Blizzard is only protecting their IP which they rightfully own. Freecraft's goal was to make a free version of War2 that plays exactly the same.
Like it or not, they are still ripping off war2 completely. And War2 is still a product that Blizzard sells and supports on battle.net so they have a vested interest in protecting the IP of this game (so you cant use the "rom" argument here its an old game that isnt sold anymore)
This is an outrageous attitude. The "Intellectual Property" associated with Warcraft is a copyright on the Warcraft code itself. Freecraft is a clean-room, reverse engineering of Warcraft functionality. Yes it has the same gameplay, yes it has same units, it is a functional reimplementation. There is no suggestion that any of the Freecraft team has seen and/or copied any the original Warcraft code.
This is exactly the same as Phoenix Technologies reverse-engineering IBM's PC BIOS in the mid 1980s and it is permitted in almost all the world's jurisidictions, even the DMCA.
Blizzard's behaviour is nothing more than the deliberate, and sadly all to common, attempt to restrict consumer choice by intimidationg smaller competitors.
> Up until recently I have had no moral qualms downloading > to my heart's content from Kazaa, but lately I've been > having a few guilty tugs at my morality whenever I double > click on a semi-popular song.
Just thinking out loud here: do you think the RIAA get little tugs at their morality everytime we shell out $18 for the latest semi-popular CD? I bet they do.
The situation that made the double jeopardy clause seem so important to the framers of the US Constitution was that oppressive governments can and do repeatedly prosecute people until they reach the verdict they wanted...It was an issue that people were willing to kill or die over, and not some absract ideal that would be nice to have.
Nobody in America ever killed and died over double jeopardy. Pre-1776 the colonists were living under English Common Law, which didn't allow double jeopardy either. Like most of the concepts in the US Constitution it was just adopted more or less directly from English Law.
Atomic weapons just do not simply "go off" unless the bomb were specifically armed, and there would be no reason to keep an armed atomic weapon in the hold of a ship.
On the contrary, one of the most challenging parts of building a nuclear weapon is making sure that it doesn't do just that. If you gather enough fissionable material in one place it will "go off" on it's own.
This is because an atom bomb is triggered by firing neutrons at uranium-235, and uranium-235 sheds neutrons itself while it is just sitting there. This is a big problem for the factory that produces the U235, as the place will blow up if you get too much of it together, be that in a filter, a valve, or the the warehouse. You can't even keep it in adjacent rooms because neutrons go through walls.
The critical mass for a piece of Uranium 235 in the right (wrong!) configuration is about 15kg. It is quite believable to see that coming together unintentionally.
> Linux makes a decent server OS and a passable > desktop OS. The problem is that Linux's desktop > design is anything but unified, and has a lot of > 15-year-old cruft in it.
I agree, we should aim definately aim to be more unified on the desktop and lose the cruft, just like Microsoft does. How quickly can we port DDE, OLE, OCX, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, ASP, and.NET?
This about Philips and Sony deliberatly excluding MS from a business area they are interested in.
It might look like MS walked away clear from the antitrust case, but this is the real damage that was done. The trial dragged up all sorts of things MS had been up to, it has been reported widely - in the techie news, of course - but also in places that the suits read. Now world+dog knows what sort of man billg is to do business with, we all now what he done to the PC market. The vendors are just bill's box-shifters, living on razor-thin margins, while MS exceeds its own earnings expectations - during a recession. This is the reason Passport fell on it's face, this is the reason Nokia and all the others have frozen MS out of the phone market, and this is the reason that Philips and Sony are pre-empting them on DRM.
However, I agree with your central point that Linux does still rely heavily on one man. What happens when he stops running the show is an interesting question...
That's easy. The new Kernel King will be Alan Cox, or possibly one of the other members of ZZ-Top. -- Nick "Hallo. This is Beel Gates, und I say WEENdoze".
> Also it may also encourage your stock picks on your 6 > month portfolio rebalance. I mean I wouldn't bet on any > comercial company in a product space to compete directly > with microsoft.
