Mesa cannot legally call itself an implementation of OpenGL, because it has not taken SGI's hideously expensive testing process. Pretty much everyone agrees that it's "close enough" (even SGI) so this is more a semantic point than anything else. But stupid as it is, that's enough to scare away some businesses.
Epic has already made a ton of money off of all three operating systems. And yet they would do something which would hinder that strategy? Particularly with an inferior 3D API?
I'm not worried about the Mac port; Westlake (who did the Unreal and UT ports to MacOS) has a lot of experience converting DirectX to interoperable API's (heck, most of The Sims is Windows-specific but they've already got it playable, albeit not yet at Alpha). But this could spell big trouble for the Linux port.
It's yet another of Microsoft's Broken Promises (tm). The Mac compatibility layer for DirectX was due years ago, according to Microsoft itself. And with a public API, a Linux layer would have been far easier to implement.
Now, let's look for a moment at layers:
DirectX Pro - Easily controlled if you're in bed with MS, as Epic admits to being. Relatively easy to program. Con - Windows-specific.
QuickDraw3D Pro - Very easy to program. Available on many platforms via the Quesa project (already nearly complete). (and available on at MacOS and Windows in its original, closed implementation) Open-Source, again via Quesa. Implements a standard file format (3DMF, the basis for VRML97). Con - No longer being actively developed by Apple.
OpenGL Pro - The most powerful API out there. Already has the non-game marketshare by an overwhelming margin. Runs almost anywhere (hell, it even runs on PalmPilots!) Has Open-Source "alternatives." Con - Few primitives, making it harder to program. Eats resources like you wouldn't believe; requires hardware acceleration for decent results. No true Open-Source "implementations," though that's more a technicality than anything else.
So which is the best? Each has its pros and cons. I'm more partial to the underappreciated QD3D (which, incidentally, Quesa implements on top of OpenGL). I will say that DirectX's platform specificity is a big problem unless you only plan to port the thing to the X-Box. But again, if you're in bed with MS, you can change the API practically at will. OpenGL really doesn't have that big a share of the gaming market (though overall it's overwhelmingly the most popular), but it's more powerful than any of the others. QD3D has ease of programming, but it never really caught on for some reason.
If something goes wrong at the labs, everyone dies, and then your concerns for their safety and mental stability don't count for very much.
It's right that the top priority for now is the lab's integrity. Get the people out of immediate danger. Then worry about the rest.
As it was, the lab's presence was only coincidental. The fire could have happened anywhere. The lab itself had nothing to do with the fires except that it happened to be sitting in their path. However, it does pose a potential threat to the safety of the city; now that the fires are out it is the biggest potential threat. Therefore, it's much better that this threat is taken care of. There will be time to care for the people when the lab's integrity is assured. Your concern is admirable, but it doesn't do any good if they all die because something went wrong in the lab.
What do we do if the companies decide to get greedy like Fraunhoefer and clamp down on Open-Source players (as FhG is planning to do with AAC) as well as encoders (as FhG does with mp3)?
This is why I think ISO shouldn't be accepting patent-encumbered stuff as open standards. Companies do have a right to their work and their intellectual property. But they shouldn't be allowed to hold that out to the public as an "open standard" then force people to jump through hoops. You want to patent stuff, fine. You want to open it as an indistry standard, fine. But you shouldn't be able to have your cake and eat it too. Nowhere else in the universe do things work that way. Why, then, should standards?
It is quite true that it was a really, really big brush fire. And a catastrophic one. It was a terrible thing, and I feel for the people who lost their homes to the blaze.
But in terms of the laboratory, it was still "just" a brush fire. That lab was probably built to itself withstand a nuclear assault. A brush fire, no matter how big it is, is not going to do very much to it.
Someone should have told that to Red Hat before they started making a lot of money selling Open-Source software.
People just don'e Get It. Free Software != $0 pricing. It does mean you have to change your business model. Substantially, in fact. And because of this, businesses are afraid to try it. But it is quite possible to make money, even a ton of money, with Open-Source software.
