I don't care if a HDD's packaging expresses the capacity in powers of 10, as long as it's clear there's a difference between KiB and KB.
What really gets to me is the minority of hard disk manufacturers who use a rather bizarre scheme where 1KB = 1024 bytes, but 1MB = 1000KB, 1GB=1000MB and so on. You can see the origins of this scheme in the common reference of floppy disk capacity as being 1.44MB (it isn't --- it's 1440KiB, which is neither 1.44MB nor 1.44MiB).
Disk space was measured in powers of 10 until Microsoft came along and muddled the issue
I'm a long way from convinced by this. I'm pretty sure my pre-MS double-density 5 1/4" floppies contained 368,640 bytes, not 360,000, yet were generally called "360K". This article suggests the practice dates back to DEC 8-inch drives (although apparently IBM used powers of ten for their 8-inch drives).
Unless you have the first P4 process (Willamette (180 nm)) and the low end version. Your single core performance is most likely double that of your phone. Those memory and pipeline speeds look slow but they still will be very competitive with your phone.
Sure, but with quad-core phones on the market these days, why does the single-core performance matter?
It's quite simple, really: my usual PC died last week and I had to resurrect an old one. The old one is inferior in almost every respect to my phone. Its single-core performance is somewhat faster (despite only having 50% higher clock rate, it benchmarks at well over twice the speed), but as it's a quad-core versus my desktop's single core in terms of total CPU power it's much better. They both have 1GB of RAM, but my desktop's onboard graphics uses up a rather large chunk of that for video RAM. My desktop's integrated intel graphics has a theoretical shader throughput of about 1300 Mpix/s while my phone's Mali400 can handle about 1600. My desktop has a 40GB hard disk, which is larger than the integrated 16GB in my phone, but I have an extra 32GB SD card in there, too.
Despite the lower power of my PC, it handles Windows 7 just fine. No Aero, but I don't really care that much.
Wow, so you are telling people what I already stated. Wolves are Canine correct? Coyotes are Canine correct? Most people seeing a coyote would probably recognize it as.. a dog! We have seen cats become cats too. As I stated, a species has been shown to change within themselves. Sometimes those changes are drastic. In the case of dogs, cross breeding has done wonders to the variety.
You seem to be under some kind of misunderstanding concerning what the word "species" means. For reference, coyotes and dogs are not the same species. Neither are wolves or jackals. They are, however, all from the same genus.
It is true that we have never directly witnessed evolution of a new genus, but then the question of what exactly would constitute a new genus is somewhat difficult to nail down to an accurate answer -- we struggle to classify existing genuses accurately, and regularly change our minds about what consitutes one and what doesn't, so how we'd cope with an entirely new one is a bit of a mystery.
Also, nobody but creationists claim apes evolved into humans.
To be fair to GP, our closest surviving relative is believed to be the chimpanzee, which is classed as an ape, so it seems likely that whatever ancestor we had in common would be considered an ape also. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae
Changing species from ape to human requires new DNA strands, not the same strand with a slight modification in the chain.
Please do research before making statements like this. We've sequenced both human and ape DNA, so we know exactly what modifications would be required. Here's a good place to start reading about them.
To summarise briefly:
- No new DNA strands are required. In fact, you'd need more new DNA to go the other way -- Humans are short a chromosome compared with apes, and have lost around 80 genes in the process. - Slight modifications are all that is required. Ape DNA can be converted to human DNA with only around 3.5x10^7 single-base-pair modifications and a handful of splicing errors, which is to say around the same number of mutations you'd expect to see in about 21,000 generations, or the overall number you'd expect to see in less than 1/8th of the time since the genera diverged if the process were purely random. - Most of the changes are in gene regulation, not in the genes themselves. This means we might make more or less of a particular protein compared to, say, a chimp (which is still believed to be our closest living relative), and is a much easier change to happen randomly than creation of an entirely new form of protein (although that has happened in a handful of cases, too). - One of the most important changes is in a gene that suppresses brain development in chimps; this activates much less easily in humans, meaning we grow larger brains.
There is no solid evidence to show that a species can evolve into a different species. We have seen no plants that evolved into something other than the same plant with some variation.
Actually, they technically do. Their doctrine is that the Bible is wholly and completely true AND that science is discovering God's work in creation, and if you think one contradicts the other, you're misinterpreting at least one and should reinterpret them as necessary until they agree.
