That's right. Downloading movies from the Internet so you don't have to pay towards the costs of making them is certainly a comparable activity to the examples you mention. Why, I was comparing the 70 years + lifetime rule to the Holocaust only the other day.
Those who want the law reformed need to posit credible alternatives, alternatives that ensure that movies (and music and books etc) can still be made, before arguing that there's something inherently unjust in having to pay to have access copyrighted material.
Right now, the only person I've seen who's made any effort to do this is Richard M. Stallman: his proposals only seem to apply successfully to computer software (I can't see a GPL'd movie being fundable, can you?); they do not require copyright reform; and he's demonised on Slashdot all the time as some kind of raving lunatic for his efforts.
Civil disobedience doesn't simply involve breaking laws that get in your way. They involve breaking the unjust parts of laws that are clearly unjust to begin with. Given copyright law, as it stands, gave people the movies they so deliberately set out to download without paying for, and given the lack of proposed alternatives that are relevent to that medium, and the hatred spewed by the same idiots who like P2P against those who make the efforts to formulate alternatives, I find it hard to accept there's any civil disobedience here. It's a simple case of freeloading.
And, you know what, if everyone downloading a movie today who hasn't made some effort to directly fund it - bought the DVD, watched it at the theater, etc - spent a day in jail tomorrow for doing just that, I'd see it as just desserts.
I think I speak for everyone when I say that terraforming the moon has to be a major priority if we're to, erm, get away from this planet.
Anyway, all we need now is a way to increase the mass of the moon by about 6x, so the moon has a gravity similar to Earth's. Then it can hold an atmosphere, and we'll be able to make better use of it, like turn it into a huge vacation destination or something.
ReactOS is not a CPU emulator or a hardware emulator. It's a software emulator. It emulates Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, as you say in your last comment "designed to look and run like Windows NT 4.0".
Once upon a time, the use of the word "emulator" to mean "something that looks like something it isn't" was generally considered correct usage. Somewhere along the line, because the most popular "emulators" were hardware emulators, too-clever-for-their-own-good people of the "/usr stands for Unix System Resources" and "The US is not a democracy, it's a Republic" variety, decided to "correct" anyone using the word in its original wider definition.
Please. You knew exactly what he meant. He wasn't being misleading, it really is a product that tries to look and run as much like Windows as possible.
More to the point, ReactOS is an implementation of Windows NT, whereas 98Lite was a modification of DOS/Windows, version Windows 98. Despite Microsoft's liberal use of the word "Windows", and the fact both implemented compatable APIs, these were two entirely different operating systems, with different underlying technology models, designs, and everything.
I certainly agree about the 68000 (and its successors), never used the 6800.
Motorola seemed to have an intuitive feel for how a processor should be programmed, unlike the Intel processors and their offspring which were feature laden but... and as for the 6502, I'll never understand why people loved that chip. 8 bit addressing? Ouch!
Ahhhhhhh though, the 6809. I need to dig out the programs I wrote for the Dragon 32 (a TRS80 CoCo clone) at some point.
Ob6809Trivia - it had a SEX instruction, causing much chuckling to sad 15 year olds as I was when I programmed it. (Sign Extend, IIRC, made an eight bit signed value into a 16 bit signed value.)
As I said in another post, this is where the FSF can make a major difference, providing funding, etc.
And, of course, without copyrights, a lot of code will now enter the public domain. A lot will be without source, but reverse compiling techniques, I'm sure, with time, will fix that.
The problem is that to gain copyright on your code, you have to do... nothing. To gain patents on your code, you have to spend money. This is why very few opensource coders have applied for patents, the cost barrier.
Finally a purpose for the Free Software Foundation beyond advocacy and litigation...
How? No carrot, no stick, so how are you going to make the GPL anything but a meaningless admonition?
I'm sorry, I don't understand your criticism, except possibly as not understanding what I've written, so I'll give an example.
The rewritten GPL will "force all use of patented technologies to be released with source and with all other patented technologies in the same product open too."
Linus patents the foo_open() method, Linus releases Linux under GPL3, anyone wanting to use a technology that uses the foo_open() method when has to release source and ensure any other patents applying to the derived product are similarly licensed under GPL3.