The only question now is, when are we going to see an actual standard released? All I've seen so far is Microsoft's proprietary implementations of MPEG4 drafts, and those certainly couldn't be called cross-platform. DivX is just a hack of the Microsoft codec, so that's just as closed in the end (though I do hope that contest will help speed things up as concerns platform adoption, particularly since that implementation is to be Open-Source).
As a (more or less) native of the DC area, I see your point about representation, however the solution I would propose is different. Frankly, I believe the residential areas of DC should be given back to Maryland (Virginia already took its half of DC back when it seceded). The whole point of making a federal enclave was that it should not be in any state; it was where national business was to be conducted on neutral ground. As such, there's only two people who actually have any business living there: the President and Vice President (and their respective families, of course). The other residential and commercial districts really ought to be given back to the state that handed them over in the first place; DC was never intended to be a place for people to live.
Of course, Maryland doesn't want DC back, and this could cause problems. But it's really the only totally fair way to do it. The citizens of (what was) DC get their congressional representation, which it is only fair that they get. DC itself can get back on track as pertains to its original purpose. Everybody's happy (except maybe Maryland's government and that of Montgomery County, into which the former DC would likely go).
HTML is certainly copyrightable. I think it falls under the same copyright laws as any other written works.
However, contracts might have reassigned those rights. Look into those as carefully as possible. It is possible, depending on the terms of the first company's contract, that they could have a case. IANAL, of course, but that's how it seems based on previous stories like this.
By the way, I doubt that the "DreamWeaver defense" would hold up in court. So much stuff is generated by computer nowadays that I get the feeling that the program used to generate it is basically ignored by the law.
I'll start with your last statement, because it's the easiest to definitively disprove.
Patents were seen as very important by the founders of this nation. So important, in fact, that the patent office is defined in the Constitution, before the office of President is even mentioned. And why did they do this? Well, they spell it out right there. Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
The emphasis is mine, but look at it again. The purpose of patents is not to reward inventors; that is only a means to the real end. Patents are actually made to benefit the people by encouraging the growth of the arts and sciences. It works like this: an inventor agrees to give up all rights to an invention and release it all to the public. In return for this, the government will first allow that inventor exclusive rights to that invention for some time (currently up to seventeen years, which was fine in less technologically-advanced times but is now far too long; technology makes a seventeen-year time period way too easy to abuse).
MP3 was an invention about math and science, not about code.
Hold on; you're confused. Fraunhoefer did NOT patent MP3. It patented several algorithms which are typically used in creating MP3's, but FhG holds no patents on MP3 itself. It would like you to think it held "virtual patents" on MP3 by means of "irreplacable" algorithms, but this is not necessarily the case. It is quite possible that the LAME team has managed to completely replace all of the patented algorithms with new ones, not stepping on a single patent in the process. This is their right, just as it was FhG's right to invent the "old" algorithms. It's a little thing called competition.
People had to figure out how human audio perception works...
This was not FhG's doing, I should point out. They built upon earlier research for that part of the bargain. Now, to continue...
and figure out how to mathematically transform audio signals in a way that reduced their information content without altering how they would be perceived by humans.
That last bit is arguable; I know plenty of people who claim they can hear the difference (I can't, and I don't see how they could, but I'll believe them). It's not that relevant, though. The fact remains that Fraunhoefer never patented MP3; no one did, no one can. If someone can make an MP3 encoder that doesn't tread on a single FhG patent, then more power to them; that patent has been abused in some pretty disgusting ways and a legitimate way around it would be nothing short of poetic justice.
I can't believe that you are actually *boasting* about the fact that Fraunhofer can't protect their intellectual works.
What do you mean? Fraunhoefer's got its intellecual works perfectly intact. That would, incidentally, be the code it produced. And the LAME team basically said "Screw you, Fraunhoefer, we can make MP3's without using your precious 'intellectual works'" and went and wrote their own. What's the matter with that? That's perfectly legal and moral. We didn't want to use their stuff, so we made our own stuff. When has that ever been bad?
Remember, Scum^H^H^H^HFraunhoefer didn't patent the ISO code. They patented the algorithms they use in their encoder. That means any code that uses that algorithm violates their patents.
Now, despite what FhG says, it probably is possible to create an MP3 encoder without using those algorithms. But only if the LAME team managed that is LAME totally legal. And by the way, no one has managed to do it yet.
