Style or not, the article drips with flagrant wrongness. Implying that because billions of files are traded on kazaa every day means kazaa has money... why? Does the author of the article think that Kazaa takes a few cents off the top of every copyright infringing file sent for free?
You say that, but once they have this victory under their belt, they have a precedent: People who write software whose purpose is for sharing files can be sued for the behavior of their users.
Everyone should switch to using microsoft netmeeting's sharing capability to distribute their warez and pirated music.
So is this another sticker we're supposed to put on the screen too? If we combine this with the sticker on the battery, can we get hundreds of hours of battery life?
I played portal on the c64 many years ago. It was very intriguing at the time, but somehow I broke the plotline or made a mistake and couldn't get any more messages, and eventually forgot the whole thing.
I think you're wrong about these getting produced now though. Remember the graphic showing the overlap between Dickenson and GTA? I bet thats roughly the same diagram as for The Sims, and that would be the perfect environment for such a thing. Famous Poets expansion pack, anyone? Hell, I'd buy SimEinstein.
The only law I believe in is the zero-aggression principle
And yet you see no aggression in raising prices against a portion of society sliced in any arbitrary manner? Do you define aggression by any sane standard or do you only count sticks and stones?
Ok, so it is possible to obtain a free filing (from a company, not the IRS), as long as you manage to dodge the non-free links on every page (Remember how "easy" it was to download the free RealPlayer?). I just went to the H&R Block site from the IRS site, clicked on "Free File" and got a page telling me to create an account so I can try before I buy and see how I can save on my fees.
you don't have a mortgage, trade stocks, own a business, or have significant deductions.
All you have to do is RTFM. Seriously. You start with the simplest form you think you can get away with and read the docs from the irs.gov site. You read through to the part that says "if you xxxxxxxxx you must use form yyyy", then repeat with yyyy. Generally you'll file the same or a more complex form as you did last year, so if you used the 1040A last year, start with the 1040A this year.
Eventually you'll get to a point where it quits telling you to use a different form, and it starts telling you to attach other forms. There's an entire section at the beginning of the 1040 doc devoted to "where do I fill in these numbers".
It's not rocket science. When you pay a tax preparer to do the work for you, the only real service they can provide is simply in taking the time to filter through that big box of receipts you have and sorting them into can-deduct and cant-deduct piles.
The IRS is specifically banned from doing so, thanks to the lobbying effort of the tax preparation industry. It's just like the "free" electronic filing the IRS offers. The only way to use it is to buy a nonfree tax software product or go to a professional that has a product that can e-file.
In this environment, I think we're pretty lucky that the telefile option doesn't require us to call 1-900-HRB-FILE or something.
YOU ARE A DEVELOPER, IF YOU DON'T LIKE FIREFOX MAKE IT BETTER.
So if the reason I like Mozilla is because it has an IRC client, mailreader, DOM inspector, javascript debugger, and an HTML editor built in, do you think they'd let me add all that into firefox?:P
The problem is that the Mozilla suite fits the developer lifestyle. It does everything, and its all at your fingertips. It's the emacs of the browser world. Firefox was coded by the developers who went above and beyond scratching their own itch and said "hey, normal users who just want a webbrowser and nothing else are being turned off by the size of the suite, so lets make just a browser!"
There's even more options available to you if you back off the GPL. Do what PHP does and give away a fully functional photoshop plugin under the BSD license, and then sell a better version that has 20% more bang and 50% faster whiz (like Zope). You run the risk of someone else picking up your module and figuring out the improvements you made to make it better, but that'll keep you on your toes, and you can just repeat the process with a new module.
I can and have "threatened" to quit doing business with online stores who tried to sell me damaged computer parts. Should I be charged with antitrust violations? Why or why not?
Of course not, A) damaged goods are not an acceptable good and B) You're the buyer, you can do what you want anyway.
Now lets say you go to the computer store and the manager says "You own an AMD, so that video card in your hand will cost double" would you call that a fair trade practice? If they're the only computer store in the country?
