In fact, it's a direct derivative of the original cover... and that alone is enough to qualify it as a parody.
I don't think that can be right - if it were, all derivative works would be protected as fair use, which is fairly clearly not the case. To count as a parody, it has to comment on the work being parodied. Maybe the image does do that, but it's not obvious or unquestionable that it does, as the summary claims.
I did read the article, but evidently the submitter, who claimed that the picture was "unquestionably" a parody, did not. The article doesn't include any explanation of how the photoshopped image comments on or criticizes the original (although another commenter above does provide a pretty good potential justification), indeed, as you say, the creator doesn't mention that as a purpose at all. The legal standard for parody as justification of fair use is, as I understand it, "reasonably could be perceived as commenting on the original or criticizing it, to some degree"; the article suggests the creator of the image wouldn't claim that that was the purpose of the image.
The Joker was about chaos and anarchy which is so far away from Socialism that the juxtaposition just strikes me as ludicrous.
It depends what kind of socialism you're talking about. Of course, though Obama isn't a socialist of any sort, he's even less a libertarian socialist than he is a social democrat (which I think is what people mean when they accuse him of being a socialist).
Yes, I have seen it. Of course it looks like a Time magazine cover, but it's not clear to me that it is a parody of that cover. Again - what, exactly, is it parodying? It might be a parody, but it's not, as the summary claimed, unquestionably one.
Corporate Censorship has nothing to do with Freedom of Speech.
Yes it does. Just because most constitutional provisions only protect freedom of speech from government interference, it doesn't mean that other forms of interference with speech aren't also damaging. Indeed, if it is bad to allow governments to prevent free speech, would it not also be bad to allow other organizations to use their power to interfere with speech.
Your wikipedia link does nothing to support your claim that only government censorship is relevant to freedom of speech, by the way.
Unquestionably a parody of the President and Time Magazine which would be covered under fair use.
It's not "unquestionable" at all. First of all, the fact that it's a parody of the President does not make it fair use - to be fair use as a parody, something has to be a parody of the copyright work, not the subject of that work. Second, it's not at all obvious to me that this is a parody of Time Magazine. What feature of the Time cover is being parodied, exactly? It seems to me that the image in question is using the Time photograph to produce an unrelated piece of work commenting on the President. That's no more fair use than, say, sampling a record to produce a new track is fair use.
I think you could make a good case that this kind of transformative use of copyright material ought to be generally allowed, but it doesn't help that case to exaggerate the actual scope of fair-use rights to make derivative works.
I think the BSA are largely less hated because it is less well known than the RIAA. The fact that it rarely targets individuals is probably part of this. If you don't run a small-to-medium sized business, the BSA are unlikely to really be on your radar. But small business owners who've interacted with the BSA hate them at least as much as your average Slashdot reader hates the RIAA.
Protesting against rules that a private business sets for behavior on their own property is a ridiculous idea.
Luckily, the Civil Rights Movement disagreed with you. The sit-ins were protesting against segregation imposed as private rules by private businesses, and now, laws prevent private businesses from setting unjust rules on their own property. You don't have the right to set down just any conditions you want on the use of your property, and rightly so; allowing property owners to use their ownership to promote injustice, is not just.
You're citing a blog which appears to be a reposting an article, but doesn't say where it's from. References to this case, as far as I can see, only show up on right-wing blogs and forums; I can't find any newspaper coverage in Lexis-Nexis, and I can't find any reference to a decision for the case with that number.
If you can provide a link to the actual decision in that case, or a discussion of it in a mainstream or scholarly source, I'd be very interested to look at it. Prima facie, though, it sounds very unlikely that county sherrifs in fact have powers exceeding officers of the federal government; I don't see how you could square that with the Supremacy clause.
The gaming industry has been struggling in the last few months, and it is about to struggle even more when OnLive and Gaikai launch later this year. The new services are both a step in the right direction to counter piracy and provide easily-accessible gaming to people with low-end PCs.
Indeed, the outrage over this is completely ludicrous, especially as Ubuntu have been using their customized Google search on the default start page since at least 8.04. The two changes in the multisearch extension are that this customized google search now gets used a) in new tabs and b) when searching from the address and search bars. This may be good or bad UI changes, but they have no privacy implications and are nothing to get outraged over.
"compile-time duck typing" is, by definition, a contradiction.