This is not entirely true, as I understand it, and I'm lead to believe it was a subject of some debate at the second vatican council, which rather cautiously made the following statement: "the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures." Which is to say that they acknowledge that the bible may be in error regarding issues which God did not wish to teach us for the sake of our salvation. See Brown et al, The New Jerome Biblical Commentary page 1169 for further discussion of this idea.
For many people, a book or a game loses it's utility after one run through. If you read a book that you were lent and fall into this group, you are unlikely to buy yourself another copy just because you thought it was so good the author / publisher deserved an extra chunk of money. In short, the act of lending may have prevented a sale.
You're probably right. We should ban libraries, just in case.
Further to my above comment -- see: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9907256353585916992&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr in which a US court held that the title "The Book of Virtues" was eligible for trademark protection, because it had acquired "secondary meaning", i.e. it was associated by consumers with a particular source. Now, I make no argument that this is true for "space marines" -- it blatantly isn't -- but it does mean that your suggestion that book titles in the US cannot be trademarks is clearly wrong.
There is no trademark or copyright for book titles. Period. Ever. In the US.
Depends on the title. If it consists of terms that are considered generic, or are descriptive of the content, then you're right. However, try releasing a book called "Lord of the Rings 2" or "Star Wars: Jedis vs Ninjas" and see if you successfully defend against the inevitable trademark violation suits, even if your books otherwise have nothing in common with the original works whose names you have reused.
I've been comparing so-called piracy to historic real estate squatting, rather than comparing it to stealing or thievery as has become the propaganda of Big Content. When a court compares it to real estate trespass, it's recognizing the same disingenuous manipulation of Big Content's propaganda.
Exactly. Now we just need a law saying that if we infringe on copyright for 10 years without the owner doing anything to intervene, the copyright becomes ours... not only does it make the comparison to tresspassing/squatting even more accurate and obvious, it's also a useful solution to the orphan works problem.
Microsoft's OS is simply too large, too encumbering and too useless for devices that people will use in the future.
Meh. Once upon a time I would have agreed with you, but now I actually run Windows 7 on a PC that is less powerful than my phone, and it doesn't seem too bad, so I think the idea of resource constraints stopping you from running a desktop OS on a mobile device is something that will soon be consigned to history.
1.... (it's 'altogether', dammit.) - Punctuation should be inside parenthetical
2. "Your" is possessive, as opposed to a contraction of "You are" makes no sense when describing "inability."
3. privateer is spelled incorrectly
</pedantic>
<pedantic class="extra-pedantic">Punctuation should be outside of parenthetical remarks unless they form a complete sentence, which this probably doesn't. I cannot parse your second point as a valid sentence. You also missed other spelling errors ("ellipse" vs "ellipsis"), and phrasing errors (I assume that GPP did not actually intend to suggest the person he was replying to had misplaced incomplete sentences, but that is what he wrote). </pedantic>
Not seeing much difference between your post and the OP from an editing perspective. Something about glass houses and rocks.
The license agreement say that Steam can change it whenever they want for whatever they want and if we refuse the new license agreement, then the only option is to close the account and lose all the games we "bought". No refund.
Check your local consumer protection legislation. Here in the UK, the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations apply (which is an implementation of an EU directive, so other EU countries should have very similar regulations), and state that the following categories of contract term are unfair and therefore cannot be enforced:
* Terms which have the object or effect of [...] making an agreement binding on the consumer whereas provision of services by the seller or supplier is subject to a condition whose realisation depends on his own will alone * Terms which have the object or effect of [...] permitting the seller or supplier to retain sums paid by the consumer where the latter decides not to conclude or perform the contract, without providing for the consumer to receive compensation of an equivalent amount from the seller or supplier where the latter is the party cancelling the contract * Terms which have the object or effect of [...] enabling the seller or supplier to alter the terms of the contract unilaterally without a valid reason which is specified in the contract;
AFAICT, any one of these would prevent Valve from behaving as you fear.
So the ECJ (I guess Europe's equivalent of the US Supreme Court, correct me if wrong)
Not entirely. Like the US, the EU has two parallel legal systems (equivalent to federal and local laws). ECJ has the responsibility for final determination on the meaning of the equivalents to federal laws, but has no say over interpretation of local laws. The way it typically works (and I believe did in this case, although I haven't read the documents so am not certain) is that a local court realises that their case depends on interpretation of a 'federal' law, and refers a question of how to interpret that law to the ECJ, who send them back a response saying how it applies in their specific case. There is also a right of appeal directly to the ECJ if you feel a local court has misapplied the law.
