between Bush and Gore.
I attempted to watch them without my preconceptions coming into play (i.e. the fact that Bush is a xenphoibic fascist).
There was so little to choose from them because they both resolutely ignored the questions to score cheap political points.
In the end I fell to the tried and tested method of choosing by deciding who has the best hair (i have it on the authorith of Bill Bryson that this is how most US presidents have been chosen since the TV age came to be).
:-)
Whilst ADO may provide a common interface to all the DB implementations the datasources do not all support the same features - you would struggle to use an Access datasource for any 'real' db application, it's just too limited.
JDBC is almost identical to ADO in alot of its functionlity and the drivers supplied by various vendors seem more coherent than using ODBC connections through ADO. You often get many errors when using JDBC via ODBC and so far I have yet to see one which is a limitation of the Java side of things!
All in all I'm sure that there must be a better way of handling database access than through either ADO or ODBC... if only someone would ocme up with it!
...and mainly because c/c++ aren't well suited to the web realm?
"He's not the Mesiah, he's a very naughty boy" - Monty Python 'The Life of Brian'