Copyrights are one of the few property rights actually mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. The key passage is:
" To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Notice the phrase 'limited Times'. Evidently the supreme court interprets this to mean: "as long as the law lists a limit it is ok - even when the law is changed ex post facto to change that period.
Funny, I thought the constitution strictly forbids ex post facto laws - but nothing bothers lawyers; the law to them is what ever they can get away with. Just another reason to follow Shakespeare's advice and "first kill all the lawyers".
Most of the problems with both patents and copyrights would disappear if the Constitution had said that only the individual authors and inventors could own copyrights and patents - not fictitious beings like corporations.
No, it is you who fail to understand. Scientists are convinced by the evidence, skeptics are people who attempt to create a scientific reputation by doubt and ridicule.
I note with interest that you have nothing to say about the example I show of the destructive effects of skepticism. You said nothing because I am correct, and there was nothing you could say.
The attacks of skeptics are largely responsible for the failure of NASA to send follow up experiments to Mars to settle the question of life.
I'll state it again: skeptics need to be ridiculed in public when they are wrong.
One of the things which we fail to do is mock skeptics when they are wrong. The idea of rocks falling from the sky was rejected by all scientists at one time - despite the eye witness testimony of those who had seen it happen. The people who had seen it happen were dismissed as liars, as hoaxers, and as hallucinogenic; they were not gifted great thinkers like all skeptics are known to be.
An example of current skeptical thought: the idea of an elephant startling at the sight of a mouse is 'scientifically' ridiculous. I have never seen an elephant startle at a mouse, however I have seen a full grown African elephant startle and flinch back at the sight of a common gray squirrel. This occurred at the Houston Zoo in the early 1980's. That behavior is not unreasonable if it is viewed from the elephant's perspective; elephants have poor eyesight, and the serpentine movement of a running rodent when seen by an elephant could easily be mistaken for the movement of a poisonous snake - which is one creature that might cause an elephant to startle.
I know for a fact that the idea of an elephant flinching at the sight of a small rodent is a reasonable idea since I have personally seen it happen, and that the skeptics are dead wrong in this respect. Since skeptics never apologize when they are wrong I would like take this opportunity to say to all of the skeptics of the world most formally: "You are of my own personal knowledge completely full of shit".
Skepticism is very important in science; it keeps people from being gullible. Skepticism is healthy scientific behavior up to a point, when it goes beyond that point it is wrong and destructive. An example may clarify what that point is: saying "Your experiment show evidence of 'X' but it could also be explained by 'Y' or 'Z'" is an example of proper skepticism. However to mock someone and in general act like a turd is going beyond the point of healthy skepticism and into a destructive unscientific area.
The original Viking lander experiments on Mars all sent back evidence of life existing on Mars. Healthy skepticism would have been to say: "The results are inconclusive because they could have also been caused by certain rare chemical compounds, further testing to rule out those rare compounds is required". Instead we are told there is "no evidence of life", the people who designed the experiments are ridiculed publicly, and the test data is ignored as 'poor science'. As a result of skepticism gone wild no follow up experiments have been performed, and everyone 'knows' that there is no life on Mars.
Flaming rocks DO fall from the sky, Elephants DO startle at small rodents, the Viking experiments DO need to be followed up, and 'skeptical' scientists who use mockery need to be publicly humiliated by being forced to wear Dunces caps with the words "Rocks don't fall from the sky!" stenciled on them.
Re:Why were MP ever such a big deal?
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The HP 7960 8 ink printer produces prints which are superior to photographic enlarger prints. Having done extensive darkroom work I think that scanned film with a 7960 is currently the way to go (up to 8.5 x 11 inch prints that is.) Are the inks expensive? Yes, is the paper expensive? Yes. Are the results superb? Yes.
Why do I do my own printing? A $10,000 printer at a camera store is only as good as the person operating it. If I screw up my prints I have only myself to blame. For serious work I want at least a 6x6 cm negative, which is about equal to 64 megapixels.