So let me get this straight: You have a PhD and all you can do is write photoshop plugins, and you're pestering me about how to make a living?
You want an answer to how EVERYONE can make money with opensource? Why don't you get in the unemployment line and whine about it along with the rest of the guys living in their parents' basements who discovered that just because they got a programming degree doesn't mean the world owes them a job, because there isn't an answer.
Moving from making opensource software for fun to making opensource software for profit means switching from scratching your own itch to scratching someone else's. Maybe you should switch to contract work and make photoshop plugins for a fixed fee or charge hourly, with it written in your contract that whatever you develop will be available to everyone. Maybe you can write an opensource plugin, then charge to make it do what certain clients want it to do. Or hell, write opensource plugins then go teach computer art at a university or something.
a Perl Script of 500 lines. So they write a new program in C, that does the same thing in 5,000
What does the following Perl command do, how does it do it, and how many lines of C would it take you to produce the same output (not necessarially the same way!)
perl -le '(1x$_)!~/^(11+)\1+$/ && print for (2..100)'
Here, have a clue on the house. The people who run sendmail.com? It's CTO is the original author of sendmail. How's that for making money writing open source software?
As for redhat, are you saying that having someone who knows how to make 50 software packages work together across 2000 seats in an enterprise situation isn't worth the price of admission to Red Hat Enterprise? Do they need to have written all that software themselves in order to make money off of it? Apparently not, or they'd be out of business.
Not to mention you're completely overlooking the fact that they wrote rpm and dozens of other tools that make their job as support as well as the actual administrators' jobs that much easier.
If your code directly calls GPL code, then your code must be GPL. If it forks through a system call, its separate.
If GPL code directly calls your code, your license must be compatible with the GPL.
However there are millions of other open source licenses out there that doesn't have this problem, and if you've got a hardon for the GPL, you can write the "main" program using a modified GPL that states that proprietary plugins may be added to the code, then write proprietary plugins.
See www.redhat.com, see www.sendmail.com, and so on and so forth. These people sell opensource product support, and make money doing it. This doesn't require paying some "analyst" $50k+ to write you a white paper on how to make money.
And yet every actor and actress roleplays. Many authors roleplay, at least acting out what happens in their novels in their mind. In theory, elected representatives should roleplay in considering how a given piece of legislature will affect various different constituents.
Roleplaying is a normal everyday occurrence, its part of learning about anyone who isn't yourself or any job you don't currently do (like the Model United Nations groups in High School).
The only difference here is that these people wield maces and fireballs in their fantasy world instead of bayonets and bazookas. I have to wonder if these people had chosen to play an Avalon Hill wargame, if they'd have been given higher clearances.
There are several reasons I'm against software patents but not other patents:
1) Software patents tend to be applied for on individual ideas, rather than a single invention. Take a look at Photoshop's splash screen. How many patent numbers are there for that one single program? Not only that, there are dozens, if not hundreds of "ideas" that are embodied in every program. Sorting, for instance: whether you sort emails or high scores, if your program isn't a highschool assignment, it probably uses a sort. Or online help, the concept of which has been around for decades now, yet a company in Japan was just crushed with a patent on it.
2) The software lifecycle is shorter than the hardware lifecycle. How long have we been using combustion engines now? Fundamentally the basic engine hasn't changed in decades, but people have invented improvements. Have you seen improvements for the Commodore 64's GEOWrite program lately? Does it really need 20 years worth of protection?
3) Enforcability. Because honestly, the majority of software out there is closed source proprietary stuff, the only way to find out if infringement is actually occurring with a software patent is to sue the victim and force them to show you the source. If I patent an engine design and you start selling it, all I need to do is take apart your engine. If you have a patent on "doing X using A,B,C" and your competitor does X with 1,2,3 you have no way of knowing if they infringe on your patent or not except to sue them and let the courts sort it out. This is what leads to the huge messes like SCO demanding IBM's source, and probably why most companies settle even if they have a strong case: they don't want to give up their source to their competitor. In the end if you're sued and it turns out you're not infringing, the plaintiff gets off with an "oops my bad".
