Looks more like WebDAV should be cited as prior art, though. Or perhaps Mozilla's own development system, which has been running for well over two years and can be applied to Websites (Mozilla's own Website does this, in fact).
Chalk up another boneheaded patent for the USPTO. Someone really needs to give Congress the heads-up on these people, you know? ----------
The web only has "forums" not true communities. There is no real interaction on the web, just reaction.
However, what is interaction but a long chain of actions and reactions? Perhaps the delay inherent in the Net is only now causing people to realize that.
...because no one knows how to work and be with one another, they just know how to anticipate and react to the actions of each other. It's a difference.
And the difference is... ? While it's true people aren't physically with each other, does this really matter? And if they aren't, then is a telephone call "interaction"? And if it is, then why isn't a Web-based forum? ----------
While not quite the ideal outcome, we can definitely chalk one up for The Good Guys here.
The ideal outcome for this would have been for the SC to hear the case and explicitly rule in Connectix's favor; that would make things a lot less ambiguous. But this is certainly much better than nothing at all (or worse, a ruling in Sony's favor).
Now, the inevitable question: how can this best be applied to DeCSS and the DMCA? ----------
The privacy concerns with IPv6 are really no greater than with IPv4. Yes, even with the IP address possibly tied to a MAC address (which, I might add, it does not have to be). Think about it...
1) Your MAC address is already embedded in every single packet going out of your Ethernet card, no matter what protocol you're using. It's the way Ethernet works.
2) MAC addresses are handed out to companies or individuals in huge chunks. The body that does this has no way of tracking right down to the user, only to the card manufacturer. If you're really concerned, pay for your NIC with cash and don't register it with the manufacturer.
3) MAC addresses are configurable with most card/stack combinations. So chances are you can change your MAC at will.
4) The IPv6 address is not necessarily tied to the MAC address. There are other ways to do it.
5) If even these aren't enough for you, please remember that services like Anonymizer still exist.
6) One feature of IPv6 is security. In order for transmissions to be secure, they have to be verifiable for obvious reasons. In other words, if you want to have truly secure communication, you have to give up some measure of privacy, just enough so that you can be verified as the intended recipient. Conversely, you can have private communications if you want them, but in doing so you lose all semblances of security because there's no way to verify who's on the other end. It's a tradeoff; take your pick.
7) It's an outright fallacy to think your Internet communications are currently truly anonymous. Even under IPv4, you leave a trail of "mouse droppings" wherever you go, and these can be traced straight back to you if the hops in the chain are willing to cooperate (you can foil this by using things like Anonymizer, who won't cooperate, but this will be no different in IPv6).
So yes, you might say there are potential privacy concerns with IPv6. However, they're no greater than those already in the IPv4 system we've been using for many years, and they're just as easy to circumvent if you truly need the extra measure. ----------
The problem is, Win9X simply cannot handle long uptimes, and while sleep mode doesn't render the system any more unstable, all that time you're running the OS will.
You'll get more mileage (no pun intended) out of NT. It does still have to be rebooted in a regular basis, but because cars don't typically run continuously for weeks as a time, you can go for far longer than the typical NT installation.
Your best bet would be to find something more stable that supported suspend-to-disk. The only problem is, I don't know of anything that can do that. Linux is more stable by a long shot, but last I checked you couldn't suspend to disk. MacOS can be made to do suspend-to-disk, but is certainly not as stable as NT. People have successfully made car-based MP3 players based on both Linux and MacOS (never heard of a Windows-based one but I don't doubt they exist). But you're really doing something different here with the suspend-to-disk feature; I like the idea (lower audio "warm-up" times are a Very Good Thing) but I'm not sure how it can feasibly be done with any of these three OS'es. You're going to have to look further afield.
But if you can get something running, be sure to post about it here; I like this idea. ----------
Actually, yes, this is a case of free speech. The ISONews site does have legitimate backups. The reason: it is legal to back up software; this is fair use. It is also, however, legal to obtain a backup copy of the software you already own, even if it is an Internet download (note, though, that it may not be legal to provide it for download, if you don't own the game yourself and don't take all technically feasible measures to verify that the people downloading the ISO actually own it). For people who can't make their own ISO's (and there are a great many people who can't), this is a very valuable service indeed.
It's also interesting to note that the people who send out the press releases are totally legitimate. After all, in order to rip the game to an ISO, they must have purchased the game to rip from. (OK, theoretically they could rent the game, but last I checked Dreamcast ripping isn't simple stuff, and takes longer to do than it is practical to rent a game for). Advertising the downloadable image, as a service to people who legitimately own the game, is also legal.
Now, is this an ethical thing to do? It depends. Look at what Sega is doing: is punishing innocent people for crimes they aren't committing ethical (and this does happen to many people, either directly or indirectly due to Sega's actions, by being deprived of their right to protect their investment by backing up legitimately-purchased software)? I wouldn't say so, and in this case providing backups to people who could not otherwise get them is quite ethical. However, is putting up ISO's with no verification of ownership, knowing that people will download them illegally, ethical? Again, no.