Not if compilation involves evaluating a Turing-complete language. In that case, "compile time" is also the run time for the language that is evaluated during compilation. Compiling lisp code that uses macros also involves running those macros. Likewise, compiling C++ code that uses templates involves running those templates; compile time is also run time. Dispatch that happens when these templates are evaluated is as much duck typing as the dispatch that occurs during the evaluation of a Python program. Just because the interpreter in this case is also a compiler doesn't make it any less duck typing.
duck typing in Python is dynamic (resolved at runtime), where-as the type system in C++ is static (resolved at compile-time).
It's not quite that simple. C++ templates are a Turing-complete programming language, evaluated at compile time. So "runtime" for templates is compile time. Type checking for templates is done when they are evaluated, not when they are defined, that is, at runtime (to repeat, the template runtime that happens during compilation). So they are indeed, like Python, duck typed. Concepts would have added a system for checking templates when they are defined, which would be the equivalent of a static type system for the template language that gets evaluated during compilation.
The Ubuntu modification uses an Ubuntu custom Google search, rather than the Mozilla custom Google search. Google collects the same data in both cases; the only difference is that, with the Ubuntu search, Ubuntu gets to see aggregates information about popular searches, while, with the Mozilla custom search, Mozilla gets to see this aggregated information. In both cases, Google are the only people who get individually identifiable information about searches. Ubuntu isn't "watching you" any more than Mozilla is watching you when you search using a stock Firefox.
Actually, the OpenDocument specification explicitly covers two possibilities: OpenDocument packages, which are zip files containing an XML document, a manifest, and other ancilliary files, and a single XML document, which contains the whole document in one XML file. See section 2.1 of the spec.
You DO get fined for not buying government approved coverage. Massachusetts, the only US state to try socialized medicine does exactly that. They've also discovered that the system doesn't work - i.e. cost overruns for the program have been enormous since day one.
You can't use the Massachusetts system as an argument against socialized medicine, because all its problems stem from the fact that it isn't socialized medicine, it's private insurance with bullshit mandates and an unsustainable public option. If Massachusetts had socialized medicine, everyone would be enrolled in the public insurance system, which would mean no fines for having no coverage (because no-one would be without coverage), and the private insurace industry wouldn't be able to cherry-pick those who it is most profitable to cover, which would make the financial situation of the public insurance system much more secure.
If they are required to stop exclusive carrier deals, then subsidies will go away and we'll all get to pay for our phones, not be locked to a carrier and probably end 1+ year contracts.
I don't think that's true. In the UK, it's very unusual for a phone to be exclusive to a particular carrier, and phones are frequently sold unlocked. However, they're still subsidized - you get a free phone if you sign a contract with a carrier. The carriers still benefit from this kind of deal, because even if the phone is unlocked, and you _could_ use it on another carrier, why would you if you're already paying monthly fees to the carrier you've signed a contract with? The subsidized-phone model is compatible with a much less restrictive marketplace than the US one.
if anything, the AppStore is in violation of the GPL, and *not* the author.
However, if the author agreed to the restrictions imposed by the AppStore, they may themselves be in violation of the GPL. Section 7 says:
If...conditions are imposed on you...that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.
I don't know what, if any, conditions are imposed on iPhone developers, but it is at least possible that, if the AppStore violates the GPL, an author who puts GPLed software on the AppStore would also be in violation.
It is, instead, an interface to a database of facts that were input by the Wolfram people. Since they most likely hold copyright to the input data.
But the input data is just facts, isn't it? You can't copyright mere data and, in the US, you can't copyright collections of data either. So I don't think the Wolfram people do have copyright on the input to Wolfram Alpha.
I haven't gone and looked at the code, but a program like Firefox that's written in C++ shouldn't be vulnerable to this - C++ strings are not NULL terminated, so shouldn't be vulnerable to this exploit. Either the Firefox developers are using C strings, which they shouldn't do, or they're incorrectly constructing their C++ strings.
It does make a statement about the validness for using such a language today
The odd thing is that Firefox is written in C++, and C++ strings aren't NULL terminated, they store the string length alongside the string. I wonder why Firefox is using C strings when it doesn't need to.
The problem with that is that you're now limiting the maximum length of your string to whatever the witdth of the number at the beginning is.
But the length of strings is limited anyway by the hardware; there's always going to be a maximum size to any addressable array. If the width of the number is of type size_t, that is, large enough to store the size of any possible array on the hardware in question, storing the length of a string with the string doesn't introduce any limit on the string's length.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, it's a direct derivative of the original cover ... and that alone is enough to qualify it as a parody.
I don't think that can be right - if it were, all derivative works would be protected as fair use, which is fairly clearly not the case. To count as a parody, it has to comment on the work being parodied. Maybe the image does do that, but it's not obvious or unquestionable that it does, as the summary claims.
