Nowhere near. The worst software deal was California paying for licenses of Oracle they weren't even going to use...
They very well might have a tough contract with IBM saying that support is terminated if they have outsiders in. That's not odd, most every company has a similar one, "if you have someone else look at it, and they break it, you're on your own, or have to pay us extra".
The thing is that *nothing* they do can have their license revoked, or their software costs raised for the next upgrade. If IBM starts jerking them around they can put another public bid out, just for support, and because it's open source, anyone can support them. I'm sure they won't hire on-site programmers, but a multi-million dollar contract buys a lot of attention from a software development company.
Any deal that involves them being more in control of the software, and less tied to a particular vendor, is a good thing. Choice is *NEVER* bad.
I'd be happy with the decision. For once it looks like politicians made the right decision instead of doing what costs the least now, leaving the expensive mess for the next guy.
Going with an open source (and thus open document format, open support, etc) system will make the whole thing cheaper and easier to keep working, and to upgrade.
If the next version of Linux offers something they want they can get it for the cost of the support techs installing it, no licenses required. If they want to leave their old servers happily running away for ten years, they can, no licensing difficulties.
Dynamically editing incoming web content shouldn't be illegal. That was right.
But, Gator/etc should be illegal because I've never seen them offer a properly worded install screen. "Check here to not disable the install of Gator, a web browsing assistant!" They're never clear about what it does, or why you'd want it, but even when you're given a choice it's obfuscated and painful.
That sort of deceptive marketing should be illegal. The time in prison kind of illegal.
I agree. Beef up the cockpit door to stop quick entry and give them a gun to discourage anyone taking it apart slowly. If you get shot trying to break into a cockpit I'm not going to cry. That said, I wonder if a shotgun would be better?
I don't agree with *just* arming pilots. Those doors aren't much of a problem to get through and the gun isn't much use in a melee struggle. You need to make a few changes to the current insecure system.
And under-cover armed air marshals. Just enough that the terrorists couldn't risk turning their back on anyone...
The only use I can see for stun-guns is for the stewards, people who aren't combat trained with deadly weapons, and who are much more likely to need to stop an abusive drunk than a terrorist. I wouldn't want untrained people to be shooting a gun in a crowded area.
That worked; before the pilot knew that everyone on the plane would die if they followed the terrorist's directions. Now little Sandra may die, but nobody will every trust a terrorist again.
I'm only sorry the passengers didn't kill the guy with the shoe bomb. Would have been a good precedent.
The problem with a system like this is that it doesn't shut off properly where it's not needed. There are too many cases to consider and what helps in some situations guarantees a crash in others.
Instead of limiting the power a pilot could apply, the system should use a HUD or other semi-intrusive mode of communication to strongly suggest more power. Then you put a skilled pilot in the cockpit and let him evaluate the situation and decide if he should follow the advice or not.
Actually, the airport itself would be a good target. There's no way to ward planes away from the airport itself and not only can you kill a ton of people, but you knock out a major air-travel hub for a long time.
I wouldn't trust a system that took over control all together, I think it'd be easier to fool it into violating the protected airspace, and that it'd be more likely to come on at a bad time and completely ignore the pilot.
I don't think there's a pilot who'd be willing to climb into a plane with an autopilot they couldn't override, military or civilian.
I think the USA is going too far with this. El Al does a fine job with carefully screen pilots, locked and secure cockpits, and armed under-cover air marshals. There are solutions for these problems that don't require us to invent bug-proof software for a very hard problem.
I think what the parent post was saying is that the pilot could mistake the gentle course correction of the system for strong wind, or something else.
"I steer left, but don't go as much left as I wanted, must be a wind blowing from my left."
The solution to this potential problem is to have a "Soft Wall Warning" light.
However, I work as a software tester and I doubt the ability of someone to design a soft-wall system that satisfies two conditions 1) don't crash planes 2) can stop a creative person from passing through the wall.
Condition 1 is accomplished by not doing anything that puts a plane into a "crashing" state. This means the system needs to know the limits of the plane and to not exceed them. If they want to system to be able to over-ride the pilot they either limit the ability of the pilot to approach the limits of the airframe, or allow the system to bypass those limits. Otherwise, the pilot can hold the system at a stand-still. Fly straight at the WTC and fight the system trying to turn away....