However, how do you get proof of ownership? This is not an easy thing to do, because it really can't be done reliably. You could have someone scan in the disc and e-mail it to you, but this isn't reliable because scans can be posted anywhere. Receipts can also be faked easily. Serial numbers aren't provided on console games (they're not practical for a console), so this is no good. Sending in the actual game is a possibility, but also hideously impractical as it incurs the charges and delays of sending it back (plus, what happens if the game is lost or damaged in transit?) Also, there's no way to be sure that one person isn't simply lending the game out to his friends so they can send it in to get their own copies. If you could somehow get access to credit card records, that would work for some game owners, but people can and do sometimes pay cash or use a check, so you cannot verify ownership for these people (and illegitimate users can always claim to have paid cash, which you can't prove they didn't do).
So there's no reliable way to prove ownership of a game. Therefore, the converse is also true; you cannot prove that someone does not own a game. Given this, is it ethical to assume someone is trying to commit copyright infringement if you can't prove that they are? No, this isn't ethical either.
In other words, this is a real damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If you take down the ISO's because you can't prove anyone owns the game, you're punishing innocent people for copyright infringement (which they are not doing). If you leave them up with no attempt at verification, people will download them illegitimately. And you cannot verify, because of the numerous false-positives and false-negatives you'll get (in the end, in fact, this would be worse than no verification at all). ----------
Yep, and they hold copyrights for a rather obscene stretch of time (far longer than most corporations are even in business, though between the average life expentancy of a person and the additional 70-odd years it takes for a copyright to expire). Personally, I'm more of the belief that it should extend to 50 years or the dissolution of the corporation, whichever comes first, though I know a lot of people will disagree with me on the time limit. By the way, currently the limit is 90 years, and the copyright extends even beyond the corporation's dissolution. ----------
This is precisely what more than a few legislators who have voted for the law gave as the primary reason. They want corporations to set up shop there so that more bribe^H^H^H^H^H jobs are funneled into the state, and the consumer be damned.
It's really a sad state of affairs, no? And what's worse, the rest of the world is slowly but surely starting to follow the US' lead in this area... ----------
The last thing we need is for some troll to hack Slashdot and turn it into a goatse.cx mirror (a dream I'm sure has crossed the mind of many a middle-school, immature techno-jerk).
Honestly, though, what other features can we expect to see in Slashcode2? Story moderation (or changes to the overall mod structure)? Perhaps user-definable themes (OK, I know I'm going out on a limb there)? Removal of the suid requirement on the script? Just throwing out some honest questions... ----------
You are correct that authors have a right to be compensated for their works. I also have a right to fair use of any work I purchase. That does not include piracy, mind you, but my right to fair use equals the author's right to compensation. That's what the copyright bargain is. Among the legally-recognized principles of fair use are the following:
I can peruse the work whenever I so choose. This is called "time-shifting" and is generally not an issue with books, since they can be read anytime anyway. It's more of an issue with music and video.
I can copy the word to any menium I so choose. This is called "space-shifting." As far as the CD is concerned, that means I have the right to print the contents, which is the first thing I'd do.
I can sell the copy I bought, so long as I do not retain any copies I have made of it and sell only the copy I legitimately purchased. This is called the "first sale" doctrine, meaning that an author or publisher only has the rights to money from a given copy of a work the first time it is sold.
I can peruse any portion of the work I wish, even if it is not the entire work. This right, AFAIK, has no name.
I can peruse the work in any lawful manner I wish, again so long as I don't distribute any copies made in the process without express permission by the original rights holder. This includes interoperability. If I cannot peruse a work in the manner of my choosing, I have the right to render it such that I can. This is really an extension of time- and space-shifting, but is also why reverse-engineering to achieve compatibility is fair use.
This is how copyrights work. They were not made to reward authors for their works; that part is only a means to the real end. The real end is to eventually enrich the public domain (this is why copyrights expire, although for human authors they only expire long after the person has died). It does this by providing authors a financial incentive, but in return for that incentive the author gives up some rights (such as control over how something is used by people who legitimately pay for it).
Corporations don't like giving up that kind of control; the sad fact is that ethics are rarely as profitable as unethical means. That's why they've been backing UCITA and the DMCA; they want to take legitimate rights away from the people all in the pursuit of The Almighty Buck. It's also why they have to be stopped; the government is supposed to exist primarily for our benefit, not theirs. ----------
Windows *IS* OO. Never heard of COM? Never dragged an image from an email to a spreadsheet?
Gnumeric to Evolution? Gee, that wasn't hard.
But at the same time, I wouldn't quite call Windows truly OO (though it does come fairly close). COM was a good idea (the whole component architecture thing; hardly an innovation even then but still a good idea) but it does have a few fundamental flaws. Then again, CORBA (off of which Gnome's Bonobo is based) has many of the same ones.