Given that the summary says they compared the source for cherryos to pearpc, I'd have to say that they are distributing the source with it. Whether they are complying with the rest of the GPL or not, you'll have to look and see.
threating to show Urotsukidoji to anyone who says this to me and THEN see what they think;)
I used to think it'd be great fun to shock these people with hentai, then I realized there are much better shows to do it with that won't make them switch straight from "anime is for kiddies" to "anime is tenticle porn". My current favorite is Saishuu Heiki Kanojo (Saikano in the US, also known as "The Last Love Song on This Little Planet") though at 13 episodes, its not something you can just sit someone down and show them on a lark (The show works best if you don't tell them about it or let them see any promotional art of Chise. Just let them watch until the end of the first episode to see what its about;). Grave of the Fireflies is good for a movie-length introduction to "not for little kids" without involving any tentacles, and even has a thumbs up from Ebert.
only the Japanese one is ever encoded in anything better than stereo
These days this is coming to an end. The studios doing the dub recordings are starting to record for the Americans who own 5.1 systems, and since they're doing the recording, its no problem to put together the audio tracks they want. With Japanese audio, they have to take what they can get, and if all the Japanese studio has left in their vault is the stereo track, you're not going to see a 5.1 japanese track. Sometimes I suspect they may just leave off the 5.1 track to make room on the disc for something else (Like Disney's release of The Cat Returns: 2ch Japanese, 2ch French, 5.1 English, when the Japanese release had 5.1DD and DTS Japanese audio tracks!)
I do agree that dub actors used to be hideous, and that they have gotten much better. I attribute half of it to maturity of the market and the actors, the other half I think belongs soley to Disney entering the market with the Ghibli films, and bringing with them the fact that dubbing is what they do.
I agree that software patents should be limited in this way. I'll post my standard "what software patents should do" guide here:
1) Software patents should reflect the software lifecycle: 4 years, plus an extension for 4 more years if you can show that you personally are using it in a current product (ie, you didn't "invent" it specifically to license it out or hope someone else would create it so you could sue them)
2) If "the internet" is enough to make an existing process patentable, then its reasonable to expect that software processes can only infringe on software patents. People holding a "business process" patent can opt to convert it to a software patent for a maximum of 8 years from the application date (so if its been 7 years, they get one year out of it as a software patent with no chance of renewing). Patents so converted remain as software patents, and can no longer be used to cover non-software processes. (the vast majority of these patents are already software specific anyway)
finally, 3) (applies to all patents in general) USPTO will refund all fees to the challenger in the event that a patent challenge shows the USPTO made an error in granting the patent. If the USPTO denies a challenge and the patent is later overturned in court, the USPTO refunds the challenger double, or triple if the challenger was the defendant in the lawsuit. (this is to keep the uspto from acting in bad faith by refusing to admit errors in order to keep the fees)
Using a weapon, whether its a sword or a gun, takes more physical skill than you think. I remember the first time I fired a shotgun (in Cub Scouts/webelos;). I didn't have the butt seated properly, and if I wasn't already double-jointed in my shoulder, I'd have probably dislocated it. It hurt a hell of a lot, and made a really loud noise. I hated the skeet shooting trips our troop went on. Even with a handgun, there is still some kickback, which is liable to surprise anyone who has never fired one before (or whose only experience with one is the floating arm holding one in the video game)
I'll concede that there are psychological changes that have taken place though, now that I think of it. After years of playing Quake with headphones in college, I've quit flinching at the sound of a rocket being fired into my ear, so I probably wouldn't flinch too much from the sound of a boomstick in the real world. That, or I've just gone deaf from all that noise;)
Slashdot Mirror
And kazaa doesn't freely hand over your (internet) address to anyone who asks? All you have to do is request a file.