For snapshots of people - which are never going to be enlarged bigger than 5" x 7" I suggest an inexpensive Argus D450 35 mm point and shoot with an aspheric plastic zoom lens, built in automatic flash, motor drive and a 10 year warranty. The camera, which came with 2 batteries, and a roll of Kodak 400 speed color film sold for $17.53 (including tax) at the local Wallmart. For this type of photography I don't know of a digital camera which can come close to it for the money.
Do I own digital cameras? Yes, but I don't think they are quite ready for primetime yet.
SCRAM stands for Supersonic Combustion Ram (jet). What makes this different is that the combustion is taking place in air which is moving faster than the speed of sound inside the engine. Conventional Ram jets require that the air inside the engine be moving at less than sonic velocities for combustion to occur.
Conventional Ram jets are limited in top speed by the necessity to slow the incoming air down to sub sonic velocities.
Not only does the SCRAM jet have potential military applications, it can also serve as a 'midrange' stage for a lower cost to orbit booster.
We're talking about apples and oranges here guys. You are talking about C code, I am talking about the hardware register level problems. When a hardware register is used as as an indirect pointer on the X86-64 it is 64 bits wide. When the register is loaded it is 32 bits wide UNLIESS the prefix byte is included to load it with 64 bits. Math operations on the register are also 32 bits UNLESS the 64 bit prefix is included.
This is a clumsy way to design anything.
The X86-64 even when in "64 bit" mode is a 32 bit processor with extended addressing ability and some 64 bit extensions. Only in a marketing sense is it a 64 bit processor.
In order to use a 64 bit register in the AMD 64 bit processor one has to use an assembly language prefix to tell the hardware that the register size is 64 bits. The hardware default without the prefix is 32 bits. It would have been better the other way around. This is well below the level of a compiler, it IS a hardware issue.
In effect the registers in the X86-64 are 32 bits long unless the prefix byte is included to set the size to 64 bits.
As I said there are always good sounding arguments for poor choices.
AMD screwed up and set the default integer size on their X86-64 to 32 bits. This causes all sorts of problems with pointer math since most software assumes that an integer is large enough to do pointer math.
Their are always good sounding arguments in favor of every bad decision; it there weren't, sane but ignorant people wouldn't make bad decisions.
If Intel sets the default integer size on their X86-64 to 64 bits they stand a chance of winning the marketing fight with AMD, even though they are late to the dance.
DeCSS is not about priracy, it is a ludicrous tool for any commercial pirate to use; it is much easier for these people to do a bit copy of the DVD and mass produce it - which they do.
This is not about controlling piracy - Hollywood doesn't care about that - what they do care about is controlling your use of DVD's once you have bought them.
DeCSS is about having a free and open source DVD player for Linux.
DeCSS is as much about piracy as owning a screw driver is about being a burgular.
Sadly I think that we are putting up just good enough a fight here with the EFF to insure that we lose in court and set a precedent. This is a prime example of the general crappiness of the law overiding common sense.
As I suspected they would, SCO screwed up and showed someone the slides while forgetting to put them under NDA. Once the cat is out of the bag there is nothing they can do.
Now for the evidence: As I also suspected the people at SCO thought that code that was put into Unix from BSD sources was their original code.
The second bit of code which was released as open source by Caldera as part of the system 3 code is even more hilarious.
SCO has no case whatsoever.
However, the government does have one motherf***er of a case against them: criminal fraud is just the beginning..
Don't be surprised If Darl and his cronies try to skip to the Bahamas with the money they have made from their stock manipulations.
If you go back and read the story from the person who saw the SCO slide presentation after signing the NDA - he says that he has seen the code in question in several places on the Net which don't involve either SCO or Linux. Chances are excellent that this code is public domain code which Darl and his group of lawsuit happy thugs think belongs to them.
When you are technically ignorant like SCO's managment you will make these kind of mistakes.
UNIX is as much a derivative of MULTICS as Linux is a derivative of UNIX. SCO's claim to hold the 'intellectual property rights' to all modern operating systems fails because of that fact - a point which needs to made against them.
