This is a good thing. It makes it harder for the victims to read, and gives a lot of anomolies that any modern statistical filter will find extremely useful.
Pointing out that D3D has some advantages over OpenGL.
Arguing for some leeway for those who violate the GPL.
Complaining about X.
Telling people they're hysterical about the implications of the GPL.
To be fair, most of these were intended to be inflammatory, but most of these were genuinely my opinion, exactly the same arguments would be applauded on another forum with a less open source bias.
Re:What you can't say (if you're a friggin wussy)
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
You seem to have misssed at least 5 references to Galileo. (One of which contrasted him with Copernicus).
Re:Some of the early plans are a bit out there
on
Dreams of the Moon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I wouldn't be surprised if they could get a lot of volunteers for a guaranteed one way trip (no return, and limitted supplies). Hell, a trip to the moon is the trip of a lifetime.
We are discussing the case in which the terms of the GPL are violated.
Okay, so I take some GPL source code, and distribute as a proprietry piece of software? what are you going to do? Magically invoke the magic GPL, and watch as I find myself unable to distribute it. How does that work then? What mechanism does the GPL use to prevent me from distributing it? Is there some code embedded in the GPL that prevents the cp command from working? Without legal backing, the GPL is a text file.
Hence the GPL is only valid as far as it is supported by law.
If I mistakenly breach the terms of an agreement, and then rectify this, then I am still legally adhering to the agreement, even if according to a strict interpretation I am not. One cannot unilaterally revoke a licence even if the terms allow you to do so.
The "M" stands for "Media". But "mplayer" is an open source software product, while "Media Player" is a Microsoft product. Get it?
Now you're splitting hairs. MPlayer is a media player, and it is even called Media Player, just as the GPL can also be called "The GNU Public License"
Licenses are not different from contracts, licenses is a term used for a class of contracts.
A contract is enforced under contract law. A Licence is enforced under copyright law. A licence is permission to do something you would not normally be allowed to do. The GPL give unilateral permission to copy within certain limitations. There is no reciprical obligation. You are not even required to give your modifications to the original creator.
Binky may forget to switch on his brain sometime, but I seriously doubt you even have one.
I suggest you read up on copyright law, contract law, and how the legal system actually works to resolve disputes.
If the company violates the terms of the GPL, then they don't have a license to distribute the code, hence the copies were illegally made.
Not if a court disagrees. You see, those are the bodies that interpret the law. You seem to be of the belief that the law in this situation is totally inflexible. This is not the case. KISS had no ability to negotiate for more lenient terms, and in this sort of situation, the court is more likely to interpret the licence in favour of KISS. Clauses that allow unilateral termination are generally not enforced unless the other party makes no effort to rectify its mistakes. If a clause is considered excessively harsh, then it will be rejected in a court of law.
"Media player"? Get out of your Microsoft mindset. We are talking about "mplayer"
My mistake. What does the 'M' stand for?
and, no, they can't "just acquire another copy". The GPL isn't a per copy license, it's a contract between authors and distributors.
It's not a contract. Licences are different. Not that that matters. The fact that a contract or licence agreement has been terminated does not prevent the two parties from agreeing to another, even if the new licence has identical wording.
And that contract explicitly says that it becomes void if you violate its terms.
Indeed it has. This has no bearing on any new contract. The only licence that has become void is the one that was violated. If KISS agrees to a new licence then they can still distribute the software according to its terms.
. The GPL is not a shrink-wrap, per-copy license, it's an agreement between authors and distributors.
Actually, it's closer to a shrink-wrap, per-copy licence agreement. It is offered unilaterally to all people, including those who have violated it in the past. It is certainly not an agreement since there is no ability to negotiate terms on the part of the recipient. It is simply a list of terms and limitations on how one may share the software.
The copies are unauthorized and illegal and remain so no matter what the court does.
If the court realises that there is a valid case that the copies are legal, then the copies are legal. The courts are the ones who interpret the laww. Not Slashdot readers or open source programmers.
It still takes a court order to declare that KISS have violated the agreement. There are often clauses in licences that are considered too extreme. This could be considered one of them. People make mistakes. The legal system realises this. Like I said "There is a certain amount of common sense in the law". If it is a genuine oversight by KISS, then the court may well rule that the terms have been upheld, even though a pedantic interpretation of the licence would suggest otherwise. There is a certain amount of flexibility in the law, which extends to legal agreements.
KISS can't make the source code available to those people because KISS doesn't have a license to distribute the code anymore; they lost that license when they violated the terms of the GPL.