The carrot is you can use Linux, or any other technology that contains foo_open(). The stick is that if you don't, you don't have the right to use foo_open() at all.
And what makes this interesting most of all is that the inherent unfairness of patents (if someone independently invents foo_open, but does so after Linus does, they still have to license their end product under the terms and conditions Linus forces upon them), the GPL will end up applying to products it doesn't right now. If Microsoft uses foo_open(), they'll have no choice but to either invent an entirely new technology to solve the same problem, or relicense the product that uses foo_open() under the GPL.
Everything Microsoft did 20 years ago to enter the public domain
Everything Microsoft published more than a year ago that it hasn't, today, got a patent on, to enter the public domain
IBM to have more of its technologies in Microsoft products than vice-versa
The suggestion, incidentally, that this has to do with defeating the GPL, is patently absurd (patently, geddit? arf arf!) The GPL can be rewritten within this regime to force all use of patented technologies to be released with source and with all other patented technologies in the same product open too. Additionally, with patents requiring details of implementation, we'll see a lot more source code, documentation on proprietary formats, etc.
If you're in the proprietary software business, a successful lawsuit here could not create a worse state of affairs.
Of course, as I see it, it's highly unlikely to be completely successful. You may, at most, see a strengthening of fair use in some quarters, as the courts attempt to reconsolile the constitutional right to due process with the draconian nature of modern copyright law. But there's little reason to believe that copyright law inherently violates due process.
That just gives you the option to list cache entries.
I'm thinking what the GP means is that it'd be useful to search inside the cache, ie look for all recent documents still in the cache that contain the words "Linux drivers femdom spanking pictures", so you can get to that USB fetish page you were looking at but can't remember the URL of (to use a bizarre example, seriously though you can probably think of something useful.)
It'd be useful if this tool works when the browser has crashed too (Firefox and other Netscape successors have a habit of invalidating the cache after a crash. I understand why, but while I don't want potentially corrupted cache entries coming up in place of URLs I'm visiting, the usefulness of a search is theoretically not diminished by such a situation.)
Re:.Not a .NET CPU
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A .Net CPU
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And the 6809 that ran 6809 machine code.
Whatdayamean that doesn't count? Programming the 6809 was like programming in a high level language... well, it felt like it, back when the alternative was BASIC.;-)
Crashing the Windows shell will nuke the whole box, web servers, ftp servers, application servers and all.
Nonsense. That wasn't even true back in the Win9X days. Crash Explorer.exe, and Windows will restart Explorer.exe; in the mean time the rest of your applications - including those that have windows open - are available for you to use.
It's possible that crashing the underlying windowing system would result in a blue screen (unlike, say, X11), but crashing KDE vs crashing Explorer.exe gives pretty much the same results.
The iPod does appear as an external hard drive, but be aware that this is a separate concept from music being installed upon such a thing by dragging MP3s (I mention this only because I've told people a few times "Yes, it's just an external hard drive" and it's turned out the people asking the question were thinking more in terms of how you put music upon it.)
The iPod's music is stored in a set of "hidden" (you can see them with the shell in OS X, but not with the Finder or at all in XP) folders, together with various XMLish files that tell the iPod what's available and what the playlists are. To copy music from the iPod is a simple matter of finding the file. To copy music to the iPod requires updating the XML files. There are free software tools to do this.
But in essense, yes, it's a regular firewire (or with 3G and newer models USB and FW) hard drive. You can even partition it, as far as I'm aware.
Even if you want software patents, 20 years for software is insane. 20 years ago we were just inventing personal computers with GUIs. Internet time is traditionally, what, a month a year? 12 times as fast? Software patents should, if they exist at all, last 2 years, not 20. (And by the time you've gone through the patent process, half that time is over anyway, so they seem rather poin tless.)
Ok, call me dumb if you like, but I'm trying to work out who benefits ("us", developers, independent developers, etc) from this regime? Do we see products developed that wouldn't have been otherwise? Do we not see products damaged as certain avenues, for example in Free Software, are locked out for the use of certain technologies in this two year time span? Do the "first developers" (the people who discover the technology first) have time enough to exploit?