My money is on Nokia. For desktop software, you're right, nobody competes successfully with Microsoft. The desktop is Microsoft's front lawn and only Redmond tanks are permitted to park there. But the further you stray from that, the less hold MS have. They do OK in the server space, for example, but nothing like the stranglehold they have on the desktop. Mobile phones are even further away. Sure, people recognise the MS brand and that makes it easy for them to leverage themselves into new markets (the name has traction, as the marketroids say) but Microsoft cellphones? Up against *Nokia*? -- Nick "Hallo. This is Beel Gates, und I say... WEENdoze".
> Given that half of the planet is illuminated at any time,
> and assuming (enter truly massive error margin) for the
> sake of argument that the entire half is recieving full
> insolation, that means that the total energy striking the
> earth over 24 hours is:
> 5.52E21 Watts.
> (Damn!)
> So, if the day is 1/10,000 of a second longer, we take
> on an additional 6.39E12 Watts.
Except - the night time is longer, too. So net change is... wait for it - ZERO!
> Um. No. I vehemently disagree with you. Global Warming is bunk.
> We only have about 100 years worth of weather data. HOW IN THE
> WORLD CAN YOU SAY HUMANS CAUSE THIS WITH THIS DATA! It isn't
> enough!
But there is enough data for you to say it's bunk, right?
Wouldn't you say the huge risks involved suggest caution? That we consider something less than a memo from God as grounds for action? All scientific studies contain greater or lesser elements of doubt, the question is how much certainty do we need before we act?
BTW, the original poster is right, it is only in the US that anyone seriously disputes the reality of manmade climate change. Even the Toxic Texan has stopped denying it, even if he doesn't have any serious plans to tackle it, yet.
--
Nick
"Hallo. This is Beel Gates und I say... WEENdoze"
The EU accord basically makes it illegal for me to sell somebody else a mailing list I may have built.
Yup. Just like it's illegal to sell that MP3 collection you may have built.
There's a pretty strong case that such a law would violate the First Amendment, kids.
Just think of it as being like copyright - personal data is owned by the person it describes, you can't distribute it without the owner's permission, and copyright is a clearly defined exception to the First Amendment.
I think the point being made is that the EU directive would require the U.S. to pass laws violating its own constitution - I've never really considered it this way, but it's not a bad argument, IMO.
The First Amendment is not absolute and has lots of exceptions, this would just be another one. For example, you could just think of it as copyright - personal data is owned by the person it describes. Copyright is a well established exception.
American companies are forbidden to bribe foreign governemtns, etc. This is actually a matter of dispute with some European countries whose companies are not thusly restricted.
And Microsoft is such good, law-abiding corporate citizen, right?
Well the English governement at the time would have killed Tom Paine had they been able to catch him
They did catch him. Thomas Paine was an Englishman who arrived in America in 1774. He helped stir up a revolution, and then in 1787 he went back to England. He was arrested, etc., found guilty of sedition, and declared an outlaw.
So he went to France and helped whip up a revolution there.
Without armed citizens, what threat can be held against the government if they decide to NOT obey an election?
Picture this: Tony Blair declares himself President-for-Life, and tells us the election is cancelled. What happens?
The Queen immediately dissolves Parliament (one of her very few powers). Tony Blair resists, but the Metropolitan Police, the House of Commons Police, the Army and all the other MPS all owe loyalty to the Queen and not the PM, so there isn't much he can do.
The election is held, the Queen invites the winner to form a new government. Tony Blair goes to prison.
Much more civilised than an armed uprising, don't you think?
My understanding is that SDMI will only trust hardware, not software.
That, to use a technical expression, is bollocks. Firstly, execution in software is mathematically equivalent to execution in hardware, in other words there is no way SDMI can tell the difference between a hardware player and a software player.
Secondly, your hardware and software executes the SDMI data, not the other way around, so if the SDMI data contains something like "If (player_is_software) then refuse_to_play" your software player can easily choose to ignore it.