Scenario 1) What does the guidance system do when the plane is flying close to stall speed and the wind is blowing it into the out-of-bounds area? If it initiates a turn it could crash at this speed. Will it be given throttle control? If not, it'll either crash legitimate planes in this scenario, or allow a terrorist into forbidden airspace by refusing to crash the plane. If it has throttle control, can the pilot initiate fire-control measures, arbitrarily removing some engines from service? Or, dump fuel in one wing, etc...
Scenario 2) To protect against software failures, course corrections won't be allowed to stress the airframe. Otherwise if the system suddenly thought it was inside the "hardest correction away" zone of a soft wall it could crash the plane trying to get out. So, what happens if you approach a soft wall in such a way that is outside of the safe limits for that airframe? The kamikaze pilot is willing to risk the wings falling off for a chance of reaching the target, the plane can't correct away fast enough, so the pilot manages to get into a forbidden zone...
Some of these problems simply can't be solved perfectly. To stop more terrorists you crash more legitimately damaged jets. IMHO they'd have to make this nearly 100% safe which means that it'd only stop unskilled terrorists... Still a benefit, but not as much as their "unhackable" claim would suggest.
I'm saying that it's unreasonable to say open-source programs aren't at all innovative when they fill the same niche as another program, but that closed source ones are.
People seem to think that Excel is innovative, but OOCalc isn't. Why the difference? Is it because one of them is open source and the other isn't? I suggest this only because people go on about Open Source never innovating, which suggests that closed source companies must be innovating pretty much all the time.
I think that having a server-class operating system as a desktop machine, with uptimes of months (all the time between lan parties) that I can also use as a firewall, web/file server, bandwidth shaper, etc, is pretty innovative. As in, I don't see MS offering anything like that.
"To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief."
Let's say we were flying over the arctic circle and our plane crashed. You've got a coat you made, I'm in a t-shirt. If I *steal* your coat, you freeze to death. If I duplicate your coat with a magic duplicator, we're both warm, you *might* have lost a sale. (Did you have a spare coat to sell me? Did I have cash with me? Would I have survived to get to a store where my bank card would work?)
Calling this theft is a dilution of language. Imagine how pissed off a rape victim would be if people who were merely mugged were refered to as being raped. Imagine how hard a time the police would have finding this sex fiend when really they should have been looking for someone who committed a completely different crime. Words have precise meanings, they can't be simply swapped harmlessly.
Now, the reason this is really damaging is that it's done specifically to confuse. Unauthorized duplication of media is called pirating by people who want to make it seem worse. Copying a friend's CD for yourself is called theft by people who don't like it, despite this being a 100% legal act (in Canada at any rate.)
I hope you never go camping and drink river water instead of bringing along bottled water. That river water doesn't belong to you.
Seriously though, theft is defined as taking something away from the lawful owner. Making a copy doesn't diminish the original, and thus isn't theft. Unlawful, perhaps. Morally wrong, maybe. But not theft.
I don't. There's no reason for a consumer (the people CR supposedly tests for) to be installing Lindows. Nobody installs WinXP either, they buy a computer that has it pre-installed.
The last thing to come back after a recession is luxury items. Compare CD sales to some other luxury item, like theatre attendance, and see how they compare.
There's no way pre-release movie download are large enough now to cause any change in the numbers.
The problem is that passwords are an all or nothing. "google" works "goofle" does not. There's no hint.
Biometric systems however supply a score. If password systems did this you crack then like this... If the password is "aaaa" and you first try "mmmm" it'll (let's say) give a score of 50. So you try "mmma" and "mmmz" and see which one gives the highest score. The first would give 62.5% and the second would be 37.5%, so you'd stick with the first and you'd make another change.
With biometrics this is like showing it a standard face and getting a score. Then raising the cheekbones and trying again, then widening the nose, and so on. See how to change things to get closer to a match.
You know how they crack ATM codes in the movies? Where all the numbers change randomly, but then they "get" a digit, and then another, etc... Passwords don't work this way because there's no way to tell if a given character is correct without getting the whole thing right. Biometrics let you solve a piece at a time.