I just don't see how this isn't the worst of all worlds.
Fundamentally, if someone proposes to allow patents to exist in a particular sphere, that someone must come up with reasons to show that (a) such patents are necessary because substantial innovation is not happening, (b) such patents would not generally harm existing innovation efforts, except by an amount so small as to be heavily outweighed by (a), and (c) the sphere allows methods and technologies to be identified that clearly are patented, and will not usually result in people violating patents by accident. In general, we do this by proposing patents be "non-obvious", but it's not always obvious what non-obvious means.
In my view, while all three of the above justifications need to be present to argue there's a reasonable case for patenting, not one of those justifications stands up in the sphere of software, and arguably a case cannot be made for (a) and (c) when it comes to business methods.
People should have more latitudes to use patents for themselves, whereas people selling the 'method' need to pay for it. (And it's easier to keep track of the people selling the method, anyway.) People should definately have the ability, if a device that embodies a patent method, that they purchased, breaks, to build their own device that uses the patented method. (I'm thinking along the lines of patented file formats, for one thing.)
Patents are inherently unjust. We grant them not because they're right and just but to create an incentive to research areas that might otherwise be left alone.
They're unjust for this reason: a patent is a monopoly on an idea and all implementations of that idea. It differs from copyrights in that it applies to all instances of that idea, not just those that were copied from a single creation. And, while with things that are copyrightable it's highly unlikely that two people would come up with the same thing for anything but the most trivial of works (you're not likely to accidentally, without reading the original, write "War and Peace", for example), with patents two people researching the same problem are very likely to come across the same solution. The person who gets to the patent office first with the solution wins the patent, and wins the monopoly.
With software patents and patents on business methods, we see the problems with patents come to the fore. There is every incentive already for software authors to come up with new and innovative software systems, be that file formats or data compression systems or user interfaces. Likewise with businesses, businesses can and do want to experiment with different business methods to find ways of doing business more profitably.
Worse still, with so many people versed in the relevent arts, and with no monetary investment required save for time, for software, there's absolutely no possible justification for patents in either area. If I patent anything related to a real world problem in the software world, I can guarantee it that patent will be violated, independently, without any knowledge of my patent or what I did, by the people violating it.
To answer your final point: this is exactly the problem with patents. Patents give people the right to dictate how other people who independently create things (that the patent holders just so happen to have a patent on) use those things. That's why they're unjust. That's why we need to be reducing the amount of areas that are patentable, not increasing them.
Well, if we can cover the whole of Florida's Treasure Coast in windmills, then we can kill both birds with one stone. The hurricanes will be the air masses slowed to a standstill, and yet, because these hurricanes will be permanently over that area, we'll never run out of wind for the mills.
Alas, myopic ISPs still usually ban people from running their own SMTP servers. Ironically, this means those of us who do it to avoid spam, and use very little in the way of resources, have to do without while waiting for more reasonableprogressive ISPs to have service in our areas, while those who put default NT4 installations up and are unaware they have servers running, and end up being big DDoS hosts, usually can safely argue that they didn't run anything deliberately or knowingly and so shouldn't lose their accounts.
Be aware that for those who do not want to run their own servers, or who cannot, Yahoo actually provides exactly this service for a small fee. Take a look at Yahoo's premium email offerings. It's nice to see one Internet service that "gets it" when it comes to rational, non-destructive, RFC-compliant, anti-spam techniques.
With the greatest of respect, this is just totally wrong.
There lies the greatest difference, that both Linux and Mac OS X (BSD) were built with security as a cornerstone, not as an afterthought.
The designs of (GNU/)Linux and BSD are primarily based upon the design of Unix, which was initially a nice research project for a few friends at AT&T, and whose security has always been less than cutting edge. During the early stages of the Internet, it was Unix, not Windows, that was constantly pilloried for its vulnerabilities. Had the kind of lunatic hacking and cracking that goes on today been the norm twenty years ago, in all probability we wouldn't have The Internet, not as we know it anyway.