The best idea I'd seen out there was IBM's SOM (off of which Apple's OpenDoc and, IIRC, BeOS' Replicants, were based). Based off of, and interoperable with, CORBA, but fixing the holes (one of the most glaring being lack of true inheritance in interfaces; in COM and most CORBA-based technologies one can inherit interfaces but not implementations, leading to unnecessarily bloated code in many cases). NeXT's EOF was also great; glad to see it still around in OSX. ----------
I doubt this guy's even a Microsoft apologist. He's just plain stupid. It's obvious he knows nothing about computers whatsoever, as evidenced by the fact that he thinks WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 competed with DOS in the operating systems market despite the fact that neither Lotus 1-2-3 nor WordPerfect are operating systems at all.
He attempts to apply classical econimic rules in a field where they simply don't apply. And he doesn't realize why they don't apply. Classical economic rules apply very well to things like card, hammers, television, and such, because people know about these things. They might not be experts, but they know enough to spot obvious lies. People don't know about computers. This is how Microsoft has managed to make its way to the top; it decieves consumers with various techniques (their favorite being what we call FUD, which there is plenty of in this piece as well).
Honestly, I don't see the reasoning behind this at all. It talks a good game, yes. Lots of overpretentious stuff aimed at confusing people. But if you wade through it and look at the wording and the terminology, you'll find that there's absolutely no substance whatsoever. ----------
The API which OpenGL obsoleted on the Mac was QuickDraw 3D, not QuickTime VR.
Then again, there are people moving to create an Open-Source implementation of QD3D now, too. Check the Quesa Website for more info on that. They're pretty far along in it, too.
I always thought Apple made a mistake in obsoleting QD3D. Relatively easy to work with (easier than OpenGL), an open standard file format, and the capability to do some seriously cool stuff besides. Ever used TextureEyes to map a running MPEG onto a 3D model with three mouseclicks? What Apple should have done was offered OpenGL as a low-level API, with QD3D as a higher-level option. Maybe Quesa can fulfill that one. ----------
When was the last time you tried to upgrade that woderful hardware you wierdo?
Last month. Processor upgrade. Worked fine.
Three months ago, another 128 megs RAM. Worked fine.
Before that, new internal hard drive. Worked fine.
Earlier still, another 64. Still worked fine.
Then of course there were the video and TV cards I added (I now run a two-headed Mac, thank you very much). All of it worked fine. Oh, and there's the external hard drives and CD burner.
Next on the list: a USB/FireWire combined card. If the other upgrades are any indication at all, it'll work fine.
I hope you enjoyed being reemed up the ass for the price since apple has a monopoly on its hardware.
Which is precisely why the only hardware I buy from Apple is the original system itself. The video/TV cards, the RAM, the drives, the burner, and processor upgrade... none of them are from Apple. Apple does overcharge for peripherals (have you seen the ungodly prices they're charging for the RAM upgrades they just started offering?) but the CPU's are more than worth every last penny.
Ever owned a Mac? I thought not. Very, very few people who call Macs overpriced ever have. All I can say is, own one and you'll understand. ----------
RSA actually isn't very complex (relatively speaking, of course). It's been in any decent college-level discrete mathematics textbook for years. CS students are taught to do it in their heads (mind you, the human brain is a lot slower than a computer at this sort of thing, but the algorithm holds).
So no, it's no surprise that the BSD folks could get an implementation going. The Mozilla folks have had their OSS RSA out for a week already.
And, oh yeah, [i]everyone [/i]wanted RSA, even when you had to pay for a license. What we were mad about was RSA's abuse of the patent system (never mind the issues of software patents; they had freely published this themselves for so long that in any sane country it would be considered prior art; in fact they published it for so long that even by the US system it should have been considered as such). ----------
ISBN's only identify works themselves, not copies. This means that the ISBN's on all copies of a given work will be the same. All it would take would be for someone to compile a big list of ISBN's, and the whole authentication process is circumvented.
There's another way I'd considered, but this keeps the service from being free. It involves sending in the actual CD, along with the cost of shipping it back. Since you can't send in a legal CD if you don't have it, that's about as good as you can get (the CD could have been stolen, but thanks to presumption of innocence that can't be taken into consideration).
Another, possibly equally or more suitable way, would be to send/fax in a photocopy of the disc itself, ot the liners. This has been used in the proprietary software industry for a long time to determine ownership (usually for purposes of upgrade discounts). It can be circumvented, but it's generally more trouble than it's worth to do so.
Rehnquist probably should have abstained. He can't be utterly impartial (as judges must be) if his son is representing Microsoft. It could be argued, however, that by delaying the Supreme Court's hearing of the case, he increases the chances that by the time it hits the Supreme Court either his son won't be representing Microsoft anymore or he will have retired.
