Contrary to (unpopular) opinion, source code is not like a book. Binray [sic] code is like a book: its a finished, usable product. Should authors be forced to disclose their notes, the design of their plot, their character sketches? No. How about their "formula" for writing a captivating novel?
Source code is like a book.
I can read a book. I can page through it, and think about how the author uses various techniques to achieve the ends that are sought.
I might, on occasion, wonder about the author's thought process, but I know that there are probably notes that I'm not reading that the author made, but decided not to include directly in the book because they wouldn't help achieve the ends that the author wanted to achieve.
I can read source code. I can page through it, and think about how the author uses various techniques to achieve the ends that are sought.
I might, on occasion, wonder about the author's thought process, but I know that there are almost certainly bits of source that I'm not reading that the author made, but decided not to include directly in the source because they wouldn't help achieve the ends that the author wanted to achieve.
Okay, I admit, there are programmers (I'm infamous for this) who sometimes sit down and write a program straight up, all the way through, no edits. However, these are invariably very short programs.
I also write short stories the same way sometimes. No notes: the whole story is what I thought of when I typed it up.
Anything big, though, either in writing or in programming, and there are bits that don't go in.
Your conception of patents does not reflect their current use. If Unreal patented their advance, they would still be in violation of id's hypothetical patents. In this case, the two companies would cross-license their patents, which the large companies do on a regular basis, which doesn't help the little guy.
This is a problem of intellectual property law in general. We've all seen how copyright law gets manipulated to serve the interests of large corporations, patent law's no different. However, while I acknowledge this problem with both structures, I also think that the real problem is more of a structural problem with the legal system: the little guy can't get effective legal help.
What's the difference between algorithms and code?
As you point out, in the real world, none (or very little). In the copyright world, however, the main type of copyrighted code that's commercially available is binary executables. It's the binary executables that I'm against copyright protection for; I think that if a corporation decides to release its computer programs in binary form alone, it should be forced to seek patent protection for its programs. Releasing programs in binary form alone allows the copyright holder to claim intellectual property protection without making any reasonable disclosure of the article. This hits at the foundation of intellectual property; every other form of intellectual property requires some kind of reasonable disclosure in order to get protection. Why are binary programs different?
Cars are not patented. Individual technological advances that are used in cars are patented. For example, suppose somebody comes up with a technique that allows an automobile to be manufactured with a more responsive steering wheel ("power steering"). This technique can be patented.
Also, intent is totally irrelevant to patent law (unlike copyright, where intent is actually fundamental). If you use a patented technique, you're infringing the patent, regardless of whether you meant to or not, or even if you'd never heard of the patent.
An automobile is a sum of a large number of parts. I believe the internal combustion engine was the main patented article in the early days of the automobile, although I haven't done a patent search so don't quote me.:) The ICE was the main advance that made the automobile possible; other parts of it, like wheels, chairs and steering, had been around for a long time.
In order for somebody to patent The Car, they'd have to come up with something where all the parts were new. This is pretty unlikely.
Patents don't protect ideas. No intellectual property can be held in a simple idea. Patents do, however, come the closest.
Patents protect implementations of ideas. There are several kinds of patents; the ones that apply most commonly in computer software are patents on techniques, where the patented invention usually consists of a series of steps that the user has to take in order to perform the actions.
Also, let's be clear about what happens in the world of patents that engineers live in. If id gained a patent on, for example, true 3D game architectures (unlikely but possible, given their achievements in the past), and Unreal managed to develop an advance that was really important in the 3D world, they could patent the advance - without consent from id, and even without a license for the underlying patent of id's. id would then be forced to negotiate with Unreal, or be blocked from using the technique that Unreal developed.
You appear to overly obsess with code. I think algorithms are way more important. Monkeys can make code once the algorithm is worked out; perhaps this is where we disagree, and if so, prolly this argument is over.:)
Correct on Half-Life (and the legion of other games that licensed one or another of the Quake engines).