I did read the article, but evidently the submitter, who claimed that the picture was "unquestionably" a parody, did not. The article doesn't include any explanation of how the photoshopped image comments on or criticizes the original (although another commenter above does provide a pretty good potential justification), indeed, as you say, the creator doesn't mention that as a purpose at all. The legal standard for parody as justification of fair use is, as I understand it, "reasonably could be perceived as commenting on the original or criticizing it, to some degree"; the article suggests the creator of the image wouldn't claim that that was the purpose of the image.
Thanks, that does explain why the image is a parody.
The Joker was about chaos and anarchy which is so far away from Socialism that the juxtaposition just strikes me as ludicrous.
It depends what kind of socialism you're talking about. Of course, though Obama isn't a socialist of any sort, he's even less a libertarian socialist than he is a social democrat (which I think is what people mean when they accuse him of being a socialist).
Yes, I have seen it. Of course it looks like a Time magazine cover, but it's not clear to me that it is a parody of that cover. Again - what, exactly, is it parodying? It might be a parody, but it's not, as the summary claimed, unquestionably one.
Corporate Censorship has nothing to do with Freedom of Speech.
Yes it does. Just because most constitutional provisions only protect freedom of speech from government interference, it doesn't mean that other forms of interference with speech aren't also damaging. Indeed, if it is bad to allow governments to prevent free speech, would it not also be bad to allow other organizations to use their power to interfere with speech.
Your wikipedia link does nothing to support your claim that only government censorship is relevant to freedom of speech, by the way.
Unquestionably a parody of the President and Time Magazine which would be covered under fair use.
It's not "unquestionable" at all. First of all, the fact that it's a parody of the President does not make it fair use - to be fair use as a parody, something has to be a parody of the copyright work, not the subject of that work. Second, it's not at all obvious to me that this is a parody of Time Magazine. What feature of the Time cover is being parodied, exactly? It seems to me that the image in question is using the Time photograph to produce an unrelated piece of work commenting on the President. That's no more fair use than, say, sampling a record to produce a new track is fair use.
I think you could make a good case that this kind of transformative use of copyright material ought to be generally allowed, but it doesn't help that case to exaggerate the actual scope of fair-use rights to make derivative works.
All of your points are bullshit, but especially:
1. There will be no useful compiler warnings/errors for the feature, since compilers implement only the core languuage.
There's no reason that a library can't express sufficient semantics for the compiler to detect errors with its use.
I think the BSA are largely less hated because it is less well known than the RIAA. The fact that it rarely targets individuals is probably part of this. If you don't run a small-to-medium sized business, the BSA are unlikely to really be on your radar. But small business owners who've interacted with the BSA hate them at least as much as your average Slashdot reader hates the RIAA.
Protesting against rules that a private business sets for behavior on their own property is a ridiculous idea.
Luckily, the Civil Rights Movement disagreed with you. The sit-ins were protesting against segregation imposed as private rules by private businesses, and now, laws prevent private businesses from setting unjust rules on their own property. You don't have the right to set down just any conditions you want on the use of your property, and rightly so; allowing property owners to use their ownership to promote injustice, is not just.
You're citing a blog which appears to be a reposting an article, but doesn't say where it's from. References to this case, as far as I can see, only show up on right-wing blogs and forums; I can't find any newspaper coverage in Lexis-Nexis, and I can't find any reference to a decision for the case with that number.
If you can provide a link to the actual decision in that case, or a discussion of it in a mainstream or scholarly source, I'd be very interested to look at it. Prima facie, though, it sounds very unlikely that county sherrifs in fact have powers exceeding officers of the federal government; I don't see how you could square that with the Supremacy clause.
The gaming industry has been struggling in the last few months, and it is about to struggle even more when OnLive and Gaikai launch later this year. The new services are both a step in the right direction to counter piracy and provide easily-accessible gaming to people with low-end PCs.
Article troll you!
Indeed, the outrage over this is completely ludicrous, especially as Ubuntu have been using their customized Google search on the default start page since at least 8.04. The two changes in the multisearch extension are that this customized google search now gets used a) in new tabs and b) when searching from the address and search bars. This may be good or bad UI changes, but they have no privacy implications and are nothing to get outraged over.
"compile-time duck typing" is, by definition, a contradiction.