As I have pointed out before, SCO has no case under the 'derived operating system theory' since UNIX itself is 'derived' from Multics in the same way that Linux is 'derived' from UNIX. Under the 'derived' OS theory MIT might have a much stronger claim against SCO than SCO has against anyone else.
"We [SCO] believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V."
Even if SCO's broad derivation theory were held by the courts to be true, they own nothing. Why? Because UNIX is itself derived from Multics in precisely the way that Linux is derived from UNIX.
In other words, using their own theory, no case whatsoever can be made for SCO owning the intellectual rights to any OS, including UNIX System V.
Sorry to disagree, but frames often do work. Only technical people who assume that the law has something to do with 'reasonable' would assume that planting evidence wouldn't work.
Chances are excellent that almost any prosecutor could convict your neighbors of theft. What would happen is that even the other people would be suspicious of each other; the parents would suspect the kids, and the kids would suspect each other, husband suspect wife and vice versa.
Even if there were only one person at the other house and he KNEW he didn't steal it - he would have a terrible time proving he didn't steal it.
And yes, I know the burden of proof is on the prosecution, but once they have shown that the article was the property of the 'victim' and the 'victim' testifies that he didn't give the defendant permission to have the property, they have satisfied their burden of proof, and the burden of proof now shifts to the defendant, who usually doesn't have any way to show he didn't steal it. In fact about the only way the prosecution could lose would be if the defendant had a surveillance tape showing the 'victim' planting the evidence - which is pretty unlikely.
The law - millions of lines of code - not one of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
Thanks, do you work for SCO, Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, or their lawyers?
As a matter of fact since SCO and their lawyers can't show up at all of these suits, and will in effect ignore them, the result is that the courts in question will be mightily pissed that they have been ignored. Even small claims courts judges don't like being ignored. It is a very dangerous thing to ignore government officials acting in their official capacity.
The judgment won't be for $1.00, most likely it will be for the maximum amount that the jurisdiction can allow, as punishment for contemptuously ignoring their jurisdiction. As one of the other posters pointed out, by publicly questioning the honesty of open source coders SCO has made it more difficult for us to obtain employment; that is real and substantial damage.
To amplify: because SCO has failed to identify the code they claim to be copied they have cast aspersions on, and created harm to, the reputations of everyone who has written open source code.
By the way, since SCO is threatening individual Linux users - everyone who uses Linux has standing to file suit against them.
We do have a defamation case against these people. In order to get dismissed the other side has to 'show up'. As I said earlier failure to respond results in summary judgment.
It is easy to swat one or two bees - but thousands will kill you.
The members of the opensource community are like a hive of busy bees. We need to realize that worker bees carry a sting.
Here is how to utterly stop anything like the SCO legal action in the future.
Each individual in the open source movement needs to file a small claims law suit not only against SCO but against the individual lawyers working for SCO. These people have defamed us, and they need to learn that they do well to leave all of us alone.
It is impossible to fight thousands of law suits filed in hundreds of different courts. The expense is huge, and failure of the other side to respond results in a summery judgment against them.
While each suit might be small - a few thousand dollars - the end result is a disaster for someone like SCO and their lawyers.
Software is unstable because it is designed with the wrong things in mind.
If you are doing some plumbing and what you think you are doing is running water from point A to point B you are in deep trouble. What you are actually doing is keeping water out of the rest of the room.
A computer doesn't need our code to run; it will happily execute what ever random garbage is on its data lines. What you are actually doing when you program is controlling all the things you don't want the computer to do. Until we realize that by far the most important thing in software is preventing code leakage software will continue to be an unstable mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyrights are one of the few property rights actually mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. The key passage is:
" To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Notice the phrase 'limited Times'. Evidently the supreme court interprets this to mean: "as long as the law lists a limit it is ok - even when the law is changed ex post facto to change that period.