However, consider that even if Rehnquist had abstained, the outcome would not have changed. As it was, the vote to delay the case was 8-1 in favor of Microsoft; a 7-1-1 vote would not change that at all. ----------
THAT section doesn't say anything about the relative strength of the federal constitution, the federal laws, and treaties.
Actually, read it again. The way I look at it, it seems as though it provides a clear hierarchy. State constitutions trump state laws. Federal law trumps state laws. Treaties trump federal law. And finally, the Constitution trumps everything else, at least as far as the US is concerned.
Of course, technically the government is forbidden to ratify any treaty that would conflict with the Constitution, but go figure; that provision has been ignored for how many years? ----------
No compromise is required, only very strict enforcement of Constitutional rights.
Let me explain. What if Carnivore was authored in such a way that it could only sniff a particular person's e-mail? Further, what if it could only do this if law enforcement could prove to the system that a warrant had been issued, perhaps via an incredibly strong digital signature that even Moore's Law wouldn't bring into the realm of crackability for centuries? And finally, what if Carnivore would not function at all, not even passively watching the data stream, if there were none of these "proofs of warrant" active in the system (the only functionality still available, in other words, would be to put proofs of warrant into the system to unlock the remaining functionality)? And, as a crowning touch, what if the Carnivore system were Open-Source, so it could be inspected, and also put through formal verification to ensure no exploits either from hackers or law enforcement trying to hack around the security to do a little illegal surveillance)? Oh, yes, and make it an embedded system (no Windows NT to introduce exploits of its own).
Once that mechanism is in place, it's guaranteed that it cannot be abused. And if Carnivore can, by these means, be proven conclusively to be unabusable, then I no longer have any problems with it. But as the situation is now, I very much doubt any of the measures I mentioned above are in place. ----------
I'd love to see Microsoft manage this. OK, so I wouldn't, but I'd love to see them fall on their faces trying. Sadly for them, it's already been very well-established in the courts that interoperability, even if it means reverse-engineering, is fair use.
Now, the NDA thing is much more interesting, and could be more of a problem. However, Microsoft cannot possibly prove that any NDA's are being violated. To do so, they would have to disclose their source code -at least those parts of it which deal with NTFS- and we all know they'll never do that due to their irrational fear that if someone saw their source they might make something better (never mind that they already do this without having seen the Windows source, so I doubt it would change things much). I suppose it's possible; I've never seen the NT code (sometimes I wonder if Microsoft even lets its programmers see the Windows source), but there could be things in common between them. But how can I be certqain of this unless I can see both sources and compare them? I can't. Neither can a judge. Therefore, there's no way to prove this guy guilty, so Microsoft can't win this case.
But let them try. Let them waste millions on a case they cannot win. This'll be fun:) ----------
This guy claims to have been writing emulators for fourteen years, but the sheer cluelessness of this rant is outright amazing. He doesn't even know quite what an emulator is, as evidenced by the fact that he thinks OSX's Classic environment is an emulator. In reality, it's no more an emulator than Wine, Plex86/VMWare, MOL, OS/2's Windows compatibility environment, and so on. These are all virtual machines, but they are not emulators due to the fact that they make no attempt at imitating hardware. This is why you cannot run Wine on LinuxPPC.
Then, he talks about Apple's horrendous OSX and how it obsoletes every Mac over two years old. Wrong again. While it is true that most older machines will not run OSX, Apple has provided a means of forward-compatibility for many older machines via CarbonLib. This allows Carbon apps to run all the way back to OS8.1 (which is itself a free upgrade from 8.0). Since most existing Mac apps are likely to choose Carbon rather than Cocoa (this only makes sense, since it's far less work to port and will still run on the earlier OS), these machines will continue to run most current applications. This happens to include every PowerPC-based Mac ever made, all of the clones, and a healthy chunk of 68K-based machines with PPC upgrade cards. That's a lineage of over seven years for the OOC-based machines alone. I'd love to see anyone run Win2K or WinME on a seven year old machine at a reasonable speed.
Then, the lovely bit about PC's not going obsolete every two years. In the Windows world, they basically do (the Linux world is far less affected by this phenomenon), due to a vairety of factors. It should be noted that according to recent studies, the average useful life of a Mac was four years, the average Wintel box only two. Sadly, no Linux results were posted (they may not have been studied).
Oh, and the bit about MacOS being based off of two-decade-old technology. Guess what: the technology Win9x is based off of is very nearly as old (older, even, if you count the operating systems off of which DOS was based); whatever M$ may do to hide the fact even WinME is still little more than a bloated, overglorified DOS shell. WinNT/2K is a different matter entirely, but he was focusing on WinME, so I will too.
Also, forgive me if I don't buy his claims of G4 performance on a PC. All claims of which processor is faster aside, emulation takes tons of processing power. Even in best-case scenarios, you could only emulate a processor running at a fraction of the clockrate of the host machine. On a 1-GHz P3, you might be able to get up to the speed of a low-end Blue G3, but I doubt even that. Likewise, on a 500-MHz G4, you might manage a 300-MHz Pentium if Apple's speed claims are true, and more likely you'd be lucky to get a P233's performance.