Not if compilation involves evaluating a Turing-complete language. In that case, "compile time" is also the run time for the language that is evaluated during compilation. Compiling lisp code that uses macros also involves running those macros. Likewise, compiling C++ code that uses templates involves running those templates; compile time is also run time. Dispatch that happens when these templates are evaluated is as much duck typing as the dispatch that occurs during the evaluation of a Python program. Just because the interpreter in this case is also a compiler doesn't make it any less duck typing.
duck typing in Python is dynamic (resolved at runtime), where-as the type system in C++ is static (resolved at compile-time).
It's not quite that simple. C++ templates are a Turing-complete programming language, evaluated at compile time. So "runtime" for templates is compile time. Type checking for templates is done when they are evaluated, not when they are defined, that is, at runtime (to repeat, the template runtime that happens during compilation). So they are indeed, like Python, duck typed. Concepts would have added a system for checking templates when they are defined, which would be the equivalent of a static type system for the template language that gets evaluated during compilation.
The Ubuntu modification uses an Ubuntu custom Google search, rather than the Mozilla custom Google search. Google collects the same data in both cases; the only difference is that, with the Ubuntu search, Ubuntu gets to see aggregates information about popular searches, while, with the Mozilla custom search, Mozilla gets to see this aggregated information. In both cases, Google are the only people who get individually identifiable information about searches. Ubuntu isn't "watching you" any more than Mozilla is watching you when you search using a stock Firefox.
Actually, the OpenDocument specification explicitly covers two possibilities: OpenDocument packages, which are zip files containing an XML document, a manifest, and other ancilliary files, and a single XML document, which contains the whole document in one XML file. See section 2.1 of the spec.
We already know what it would be like to have "an agency like that running a healthcare system." It's called Medicare, and it has significantly higher customer satisfaction ratings that private insurance.
You DO get fined for not buying government approved coverage. Massachusetts, the only US state to try socialized medicine does exactly that. They've also discovered that the system doesn't work - i.e. cost overruns for the program have been enormous since day one.
You can't use the Massachusetts system as an argument against socialized medicine, because all its problems stem from the fact that it isn't socialized medicine, it's private insurance with bullshit mandates and an unsustainable public option. If Massachusetts had socialized medicine, everyone would be enrolled in the public insurance system, which would mean no fines for having no coverage (because no-one would be without coverage), and the private insurace industry wouldn't be able to cherry-pick those who it is most profitable to cover, which would make the financial situation of the public insurance system much more secure.
If they are required to stop exclusive carrier deals, then subsidies will go away and we'll all get to pay for our phones, not be locked to a carrier and probably end 1+ year contracts.
I don't think that's true. In the UK, it's very unusual for a phone to be exclusive to a particular carrier, and phones are frequently sold unlocked. However, they're still subsidized - you get a free phone if you sign a contract with a carrier. The carriers still benefit from this kind of deal, because even if the phone is unlocked, and you _could_ use it on another carrier, why would you if you're already paying monthly fees to the carrier you've signed a contract with? The subsidized-phone model is compatible with a much less restrictive marketplace than the US one.
if anything, the AppStore is in violation of the GPL, and *not* the author.
However, if the author agreed to the restrictions imposed by the AppStore, they may themselves be in violation of the GPL. Section 7 says:
If...conditions are imposed on you...that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.
I don't know what, if any, conditions are imposed on iPhone developers, but it is at least possible that, if the AppStore violates the GPL, an author who puts GPLed software on the AppStore would also be in violation.
It is, instead, an interface to a database of facts that were input by the Wolfram people. Since they most likely hold copyright to the input data.
But the input data is just facts, isn't it? You can't copyright mere data and, in the US, you can't copyright collections of data either. So I don't think the Wolfram people do have copyright on the input to Wolfram Alpha.
I haven't gone and looked at the code, but a program like Firefox that's written in C++ shouldn't be vulnerable to this - C++ strings are not NULL terminated, so shouldn't be vulnerable to this exploit. Either the Firefox developers are using C strings, which they shouldn't do, or they're incorrectly constructing their C++ strings.
It does make a statement about the validness for using such a language today
The odd thing is that Firefox is written in C++, and C++ strings aren't NULL terminated, they store the string length alongside the string. I wonder why Firefox is using C strings when it doesn't need to.
The problem with that is that you're now limiting the maximum length of your string to whatever the witdth of the number at the beginning is.
But the length of strings is limited anyway by the hardware; there's always going to be a maximum size to any addressable array. If the width of the number is of type size_t, that is, large enough to store the size of any possible array on the hardware in question, storing the length of a string with the string doesn't introduce any limit on the string's length.