Funny, I thought the constitution strictly forbids ex post facto laws - but nothing bothers lawyers; the law to them is what ever they can get away with. Just another reason to follow Shakespeare's advice and "first kill all the lawyers".
Most of the problems with both patents and copyrights would disappear if the Constitution had said that only the individual authors and inventors could own copyrights and patents - not fictitious beings like corporations.
No, it is you who fail to understand. Scientists are convinced by the evidence, skeptics are people who attempt to create a scientific reputation by doubt and ridicule.
I note with interest that you have nothing to say about the example I show of the destructive effects of skepticism. You said nothing because I am correct, and there was nothing you could say.
The attacks of skeptics are largely responsible for the failure of NASA to send follow up experiments to Mars to settle the question of life.
I'll state it again: skeptics need to be ridiculed in public when they are wrong.
One of the things which we fail to do is mock skeptics when they are wrong. The idea of rocks falling from the sky was rejected by all scientists at one time - despite the eye witness testimony of those who had seen it happen. The people who had seen it happen were dismissed as liars, as hoaxers, and as hallucinogenic; they were not gifted great thinkers like all skeptics are known to be.
An example of current skeptical thought: the idea of an elephant startling at the sight of a mouse is 'scientifically' ridiculous. I have never seen an elephant startle at a mouse, however I have seen a full grown African elephant startle and flinch back at the sight of a common gray squirrel. This occurred at the Houston Zoo in the early 1980's. That behavior is not unreasonable if it is viewed from the elephant's perspective; elephants have poor eyesight, and the serpentine movement of a running rodent when seen by an elephant could easily be mistaken for the movement of a poisonous snake - which is one creature that might cause an elephant to startle.
I know for a fact that the idea of an elephant flinching at the sight of a small rodent is a reasonable idea since I have personally seen it happen, and that the skeptics are dead wrong in this respect. Since skeptics never apologize when they are wrong I would like take this opportunity to say to all of the skeptics of the world most formally: "You are of my own personal knowledge completely full of shit".
Skepticism is very important in science; it keeps people from being gullible. Skepticism is healthy scientific behavior up to a point, when it goes beyond that point it is wrong and destructive. An example may clarify what that point is: saying "Your experiment show evidence of 'X' but it could also be explained by 'Y' or 'Z'" is an example of proper skepticism. However to mock someone and in general act like a turd is going beyond the point of healthy skepticism and into a destructive unscientific area.
The original Viking lander experiments on Mars all sent back evidence of life existing on Mars. Healthy skepticism would have been to say: "The results are inconclusive because they could have also been caused by certain rare chemical compounds, further testing to rule out those rare compounds is required". Instead we are told there is "no evidence of life", the people who designed the experiments are ridiculed publicly, and the test data is ignored as 'poor science'. As a result of skepticism gone wild no follow up experiments have been performed, and everyone 'knows' that there is no life on Mars.
Flaming rocks DO fall from the sky, Elephants DO startle at small rodents, the Viking experiments DO need to be followed up, and 'skeptical' scientists who use mockery need to be publicly humiliated by being forced to wear Dunces caps with the words "Rocks don't fall from the sky!" stenciled on them.
The HP 7960 8 ink printer produces prints which are superior to photographic enlarger prints. Having done extensive darkroom work I think that scanned film with a 7960 is currently the way to go (up to 8.5 x 11 inch prints that is.) Are the inks expensive? Yes, is the paper expensive? Yes. Are the results superb? Yes.
Why do I do my own printing? A $10,000 printer at a camera store is only as good as the person operating it. If I screw up my prints I have only myself to blame. For serious work I want at least a 6x6 cm negative, which is about equal to 64 megapixels.
For snapshots of people - which are never going to be enlarged bigger than 5" x 7" I suggest an inexpensive Argus D450 35 mm point and shoot with an aspheric plastic zoom lens, built in automatic flash, motor drive and a 10 year warranty. The camera, which came with 2 batteries, and a roll of Kodak 400 speed color film sold for $17.53 (including tax) at the local Wallmart. For this type of photography I don't know of a digital camera which can come close to it for the money.