KISS still has a licence to distribute the code. They simply need to acquire another copy of media player, and agree to the terms. It doesn't matter whjether the old licence was violated. This would become an entirely new licence. The fact that the terms are identical is irrelevent. The GPL grants rights to anyone who accepts the terms, regardless of whether they chose to accept them in the past.
No, but it matters whether they are copying mplayer, and they clearly are:
They may be copying portions of MPlayer. This is different.
they also need to destroy the illegally made copies--i.e., copies on machines they already have shipped.
No they don't. Neither the GPL or copyright law makes this rquirement. A court may choose to insist that they do this.
Furthermore, there have no way of coming into compliance: once you violate the GPL, you lose all your rights under it. You can't turn around later and say "oh, sorry, here is the source after all".
Once again, neither copyright law or the GPL states this. As long as they make a good faith attempt to fulfil obligations, then they can do so after the fact. Strange as it may seem, there is a certain amount of common sense in the law.
And end users probably don't even have the right to keep the binaries because they never received those binaries under the GPL. Which, again, means that KISS needs to erase mplayer from those already shipped products and compensate their customers.
No, they simply need to make the source code available to these people.
It doesn't matter whether their using it. the end user is not selling anything.
Besides, the GPL has a clause that states nobody has to accept it. Hence, if it is rejected, normal copyright law comes into play. Copyright law does not give a 100% ban on any redistribution. This is what fair use is all about. Allowing people to distribute small portions for personal use.
Copying an mp3 is NOT fair use. Firstly because of the nature of the work - i.e. it is made with the intention of making a profit for the distributors, and secondly the portion of the work. Copying 100% of a work is rarely fair use.
Looking at the criteria neccesary for fair use, it appears that the KISS people are doing nothing wrong. The alleged code is only a small portion of that available in MPlayer, is being used only for personal use, and the use of said code is not costing the MPlayer organisation a penny since it is non-commercial.
As long as the government treats the law as putrely experimental, then I see it as a good thing. It acknowledges that spam is considered harmful, and therefore paves the way for more effective legislation later on. It also starts to set up boundaries. Those companies who send legitimate commercial emails will not be covered by the legislation, those who are borderline should not find it overly inconvenient to adjust their practices such that they are well within the law, and those who just send a load of unwanted rubbish indiscriminately will be made illegal.
We will need the law to change and become more clear on what is and is not spam, and we will also need stronger penalties and some way of preventing overseas spammers, but at least we have a starting point.
They have over 150,000 cameras in London monitoring every citizens actions.
Most of these are either traffic cameras, or security cameras in shops. A lot of them are simply used ot monitor traffic. To actually use most of these to spy on citizens, the police need a court order.
With a 1.8% market share, Apple isn't going to popularise a THING
Well, they seemed to make USB quite popular. Come to think of it, they made the Xerox's WIMP GUI popular as well. And floppyless desktop computers. And desktop publishing.
The characters seem to be from the Robot stories. The plot just happens to have a resemblance to the caves of Steel. It doesn't seem to be set in an undergraound overpopulated earth, and it looks like Lije Bailey isn;t going to be in it.
Oh there's a fantastic idea. All I need to do now is figure out how to live without paying for food, clothing or rent and I'll be all set.
Grow your own food, buy a cheap property since location isn't so important when telecommuting, and don't wear clothes since these are not needed for telecommuting:)
Red Dwarf was BBC. So was Blake's 7. No ads, so no markers.
It does seem a little odd that they are still there on the DVDs though. I suspect that they may not be from the original masters, but from the tapes that were used for broadcast. Before home video, many tapes of a lot of shows were destroyed to save space. The orginal copies may be the only ones they had access to.
Seems its a lot easier to get a PAL TV that plays NTSC (or PAL 60 at elast) than it is to get an NTSC TV that plays PAL. Not that I care. I live in PALLand.
Oddly enough, my player (and my last player) will convert an NTSC disc to 50Hz PAL but will not convert PAL50 to an NTSC signal. This one simply refuses to play the disc, and my last one output it as PAL.
John 10:1. "[T]he man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber." (It's a slight stretch, but it's a little applicable.)
I thought this was the most applicable to typical spammers. They go to great lengths to do something that people are trying to prevent them from doing. This should suggest that what they're doing is possibly undesirable.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a good thing. It makes it harder for the victims to read, and gives a lot of anomolies that any modern statistical filter will find extremely useful.
That instances of jaywalking are lower in a police state.
I don't doubt the statistics, but are threats of disproportionate punishment really the way a civilised society should behave?
- Suggesting Bill Gates is actually a nice guy.
- Pointing out that D3D has some advantages over OpenGL.
- Arguing for some leeway for those who violate the GPL.
- Complaining about X.