Possibly incorrect on Unreal. Patents protect against reverse engineering. If you rebuild the program, using the same techniques, then you infringe on the patent.
Patents mostly protect the techniques used by the invention. If Unreal used a patented technique that Carmack or id software held the patent on, then they'd be hit with patent licensing fees.
The big difference here of course is the timeframe: 20 years, plus there's a requirement for public disclosure of the patent.
it may be just my player, but it's not very shock resistant. i use it at the gym, and if it gets tapped with even more than a slight touch it jumps songs and stops playing (even when locked). Maybe a lose wire somewhere, but it's always done it.
I used to have this problem. I figured it out and it's stopped happening.
The problem is that the battery gets jostled and loses its connection. That's why the Rio dies even if it's locked; no power = no power.:)
The solution is to make sure the battery is absolutely secure in the case. You know the little cord-like bit that sticks out in the battery slot? When you put a new battery in, pull it up and wrap it around the battery. Works like a charm, and converts the Rio into something suitable for rollerblading and other high-energy activities.
BTW - 10 hours out of a single battery? You must be less deaf than me; I've never gotten anywhere over four or five.:)
In the absence of copyright, how exactly do you think games would get written?
We're only talking about copyright for computer programming code here. Most games have significant non-code parts, i.e. artwork and so on. Games like Myst (to use an extreme example) would barely notice if their code was no longer copyrighted, as all the copyrighted artwork would still be there.
How would John Carmack earn a living?
Now, that's a valid point. Carmack's games are an exception to the rule above. However, I've thought of this too. Read my argument here.
Its really upsetting to watch a 14 year old tell their parents that if they aren't allowed to go to an all night boy/girl party, they (the kid) will call the police and say the parents are abusing them.
Let's analyze this. Why is it upsetting?
The parents don't want their 14-year-old offspring to be possibly having sex.
The youth in question are willing to blackmail their parents into allowing entry to a potentially sexual situation.
Okay, so now, let's analyze a little further. Why are the youth willing to go so far in pursuit of what they obviously consider to be normal social interaction?
There's the rub. The 14-year-old doesn't think there's anything wrong or even unusual about 14-year-olds spending the night out in the company of friends of both genders.
Now, let's look at a little history.
How long ago, in Western civilization, was it considered normal - by those legally defined as adults - for 14-year-olds to participate in sexual activity?
Why... about 150-200 years, at the most. If you go back that far (particularly if you look at frontier societies), 14-year-olds were getting married. It's worthwhile to note that in Romeo & Juliet, the lovers (who get married and have sex) are roughly 14.
Now, how old is Western civilization?
Conclusion: During the vast majority of Western history, normal 14-year-olds have been having sex, or at least seriously thinking about it.
Of course, it hasn't been premarital sex, by and large (well not that anyone would own up to it anyway), but that's quite a different issue.
No, the real problem is the modern post-Victorian illusions of parents. Human society has changed a lot in a thousand years, but the basic instincts haven't been modified really at all, and there's a conflict.
McAfee and Norton dominate the market, though. IBM's software division has a bit of a history of giving up on products that fail to take a significant market share, even if they're still somewhat profitable; e.g. OS/2. IBM AV got canned for that reason, I think.
Also, IBM AV was mostly marketed as a part of PC-DOS, which got tossed from the market by Win95.
You only have to look at events like the Jamie Bulger killing to realise that our nation is sliding down the same slope as the US when it comes to atrocities commited by young people (Columbine killings to name one).
Great, I'm glad to hear it.
Youth crime is down throughout North America. You don't see it on the news, of course; announcements that "The World is Getting Better" don't sell very many papers.
However, on to the effectiveness of the proposed measures. Speaking as a former victim of bullies, I doubt very much whether a system like this would have helped me very much. I in fact did accumulate a rather large permanent record through my school days; however, it was mostly filled with things teachers wanted to believe rather than the truth (which was often remarkably obvious; there are teachers who apparently really believe that I attacked groups of five or six other children by myself, unarmed, with many of these children being several years older than me, at recess every single day - right).