Do I own digital cameras? Yes, but I don't think they are quite ready for primetime yet.
SCRAM stands for Supersonic Combustion Ram (jet). What makes this different is that the combustion is taking place in air which is moving faster than the speed of sound inside the engine. Conventional Ram jets require that the air inside the engine be moving at less than sonic velocities for combustion to occur.
Conventional Ram jets are limited in top speed by the necessity to slow the incoming air down to sub sonic velocities.
Not only does the SCRAM jet have potential military applications, it can also serve as a 'midrange' stage for a lower cost to orbit booster.
We're talking about apples and oranges here guys. You are talking about C code, I am talking about the hardware register level problems. When a hardware register is used as as an indirect pointer on the X86-64 it is 64 bits wide. When the register is loaded it is 32 bits wide UNLIESS the prefix byte is included to load it with 64 bits. Math operations on the register are also 32 bits UNLESS the 64 bit prefix is included.
This is a clumsy way to design anything.
The X86-64 even when in "64 bit" mode is a 32 bit processor with extended addressing ability and some 64 bit extensions. Only in a marketing sense is it a 64 bit processor.
In order to use a 64 bit register in the AMD 64 bit processor one has to use an assembly language prefix to tell the hardware that the register size is 64 bits. The hardware default without the prefix is 32 bits. It would have been better the other way around. This is well below the level of a compiler, it IS a hardware issue.
In effect the registers in the X86-64 are 32 bits long unless the prefix byte is included to set the size to 64 bits.
As I said there are always good sounding arguments for poor choices.
AMD screwed up and set the default integer size on their X86-64 to 32 bits. This causes all sorts of problems
with pointer math since most software assumes that an integer is large enough to do pointer math.
Their are always good sounding arguments in favor of every bad decision; it there weren't, sane but ignorant people wouldn't make bad decisions.
If Intel sets the default integer size on their X86-64 to 64 bits they stand a chance of winning the marketing fight with AMD, even though they are late to the dance.
DeCSS is not about priracy, it is a ludicrous tool for any commercial pirate to use; it is much easier for these people to do a bit copy of the DVD and mass produce it - which they do.
This is not about controlling piracy - Hollywood doesn't care about that - what they do care about is controlling your use of DVD's once you have bought them.
DeCSS is about having a free and open source DVD player for Linux.
DeCSS is as much about piracy as owning a screw driver is about being a burgular.
Sadly I think that we are putting up just good enough a fight here with the EFF to insure that we lose in court and set a precedent. This is a prime example of the general crappiness of the law overiding common sense.
As I suspected they would, SCO screwed up and showed someone the slides while forgetting to put them under NDA. Once the cat is out of the bag there is nothing they can do.
Now for the evidence: As I also suspected the people at SCO thought that code that was put into Unix from BSD sources was their original code.
The second bit of code which was released as open source by Caldera as part of the system 3 code is even more hilarious.
SCO has no case whatsoever.
However, the government does have one motherf***er of a case against them: criminal fraud is just the beginning..
Don't be surprised If Darl and his cronies try to skip to the Bahamas with the money they have made from their stock manipulations.
No, the SCO execs have more information than outsiders: they know whether their lawsuit is bogus or not.
If they thought they had a real case against IBM they would be BUYING SCO stock - not selling it.
Duh.
If you go back and read the story from the person who saw the SCO slide presentation after signing the NDA - he says that he has seen the code in question in several places on the Net which don't involve either SCO or Linux. Chances are excellent that this code is public domain code which Darl and his group of lawsuit happy thugs think belongs to them.
When you are technically ignorant like SCO's managment you will make these kind of mistakes.
UNIX is as much a derivative of MULTICS as Linux is a derivative of UNIX. SCO's claim to hold the 'intellectual property rights' to all modern operating systems fails because of that fact - a point which needs to made against them.