It makes no difference, in a situation such as that at issue in [Oracle vs UsedSoft], whether the copy of the computer program was made available to the customer by the rightholder concerned by means of a download from the rightholder’s website or by means of a material medium such as a CD-ROM or DVD. Even if, in the latter case too, the rightholder formally separates the customer’s right to use the copy of the program supplied from the operation of transferring the copy of the program to the customer on a material medium, the operation of downloading from that medium a copy of the computer program and that of concluding a licence agreement remain inseparable from the point of view of the acquirer.
2. The first sale in the Community of a copy of a program by the rightholder or with his consent shall exhaust the distribution right within the Community of that copy, with the exception of the right to control further rental of the program or a copy thereof
If users can sell or give away games as they see fit, that would put a lot of stress on the steam servers. Would it be possible for valve to take out a fee to cover expenses?
I don't think it would, no. The problem is that EU law's equivalent of the US first sale doctrine applies here, meaning purchasers of Steam games have a legal right to transfer them to others. The law makes no mention of applying charges for the transfer, so it would appear as though Valve has a legal obligation to honour such transfers with no charge.
The software is not being sold. It is being licensed. The doctrine of first sale only applies when something is sold.
[citation needed]
A license is a piece of virtual property that may be bought and sold. Why would doctrine of first sale (or, rather, the principle of exhaustion, which is the name used for the equivalent concept in european law) not apply to them?
if you use Steam with DRM for online distribution (a good idea) then they disallow you from having a physical copy without Steam (bad idea) or from using alternate online distribution means.
That's not true. Let's pick a semi-recent release, FTL. Development was funded through Kickstarter, and the game is available from three digital distributors. You can get it on Steam, GoG, or direct from the developers.
Read the post you're replying to. "if you use Steam with DRM [...]". FTL is marketed as a DRM-free game, so is clearly not using Steam with DRM, so the rest of the post doesn't apply to it.
The No True Scotsman fallacy to the rescue, again!
Not really, no. For an argument to be a No True Scotsman fallacy, you have to shift your definitions in order to exclude the item(s) under argument. In this case, however, communism was quite adequately defined a long time before the USSR/PRC came into being, and it is quite clear that neither of them match the original definition.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care if a HDD's packaging expresses the capacity in powers of 10, as long as it's clear there's a difference between KiB and KB.
What really gets to me is the minority of hard disk manufacturers who use a rather bizarre scheme where 1KB = 1024 bytes, but 1MB = 1000KB, 1GB=1000MB and so on. You can see the origins of this scheme in the common reference of floppy disk capacity as being 1.44MB (it isn't --- it's 1440KiB, which is neither 1.44MB nor 1.44MiB).
Disk space was measured in powers of 10 until Microsoft came along and muddled the issue
I'm a long way from convinced by this. I'm pretty sure my pre-MS double-density 5 1/4" floppies contained 368,640 bytes, not 360,000, yet were generally called "360K". This article suggests the practice dates back to DEC 8-inch drives (although apparently IBM used powers of ten for their 8-inch drives).
Unless you have the first P4 process (Willamette (180 nm)) and the low end version.
Your single core performance is most likely double that of your phone. Those memory and pipeline speeds look slow but they still will be very competitive with your phone.
Sure, but with quad-core phones on the market these days, why does the single-core performance matter?
Explain this... I don't believe it.
It's quite simple, really: my usual PC died last week and I had to resurrect an old one. The old one is inferior in almost every respect to my phone. Its single-core performance is somewhat faster (despite only having 50% higher clock rate, it benchmarks at well over twice the speed), but as it's a quad-core versus my desktop's single core in terms of total CPU power it's much better. They both have 1GB of RAM, but my desktop's onboard graphics uses up a rather large chunk of that for video RAM. My desktop's integrated intel graphics has a theoretical shader throughput of about 1300 Mpix/s while my phone's Mali400 can handle about 1600. My desktop has a 40GB hard disk, which is larger than the integrated 16GB in my phone, but I have an extra 32GB SD card in there, too.
Despite the lower power of my PC, it handles Windows 7 just fine. No Aero, but I don't really care that much.
Wow, so you are telling people what I already stated. Wolves are Canine correct? Coyotes are Canine correct? Most people seeing a coyote would probably recognize it as .. a dog! We have seen cats become cats too. As I stated, a species has been shown to change within themselves. Sometimes those changes are drastic. In the case of dogs, cross breeding has done wonders to the variety.