What this is equivalent to is the master-key problem from a month or two ago.
It's not to say that Harry Potter fans can't tell good fantasy, but that there are different groups of readers who can be called Harry Potter fans.
Some readers have read a ton of other books, fiction and non-fiction, fantasy and other, etc. If they read Harry Potter and like it, they're qualified to judge.
Other people though, consider themselves heavy readers when they read a book or two in a year and their closest encounter with fantasy is reading _The Chrysalids_ in school. They read Harry Potter because everyone around them tells them what a wonderful book it is and they don't have anything to compare it to. They probably aren't good judges of quality.
Obviously, I consider myself in the first category. Not in the sense that my views must be right, but in that I have read a lot of other books which I can compare Harry Potter to.
I find that the HP books are a fun read, with that cute fuzziness you describe, but they're also somewhat insulting to the reader. Why are the Dursleys *so* evil? Why is Malfoy such a complete jerk? Wouldn't the books be more interesting if they had real people in them? You know, people who aren't evil but who are doing things *you* think are evil for reasons they think are justified. They Dursleys could still like their son more than Harry without the way they do it in the book. They could still be down on magic, but for "real" reasons, like perhaps thinking that Harry's parents would still be alive if they hadn't tinkered in black magic, instead of this irrational hatred of anything Harry does...
It smacks of what adults think they need to do for kids to understand; simplify the crap out of things. I've been a kid and resented this. I know kids who resent this.
Yes it's wrong. Wrong in the sense of incorrect or broken. You're using a book, written by people with a vested interest, as proof of a religion. The religion requires you believe ilogical and irrational things.
You're free to be a kook, but to imply that you're better than other kooks just because your holy book tells you so... that's pretty crazy.
I think a war is precisely what we want. The sooner, the better. Before people adjust to the idea of only being able to play movies on their DVD player, not being able to share music, or anything else. If it comes to a war now, people will notice. If it takes twenty years nobody will remember when we had freedoms.
That said, I think these guys are doing the nice thing. They want to run Linux. They could just go ahead and release a method of doing that, but they know this would bug MS so they offer to let MS provide them with a way to do what they want, without enabling people to play copied games.
For the record though, it's not extortion or blackmail. There's nothing illegal about it.
I'm in support of shorter copyright terms, even if it means my own stuff isn't protected forever, but I dislike the idea of someone claiming authorship and a new copyright because they tweaked a couple of lines.
But, I think there should be a few changes made to copyright law to support this.
1) Works derived primarily from a public domain work are themselves in the public domain. 1.1) Up the reasonable ammount of quoting that falls under fair use (and thus doesn't put the new work into the public domain).
A commentary on Shakespeare's Hamlet should be copyrightable, but a new printing of Hamlet with the odd footnote shouldn't be.
2) Add a "moral attribution" clause that means you can't take credit for a work in the public domain (unless you base a new work on it and change it enough to deserve a copyright) and so that you don't claim your work is someone else's.
3) To get copyright protection for non binary works (DVDs, Software) "source" must be provided in a copyable and reasonable form, to allow the work to actually enter the public domain in a real way once copyright expires.
and possibly,
4) Geometrically (starting very low) increasing fees for renewals, OR, a requirement that a work must be actively marketed during each 14-year term to be eligible for renewal.
This would prevent someone from pre-paying (through a trust perhaps) a thousand $1 extensions just to spite the public.
Because dating patents from when they are finally approved is blatantly cheating the system. If this was invented in the later 50s it's unlikely to warrant a patent in the late 80s, let alone for twenty years after that.
Are you usually pro-stupid-lawsuit or is this a "getting karma by appearing to buck the crowd" thing?
I agree. The text of the comments lets you know if the person's circumstances are similar enough to yours for their opinions to be of use.
For picking a teacher you probably want to pay more attention to the opinions of people who finished a class with them and share your major. Someone's opinion of the teacher could be unfairly colored by failing, or by them taking a class they didn't really want to be in. For a digital camera you want to find someone in your rough experience range using the camera for that you want. My camera (Canon G2) gets slagged by people wanting a pocketable camera, but users who bought it knowing what size it was tend to really like it. A pro would feel handicapped because it's not an SLR, etc. In the end user reviews were more important than specs when I bought a camera, I wanted one I'd use, not a supposedly great one that lived in the closet, but I only paid attention to some of the reviews.