As I have pointed out before, SCO has no case under the 'derived operating system theory' since UNIX itself is 'derived' from Multics in the same way that Linux is 'derived' from UNIX. Under the 'derived' OS theory MIT might have a much stronger claim against SCO than SCO has against anyone else.
"We [SCO] believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent
computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V."
Even if SCO's broad derivation theory were held by the courts to be true, they own nothing. Why? Because UNIX is itself derived from Multics in precisely the way that Linux is derived from UNIX.
In other words, using their own theory, no case whatsoever can be made for SCO owning the intellectual rights to any OS, including UNIX System V.
Sorry to disagree, but frames often do work. Only technical people who assume that the law has something to do with 'reasonable' would assume that planting evidence wouldn't work.
Chances are excellent that almost any prosecutor could convict your neighbors of theft. What would happen is that even the other people would be suspicious of each other; the parents would suspect the kids, and the kids would suspect each other, husband suspect wife and vice versa.
Even if there were only one person at the other house and he KNEW he didn't steal it - he would have a terrible time proving he didn't steal it.
And yes, I know the burden of proof is on the prosecution, but once they have shown that the article was the property of the 'victim' and the 'victim' testifies that he didn't give the defendant permission to have the property, they have satisfied their burden of proof, and the burden of proof now shifts to the defendant, who usually doesn't have any way to show he didn't steal it. In fact about the only way the prosecution could lose would be if the defendant had a surveillance tape showing the 'victim' planting the evidence - which is pretty unlikely.
The law - millions of lines of code - not one of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
Thanks, do you work for SCO, Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, or their lawyers?
As a matter of fact since SCO and their lawyers can't show up at all of these suits, and will in effect ignore them, the result is that the courts in question will be mightily pissed that they have been ignored. Even small claims courts judges don't like being ignored. It is a very dangerous thing to ignore government officials acting in their official capacity.
The judgment won't be for $1.00, most likely it will be for the maximum amount that the jurisdiction can allow, as punishment for contemptuously ignoring their jurisdiction. As one of the other posters pointed out, by publicly questioning the honesty of open source coders SCO has made it more difficult for us to obtain employment; that is real and substantial damage.
To amplify: because SCO has failed to identify the code they claim to be copied they have cast aspersions on, and created harm to, the reputations of everyone who has written open source code.
By the way, since SCO is threatening individual Linux users - everyone who uses Linux has standing to file suit against them.
As a person who has written open source code - I do have standing in this case. People who haven't written code wouldn't.
We do have a defamation case against these people. In order to get dismissed the other side has to 'show up'. As I said earlier failure to respond results in summary judgment.
It is easy to swat one or two bees - but thousands will kill you.
The only reason I picked bees is that we produce Honey - in the form of open source code.
it could certainly be done to the MPAA and the RIAA.
Let me suggest that we go after one target first then the others.
It is usually plaintiffs attorneys who do this - in the hope of getting a big payoff. People are not required to join those suits.
My being defamed has nothing to do with anyone else being defamed.
The members of the opensource community are like a hive of busy bees. We need to realize that worker bees carry a sting.
Here is how to utterly stop anything like the SCO legal action in the future.
Each individual in the open source movement needs to file a small claims law suit not only against SCO but against the individual lawyers working for SCO. These people have defamed us, and they need to learn that they do well to leave all of us alone.
It is impossible to fight thousands of law suits filed in hundreds of different courts. The expense is huge, and failure of the other side to respond results in a summery judgment against them.
While each suit might be small - a few thousand dollars - the end result is a disaster for someone like SCO and their lawyers.
Software is unstable because it is designed with the wrong things in mind.
If you are doing some plumbing and what you think you are doing is running water from point A to point B you are in deep trouble. What you are actually doing is keeping water out of the rest of the room.
A computer doesn't need our code to run; it will happily execute what ever random garbage is on its data lines. What you are actually doing when you program is controlling all the things you don't want the computer to do. Until we realize that by far the most important thing in software is preventing code leakage software will continue to be an unstable mess.