This is a shame. This guy makes some fine emulators. But it seems he got cocky, bit off more than he could chew with the PPC emulator, and is now trying to pin the blame on Apple and Microsoft for his own mistakes. ----------
When did I ever say I favored gun control? I didn't say any such thing. Truth be told, I agree with what you've written here. Don't jump to conclusions so quickly. ----------
Slashdot Mirror
Looks more like WebDAV should be cited as prior art, though. Or perhaps Mozilla's own development system, which has been running for well over two years and can be applied to Websites (Mozilla's own Website does this, in fact).
Chalk up another boneheaded patent for the USPTO. Someone really needs to give Congress the heads-up on these people, you know?
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The web only has "forums" not true communities. There is no real interaction on the web, just reaction.
...because no one knows how to work and be with one another, they just know how to anticipate and react to the actions of each other. It's a difference.
However, what is interaction but a long chain of actions and reactions? Perhaps the delay inherent in the Net is only now causing people to realize that.
And the difference is... ? While it's true people aren't physically with each other, does this really matter? And if they aren't, then is a telephone call "interaction"? And if it is, then why isn't a Web-based forum?
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While not quite the ideal outcome, we can definitely chalk one up for The Good Guys here.
The ideal outcome for this would have been for the SC to hear the case and explicitly rule in Connectix's favor; that would make things a lot less ambiguous. But this is certainly much better than nothing at all (or worse, a ruling in Sony's favor).
Now, the inevitable question: how can this best be applied to DeCSS and the DMCA?
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The privacy concerns with IPv6 are really no greater than with IPv4. Yes, even with the IP address possibly tied to a MAC address (which, I might add, it does not have to be). Think about it...
1) Your MAC address is already embedded in every single packet going out of your Ethernet card, no matter what protocol you're using. It's the way Ethernet works.
2) MAC addresses are handed out to companies or individuals in huge chunks. The body that does this has no way of tracking right down to the user, only to the card manufacturer. If you're really concerned, pay for your NIC with cash and don't register it with the manufacturer.
3) MAC addresses are configurable with most card/stack combinations. So chances are you can change your MAC at will.
4) The IPv6 address is not necessarily tied to the MAC address. There are other ways to do it.
5) If even these aren't enough for you, please remember that services like Anonymizer still exist.
6) One feature of IPv6 is security. In order for transmissions to be secure, they have to be verifiable for obvious reasons. In other words, if you want to have truly secure communication, you have to give up some measure of privacy, just enough so that you can be verified as the intended recipient. Conversely, you can have private communications if you want them, but in doing so you lose all semblances of security because there's no way to verify who's on the other end. It's a tradeoff; take your pick.
7) It's an outright fallacy to think your Internet communications are currently truly anonymous. Even under IPv4, you leave a trail of "mouse droppings" wherever you go, and these can be traced straight back to you if the hops in the chain are willing to cooperate (you can foil this by using things like Anonymizer, who won't cooperate, but this will be no different in IPv6).
So yes, you might say there are potential privacy concerns with IPv6. However, they're no greater than those already in the IPv4 system we've been using for many years, and they're just as easy to circumvent if you truly need the extra measure.
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I'm afraid you might be out of luck on this one.
The problem is, Win9X simply cannot handle long uptimes, and while sleep mode doesn't render the system any more unstable, all that time you're running the OS will.
You'll get more mileage (no pun intended) out of NT. It does still have to be rebooted in a regular basis, but because cars don't typically run continuously for weeks as a time, you can go for far longer than the typical NT installation.
Your best bet would be to find something more stable that supported suspend-to-disk. The only problem is, I don't know of anything that can do that. Linux is more stable by a long shot, but last I checked you couldn't suspend to disk. MacOS can be made to do suspend-to-disk, but is certainly not as stable as NT. People have successfully made car-based MP3 players based on both Linux and MacOS (never heard of a Windows-based one but I don't doubt they exist). But you're really doing something different here with the suspend-to-disk feature; I like the idea (lower audio "warm-up" times are a Very Good Thing) but I'm not sure how it can feasibly be done with any of these three OS'es. You're going to have to look further afield.
But if you can get something running, be sure to post about it here; I like this idea.
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IANAL, of course.
Actually, yes, this is a case of free speech. The ISONews site does have legitimate backups. The reason: it is legal to back up software; this is fair use. It is also, however, legal to obtain a backup copy of the software you already own, even if it is an Internet download (note, though, that it may not be legal to provide it for download, if you don't own the game yourself and don't take all technically feasible measures to verify that the people downloading the ISO actually own it). For people who can't make their own ISO's (and there are a great many people who can't), this is a very valuable service indeed.