Style or not, the article drips with flagrant wrongness. Implying that because billions of files are traded on kazaa every day means kazaa has money... why? Does the author of the article think that Kazaa takes a few cents off the top of every copyright infringing file sent for free?
You say that, but once they have this victory under their belt, they have a precedent: People who write software whose purpose is for sharing files can be sued for the behavior of their users.
Everyone should switch to using microsoft netmeeting's sharing capability to distribute their warez and pirated music.
So is this another sticker we're supposed to put on the screen too? If we combine this with the sticker on the battery, can we get hundreds of hours of battery life?
I played portal on the c64 many years ago. It was very intriguing at the time, but somehow I broke the plotline or made a mistake and couldn't get any more messages, and eventually forgot the whole thing.
I think you're wrong about these getting produced now though. Remember the graphic showing the overlap between Dickenson and GTA? I bet thats roughly the same diagram as for The Sims, and that would be the perfect environment for such a thing. Famous Poets expansion pack, anyone? Hell, I'd buy SimEinstein.
The only law I believe in is the zero-aggression principle
And yet you see no aggression in raising prices against a portion of society sliced in any arbitrary manner? Do you define aggression by any sane standard or do you only count sticks and stones?
Right, and which of those is provided by the IRS?
None?
Ok, so it is possible to obtain a free filing (from a company, not the IRS), as long as you manage to dodge the non-free links on every page (Remember how "easy" it was to download the free RealPlayer?). I just went to the H&R Block site from the IRS site, clicked on "Free File" and got a page telling me to create an account so I can try before I buy and see how I can save on my fees.
you don't have a mortgage, trade stocks, own a business, or have significant deductions.
All you have to do is RTFM. Seriously. You start with the simplest form you think you can get away with and read the docs from the irs.gov site. You read through to the part that says "if you xxxxxxxxx you must use form yyyy", then repeat with yyyy. Generally you'll file the same or a more complex form as you did last year, so if you used the 1040A last year, start with the 1040A this year.
Eventually you'll get to a point where it quits telling you to use a different form, and it starts telling you to attach other forms. There's an entire section at the beginning of the 1040 doc devoted to "where do I fill in these numbers".
It's not rocket science. When you pay a tax preparer to do the work for you, the only real service they can provide is simply in taking the time to filter through that big box of receipts you have and sorting them into can-deduct and cant-deduct piles.
The IRS is specifically banned from doing so, thanks to the lobbying effort of the tax preparation industry. It's just like the "free" electronic filing the IRS offers. The only way to use it is to buy a nonfree tax software product or go to a professional that has a product that can e-file.
In this environment, I think we're pretty lucky that the telefile option doesn't require us to call 1-900-HRB-FILE or something.
YOU ARE A DEVELOPER, IF YOU DON'T LIKE FIREFOX MAKE IT BETTER.
:P
So if the reason I like Mozilla is because it has an IRC client, mailreader, DOM inspector, javascript debugger, and an HTML editor built in, do you think they'd let me add all that into firefox?
The problem is that the Mozilla suite fits the developer lifestyle. It does everything, and its all at your fingertips. It's the emacs of the browser world. Firefox was coded by the developers who went above and beyond scratching their own itch and said "hey, normal users who just want a webbrowser and nothing else are being turned off by the size of the suite, so lets make just a browser!"
There's even more options available to you if you back off the GPL. Do what PHP does and give away a fully functional photoshop plugin under the BSD license, and then sell a better version that has 20% more bang and 50% faster whiz (like Zope). You run the risk of someone else picking up your module and figuring out the improvements you made to make it better, but that'll keep you on your toes, and you can just repeat the process with a new module.
I can and have "threatened" to quit doing business with online stores who tried to sell me damaged computer parts. Should I be charged with antitrust violations? Why or why not?
Of course not, A) damaged goods are not an acceptable good and B) You're the buyer, you can do what you want anyway.