GNU/Linux and BSD (including OS X) add very little in terms of security to the Unix model. Only a general willingness on behalf of programmers to identify major regular problems, such as buffer overflows in networked software or privileged software (setuid'd), has stemmed the tide and made POSIX type operating systems a little more secure.
As far as Windows and Windows NT go, it may be correct to argue that security wasn't a cornerstone of DOS/Windows, but it's absurd to argue that of the NT generation of operating systems, which includes XP, 2003, and 2000. NT was designed with modern security principles in mind, with Culter implementing what he learnt from VMS, a genuinely secure operating system. And most of the faults people attribute to XP are equally attributable to operating systems like Mac OS X - the default user essentially having "root" privileges, or at least enough of them to install arbitrary, ordinary, applications without the need to enter passwords, for example.
(In fact, it's worse. Run Safari in OS X, with the default settings, and click on a link that results in a download - knowingly or not - and Safari will download the file... and, if it's an archive of some sort (a.sit), it'll open it, autoexpand, and - voila - that's enough to install - yes, install, because the mere presense of an app on your hard drive in Mac OS and Mac OS X automatically sets up things like file associations - the application. Sure, the user would still need to intervene a little bit if the app is to make sure it's automatically started when the user "logs in", but that could just be a matter of fooling them into running it, relatively easy if you can register file associations with the user's input.)
Windows has security issues because it has bugs and because of a few design issues that are common to the "other" mainstream Desktop operating system. And those bugs are exploited more than in other operating systems for the obvious reason that Windows is the most popular platform.
I know it's unpopular to say this. I know Linux and Mac users feel relatively safe - I know I do - and want to feel it's because of some courageous design decisions on the part of the designers of our operating systems.
But in reality, we benefit because the script kiddies are on Windows and we benefit because enough people use the operating system the script kiddies use to justify the script kiddies targetting them and not us. One root exploit is enough to ensure anyone can install a worm, and if you don't need root to install a worm or malware or whatever, then the more's the better. If I want to write Malware for the Mac, I can do that now, without exploiting any bugs, just the way Mac OS X was designed.
As far NT, Microsoft made some excellent design decisions at the beginning and them pissed them away with poor decisions in Outlook, in IE, and in their efforts to make the systems "user friendly". NT was designed, from the start, with good security in mind, and then had it "undesigned". Unix and its children only have what security they have through a lot of vigilence over the last couple of decades. And if people let their guards down - which they will if it remains the consensus that somehow NT is designed wrong and Unix isn't - then it's heading for disaster.
I didn't say a flat fee. Anyway the following comment is obviously flawed:
If Mac ports were free (or purely profitable), every game would have one. The fact that every game doesn't yields one of the following conclusions:
I didn't argue they were free, I said the original authors - the PC software house - doesn't incur any costs. MacSoft, and other similar vendors, does.
The Mac port software houses will not touch, with a ten foot pole or otherwise, any game that they do not believe will be profitable on the Mac platform. This is why not everything gets ported to the Mac.
Spyware tends to be loaded by users when browsing the web and coming across content that purportedly requires an ActiveX plug-in to view. If you're not suffering Spyware, it's not because of any NAT gateway/firewall, it's because you haven't visited those links and/or reflexedly hit "OK" and/or used a non-ActiveX supporting browser.
And don't think the latter is a perfect solution. I've seen sites prompt me to install.xpis into Firefox. The damage potential of the latter is slightly reduced compared to ActiveX, but you can bet that if there was no useful reason to be sending them, the authors wouldn't be wasting their time sending them.
I gave a neighbour access to the Internet via my DSL connection and wireless network a few months ago and all but revoked her access within two or three months because I had to clear up her PC of malware twice. Her son had been browsing certain dubious websites and had installed the malware, fed up of constant prompts to install it and under the assumption he had to to view the content. NAT is not enough to secure a PC.
Of course, that posits that there are such software houses in great quantity that consider the Mac platform a significant market *worth* supporting with time and money.
Well, I'm sure the software houses are grateful for the free cash they get from Mac users. The usual pattern is:
* PCGamesInc releases "PC Wars Ultimate Mega Online!", for PC and consoles.