The reason, IMO, youth crime is down these days is not because of measures such as this British one to track children, but rather because of a rise in simple common sense: when a 10-year-old and four of his friends are fighting with an eight-year-old, it's reasonable to suppose that the eight-year-old did not initiate the battle (which is what they were; I'd been to the emergency ward at the local hospital several times before I turned fifteen, and hospitalized some kids myself as well) but rather take the more appropriate action of punishing the group, even if the teachers don't like the eight-year-old.
It's also inappropriate for teachers to give students time off from class for the express purpose of rounding up other students to beat somebody up. (Okay, that only happened to me once.)
It's basic principles like these that could have stopped Columbine.
There's another reason why sysadmins go for the password-free, no-security approach. It's easier, in the short term, yes, but there's also remote administration. Many sysadmins either (a) refuse to give out passwords to the people who actually use/run the servers, or (b) make those passwords empty so that they can control the machines from somewhere else in the organization without fear of interference from the local users. Going with route (a) is better from a security standpoint, but tends to infuriate the local users; if you leave the password empty, then as long as the local users aren't clued enough to turn it on themselves you're fine.
IBM AV kept track of program code file sizes. If a.com or.exe got a little bit bigger, it flagged it and went "Hey! Shall I kill?"
The reason it wasn't so popular was that it wasn't very keen on cleaning viruses so much as stomping them. It usually wanted you to reinstall software that had been infected; its main clean command was del *.*:)
If McAfee is operates only on signatures, then obviously there is no need to impersonate Magic Lantern to evade it: any original code (that doesn't match existing signatures) will do.
Correct. This is one of the major problems with virus scanners, they tend to be vulnerable to The New Virus.
And since any code that does something more than Magic Lantern must necessarily be different from Magic Lantern, McAfee can write a signature for it after it's discovered. So, against signature-based defenses, impersonating Magic Lantern buys you exactly nothing. Is there anything I'm missing here?
Yes. McAfee calculates the signature from the code. Presumably, the way it works around Magic Lantern is by some code that looks like this:
if virusSignature == magicLantern then return(1);
else doCleanVirus();
Therefore, if an enterprising virus writer can synthesize a virus that does something different, but causes McAfee to detect the same signature, it's happycakes time.
That said, McAfee has always sucked donkey donuts. Norton is better; however, the only PC-based antivirus product I ever really had a lot of respect for was IBM AntiVirus, partly because it was the only one that could detect virii it didn't already know about. Sigh. It's long gone though.
Derivative works require permission of the copyright holder, at least under Anglo-American copyright law.
They get separate copyright protection on their own as well - so in effect what you have is a copyrighted article that requires permission from both the person who created the derivative work and the person who created the original.
It's not legal in Canada to intercept DirecTV. It's just hard for DirecTV to prosecute Canadian pirates.
If you receive a broadcast signal in Canada that hasn't been approved by the CRTC, you're violating the Broadcasting Act. The problem for DirecTV is that the CRTC has to prosecute under the Act; since they don't have a legal right to broadcast in Canada, it's hard for them to sue under the Copyright Act, although pirates violate it as well. Unfortunately for DirecTV, Canada isn't Singapore, and in order to go after pirates under the Copyright Act, they have to show damages, usually in the form of lost revenue.
They want a view of the scrum from the underneath. One of the problems with rugby on tv is that it's really hard to follow what's going on in the scrum.
So if there's a camera on the ball itself, you get to see inside the scrum.
Which unfortunately will probably mean quite a few crotch shots:)
Hmmm, perhaps this will help boost rugby's female viewership. (More likely, it'll boost women's rugby. Huh.)
It's really incredibly small. The thing about helmet cams is that they don't have to worry about throwing the helmet balance off; a rugby ball has to have a specific balance, or the rugby players will get even more hurt than usual:)
The consequence of this is that the rugby ballcam has to be really, really lightweight, so the players won't notice it being there.