Now lets say you go to the computer store and the manager says "You own an AMD, so that video card in your hand will cost double" would you call that a fair trade practice? If they're the only computer store in the country?
So let me get this straight: You have a PhD and all you can do is write photoshop plugins, and you're pestering me about how to make a living?
You want an answer to how EVERYONE can make money with opensource? Why don't you get in the unemployment line and whine about it along with the rest of the guys living in their parents' basements who discovered that just because they got a programming degree doesn't mean the world owes them a job, because there isn't an answer.
Moving from making opensource software for fun to making opensource software for profit means switching from scratching your own itch to scratching someone else's. Maybe you should switch to contract work and make photoshop plugins for a fixed fee or charge hourly, with it written in your contract that whatever you develop will be available to everyone. Maybe you can write an opensource plugin, then charge to make it do what certain clients want it to do. Or hell, write opensource plugins then go teach computer art at a university or something.
What does the following Perl command do, how does it do it, and how many lines of C would it take you to produce the same output (not necessarially the same way!)
LOL.
Here, have a clue on the house. The people who run sendmail.com? It's CTO is the original author of sendmail. How's that for making money writing open source software?
As for redhat, are you saying that having someone who knows how to make 50 software packages work together across 2000 seats in an enterprise situation isn't worth the price of admission to Red Hat Enterprise? Do they need to have written all that software themselves in order to make money off of it? Apparently not, or they'd be out of business.
Not to mention you're completely overlooking the fact that they wrote rpm and dozens of other tools that make their job as support as well as the actual administrators' jobs that much easier.
If your code directly calls GPL code, then your code must be GPL. If it forks through a system call, its separate.
If GPL code directly calls your code, your license must be compatible with the GPL.
However there are millions of other open source licenses out there that doesn't have this problem, and if you've got a hardon for the GPL, you can write the "main" program using a modified GPL that states that proprietary plugins may be added to the code, then write proprietary plugins.
See www.redhat.com, see www.sendmail.com, and so on and so forth. These people sell opensource product support, and make money doing it. This doesn't require paying some "analyst" $50k+ to write you a white paper on how to make money.
And yet every actor and actress roleplays. Many authors roleplay, at least acting out what happens in their novels in their mind. In theory, elected representatives should roleplay in considering how a given piece of legislature will affect various different constituents.
Roleplaying is a normal everyday occurrence, its part of learning about anyone who isn't yourself or any job you don't currently do (like the Model United Nations groups in High School).
The only difference here is that these people wield maces and fireballs in their fantasy world instead of bayonets and bazookas. I have to wonder if these people had chosen to play an Avalon Hill wargame, if they'd have been given higher clearances.
But if they did that, they wouldn't be able to sell "Now Thats What I Call Ancient Shit! Vol 4124"
Won't someone think of the executives?!
There are several reasons I'm against software patents but not other patents:
1) Software patents tend to be applied for on individual ideas, rather than a single invention. Take a look at Photoshop's splash screen. How many patent numbers are there for that one single program? Not only that, there are dozens, if not hundreds of "ideas" that are embodied in every program. Sorting, for instance: whether you sort emails or high scores, if your program isn't a highschool assignment, it probably uses a sort. Or online help, the concept of which has been around for decades now, yet a company in Japan was just crushed with a patent on it.
2) The software lifecycle is shorter than the hardware lifecycle. How long have we been using combustion engines now? Fundamentally the basic engine hasn't changed in decades, but people have invented improvements. Have you seen improvements for the Commodore 64's GEOWrite program lately? Does it really need 20 years worth of protection?
3) Enforcability. Because honestly, the majority of software out there is closed source proprietary stuff, the only way to find out if infringement is actually occurring with a software patent is to sue the victim and force them to show you the source. If I patent an engine design and you start selling it, all I need to do is take apart your engine. If you have a patent on "doing X using A,B,C" and your competitor does X with 1,2,3 you have no way of knowing if they infringe on your patent or not except to sue them and let the courts sort it out. This is what leads to the huge messes like SCO demanding IBM's source, and probably why most companies settle even if they have a strong case: they don't want to give up their source to their competitor. In the end if you're sued and it turns out you're not infringing, the plaintiff gets off with an "oops my bad".