- Telling people they're hysterical about the implications of the GPL.
To be fair, most of these were intended to be inflammatory, but most of these were genuinely my opinion, exactly the same arguments would be applauded on another forum with a less open source bias.You seem to have misssed at least 5 references to Galileo. (One of which contrasted him with Copernicus).
I wouldn't be surprised if they could get a lot of volunteers for a guaranteed one way trip (no return, and limitted supplies). Hell, a trip to the moon is the trip of a lifetime.
We are discussing the case in which the terms of the GPL are violated.
Okay, so I take some GPL source code, and distribute as a proprietry piece of software? what are you going to do? Magically invoke the magic GPL, and watch as I find myself unable to distribute it. How does that work then? What mechanism does the GPL use to prevent me from distributing it? Is there some code embedded in the GPL that prevents the cp command from working? Without legal backing, the GPL is a text file.
Hence the GPL is only valid as far as it is supported by law.
If I mistakenly breach the terms of an agreement, and then rectify this, then I am still legally adhering to the agreement, even if according to a strict interpretation I am not. One cannot unilaterally revoke a licence even if the terms allow you to do so.
The "M" stands for "Media". But "mplayer" is an open source software product, while "Media Player" is a Microsoft product. Get it?
Now you're splitting hairs. MPlayer is a media player, and it is even called Media Player, just as the GPL can also be called "The GNU Public License"
Licenses are not different from contracts, licenses is a term used for a class of contracts.
A contract is enforced under contract law. A Licence is enforced under copyright law. A licence is permission to do something you would not normally be allowed to do. The GPL give unilateral permission to copy within certain limitations. There is no reciprical obligation. You are not even required to give your modifications to the original creator.
Binky may forget to switch on his brain sometime, but I seriously doubt you even have one.
I suggest you read up on copyright law, contract law, and how the legal system actually works to resolve disputes.
If the company violates the terms of the GPL, then they don't have a license to distribute the code, hence the copies were illegally made.
Not if a court disagrees. You see, those are the bodies that interpret the law. You seem to be of the belief that the law in this situation is totally inflexible. This is not the case. KISS had no ability to negotiate for more lenient terms, and in this sort of situation, the court is more likely to interpret the licence in favour of KISS. Clauses that allow unilateral termination are generally not enforced unless the other party makes no effort to rectify its mistakes. If a clause is considered excessively harsh, then it will be rejected in a court of law.
"Media player"? Get out of your Microsoft mindset. We are talking about "mplayer"
My mistake. What does the 'M' stand for?
and, no, they can't "just acquire another copy". The GPL isn't a per copy license, it's a contract between authors and distributors.
It's not a contract. Licences are different. Not that that matters. The fact that a contract or licence agreement has been terminated does not prevent the two parties from agreeing to another, even if the new licence has identical wording.
And that contract explicitly says that it becomes void if you violate its terms.
Indeed it has. This has no bearing on any new contract. The only licence that has become void is the one that was violated. If KISS agrees to a new licence then they can still distribute the software according to its terms.
. The GPL is not a shrink-wrap, per-copy license, it's an agreement between authors and distributors.
Actually, it's closer to a shrink-wrap, per-copy licence agreement. It is offered unilaterally to all people, including those who have violated it in the past. It is certainly not an agreement since there is no ability to negotiate terms on the part of the recipient. It is simply a list of terms and limitations on how one may share the software.
"What are you doing up so late!?!"
Ignore them. There are many possible excuses, such as leaving your machine on at night for some random reason or by accident.
If I'm idle for a day because I spent the night at the girlfriend's place, "Where were you all day??? Did you really sleep in til 4pm?"
Oh, sorry. I was in the library studying.
Of course, any parent who believes that one is a mug.
The copies are unauthorized and illegal and remain so no matter what the court does.
If the court realises that there is a valid case that the copies are legal, then the copies are legal. The courts are the ones who interpret the laww. Not Slashdot readers or open source programmers.
It still takes a court order to declare that KISS have violated the agreement. There are often clauses in licences that are considered too extreme. This could be considered one of them. People make mistakes. The legal system realises this. Like I said "There is a certain amount of common sense in the law". If it is a genuine oversight by KISS, then the court may well rule that the terms have been upheld, even though a pedantic interpretation of the licence would suggest otherwise. There is a certain amount of flexibility in the law, which extends to legal agreements.
KISS can't make the source code available to those people because KISS doesn't have a license to distribute the code anymore; they lost that license when they violated the terms of the GPL.
KISS still has a licence to distribute the code. They simply need to acquire another copy of media player, and agree to the terms. It doesn't matter whjether the old licence was violated. This would become an entirely new licence. The fact that the terms are identical is irrelevent. The GPL grants rights to anyone who accepts the terms, regardless of whether they chose to accept them in the past.