Also, astroturfers can't seem to say anything convincing in their comments, they come across like advertising material. Reading what people have to say means not getting caught by stupid corp tricks.
Sure, everyone has the right to rate people, and we shouldn't just listen to "experts" or we'll get drivel like modern art.
But... You need to know whose opinions these are or you're basing your choices on the opinions of people who may be nothing like you. If I watched a sporting event I'd rate it by completely different criteria than someone who knew the rules. Similarly, two people with different goals and levels of experience could rate digital cameras differently.
I either go by reviews with reasons attached, so I can find out if my circumstances are anything like the reviewers. I don't want to buy a camera because some technophone likes the lack of controls, but I also don't want to buy some monstrosity you'd need a course to use. Having someone's reasons also helps you spot astroturf. If someone raves over a product without saying anything concrete, or talks about the specs and not the results, they're either paid advertising or otherwise useless.
If I was going to pick a professor by ratings I wouldn't go to a general site where any idiot who happened along could rate them. I don't want opinions on a CompSci prof tainted by a jock who had to take a serious course and didn't understand it, I want opinions of comp-sci people. Also, I'd prefer opinions of people who made it through a course with them, not people who either flunked/dropped out, or are basing their opinions on rumors.
So, not everyone's reviews are equal. You need to know why someone feels the way they do and you need to know who they are. Are they qualified enough to have a useful opinion?
Yeah, the idea about interlaced video seemed weak to me too, but I thought it might be worth mentioning...
And in the lack of evidence either way, we'll have to defer this.
I really hope the idea of higher framerate movies doesn't get ditched without some experimentation though, I have such trouble watching panning in movies because it seems so jerky.
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Nowhere near. The worst software deal was California paying for licenses of Oracle they weren't even going to use...
They very well might have a tough contract with IBM saying that support is terminated if they have outsiders in. That's not odd, most every company has a similar one, "if you have someone else look at it, and they break it, you're on your own, or have to pay us extra".
The thing is that *nothing* they do can have their license revoked, or their software costs raised for the next upgrade. If IBM starts jerking them around they can put another public bid out, just for support, and because it's open source, anyone can support them. I'm sure they won't hire on-site programmers, but a multi-million dollar contract buys a lot of attention from a software development company.
Any deal that involves them being more in control of the software, and less tied to a particular vendor, is a good thing. Choice is *NEVER* bad.
I'd be happy with the decision. For once it looks like politicians made the right decision instead of doing what costs the least now, leaving the expensive mess for the next guy.
Going with an open source (and thus open document format, open support, etc) system will make the whole thing cheaper and easier to keep working, and to upgrade.
If the next version of Linux offers something they want they can get it for the cost of the support techs installing it, no licenses required. If they want to leave their old servers happily running away for ten years, they can, no licensing difficulties.
Dynamically editing incoming web content shouldn't be illegal. That was right.
But, Gator/etc should be illegal because I've never seen them offer a properly worded install screen. "Check here to not disable the install of Gator, a web browsing assistant!" They're never clear about what it does, or why you'd want it, but even when you're given a choice it's obfuscated and painful.
That sort of deceptive marketing should be illegal. The time in prison kind of illegal.
I agree. Beef up the cockpit door to stop quick entry and give them a gun to discourage anyone taking it apart slowly. If you get shot trying to break into a cockpit I'm not going to cry. That said, I wonder if a shotgun would be better?
I don't agree with *just* arming pilots. Those doors aren't much of a problem to get through and the gun isn't much use in a melee struggle. You need to make a few changes to the current insecure system.
And under-cover armed air marshals. Just enough that the terrorists couldn't risk turning their back on anyone...
The only use I can see for stun-guns is for the stewards, people who aren't combat trained with deadly weapons, and who are much more likely to need to stop an abusive drunk than a terrorist. I wouldn't want untrained people to be shooting a gun in a crowded area.
That worked; before the pilot knew that everyone on the plane would die if they followed the terrorist's directions. Now little Sandra may die, but nobody will every trust a terrorist again.