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Source code is like a book.
I can read a book. I can page through it, and think about how the author uses various techniques to achieve the ends that are sought.
I might, on occasion, wonder about the author's thought process, but I know that there are probably notes that I'm not reading that the author made, but decided not to include directly in the book because they wouldn't help achieve the ends that the author wanted to achieve.
I can read source code. I can page through it, and think about how the author uses various techniques to achieve the ends that are sought.
I might, on occasion, wonder about the author's thought process, but I know that there are almost certainly bits of source that I'm not reading that the author made, but decided not to include directly in the source because they wouldn't help achieve the ends that the author wanted to achieve.
Okay, I admit, there are programmers (I'm infamous for this) who sometimes sit down and write a program straight up, all the way through, no edits. However, these are invariably very short programs.
I also write short stories the same way sometimes. No notes: the whole story is what I thought of when I typed it up.
Anything big, though, either in writing or in programming, and there are bits that don't go in.
The rendering code is code.
The visual image (say you save it as a JPEG) is art.
If you don't save the visual image, it's not fixed & there's no copyright.
Pop a Myst disc in your micro sometime. All the .mov files that pepper the thing are art. The tiny little shreds of binary are code.
This isn't rocket science.
This is a problem of intellectual property law in general. We've all seen how copyright law gets manipulated to serve the interests of large corporations, patent law's no different. However, while I acknowledge this problem with both structures, I also think that the real problem is more of a structural problem with the legal system: the little guy can't get effective legal help.
As you point out, in the real world, none (or very little). In the copyright world, however, the main type of copyrighted code that's commercially available is binary executables. It's the binary executables that I'm against copyright protection for; I think that if a corporation decides to release its computer programs in binary form alone, it should be forced to seek patent protection for its programs. Releasing programs in binary form alone allows the copyright holder to claim intellectual property protection without making any reasonable disclosure of the article. This hits at the foundation of intellectual property; every other form of intellectual property requires some kind of reasonable disclosure in order to get protection. Why are binary programs different?
Once again, completely incorrect.
Cars are not patented. Individual technological advances that are used in cars are patented. For example, suppose somebody comes up with a technique that allows an automobile to be manufactured with a more responsive steering wheel ("power steering"). This technique can be patented.
Also, intent is totally irrelevant to patent law (unlike copyright, where intent is actually fundamental). If you use a patented technique, you're infringing the patent, regardless of whether you meant to or not, or even if you'd never heard of the patent.
An automobile is a sum of a large number of parts. I believe the internal combustion engine was the main patented article in the early days of the automobile, although I haven't done a patent search so don't quote me. :) The ICE was the main advance that made the automobile possible; other parts of it, like wheels, chairs and steering, had been around for a long time.
In order for somebody to patent The Car, they'd have to come up with something where all the parts were new. This is pretty unlikely.
This is true.
However, I have rollerbladed in Victoria (B.C.) - a city of great rolling, er, mountains.
Excitement in traffic. The CD player I had then would generally just stop whenever I started going down hills and exceeded a certain speed. ;)
Patents don't protect ideas. No intellectual property can be held in a simple idea. Patents do, however, come the closest.
Patents protect implementations of ideas. There are several kinds of patents; the ones that apply most commonly in computer software are patents on techniques, where the patented invention usually consists of a series of steps that the user has to take in order to perform the actions.
Also, let's be clear about what happens in the world of patents that engineers live in. If id gained a patent on, for example, true 3D game architectures (unlikely but possible, given their achievements in the past), and Unreal managed to develop an advance that was really important in the 3D world, they could patent the advance - without consent from id, and even without a license for the underlying patent of id's. id would then be forced to negotiate with Unreal, or be blocked from using the technique that Unreal developed.