You seem to be under some kind of misunderstanding concerning what the word "species" means. For reference, coyotes and dogs are not the same species. Neither are wolves or jackals. They are, however, all from the same genus.
It is true that we have never directly witnessed evolution of a new genus, but then the question of what exactly would constitute a new genus is somewhat difficult to nail down to an accurate answer -- we struggle to classify existing genuses accurately, and regularly change our minds about what consitutes one and what doesn't, so how we'd cope with an entirely new one is a bit of a mystery.
Also, nobody but creationists claim apes evolved into humans.
To be fair to GP, our closest surviving relative is believed to be the chimpanzee, which is classed as an ape, so it seems likely that whatever ancestor we had in common would be considered an ape also. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae
Changing species from ape to human requires new DNA strands, not the same strand with a slight modification in the chain.
Please do research before making statements like this. We've sequenced both human and ape DNA, so we know exactly what modifications would be required. Here's a good place to start reading about them.
To summarise briefly:
- No new DNA strands are required. In fact, you'd need more new DNA to go the other way -- Humans are short a chromosome compared with apes, and have lost around 80 genes in the process.
- Slight modifications are all that is required. Ape DNA can be converted to human DNA with only around 3.5x10^7 single-base-pair modifications and a handful of splicing errors, which is to say around the same number of mutations you'd expect to see in about 21,000 generations, or the overall number you'd expect to see in less than 1/8th of the time since the genera diverged if the process were purely random.
- Most of the changes are in gene regulation, not in the genes themselves. This means we might make more or less of a particular protein compared to, say, a chimp (which is still believed to be our closest living relative), and is a much easier change to happen randomly than creation of an entirely new form of protein (although that has happened in a handful of cases, too).
- One of the most important changes is in a gene that suppresses brain development in chimps; this activates much less easily in humans, meaning we grow larger brains.
There is no solid evidence to show that a species can evolve into a different species. We have seen no plants that evolved into something other than the same plant with some variation.
You need to learn to research before you make bold assertions like this. Here are some counterexamples. Here are some more. See also the wikipedia article, which may or may not use the same examples, as I haven't read it in depth.
Actually, they technically do. Their doctrine is that the Bible is wholly and completely true AND that science is discovering God's work in creation, and if you think one contradicts the other, you're misinterpreting at least one and should reinterpret them as necessary until they agree.
This is not entirely true, as I understand it, and I'm lead to believe it was a subject of some debate at the second vatican council, which rather cautiously made the following statement: "the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures." Which is to say that they acknowledge that the bible may be in error regarding issues which God did not wish to teach us for the sake of our salvation. See Brown et al, The New Jerome Biblical Commentary page 1169 for further discussion of this idea.
For many people, a book or a game loses it's utility after one run through. If you read a book that you were lent and fall into this group, you are unlikely to buy yourself another copy just because you thought it was so good the author / publisher deserved an extra chunk of money. In short, the act of lending may have prevented a sale.
You're probably right. We should ban libraries, just in case.
Further to my above comment -- see: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9907256353585916992&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr in which a US court held that the title "The Book of Virtues" was eligible for trademark protection, because it had acquired "secondary meaning", i.e. it was associated by consumers with a particular source. Now, I make no argument that this is true for "space marines" -- it blatantly isn't -- but it does mean that your suggestion that book titles in the US cannot be trademarks is clearly wrong.
There is no trademark or copyright for book titles. Period. Ever. In the US.
Depends on the title. If it consists of terms that are considered generic, or are descriptive of the content, then you're right. However, try releasing a book called "Lord of the Rings 2" or "Star Wars: Jedis vs Ninjas" and see if you successfully defend against the inevitable trademark violation suits, even if your books otherwise have nothing in common with the original works whose names you have reused.
I've been comparing so-called piracy to historic real estate squatting, rather than comparing it to stealing or thievery as has become the propaganda of Big Content. When a court compares it to real estate trespass, it's recognizing the same disingenuous manipulation of Big Content's propaganda.
Exactly. Now we just need a law saying that if we infringe on copyright for 10 years without the owner doing anything to intervene, the copyright becomes ours... not only does it make the comparison to tresspassing/squatting even more accurate and obvious, it's also a useful solution to the orphan works problem.
Microsoft's OS is simply too large, too encumbering and too useless for devices that people will use in the future.
Meh. Once upon a time I would have agreed with you, but now I actually run Windows 7 on a PC that is less powerful than my phone, and it doesn't seem too bad, so I think the idea of resource constraints stopping you from running a desktop OS on a mobile device is something that will soon be consigned to history.