I'm only sorry the passengers didn't kill the guy with the shoe bomb. Would have been a good precedent.
The problem with a system like this is that it doesn't shut off properly where it's not needed. There are too many cases to consider and what helps in some situations guarantees a crash in others.
Instead of limiting the power a pilot could apply, the system should use a HUD or other semi-intrusive mode of communication to strongly suggest more power. Then you put a skilled pilot in the cockpit and let him evaluate the situation and decide if he should follow the advice or not.
Actually, the airport itself would be a good target. There's no way to ward planes away from the airport itself and not only can you kill a ton of people, but you knock out a major air-travel hub for a long time.
I wouldn't trust a system that took over control all together, I think it'd be easier to fool it into violating the protected airspace, and that it'd be more likely to come on at a bad time and completely ignore the pilot.
I don't think there's a pilot who'd be willing to climb into a plane with an autopilot they couldn't override, military or civilian.
I think the USA is going too far with this. El Al does a fine job with carefully screen pilots, locked and secure cockpits, and armed under-cover air marshals. There are solutions for these problems that don't require us to invent bug-proof software for a very hard problem.
I think what the parent post was saying is that the pilot could mistake the gentle course correction of the system for strong wind, or something else.
"I steer left, but don't go as much left as I wanted, must be a wind blowing from my left."
The solution to this potential problem is to have a "Soft Wall Warning" light.
However, I work as a software tester and I doubt the ability of someone to design a soft-wall system that satisfies two conditions 1) don't crash planes 2) can stop a creative person from passing through the wall.
Condition 1 is accomplished by not doing anything that puts a plane into a "crashing" state. This means the system needs to know the limits of the plane and to not exceed them. If they want to system to be able to over-ride the pilot they either limit the ability of the pilot to approach the limits of the airframe, or allow the system to bypass those limits. Otherwise, the pilot can hold the system at a stand-still. Fly straight at the WTC and fight the system trying to turn away....
Scenario 1) What does the guidance system do when the plane is flying close to stall speed and the wind is blowing it into the out-of-bounds area? If it initiates a turn it could crash at this speed. Will it be given throttle control? If not, it'll either crash legitimate planes in this scenario, or allow a terrorist into forbidden airspace by refusing to crash the plane. If it has throttle control, can the pilot initiate fire-control measures, arbitrarily removing some engines from service? Or, dump fuel in one wing, etc...
Scenario 2) To protect against software failures, course corrections won't be allowed to stress the airframe. Otherwise if the system suddenly thought it was inside the "hardest correction away" zone of a soft wall it could crash the plane trying to get out. So, what happens if you approach a soft wall in such a way that is outside of the safe limits for that airframe? The kamikaze pilot is willing to risk the wings falling off for a chance of reaching the target, the plane can't correct away fast enough, so the pilot manages to get into a forbidden zone...
Some of these problems simply can't be solved perfectly. To stop more terrorists you crash more legitimately damaged jets. IMHO they'd have to make this nearly 100% safe which means that it'd only stop unskilled terrorists... Still a benefit, but not as much as their "unhackable" claim would suggest.
I'm saying that it's unreasonable to say open-source programs aren't at all innovative when they fill the same niche as another program, but that closed source ones are.
People seem to think that Excel is innovative, but OOCalc isn't. Why the difference? Is it because one of them is open source and the other isn't? I suggest this only because people go on about Open Source never innovating, which suggests that closed source companies must be innovating pretty much all the time.
I think that having a server-class operating system as a desktop machine, with uptimes of months (all the time between lan parties) that I can also use as a firewall, web/file server, bandwidth shaper, etc, is pretty innovative. As in, I don't see MS offering anything like that.
How is MS Excel any more innovative than OOCalc? They're both copies of Lotus 1-2-3. How does being closed-source make Excel better than OOCalc?
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=theft
"To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief."
Surely you would accuse me of theft.
Nope. It's a lot of things, but it's not theft.
Let's say we were flying over the arctic circle and our plane crashed. You've got a coat you made, I'm in a t-shirt. If I *steal* your coat, you freeze to death. If I duplicate your coat with a magic duplicator, we're both warm, you *might* have lost a sale. (Did you have a spare coat to sell me? Did I have cash with me? Would I have survived to get to a store where my bank card would work?)