You appear to overly obsess with code. I think algorithms are way more important. Monkeys can make code once the algorithm is worked out; perhaps this is where we disagree, and if so, prolly this argument is over. :)
Correct on Half-Life (and the legion of other games that licensed one or another of the Quake engines).
Possibly incorrect on Unreal. Patents protect against reverse engineering. If you rebuild the program, using the same techniques, then you infringe on the patent.
Patents mostly protect the techniques used by the invention. If Unreal used a patented technique that Carmack or id software held the patent on, then they'd be hit with patent licensing fees.
The big difference here of course is the timeframe: 20 years, plus there's a requirement for public disclosure of the patent.
I used to have this problem. I figured it out and it's stopped happening.
The problem is that the battery gets jostled and loses its connection. That's why the Rio dies even if it's locked; no power = no power. :)
The solution is to make sure the battery is absolutely secure in the case. You know the little cord-like bit that sticks out in the battery slot? When you put a new battery in, pull it up and wrap it around the battery. Works like a charm, and converts the Rio into something suitable for rollerblading and other high-energy activities.
BTW - 10 hours out of a single battery? You must be less deaf than me; I've never gotten anywhere over four or five. :)
You drive.
You don't, for example, rollerblade.
Want to find out why some of us are solid-state only? Try rollerblades. :)
We're only talking about copyright for computer programming code here. Most games have significant non-code parts, i.e. artwork and so on. Games like Myst (to use an extreme example) would barely notice if their code was no longer copyrighted, as all the copyrighted artwork would still be there.
Now, that's a valid point. Carmack's games are an exception to the rule above. However, I've thought of this too. Read my argument here.
Let's analyze this. Why is it upsetting?
Okay, so now, let's analyze a little further. Why are the youth willing to go so far in pursuit of what they obviously consider to be normal social interaction?
There's the rub. The 14-year-old doesn't think there's anything wrong or even unusual about 14-year-olds spending the night out in the company of friends of both genders.
Now, let's look at a little history.
How long ago, in Western civilization, was it considered normal - by those legally defined as adults - for 14-year-olds to participate in sexual activity?
Why... about 150-200 years, at the most. If you go back that far (particularly if you look at frontier societies), 14-year-olds were getting married. It's worthwhile to note that in Romeo & Juliet, the lovers (who get married and have sex) are roughly 14.
Now, how old is Western civilization?
Conclusion: During the vast majority of Western history, normal 14-year-olds have been having sex, or at least seriously thinking about it.
Of course, it hasn't been premarital sex, by and large (well not that anyone would own up to it anyway), but that's quite a different issue.
No, the real problem is the modern post-Victorian illusions of parents. Human society has changed a lot in a thousand years, but the basic instincts haven't been modified really at all, and there's a conflict.
McAfee and Norton dominate the market, though. IBM's software division has a bit of a history of giving up on products that fail to take a significant market share, even if they're still somewhat profitable; e.g. OS/2. IBM AV got canned for that reason, I think.
Also, IBM AV was mostly marketed as a part of PC-DOS, which got tossed from the market by Win95.
Great, I'm glad to hear it.
Youth crime is down throughout North America. You don't see it on the news, of course; announcements that "The World is Getting Better" don't sell very many papers.
However, on to the effectiveness of the proposed measures. Speaking as a former victim of bullies, I doubt very much whether a system like this would have helped me very much. I in fact did accumulate a rather large permanent record through my school days; however, it was mostly filled with things teachers wanted to believe rather than the truth (which was often remarkably obvious; there are teachers who apparently really believe that I attacked groups of five or six other children by myself, unarmed, with many of these children being several years older than me, at recess every single day - right).
The reason, IMO, youth crime is down these days is not because of measures such as this British one to track children, but rather because of a rise in simple common sense: when a 10-year-old and four of his friends are fighting with an eight-year-old, it's reasonable to suppose that the eight-year-old did not initiate the battle (which is what they were; I'd been to the emergency ward at the local hospital several times before I turned fifteen, and hospitalized some kids myself as well) but rather take the more appropriate action of punishing the group, even if the teachers don't like the eight-year-old.