<pedantic>
1. ... (it's 'altogether', dammit.) - Punctuation should be inside parenthetical
2. "Your" is possessive, as opposed to a contraction of "You are" makes no sense when describing "inability."
3. privateer is spelled incorrectly
</pedantic>
<pedantic class="extra-pedantic">Punctuation should be outside of parenthetical remarks unless they form a complete sentence, which this probably doesn't. I cannot parse your second point as a valid sentence. You also missed other spelling errors ("ellipse" vs "ellipsis"), and phrasing errors (I assume that GPP did not actually intend to suggest the person he was replying to had misplaced incomplete sentences, but that is what he wrote). </pedantic>
Not seeing much difference between your post and the OP from an editing perspective. Something about glass houses and rocks.
Indeed.
Do those limits rely on assumptions about dimensions and time?
No. They derive from the second law of thermodynamics, which assumes very little...
The license agreement say that Steam can change it whenever they want for whatever they want and if we refuse the new license agreement, then the only option is to close the account and lose all the games we "bought". No refund.
Check your local consumer protection legislation. Here in the UK, the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations apply (which is an implementation of an EU directive, so other EU countries should have very similar regulations), and state that the following categories of contract term are unfair and therefore cannot be enforced:
* Terms which have the object or effect of [...] making an agreement binding on the consumer whereas provision of services by the seller or supplier is subject to a condition whose realisation depends on his own will alone
* Terms which have the object or effect of [...] permitting the seller or supplier to retain sums paid by the consumer where the latter decides not to conclude or perform the contract, without providing for the consumer to receive compensation of an equivalent amount from the seller or supplier where the latter is the party cancelling the contract
* Terms which have the object or effect of [...] enabling the seller or supplier to alter the terms of the contract unilaterally without a valid reason which is specified in the contract;
AFAICT, any one of these would prevent Valve from behaving as you fear.
What if you buy a physical copy that still requires steam to work?
My suspicion is that Valve are legally obliged to make it work, although I don't believe any court has made such a decision yet.
So the ECJ (I guess Europe's equivalent of the US Supreme Court, correct me if wrong)
Not entirely. Like the US, the EU has two parallel legal systems (equivalent to federal and local laws). ECJ has the responsibility for final determination on the meaning of the equivalents to federal laws, but has no say over interpretation of local laws. The way it typically works (and I believe did in this case, although I haven't read the documents so am not certain) is that a local court realises that their case depends on interpretation of a 'federal' law, and refers a question of how to interpret that law to the ECJ, who send them back a response saying how it applies in their specific case. There is also a right of appeal directly to the ECJ if you feel a local court has misapplied the law.
... and, as a previous court opinion held:
i.e., the distinction between licensing and selling a copy is a distinction without a difference.
Taken from DIRECTIVE 2009/24/EC OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 23 April 2009 on the legal protection of computer programs. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:111:0016:0022:EN:PDF
If users can sell or give away games as they see fit, that would put a lot of stress on the steam servers. Would it be possible for valve to take out a fee to cover expenses?
I don't think it would, no. The problem is that EU law's equivalent of the US first sale doctrine applies here, meaning purchasers of Steam games have a legal right to transfer them to others. The law makes no mention of applying charges for the transfer, so it would appear as though Valve has a legal obligation to honour such transfers with no charge.
The software is not being sold. It is being licensed. The doctrine of first sale only applies when something is sold.
[citation needed]
A license is a piece of virtual property that may be bought and sold. Why would doctrine of first sale (or, rather, the principle of exhaustion, which is the name used for the equivalent concept in european law) not apply to them?
See, specifically, the analysis here.
if you use Steam with DRM for online distribution (a good idea) then they disallow you from having a physical copy without Steam (bad idea) or from using alternate online distribution means.
That's not true. Let's pick a semi-recent release, FTL. Development was funded through Kickstarter, and the game is available from three digital distributors. You can get it on Steam, GoG, or direct from the developers.
Read the post you're replying to. "if you use Steam with DRM [...]". FTL is marketed as a DRM-free game, so is clearly not using Steam with DRM, so the rest of the post doesn't apply to it.
The No True Scotsman fallacy to the rescue, again!
Not really, no. For an argument to be a No True Scotsman fallacy, you have to shift your definitions in order to exclude the item(s) under argument. In this case, however, communism was quite adequately defined a long time before the USSR/PRC came into being, and it is quite clear that neither of them match the original definition.