Calling this theft is a dilution of language. Imagine how pissed off a rape victim would be if people who were merely mugged were refered to as being raped. Imagine how hard a time the police would have finding this sex fiend when really they should have been looking for someone who committed a completely different crime. Words have precise meanings, they can't be simply swapped harmlessly.
Now, the reason this is really damaging is that it's done specifically to confuse. Unauthorized duplication of media is called pirating by people who want to make it seem worse. Copying a friend's CD for yourself is called theft by people who don't like it, despite this being a 100% legal act (in Canada at any rate.)
I hope you never go camping and drink river water instead of bringing along bottled water. That river water doesn't belong to you.
Seriously though, theft is defined as taking something away from the lawful owner. Making a copy doesn't diminish the original, and thus isn't theft. Unlawful, perhaps. Morally wrong, maybe. But not theft.
I don't. There's no reason for a consumer (the people CR supposedly tests for) to be installing Lindows. Nobody installs WinXP either, they buy a computer that has it pre-installed.
CR should be testing use, not installation.
The last thing to come back after a recession is luxury items. Compare CD sales to some other luxury item, like theatre attendance, and see how they compare.
There's no way pre-release movie download are large enough now to cause any change in the numbers.
They still distributed Linux under the GPL (there is no other way) after determining that Linux supposedly contained their code.
More than a day or so later too, so it's not like it was a simple mistake where one department didn't contact another quickly enough.
Even if SCO did make a mistake, they should have remedied it within a reasonable time.
The problem is that passwords are an all or nothing. "google" works "goofle" does not. There's no hint.
Biometric systems however supply a score. If password systems did this you crack then like this... If the password is "aaaa" and you first try "mmmm" it'll (let's say) give a score of 50. So you try "mmma" and "mmmz" and see which one gives the highest score. The first would give 62.5% and the second would be 37.5%, so you'd stick with the first and you'd make another change.
With biometrics this is like showing it a standard face and getting a score. Then raising the cheekbones and trying again, then widening the nose, and so on. See how to change things to get closer to a match.
You know how they crack ATM codes in the movies? Where all the numbers change randomly, but then they "get" a digit, and then another, etc... Passwords don't work this way because there's no way to tell if a given character is correct without getting the whole thing right. Biometrics let you solve a piece at a time.
What this is equivalent to is the master-key problem from a month or two ago.
It's not to say that Harry Potter fans can't tell good fantasy, but that there are different groups of readers who can be called Harry Potter fans.
Some readers have read a ton of other books, fiction and non-fiction, fantasy and other, etc. If they read Harry Potter and like it, they're qualified to judge.
Other people though, consider themselves heavy readers when they read a book or two in a year and their closest encounter with fantasy is reading _The Chrysalids_ in school. They read Harry Potter because everyone around them tells them what a wonderful book it is and they don't have anything to compare it to. They probably aren't good judges of quality.
Obviously, I consider myself in the first category. Not in the sense that my views must be right, but in that I have read a lot of other books which I can compare Harry Potter to.
I find that the HP books are a fun read, with that cute fuzziness you describe, but they're also somewhat insulting to the reader. Why are the Dursleys *so* evil? Why is Malfoy such a complete jerk? Wouldn't the books be more interesting if they had real people in them? You know, people who aren't evil but who are doing things *you* think are evil for reasons they think are justified. They Dursleys could still like their son more than Harry without the way they do it in the book. They could still be down on magic, but for "real" reasons, like perhaps thinking that Harry's parents would still be alive if they hadn't tinkered in black magic, instead of this irrational hatred of anything Harry does...
It smacks of what adults think they need to do for kids to understand; simplify the crap out of things. I've been a kid and resented this. I know kids who resent this.
btw, neat sig, where's it from?
Yes it's wrong. Wrong in the sense of incorrect or broken. You're using a book, written by people with a vested interest, as proof of a religion. The religion requires you believe ilogical and irrational things.
You're free to be a kook, but to imply that you're better than other kooks just because your holy book tells you so... that's pretty crazy.