It's also interesting to note that the people who send out the press releases are totally legitimate. After all, in order to rip the game to an ISO, they must have purchased the game to rip from. (OK, theoretically they could rent the game, but last I checked Dreamcast ripping isn't simple stuff, and takes longer to do than it is practical to rent a game for). Advertising the downloadable image, as a service to people who legitimately own the game, is also legal.
Now, is this an ethical thing to do? It depends. Look at what Sega is doing: is punishing innocent people for crimes they aren't committing ethical (and this does happen to many people, either directly or indirectly due to Sega's actions, by being deprived of their right to protect their investment by backing up legitimately-purchased software)? I wouldn't say so, and in this case providing backups to people who could not otherwise get them is quite ethical. However, is putting up ISO's with no verification of ownership, knowing that people will download them illegally, ethical? Again, no.
However, how do you get proof of ownership? This is not an easy thing to do, because it really can't be done reliably. You could have someone scan in the disc and e-mail it to you, but this isn't reliable because scans can be posted anywhere. Receipts can also be faked easily. Serial numbers aren't provided on console games (they're not practical for a console), so this is no good. Sending in the actual game is a possibility, but also hideously impractical as it incurs the charges and delays of sending it back (plus, what happens if the game is lost or damaged in transit?) Also, there's no way to be sure that one person isn't simply lending the game out to his friends so they can send it in to get their own copies. If you could somehow get access to credit card records, that would work for some game owners, but people can and do sometimes pay cash or use a check, so you cannot verify ownership for these people (and illegitimate users can always claim to have paid cash, which you can't prove they didn't do).
So there's no reliable way to prove ownership of a game. Therefore, the converse is also true; you cannot prove that someone does not own a game. Given this, is it ethical to assume someone is trying to commit copyright infringement if you can't prove that they are? No, this isn't ethical either.
In other words, this is a real damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If you take down the ISO's because you can't prove anyone owns the game, you're punishing innocent people for copyright infringement (which they are not doing). If you leave them up with no attempt at verification, people will download them illegitimately. And you cannot verify, because of the numerous false-positives and false-negatives you'll get (in the end, in fact, this would be worse than no verification at all).
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Yep, and they hold copyrights for a rather obscene stretch of time (far longer than most corporations are even in business, though between the average life expentancy of a person and the additional 70-odd years it takes for a copyright to expire). Personally, I'm more of the belief that it should extend to 50 years or the dissolution of the corporation, whichever comes first, though I know a lot of people will disagree with me on the time limit. By the way, currently the limit is 90 years, and the copyright extends even beyond the corporation's dissolution.
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This is precisely what more than a few legislators who have voted for the law gave as the primary reason. They want corporations to set up shop there so that more bribe^H^H^H^H^H jobs are funneled into the state, and the consumer be damned.
It's really a sad state of affairs, no? And what's worse, the rest of the world is slowly but surely starting to follow the US' lead in this area...
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IANAL, but my guess is that since you'd be the one who got the computer to write the book, the rights would go to you.
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The last thing we need is for some troll to hack Slashdot and turn it into a goatse.cx mirror (a dream I'm sure has crossed the mind of many a middle-school, immature techno-jerk).
Honestly, though, what other features can we expect to see in Slashcode2? Story moderation (or changes to the overall mod structure)? Perhaps user-definable themes (OK, I know I'm going out on a limb there)? Removal of the suid requirement on the script? Just throwing out some honest questions...
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This is how copyrights work. They were not made to reward authors for their works; that part is only a means to the real end. The real end is to eventually enrich the public domain (this is why copyrights expire, although for human authors they only expire long after the person has died). It does this by providing authors a financial incentive, but in return for that incentive the author gives up some rights (such as control over how something is used by people who legitimately pay for it).
Corporations don't like giving up that kind of control; the sad fact is that ethics are rarely as profitable as unethical means. That's why they've been backing UCITA and the DMCA; they want to take legitimate rights away from the people all in the pursuit of The Almighty Buck. It's also why they have to be stopped; the government is supposed to exist primarily for our benefit, not theirs.
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Windows *IS* OO. Never heard of COM? Never dragged an image from an email to a spreadsheet?
Gnumeric to Evolution? Gee, that wasn't hard.
But at the same time, I wouldn't quite call Windows truly OO (though it does come fairly close). COM was a good idea (the whole component architecture thing; hardly an innovation even then but still a good idea) but it does have a few fundamental flaws. Then again, CORBA (off of which Gnome's Bonobo is based) has many of the same ones.
The best idea I'd seen out there was IBM's SOM (off of which Apple's OpenDoc and, IIRC, BeOS' Replicants, were based). Based off of, and interoperable with, CORBA, but fixing the holes (one of the most glaring being lack of true inheritance in interfaces; in COM and most CORBA-based technologies one can inherit interfaces but not implementations, leading to unnecessarily bloated code in many cases). NeXT's EOF was also great; glad to see it still around in OSX.