Given that the summary says they compared the source for cherryos to pearpc, I'd have to say that they are distributing the source with it. Whether they are complying with the rest of the GPL or not, you'll have to look and see.
threating to show Urotsukidoji to anyone who says this to me and THEN see what they think ;)
;). Grave of the Fireflies is good for a movie-length introduction to "not for little kids" without involving any tentacles, and even has a thumbs up from Ebert.
I used to think it'd be great fun to shock these people with hentai, then I realized there are much better shows to do it with that won't make them switch straight from "anime is for kiddies" to "anime is tenticle porn". My current favorite is Saishuu Heiki Kanojo (Saikano in the US, also known as "The Last Love Song on This Little Planet") though at 13 episodes, its not something you can just sit someone down and show them on a lark (The show works best if you don't tell them about it or let them see any promotional art of Chise. Just let them watch until the end of the first episode to see what its about
only the Japanese one is ever encoded in anything better than stereo
These days this is coming to an end. The studios doing the dub recordings are starting to record for the Americans who own 5.1 systems, and since they're doing the recording, its no problem to put together the audio tracks they want. With Japanese audio, they have to take what they can get, and if all the Japanese studio has left in their vault is the stereo track, you're not going to see a 5.1 japanese track. Sometimes I suspect they may just leave off the 5.1 track to make room on the disc for something else (Like Disney's release of The Cat Returns: 2ch Japanese, 2ch French, 5.1 English, when the Japanese release had 5.1DD and DTS Japanese audio tracks!)
I do agree that dub actors used to be hideous, and that they have gotten much better. I attribute half of it to maturity of the market and the actors, the other half I think belongs soley to Disney entering the market with the Ghibli films, and bringing with them the fact that dubbing is what they do.
Limit them to about 3 years
I agree that software patents should be limited in this way. I'll post my standard "what software patents should do" guide here:
1) Software patents should reflect the software lifecycle: 4 years, plus an extension for 4 more years if you can show that you personally are using it in a current product (ie, you didn't "invent" it specifically to license it out or hope someone else would create it so you could sue them)
2) If "the internet" is enough to make an existing process patentable, then its reasonable to expect that software processes can only infringe on software patents. People holding a "business process" patent can opt to convert it to a software patent for a maximum of 8 years from the application date (so if its been 7 years, they get one year out of it as a software patent with no chance of renewing). Patents so converted remain as software patents, and can no longer be used to cover non-software processes. (the vast majority of these patents are already software specific anyway)
finally, 3) (applies to all patents in general) USPTO will refund all fees to the challenger in the event that a patent challenge shows the USPTO made an error in granting the patent. If the USPTO denies a challenge and the patent is later overturned in court, the USPTO refunds the challenger double, or triple if the challenger was the defendant in the lawsuit. (this is to keep the uspto from acting in bad faith by refusing to admit errors in order to keep the fees)
Using a weapon, whether its a sword or a gun, takes more physical skill than you think. I remember the first time I fired a shotgun (in Cub Scouts/webelos ;). I didn't have the butt seated properly, and if I wasn't already double-jointed in my shoulder, I'd have probably dislocated it. It hurt a hell of a lot, and made a really loud noise. I hated the skeet shooting trips our troop went on. Even with a handgun, there is still some kickback, which is liable to surprise anyone who has never fired one before (or whose only experience with one is the floating arm holding one in the video game)
;)
I'll concede that there are psychological changes that have taken place though, now that I think of it. After years of playing Quake with headphones in college, I've quit flinching at the sound of a rocket being fired into my ear, so I probably wouldn't flinch too much from the sound of a boomstick in the real world. That, or I've just gone deaf from all that noise