The only time I've ever seen a house so big that it's too far to walk upstairs, they have servants to do this for you.
Walking up a flight of stairs will not kill you. In fact, it will do a lot of good.
No, but it matters whether they are copying mplayer, and they clearly are:
They may be copying portions of MPlayer. This is different.
they also need to destroy the illegally made copies--i.e., copies on machines they already have shipped.
No they don't. Neither the GPL or copyright law makes this rquirement. A court may choose to insist that they do this.
Furthermore, there have no way of coming into compliance: once you violate the GPL, you lose all your rights under it. You can't turn around later and say "oh, sorry, here is the source after all".
Once again, neither copyright law or the GPL states this. As long as they make a good faith attempt to fulfil obligations, then they can do so after the fact. Strange as it may seem, there is a certain amount of common sense in the law.
And end users probably don't even have the right to keep the binaries because they never received those binaries under the GPL. Which, again, means that KISS needs to erase mplayer from those already shipped products and compensate their customers.
No, they simply need to make the source code available to these people.
It doesn't matter whether their using it. the end user is not selling anything.
Besides, the GPL has a clause that states nobody has to accept it. Hence, if it is rejected, normal copyright law comes into play. Copyright law does not give a 100% ban on any redistribution. This is what fair use is all about. Allowing people to distribute small portions for personal use.
Copying an mp3 is NOT fair use. Firstly because of the nature of the work - i.e. it is made with the intention of making a profit for the distributors, and secondly the portion of the work. Copying 100% of a work is rarely fair use.
Looking at the criteria neccesary for fair use, it appears that the KISS people are doing nothing wrong. The alleged code is only a small portion of that available in MPlayer, is being used only for personal use, and the use of said code is not costing the MPlayer organisation a penny since it is non-commercial.
The addresses that appear twice or more are still unique. 2 identical addresses gives you one unique address.
As long as the government treats the law as putrely experimental, then I see it as a good thing. It acknowledges that spam is considered harmful, and therefore paves the way for more effective legislation later on. It also starts to set up boundaries. Those companies who send legitimate commercial emails will not be covered by the legislation, those who are borderline should not find it overly inconvenient to adjust their practices such that they are well within the law, and those who just send a load of unwanted rubbish indiscriminately will be made illegal.
We will need the law to change and become more clear on what is and is not spam, and we will also need stronger penalties and some way of preventing overseas spammers, but at least we have a starting point.
The publishers might be able to help you, or the people who did the box might have a company name on the box somewhere.
They have over 150,000 cameras in London monitoring every citizens actions.
Most of these are either traffic cameras, or security cameras in shops. A lot of them are simply used ot monitor traffic. To actually use most of these to spy on citizens, the police need a court order.
With a 1.8% market share, Apple isn't going to popularise a THING
Well, they seemed to make USB quite popular. Come to think of it, they made the Xerox's WIMP GUI popular as well. And floppyless desktop computers. And desktop publishing.
The characters seem to be from the Robot stories. The plot just happens to have a resemblance to the caves of Steel. It doesn't seem to be set in an undergraound overpopulated earth, and it looks like Lije Bailey isn;t going to be in it.
Oh there's a fantastic idea. All I need to do now is figure out how to live without paying for food, clothing or rent and I'll be all set.
Grow your own food, buy a cheap property since location isn't so important when telecommuting, and don't wear clothes since these are not needed for telecommuting:)
Red Dwarf was BBC. So was Blake's 7. No ads, so no markers.
It does seem a little odd that they are still there on the DVDs though. I suspect that they may not be from the original masters, but from the tapes that were used for broadcast. Before home video, many tapes of a lot of shows were destroyed to save space. The orginal copies may be the only ones they had access to.
Seems its a lot easier to get a PAL TV that plays NTSC (or PAL 60 at elast) than it is to get an NTSC TV that plays PAL. Not that I care. I live in PALLand.
Oddly enough, my player (and my last player) will convert an NTSC disc to 50Hz PAL but will not convert PAL50 to an NTSC signal. This one simply refuses to play the disc, and my last one output it as PAL.
All day you just see people playing warcraft or something.
Horay. We get to use iformation that an organisation has no further need for and no longer uses yet stll jealously guards.
Not quite sure it's a major victory.
John 10:1. "[T]he man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber." (It's a slight stretch, but it's a little applicable.)
I thought this was the most applicable to typical spammers. They go to great lengths to do something that people are trying to prevent them from doing. This should suggest that what they're doing is possibly undesirable.