The SDMI people have the fundamental problem of untrusted hardware. What they are trying to do, decrypt something securely on someone else's system, can't be done without control of the hardware.
Portability isn't something that should be left up
to the individual programmer. It's something that should be imposed by the language itself, like
top-down design and object-oriented behavior.
But that's the Java philosophy. What would be the point of Perl imitating it when Java already fills that niche?
When you listen to that song, the player could tell BMG.com you are listening to that song, and lock out someone from playing it on your computer at home. Is this really so unfair?
Fair doesn't come in to it. What you are suggesting is technically unenforcable. I can run MP3s on any player I like, including an open source one modified to tell BMG anything I want it to tell them.
Weren't you paying attention during the SDMI thing? Secure data is only possible on trusted hardware. Secure music on an open Internet is a technical impossibility, a logical contradiction.
The U.S. does not have an official language for a reason.
I hear this all the time and its clearly bollocks (US trans: untrue). The official language of any country is the language you use to communicate with the government. In the US that is English. It doesn't mean "everybody must use this language for all purposes".
The bit of the UK I live in (Wales) has 2 official languages, English and Welsh. All government documents carry both languages, all the roads signs are bilingual, officials can address the National Assembly in either language.
OTOH, the shops, businesses, restuarants hardly ever speak Welsh, and if you only spoke Welsh you'd have great difficulty making yourself understood most of the time, only a fraction will accept a cheque written in Welsh, for example, and they have stickers on the window to highlight how unusual they are.
When the US government writes to you, sends you a form to fill in, what language is it in? What would they do if you replied in Vietnamese?
The US has an official language, the language that it conducts it's government in, and that language is English. Government documents and communications are in English, debates in Congress are in English, all the signs it puts up are in English.
You don't need a line in the Constitution that goes "Oh BTW, the official language is English" to make it true. And if you had such a line it wouldn't change anything.
Richie can't win....if RMS sues as he should be, then no one will use the GPL. If RMS doesn't sue, people will use the GPL but RMS sells out on his principles.
I don't think you've accurately reflected Stallman's thinking. This is no dilemma in RMS-land, where principles always win over practicalities. Just look at his attitude to the Open Source movement, he recognises their approach is more practical but rejects it as unprincipled.
And it is lucky for us. The only reason there exist any alternatives to closed, proprietary software is because he is such a stubborn, uncompromising bastard.
Here's a clue for you: Microsoft isn't the embodiment of all evil. In fact most of the software license ideas that they consider weren't originally their own ideas.
Just look at the difference in quality between public domain software and licensed software. When things are in the public domain they are invariably of a far lower quality than equivalent things in the commercial domain. Without financial reward a lot of work would simply not be done, and we'd all be poorer for the loss of a huge part of our cultural heritage.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an outrageous attitude. The "Intellectual Property" associated with Warcraft is a copyright on the Warcraft code itself. Freecraft is a clean-room, reverse engineering of Warcraft functionality. Yes it has the same gameplay, yes it has same units, it is a functional reimplementation. There is no suggestion that any of the Freecraft team has seen and/or copied any the original Warcraft code.
This is exactly the same as Phoenix Technologies reverse-engineering IBM's PC BIOS in the mid 1980s and it is permitted in almost all the world's jurisidictions, even the DMCA.
Blizzard's behaviour is nothing more than the deliberate, and sadly all to common, attempt to restrict consumer choice by intimidationg smaller competitors.
> Up until recently I have had no moral qualms downloading
> to my heart's content from Kazaa, but lately I've been
> having a few guilty tugs at my morality whenever I double
> click on a semi-popular song.
Just thinking out loud here: do you think the RIAA get little tugs at their morality everytime we shell out $18 for the latest semi-popular CD? I bet they do.
The situation that made the double jeopardy clause seem so important to the framers of the US Constitution was that oppressive governments can and do repeatedly prosecute people until they reach the verdict they wanted...It was an issue that people were willing to kill or die over, and not some absract ideal that would be nice to have.