* MacSoft, or some other third party, then buys the rights to do a Mac port. They, not PCGamesInc, pay oodles of cash to developers to do the work, and eat the loss if the game doesn't sell.
* PCGamesInc then profits, without any work on their part (except for the lawyer signing the rights.)
Now, tell me again why software houses would even care about the number of Mac gamers as long as they know that there are enough that, as long as they don't make the game too PC centric (say, by chosing a server browser technology that's actively hostile to Macs in favour of something agnostic that's just as good and reasonably priced), they'll get cash from someone wanting to do a Mac port?
Personally, if I was running a software house, I'd care. It's money. I'm not upsetting anyone by keeping my options open, and I'm opening the door to raking in more cash in future without any extra expenditure today.
One would assume because the PC users are on GameSpy, so it ends up creating a wall between PC and Mac gamers that, really, ought not to exist.
Of course, long term, a software house looking to produce a game for both PCs and Macs long term will choose an agnostic server browser, or host their own, so GameSpy, ultimately, is going to lose with this move.
"Global Cooling" was a brief, six month, media-fed frenzy which had very little to do with scientists and everything to do with kooks wanting to promote books. It was dismissed almost immediately by the scientific "community".
Global Warming, on the other hand, is something that has been discussed scientifically for close to two decades now. It's been extensively researched and by-and-large confirmed.
I find it amazing that the apologists for the right wing side of ideological pseudo-science continue to use "Global Cooling" as proof of anything. It sounds like Crichton may be a popular science fiction author, but he's as much of a kook as those he criticises.
Yes, various environmentalist wackos will jump on any "environment is dying" story, regardless of the truth to it. However, it's inevitable that if an actual scientifically valid environmental disaster comes to the fore, they'll jump on that too. The evidence is overwhelming that global warming is a real threat, and we have two decades of research that has, for the most part, pointed one way.
I don't think you understand what peer review is. Peer review only confirms that a paper's evidence is solid and that the conclusions drawn from the paper match the evidence available.
If I found solid grounds for believing that a cause of global warming is a delayed reaction from telepathy between citizens of Atlantis 10,000 years ago, then I could get a paper published and peer reviewed, as long as I provided proof of the central tenets of the theory, including evidence that Atlantis existed, that Atlantians used telepathy, and that the method they used created a system that results in heat being released 10,000 years later.
Slashdot Mirror
Those who want the law reformed need to posit credible alternatives, alternatives that ensure that movies (and music and books etc) can still be made, before arguing that there's something inherently unjust in having to pay to have access copyrighted material.
Right now, the only person I've seen who's made any effort to do this is Richard M. Stallman: his proposals only seem to apply successfully to computer software (I can't see a GPL'd movie being fundable, can you?); they do not require copyright reform; and he's demonised on Slashdot all the time as some kind of raving lunatic for his efforts.
Civil disobedience doesn't simply involve breaking laws that get in your way. They involve breaking the unjust parts of laws that are clearly unjust to begin with. Given copyright law, as it stands, gave people the movies they so deliberately set out to download without paying for, and given the lack of proposed alternatives that are relevent to that medium, and the hatred spewed by the same idiots who like P2P against those who make the efforts to formulate alternatives, I find it hard to accept there's any civil disobedience here. It's a simple case of freeloading.
And, you know what, if everyone downloading a movie today who hasn't made some effort to directly fund it - bought the DVD, watched it at the theater, etc - spent a day in jail tomorrow for doing just that, I'd see it as just desserts.
Anyway, all we need now is a way to increase the mass of the moon by about 6x, so the moon has a gravity similar to Earth's. Then it can hold an atmosphere, and we'll be able to make better use of it, like turn it into a huge vacation destination or something.
Once upon a time, the use of the word "emulator" to mean "something that looks like something it isn't" was generally considered correct usage. Somewhere along the line, because the most popular "emulators" were hardware emulators, too-clever-for-their-own-good people of the "/usr stands for Unix System Resources" and "The US is not a democracy, it's a Republic" variety, decided to "correct" anyone using the word in its original wider definition.