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I doubt this guy's even a Microsoft apologist. He's just plain stupid. It's obvious he knows nothing about computers whatsoever, as evidenced by the fact that he thinks WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 competed with DOS in the operating systems market despite the fact that neither Lotus 1-2-3 nor WordPerfect are operating systems at all.
He attempts to apply classical econimic rules in a field where they simply don't apply. And he doesn't realize why they don't apply. Classical economic rules apply very well to things like card, hammers, television, and such, because people know about these things. They might not be experts, but they know enough to spot obvious lies. People don't know about computers. This is how Microsoft has managed to make its way to the top; it decieves consumers with various techniques (their favorite being what we call FUD, which there is plenty of in this piece as well).
Honestly, I don't see the reasoning behind this at all. It talks a good game, yes. Lots of overpretentious stuff aimed at confusing people. But if you wade through it and look at the wording and the terminology, you'll find that there's absolutely no substance whatsoever.
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Isn't that the one where you throw cold water on the Wintel box and it turns into an iMac?
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The API which OpenGL obsoleted on the Mac was QuickDraw 3D, not QuickTime VR.
Then again, there are people moving to create an Open-Source implementation of QD3D now, too. Check the Quesa Website for more info on that. They're pretty far along in it, too.
I always thought Apple made a mistake in obsoleting QD3D. Relatively easy to work with (easier than OpenGL), an open standard file format, and the capability to do some seriously cool stuff besides. Ever used TextureEyes to map a running MPEG onto a 3D model with three mouseclicks? What Apple should have done was offered OpenGL as a low-level API, with QD3D as a higher-level option. Maybe Quesa can fulfill that one.
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When was the last time you tried to upgrade that woderful hardware you wierdo?
Last month. Processor upgrade. Worked fine.
Three months ago, another 128 megs RAM. Worked fine.
Before that, new internal hard drive. Worked fine.
Earlier still, another 64. Still worked fine.
Then of course there were the video and TV cards I added (I now run a two-headed Mac, thank you very much). All of it worked fine. Oh, and there's the external hard drives and CD burner.
Next on the list: a USB/FireWire combined card. If the other upgrades are any indication at all, it'll work fine.
I hope you enjoyed being reemed up the ass for the price since apple has a monopoly on its hardware.
Which is precisely why the only hardware I buy from Apple is the original system itself. The video/TV cards, the RAM, the drives, the burner, and processor upgrade... none of them are from Apple. Apple does overcharge for peripherals (have you seen the ungodly prices they're charging for the RAM upgrades they just started offering?) but the CPU's are more than worth every last penny.
Ever owned a Mac? I thought not. Very, very few people who call Macs overpriced ever have. All I can say is, own one and you'll understand.
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RSA actually isn't very complex (relatively speaking, of course). It's been in any decent college-level discrete mathematics textbook for years. CS students are taught to do it in their heads (mind you, the human brain is a lot slower than a computer at this sort of thing, but the algorithm holds).
So no, it's no surprise that the BSD folks could get an implementation going. The Mozilla folks have had their OSS RSA out for a week already.
And, oh yeah, [i]everyone [/i]wanted RSA, even when you had to pay for a license. What we were mad about was RSA's abuse of the patent system (never mind the issues of software patents; they had freely published this themselves for so long that in any sane country it would be considered prior art; in fact they published it for so long that even by the US system it should have been considered as such).
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ISBN's only identify works themselves, not copies. This means that the ISBN's on all copies of a given work will be the same. All it would take would be for someone to compile a big list of ISBN's, and the whole authentication process is circumvented.
There's another way I'd considered, but this keeps the service from being free. It involves sending in the actual CD, along with the cost of shipping it back. Since you can't send in a legal CD if you don't have it, that's about as good as you can get (the CD could have been stolen, but thanks to presumption of innocence that can't be taken into consideration).
Another, possibly equally or more suitable way, would be to send/fax in a photocopy of the disc itself, ot the liners. This has been used in the proprietary software industry for a long time to determine ownership (usually for purposes of upgrade discounts). It can be circumvented, but it's generally more trouble than it's worth to do so.
Any thoughts?
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Rehnquist probably should have abstained. He can't be utterly impartial (as judges must be) if his son is representing Microsoft. It could be argued, however, that by delaying the Supreme Court's hearing of the case, he increases the chances that by the time it hits the Supreme Court either his son won't be representing Microsoft anymore or he will have retired.
However, consider that even if Rehnquist had abstained, the outcome would not have changed. As it was, the vote to delay the case was 8-1 in favor of Microsoft; a 7-1-1 vote would not change that at all.
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THAT section doesn't say anything about the relative strength of the federal constitution, the federal laws, and treaties.
Actually, read it again. The way I look at it, it seems as though it provides a clear hierarchy. State constitutions trump state laws. Federal law trumps state laws. Treaties trump federal law. And finally, the Constitution trumps everything else, at least as far as the US is concerned.
Of course, technically the government is forbidden to ratify any treaty that would conflict with the Constitution, but go figure; that provision has been ignored for how many years?