Nobody in America ever killed and died over double jeopardy. Pre-1776 the colonists were living under English Common Law, which didn't allow double jeopardy either. Like most of the concepts in the US Constitution it was just adopted more or less directly from English Law.
On the contrary, one of the most challenging parts of building a nuclear weapon is making sure that it doesn't do just that. If you gather enough fissionable material in one place it will "go off" on it's own.
This is because an atom bomb is triggered by firing neutrons at uranium-235, and uranium-235 sheds neutrons itself while it is just sitting there. This is a big problem for the factory that produces the U235, as the place will blow up if you get too much of it together, be that in a filter, a valve, or the the warehouse. You can't even keep it in adjacent rooms because neutrons go through walls.
The critical mass for a piece of Uranium 235 in the right (wrong!) configuration is about 15kg. It is quite believable to see that coming together unintentionally.
> Linux makes a decent server OS and a passable
.NET?
> desktop OS. The problem is that Linux's desktop
> design is anything but unified, and has a lot of
> 15-year-old cruft in it.
I agree, we should aim definately aim to be more unified on the desktop and lose the cruft, just like Microsoft does. How quickly can we port DDE, OLE, OCX, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, ASP, and
It might look like MS walked away clear from the antitrust case, but this is the real damage that was done. The trial dragged up all sorts of things MS had been up to, it has been reported widely - in the techie news, of course - but also in places that the suits read. Now world+dog knows what sort of man billg is to do business with, we all now what he done to the PC market. The vendors are just bill's box-shifters, living on razor-thin margins, while MS exceeds its own earnings expectations - during a recession. This is the reason Passport fell on it's face, this is the reason Nokia and all the others have frozen MS out of the phone market, and this is the reason that Philips and Sony are pre-empting them on DRM.
However, I agree with your central point that Linux does still rely heavily on one man. What happens when he stops running the show is an interesting question ...
That's easy. The new Kernel King will be Alan Cox, or possibly one of the other members of ZZ-Top.
--
Nick
"Hallo. This is Beel Gates, und I say WEENdoze".
> Also it may also encourage your stock picks on your 6
... WEENdoze".
> month portfolio rebalance. I mean I wouldn't bet on any
> comercial company in a product space to compete directly
> with microsoft.
My money is on Nokia. For desktop software, you're right, nobody competes successfully with Microsoft. The desktop is Microsoft's front lawn and only Redmond tanks are permitted to park there. But the further you stray from that, the less hold MS have. They do OK in the server space, for example, but nothing like the stranglehold they have on the desktop. Mobile phones are even further away. Sure, people recognise the MS brand and that makes it easy for them to leverage themselves into new markets (the name has traction, as the marketroids say) but Microsoft cellphones? Up against *Nokia*?
--
Nick
"Hallo. This is Beel Gates, und I say
> Given that half of the planet is illuminated at any time,
... wait for it - ZERO!
> and assuming (enter truly massive error margin) for the
> sake of argument that the entire half is recieving full
> insolation, that means that the total energy striking the
> earth over 24 hours is:
> 5.52E21 Watts.
> (Damn!)
> So, if the day is 1/10,000 of a second longer, we take
> on an additional 6.39E12 Watts.
Except - the night time is longer, too. So net change is
> Um. No. I vehemently disagree with you. Global Warming is bunk.
... WEENdoze"
> We only have about 100 years worth of weather data. HOW IN THE
> WORLD CAN YOU SAY HUMANS CAUSE THIS WITH THIS DATA! It isn't
> enough!
But there is enough data for you to say it's bunk, right?
Wouldn't you say the huge risks involved suggest caution? That we consider something less than a memo from God as grounds for action? All scientific studies contain greater or lesser elements of doubt, the question is how much certainty do we need before we act?
BTW, the original poster is right, it is only in the US that anyone seriously disputes the reality of manmade climate change. Even the Toxic Texan has stopped denying it, even if he doesn't have any serious plans to tackle it, yet.
--
Nick
"Hallo. This is Beel Gates und I say
Won't somebody please think of the children!
What worthwhile endeavor needs anonymity?