Please. You knew exactly what he meant. He wasn't being misleading, it really is a product that tries to look and run as much like Windows as possible.
It's a Windows emulator, not a PC emulator.
More to the point, ReactOS is an implementation of Windows NT, whereas 98Lite was a modification of DOS/Windows, version Windows 98. Despite Microsoft's liberal use of the word "Windows", and the fact both implemented compatable APIs, these were two entirely different operating systems, with different underlying technology models, designs, and everything.
Motorola seemed to have an intuitive feel for how a processor should be programmed, unlike the Intel processors and their offspring which were feature laden but... and as for the 6502, I'll never understand why people loved that chip. 8 bit addressing? Ouch!
Ahhhhhhh though, the 6809. I need to dig out the programs I wrote for the Dragon 32 (a TRS80 CoCo clone) at some point.
Ob6809Trivia - it had a SEX instruction, causing much chuckling to sad 15 year olds as I was when I programmed it. (Sign Extend, IIRC, made an eight bit signed value into a 16 bit signed value.)
And, of course, without copyrights, a lot of code will now enter the public domain. A lot will be without source, but reverse compiling techniques, I'm sure, with time, will fix that.
The GPL isn't just about access to source code.
BTW, did you know that white wine is actually unhealthy when combined with fish or chicken? I didn't either, I just made that up, the link doesn't even have anything to do with that, it's just I have to wait two minutes to post this reply. Bizarre, huh?
The rewritten GPL will "force all use of patented technologies to be released with source and with all other patented technologies in the same product open too."
Linus patents the foo_open() method, Linus releases Linux under GPL3, anyone wanting to use a technology that uses the foo_open() method when has to release source and ensure any other patents applying to the derived product are similarly licensed under GPL3.
The carrot is you can use Linux, or any other technology that contains foo_open(). The stick is that if you don't, you don't have the right to use foo_open() at all.
And what makes this interesting most of all is that the inherent unfairness of patents (if someone independently invents foo_open, but does so after Linus does, they still have to license their end product under the terms and conditions Linus forces upon them), the GPL will end up applying to products it doesn't right now. If Microsoft uses foo_open(), they'll have no choice but to either invent an entirely new technology to solve the same problem, or relicense the product that uses foo_open() under the GPL.
Wouldn't that be wierd?
- Unix to enter the public domain
- Everything Microsoft did 20 years ago to enter the public domain
- Everything Microsoft published more than a year ago that it hasn't, today, got a patent on, to enter the public domain
- IBM to have more of its technologies in Microsoft products than vice-versa
The suggestion, incidentally, that this has to do with defeating the GPL, is patently absurd (patently, geddit? arf arf!) The GPL can be rewritten within this regime to force all use of patented technologies to be released with source and with all other patented technologies in the same product open too. Additionally, with patents requiring details of implementation, we'll see a lot more source code, documentation on proprietary formats, etc.If you're in the proprietary software business, a successful lawsuit here could not create a worse state of affairs.
Of course, as I see it, it's highly unlikely to be completely successful. You may, at most, see a strengthening of fair use in some quarters, as the courts attempt to reconsolile the constitutional right to due process with the draconian nature of modern copyright law. But there's little reason to believe that copyright law inherently violates due process.
I'm thinking what the GP means is that it'd be useful to search inside the cache, ie look for all recent documents still in the cache that contain the words "Linux drivers femdom spanking pictures", so you can get to that USB fetish page you were looking at but can't remember the URL of (to use a bizarre example, seriously though you can probably think of something useful.)
It'd be useful if this tool works when the browser has crashed too (Firefox and other Netscape successors have a habit of invalidating the cache after a crash. I understand why, but while I don't want potentially corrupted cache entries coming up in place of URLs I'm visiting, the usefulness of a search is theoretically not diminished by such a situation.)
Whatdayamean that doesn't count? Programming the 6809 was like programming in a high level language... well, it felt like it, back when the alternative was BASIC. ;-)
It's possible that crashing the underlying windowing system would result in a blue screen (unlike, say, X11), but crashing KDE vs crashing Explorer.exe gives pretty much the same results.