It's also inappropriate for teachers to give students time off from class for the express purpose of rounding up other students to beat somebody up. (Okay, that only happened to me once.)
It's basic principles like these that could have stopped Columbine.
There's another reason why sysadmins go for the password-free, no-security approach. It's easier, in the short term, yes, but there's also remote administration. Many sysadmins either (a) refuse to give out passwords to the people who actually use/run the servers, or (b) make those passwords empty so that they can control the machines from somewhere else in the organization without fear of interference from the local users. Going with route (a) is better from a security standpoint, but tends to infuriate the local users; if you leave the password empty, then as long as the local users aren't clued enough to turn it on themselves you're fine.
IBM AV kept track of program code file sizes. If a .com or .exe got a little bit bigger, it flagged it and went "Hey! Shall I kill?"
The reason it wasn't so popular was that it wasn't very keen on cleaning viruses so much as stomping them. It usually wanted you to reinstall software that had been infected; its main clean command was del *.* :)
Does anybody know what the subnets for fbi.gov are? It'd be pretty easy for people to block outgoing connections to them...
Correct. This is one of the major problems with virus scanners, they tend to be vulnerable to The New Virus.
Yes. McAfee calculates the signature from the code. Presumably, the way it works around Magic Lantern is by some code that looks like this:
if virusSignature == magicLantern then return(1);
else doCleanVirus();
Therefore, if an enterprising virus writer can synthesize a virus that does something different, but causes McAfee to detect the same signature, it's happycakes time.
That said, McAfee has always sucked donkey donuts. Norton is better; however, the only PC-based antivirus product I ever really had a lot of respect for was IBM AntiVirus, partly because it was the only one that could detect virii it didn't already know about. Sigh. It's long gone though.
Derivative works require permission of the copyright holder, at least under Anglo-American copyright law.
They get separate copyright protection on their own as well - so in effect what you have is a copyrighted article that requires permission from both the person who created the derivative work and the person who created the original.
I doubt it's any of those three, although C-Net is probably up there.
This is the biggest site I know of. However, it's also one of the most poorly organized, with probably terabytes of lost documents.
So, will we start seeing -post releases?
Heh. I can see it now. 2.4.15-post1 :)
It's not legal in Canada to intercept DirecTV. It's just hard for DirecTV to prosecute Canadian pirates.
If you receive a broadcast signal in Canada that hasn't been approved by the CRTC, you're violating the Broadcasting Act. The problem for DirecTV is that the CRTC has to prosecute under the Act; since they don't have a legal right to broadcast in Canada, it's hard for them to sue under the Copyright Act, although pirates violate it as well. Unfortunately for DirecTV, Canada isn't Singapore, and in order to go after pirates under the Copyright Act, they have to show damages, usually in the form of lost revenue.
That's actually the opposite of what they want.
They want a view of the scrum from the underneath. One of the problems with rugby on tv is that it's really hard to follow what's going on in the scrum.
So if there's a camera on the ball itself, you get to see inside the scrum.
Which unfortunately will probably mean quite a few crotch shots :)
Hmmm, perhaps this will help boost rugby's female viewership. (More likely, it'll boost women's rugby. Huh.)
It's really incredibly small. The thing about helmet cams is that they don't have to worry about throwing the helmet balance off; a rugby ball has to have a specific balance, or the rugby players will get even more hurt than usual :)
The consequence of this is that the rugby ballcam has to be really, really lightweight, so the players won't notice it being there.
Why does it have to be copyright?
See my argument here.
Let's face it here: RMS is a computer programmer. He's not a musician or a moviemaker.
He's interested in computer programs. He's never spoken out about the effects of IP on other industries. I suspect he doesn't care.
Wow. You believe in eternal copyright protection. Sonny Bono would love you.
You also believe in protecting private corporations against anything that makes them look bad.
Wow. Ever hear of free speech? :)