Gimme a break. Voting? Alcoholics?
Yup. Just like it's illegal to sell that MP3 collection you may have built.
There's a pretty strong case that such a law would violate the First Amendment, kids.
Just think of it as being like copyright - personal data is owned by the person it describes, you can't distribute it without the owner's permission, and copyright is a clearly defined exception to the First Amendment.
The First Amendment is not absolute and has lots of exceptions, this would just be another one. For example, you could just think of it as copyright - personal data is owned by the person it describes. Copyright is a well established exception.
American companies are forbidden to bribe foreign governemtns, etc. This is actually a matter of dispute with some European countries whose companies are not thusly restricted.
And Microsoft is such good, law-abiding corporate citizen, right?
Well the English governement at the time would have killed Tom Paine had they been able to catch him
They did catch him. Thomas Paine was an Englishman who arrived in America in 1774. He helped stir up a revolution, and then in 1787 he went back to England. He was arrested, etc., found guilty of sedition, and declared an outlaw.
So he went to France and helped whip up a revolution there.
Picture this: Tony Blair declares himself President-for-Life, and tells us the election is cancelled. What happens?
The Queen immediately dissolves Parliament (one of her very few powers). Tony Blair resists, but the Metropolitan Police, the House of Commons Police, the Army and all the other MPS all owe loyalty to the Queen and not the PM, so there isn't much he can do.
The election is held, the Queen invites the winner to form a new government. Tony Blair goes to prison.
Much more civilised than an armed uprising, don't you think?
That, to use a technical expression, is bollocks. Firstly, execution in software is mathematically equivalent to execution in hardware, in other words there is no way SDMI can tell the difference between a hardware player and a software player.
Secondly, your hardware and software executes the SDMI data, not the other way around, so if the SDMI data contains something like "If (player_is_software) then refuse_to_play" your software player can easily choose to ignore it.
The SDMI people have the fundamental problem of untrusted hardware. What they are trying to do, decrypt something securely on someone else's system, can't be done without control of the hardware.
But that's the Java philosophy. What would be the point of Perl imitating it when Java already fills that niche?
Does anyone else understand this gibberish?
Fair doesn't come in to it. What you are suggesting is technically unenforcable. I can run MP3s on any player I like, including an open source one modified to tell BMG anything I want it to tell them.
Weren't you paying attention during the SDMI thing? Secure data is only possible on trusted hardware. Secure music on an open Internet is a technical impossibility, a logical contradiction.
I hear this all the time and its clearly bollocks (US trans: untrue). The official language of any country is the language you use to communicate with the government. In the US that is English. It doesn't mean "everybody must use this language for all purposes".
The bit of the UK I live in (Wales) has 2 official languages, English and Welsh. All government documents carry both languages, all the roads signs are bilingual, officials can address the National Assembly in either language.
OTOH, the shops, businesses, restuarants hardly ever speak Welsh, and if you only spoke Welsh you'd have great difficulty making yourself understood most of the time, only a fraction will accept a cheque written in Welsh, for example, and they have stickers on the window to highlight how unusual they are.
When the US government writes to you, sends you a form to fill in, what language is it in? What would they do if you replied in Vietnamese? The US has an official language, the language that it conducts it's government in, and that language is English. Government documents and communications are in English, debates in Congress are in English, all the signs it puts up are in English.
You don't need a line in the Constitution that goes "Oh BTW, the official language is English" to make it true. And if you had such a line it wouldn't change anything.
When I'm on my break, I use company equipment to take a shit. If they start monitoring said usage, I'll be deeply unhappy.
I don't think you've accurately reflected Stallman's thinking. This is no dilemma in RMS-land, where principles always win over practicalities. Just look at his attitude to the Open Source movement, he recognises their approach is more practical but rejects it as unprincipled.
And it is lucky for us. The only reason there exist any alternatives to closed, proprietary software is because he is such a stubborn, uncompromising bastard.
LOL! Why did this seem inevitable?
Uh-oh. Now you're in trouble.
You don't come here often, do you?