The iPod's music is stored in a set of "hidden" (you can see them with the shell in OS X, but not with the Finder or at all in XP) folders, together with various XMLish files that tell the iPod what's available and what the playlists are. To copy music from the iPod is a simple matter of finding the file. To copy music to the iPod requires updating the XML files. There are free software tools to do this.
But in essense, yes, it's a regular firewire (or with 3G and newer models USB and FW) hard drive. You can even partition it, as far as I'm aware.
I just don't see how this isn't the worst of all worlds.
Fundamentally, if someone proposes to allow patents to exist in a particular sphere, that someone must come up with reasons to show that (a) such patents are necessary because substantial innovation is not happening, (b) such patents would not generally harm existing innovation efforts, except by an amount so small as to be heavily outweighed by (a), and (c) the sphere allows methods and technologies to be identified that clearly are patented, and will not usually result in people violating patents by accident. In general, we do this by proposing patents be "non-obvious", but it's not always obvious what non-obvious means.
In my view, while all three of the above justifications need to be present to argue there's a reasonable case for patenting, not one of those justifications stands up in the sphere of software, and arguably a case cannot be made for (a) and (c) when it comes to business methods.
That seems reasonable.They're unjust for this reason: a patent is a monopoly on an idea and all implementations of that idea. It differs from copyrights in that it applies to all instances of that idea, not just those that were copied from a single creation. And, while with things that are copyrightable it's highly unlikely that two people would come up with the same thing for anything but the most trivial of works (you're not likely to accidentally, without reading the original, write "War and Peace", for example), with patents two people researching the same problem are very likely to come across the same solution. The person who gets to the patent office first with the solution wins the patent, and wins the monopoly.
With software patents and patents on business methods, we see the problems with patents come to the fore. There is every incentive already for software authors to come up with new and innovative software systems, be that file formats or data compression systems or user interfaces. Likewise with businesses, businesses can and do want to experiment with different business methods to find ways of doing business more profitably.
Worse still, with so many people versed in the relevent arts, and with no monetary investment required save for time, for software, there's absolutely no possible justification for patents in either area. If I patent anything related to a real world problem in the software world, I can guarantee it that patent will be violated, independently, without any knowledge of my patent or what I did, by the people violating it.
To answer your final point: this is exactly the problem with patents. Patents give people the right to dictate how other people who independently create things (that the patent holders just so happen to have a patent on) use those things. That's why they're unjust. That's why we need to be reducing the amount of areas that are patentable, not increasing them.
Well, if we can cover the whole of Florida's Treasure Coast in windmills, then we can kill both birds with one stone. The hurricanes will be the air masses slowed to a standstill, and yet, because these hurricanes will be permanently over that area, we'll never run out of wind for the mills.
Be aware that for those who do not want to run their own servers, or who cannot, Yahoo actually provides exactly this service for a small fee. Take a look at Yahoo's premium email offerings. It's nice to see one Internet service that "gets it" when it comes to rational, non-destructive, RFC-compliant, anti-spam techniques.
GNU/Linux and BSD (including OS X) add very little in terms of security to the Unix model. Only a general willingness on behalf of programmers to identify major regular problems, such as buffer overflows in networked software or privileged software (setuid'd), has stemmed the tide and made POSIX type operating systems a little more secure.
As far as Windows and Windows NT go, it may be correct to argue that security wasn't a cornerstone of DOS/Windows, but it's absurd to argue that of the NT generation of operating systems, which includes XP, 2003, and 2000. NT was designed with modern security principles in mind, with Culter implementing what he learnt from VMS, a genuinely secure operating system. And most of the faults people attribute to XP are equally attributable to operating systems like Mac OS X - the default user essentially having "root" privileges, or at least enough of them to install arbitrary, ordinary, applications without the need to enter passwords, for example.
(In fact, it's worse. Run Safari in OS X, with the default settings, and click on a link that results in a download - knowingly or not - and Safari will download the file... and, if it's an archive of some sort (a .sit), it'll open it, autoexpand, and - voila - that's enough to install - yes, install, because the mere presense of an app on your hard drive in Mac OS and Mac OS X automatically sets up things like file associations - the application. Sure, the user would still need to intervene a little bit if the app is to make sure it's automatically started when the user "logs in", but that could just be a matter of fooling them into running it, relatively easy if you can register file associations with the user's input.)