I think a war is precisely what we want. The sooner, the better. Before people adjust to the idea of only being able to play movies on their DVD player, not being able to share music, or anything else. If it comes to a war now, people will notice. If it takes twenty years nobody will remember when we had freedoms.
That said, I think these guys are doing the nice thing. They want to run Linux. They could just go ahead and release a method of doing that, but they know this would bug MS so they offer to let MS provide them with a way to do what they want, without enabling people to play copied games.
For the record though, it's not extortion or blackmail. There's nothing illegal about it.
I'm in support of shorter copyright terms, even if it means my own stuff isn't protected forever, but I dislike the idea of someone claiming authorship and a new copyright because they tweaked a couple of lines.
But, I think there should be a few changes made to copyright law to support this.
1) Works derived primarily from a public domain work are themselves in the public domain.
1.1) Up the reasonable ammount of quoting that falls under fair use (and thus doesn't put the new work into the public domain).
A commentary on Shakespeare's Hamlet should be copyrightable, but a new printing of Hamlet with the odd footnote shouldn't be.
2) Add a "moral attribution" clause that means you can't take credit for a work in the public domain (unless you base a new work on it and change it enough to deserve a copyright) and so that you don't claim your work is someone else's.
3) To get copyright protection for non binary works (DVDs, Software) "source" must be provided in a copyable and reasonable form, to allow the work to actually enter the public domain in a real way once copyright expires.
and possibly,
4) Geometrically (starting very low) increasing fees for renewals, OR, a requirement that a work must be actively marketed during each 14-year term to be eligible for renewal.
This would prevent someone from pre-paying (through a trust perhaps) a thousand $1 extensions just to spite the public.
Because dating patents from when they are finally approved is blatantly cheating the system. If this was invented in the later 50s it's unlikely to warrant a patent in the late 80s, let alone for twenty years after that.
Are you usually pro-stupid-lawsuit or is this a "getting karma by appearing to buck the crowd" thing?
I agree. The text of the comments lets you know if the person's circumstances are similar enough to yours for their opinions to be of use.
For picking a teacher you probably want to pay more attention to the opinions of people who finished a class with them and share your major. Someone's opinion of the teacher could be unfairly colored by failing, or by them taking a class they didn't really want to be in. For a digital camera you want to find someone in your rough experience range using the camera for that you want. My camera (Canon G2) gets slagged by people wanting a pocketable camera, but users who bought it knowing what size it was tend to really like it. A pro would feel handicapped because it's not an SLR, etc. In the end user reviews were more important than specs when I bought a camera, I wanted one I'd use, not a supposedly great one that lived in the closet, but I only paid attention to some of the reviews.
Also, astroturfers can't seem to say anything convincing in their comments, they come across like advertising material. Reading what people have to say means not getting caught by stupid corp tricks.
Sure, everyone has the right to rate people, and we shouldn't just listen to "experts" or we'll get drivel like modern art.
But... You need to know whose opinions these are or you're basing your choices on the opinions of people who may be nothing like you. If I watched a sporting event I'd rate it by completely different criteria than someone who knew the rules. Similarly, two people with different goals and levels of experience could rate digital cameras differently.
I either go by reviews with reasons attached, so I can find out if my circumstances are anything like the reviewers. I don't want to buy a camera because some technophone likes the lack of controls, but I also don't want to buy some monstrosity you'd need a course to use. Having someone's reasons also helps you spot astroturf. If someone raves over a product without saying anything concrete, or talks about the specs and not the results, they're either paid advertising or otherwise useless.
If I was going to pick a professor by ratings I wouldn't go to a general site where any idiot who happened along could rate them. I don't want opinions on a CompSci prof tainted by a jock who had to take a serious course and didn't understand it, I want opinions of comp-sci people. Also, I'd prefer opinions of people who made it through a course with them, not people who either flunked/dropped out, or are basing their opinions on rumors.
So, not everyone's reviews are equal. You need to know why someone feels the way they do and you need to know who they are. Are they qualified enough to have a useful opinion?
Yeah, the idea about interlaced video seemed weak to me too, but I thought it might be worth mentioning...
And in the lack of evidence either way, we'll have to defer this.
I really hope the idea of higher framerate movies doesn't get ditched without some experimentation though, I have such trouble watching panning in movies because it seems so jerky.