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No compromise is required, only very strict enforcement of Constitutional rights.
Let me explain. What if Carnivore was authored in such a way that it could only sniff a particular person's e-mail? Further, what if it could only do this if law enforcement could prove to the system that a warrant had been issued, perhaps via an incredibly strong digital signature that even Moore's Law wouldn't bring into the realm of crackability for centuries? And finally, what if Carnivore would not function at all, not even passively watching the data stream, if there were none of these "proofs of warrant" active in the system (the only functionality still available, in other words, would be to put proofs of warrant into the system to unlock the remaining functionality)? And, as a crowning touch, what if the Carnivore system were Open-Source, so it could be inspected, and also put through formal verification to ensure no exploits either from hackers or law enforcement trying to hack around the security to do a little illegal surveillance)? Oh, yes, and make it an embedded system (no Windows NT to introduce exploits of its own).
Once that mechanism is in place, it's guaranteed that it cannot be abused. And if Carnivore can, by these means, be proven conclusively to be unabusable, then I no longer have any problems with it. But as the situation is now, I very much doubt any of the measures I mentioned above are in place.
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I'd love to see Microsoft manage this. OK, so I wouldn't, but I'd love to see them fall on their faces trying. Sadly for them, it's already been very well-established in the courts that interoperability, even if it means reverse-engineering, is fair use.
:)
Now, the NDA thing is much more interesting, and could be more of a problem. However, Microsoft cannot possibly prove that any NDA's are being violated. To do so, they would have to disclose their source code -at least those parts of it which deal with NTFS- and we all know they'll never do that due to their irrational fear that if someone saw their source they might make something better (never mind that they already do this without having seen the Windows source, so I doubt it would change things much). I suppose it's possible; I've never seen the NT code (sometimes I wonder if Microsoft even lets its programmers see the Windows source), but there could be things in common between them. But how can I be certqain of this unless I can see both sources and compare them? I can't. Neither can a judge. Therefore, there's no way to prove this guy guilty, so Microsoft can't win this case.
But let them try. Let them waste millions on a case they cannot win. This'll be fun
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I knew that much, but what does that have to do with what appears to be a directory dealing with system configuration?
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This guy claims to have been writing emulators for fourteen years, but the sheer cluelessness of this rant is outright amazing. He doesn't even know quite what an emulator is, as evidenced by the fact that he thinks OSX's Classic environment is an emulator. In reality, it's no more an emulator than Wine, Plex86/VMWare, MOL, OS/2's Windows compatibility environment, and so on. These are all virtual machines, but they are not emulators due to the fact that they make no attempt at imitating hardware. This is why you cannot run Wine on LinuxPPC.
Then, he talks about Apple's horrendous OSX and how it obsoletes every Mac over two years old. Wrong again. While it is true that most older machines will not run OSX, Apple has provided a means of forward-compatibility for many older machines via CarbonLib. This allows Carbon apps to run all the way back to OS8.1 (which is itself a free upgrade from 8.0). Since most existing Mac apps are likely to choose Carbon rather than Cocoa (this only makes sense, since it's far less work to port and will still run on the earlier OS), these machines will continue to run most current applications. This happens to include every PowerPC-based Mac ever made, all of the clones, and a healthy chunk of 68K-based machines with PPC upgrade cards. That's a lineage of over seven years for the OOC-based machines alone. I'd love to see anyone run Win2K or WinME on a seven year old machine at a reasonable speed.
Then, the lovely bit about PC's not going obsolete every two years. In the Windows world, they basically do (the Linux world is far less affected by this phenomenon), due to a vairety of factors. It should be noted that according to recent studies, the average useful life of a Mac was four years, the average Wintel box only two. Sadly, no Linux results were posted (they may not have been studied).
Oh, and the bit about MacOS being based off of two-decade-old technology. Guess what: the technology Win9x is based off of is very nearly as old (older, even, if you count the operating systems off of which DOS was based); whatever M$ may do to hide the fact even WinME is still little more than a bloated, overglorified DOS shell. WinNT/2K is a different matter entirely, but he was focusing on WinME, so I will too.
Also, forgive me if I don't buy his claims of G4 performance on a PC. All claims of which processor is faster aside, emulation takes tons of processing power. Even in best-case scenarios, you could only emulate a processor running at a fraction of the clockrate of the host machine. On a 1-GHz P3, you might be able to get up to the speed of a low-end Blue G3, but I doubt even that. Likewise, on a 500-MHz G4, you might manage a 300-MHz Pentium if Apple's speed claims are true, and more likely you'd be lucky to get a P233's performance.
This is a shame. This guy makes some fine emulators. But it seems he got cocky, bit off more than he could chew with the PPC emulator, and is now trying to pin the blame on Apple and Microsoft for his own mistakes.
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When did I ever say I favored gun control? I didn't say any such thing. Truth be told, I agree with what you've written here. Don't jump to conclusions so quickly.
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