Windows has security issues because it has bugs and because of a few design issues that are common to the "other" mainstream Desktop operating system. And those bugs are exploited more than in other operating systems for the obvious reason that Windows is the most popular platform.
I know it's unpopular to say this. I know Linux and Mac users feel relatively safe - I know I do - and want to feel it's because of some courageous design decisions on the part of the designers of our operating systems.
But in reality, we benefit because the script kiddies are on Windows and we benefit because enough people use the operating system the script kiddies use to justify the script kiddies targetting them and not us. One root exploit is enough to ensure anyone can install a worm, and if you don't need root to install a worm or malware or whatever, then the more's the better. If I want to write Malware for the Mac, I can do that now, without exploiting any bugs, just the way Mac OS X was designed.
As far NT, Microsoft made some excellent design decisions at the beginning and them pissed them away with poor decisions in Outlook, in IE, and in their efforts to make the systems "user friendly". NT was designed, from the start, with good security in mind, and then had it "undesigned". Unix and its children only have what security they have through a lot of vigilence over the last couple of decades. And if people let their guards down - which they will if it remains the consensus that somehow NT is designed wrong and Unix isn't - then it's heading for disaster.
The Mac port software houses will not touch, with a ten foot pole or otherwise, any game that they do not believe will be profitable on the Mac platform. This is why not everything gets ported to the Mac.
And don't think the latter is a perfect solution. I've seen sites prompt me to install .xpis into Firefox. The damage potential of the latter is slightly reduced compared to ActiveX, but you can bet that if there was no useful reason to be sending them, the authors wouldn't be wasting their time sending them.
I gave a neighbour access to the Internet via my DSL connection and wireless network a few months ago and all but revoked her access within two or three months because I had to clear up her PC of malware twice. Her son had been browsing certain dubious websites and had installed the malware, fed up of constant prompts to install it and under the assumption he had to to view the content. NAT is not enough to secure a PC.
* PCGamesInc releases "PC Wars Ultimate Mega Online!", for PC and consoles.
* MacSoft, or some other third party, then buys the rights to do a Mac port. They, not PCGamesInc, pay oodles of cash to developers to do the work, and eat the loss if the game doesn't sell.
* PCGamesInc then profits, without any work on their part (except for the lawyer signing the rights.)
Now, tell me again why software houses would even care about the number of Mac gamers as long as they know that there are enough that, as long as they don't make the game too PC centric (say, by chosing a server browser technology that's actively hostile to Macs in favour of something agnostic that's just as good and reasonably priced), they'll get cash from someone wanting to do a Mac port?
Personally, if I was running a software house, I'd care. It's money. I'm not upsetting anyone by keeping my options open, and I'm opening the door to raking in more cash in future without any extra expenditure today.
Of course, long term, a software house looking to produce a game for both PCs and Macs long term will choose an agnostic server browser, or host their own, so GameSpy, ultimately, is going to lose with this move.
Global Warming, on the other hand, is something that has been discussed scientifically for close to two decades now. It's been extensively researched and by-and-large confirmed.
I find it amazing that the apologists for the right wing side of ideological pseudo-science continue to use "Global Cooling" as proof of anything. It sounds like Crichton may be a popular science fiction author, but he's as much of a kook as those he criticises.
Yes, various environmentalist wackos will jump on any "environment is dying" story, regardless of the truth to it. However, it's inevitable that if an actual scientifically valid environmental disaster comes to the fore, they'll jump on that too. The evidence is overwhelming that global warming is a real threat, and we have two decades of research that has, for the most part, pointed one way.
If I found solid grounds for believing that a cause of global warming is a delayed reaction from telepathy between citizens of Atlantis 10,000 years ago, then I could get a paper published and peer reviewed, as long as I provided proof of the central tenets of the theory, including evidence that Atlantis existed, that Atlantians used telepathy, and that the method they used created a system that results in heat being released 10,000 years later.
Peer review is not generally subjective.