Yeah, it's a stupid patent; you're not supposed to be able to patent mathematical equations. But it's the way it is, and we've got to work within the system while we fight to change it.
Not quite. RedHat reveals all the source that it has to release, makes its distro available for download, and allows for myriad distros based off of it (see Mandrake and all the PPC-based distros except Debian). This is very different from a truly proprietary vendor, which won't do any of these.
Last I checked, the video portion of the DivX codec set was Microsoft's proprietary implementation of MPEG4. While it's true they have yet to pounce on the original DivX:-) (I think the smiley actually is officially part of the name, but is silent when spoken), isn't it possible they might get mad about an Open-Source version? Consider who we're talking about, after all.
Then again, chalk this up as yet another reason to do it: Pissing Off Micro$oft. Not to mention the MPAA; if this becomes popular I'd be willing to bet it'll throw MPAA into a tizzy, ratrher like MP3 with RIAA.
Atom bombs - legalize it! Sure, the potential for abuse is pretty bad, but Atom bombs don't kill people, people kill people!
You're comparison of Napster to an atom bomb is completely inappropriate, not to mention outright wrong. An atom bomb was clearly meant for one purpose: destruction (both of peoperty and of life). Napster was never intended for such things, or anything illegal at all.
99%+ of the files on Napster at a given time are copyrighted works. The huge, vast, overwhelming majority of folk do not use napster for anything else.
So? This fight is over intent. The atom bomb, to continue your example, was never meant to actually be used either. You cann my comparison of Napster to an acetylene torch to be a silly extreme; your atom bomb example is both sillier and more extreme.
And for an honest question: what do you think of the legalization of drugs? For the record, I'm against, but I do think it would be interesting to see what you think of it.
No, they actually didn't do anything, unlike say ebay, which actually has people sifting through e mails and auctions attempting to keep their hands clean.
Napster is not EBay. Napster cannot do anything, nothing which is reliable, legal, and fair, at any rate. Any method can at least get one of these, maybe two, but there is no way all three can be done. It's simply limitations of today's technology. Let's look at some of the methods...
Looking at filenames. This is truly idiotic, because filenames are trivially easy to change.
Analyzing the streams. Again stupid. All one has to do is decode an MP3 and re-encode it, and enough noise is introduced to fool detectors (but not enough for a human to hear). Besides this, please keep in mind that terabytes of data pass through Napster every single day. To analyze all of that data in real time (which is what you'd have to do)... have you any concept of the computing power that requires? Let me put it this way; it would take a second Napster network, working with all the computers distributed, to get enough power to do something like this. In fact it would probably take more than that.
You got any other ideas? Let's hear them.
Napster on the other hand has done absolutely nothing until this whole challenge to provide "lists" of abusers - which I'll wager, they were real surprised and upset Metallica decided to take them up on.
Oh, yes, this reminds me; is there any fair way to punish users? Not really. You can cancel their accounts, but that's no big deal; they'll just grab other ones. Dynamic IP's make IP-banning unreliable, and banning a whole ISP for the sake of a few abusers is just plain unfair.
If you're going to support free music, at least support something like Gnutella, where the anti copyright sentiment and non-commercialism IS pure, even if I don't agree with it at all.
Actually, I do support Gnutella. And you'd be surprised at how little music is up there. And it's not about anti-copyright there either. You just don't get it, I suppose. It's not about anti-copyright, it's about the free flow of information. Yes, some people will abuse that; there are people who will abuse anything given the chance. But does that mean that we should take away everything with potential for abuse? Certainly not; that would leave us with nothing at all.
Sometimes I wonder. It seems as though the US is ruled by corporations now. Otherwise how could such an injustice as this occur?
Napster was never intended for illegal acts. They do absolutely everything they can legally and fairly do to prevent piracy; granted this isn't much (a copyright warning in the splash screen is all you can do), but they do everything they can. Simply because something can be used illegally is not grounds to criminalize it. Take acetylene torches. I can use such a torch to help me build or service machinery; this is totally legal. I can also use it to kill someone or burn a building to the ground; this is clearly illegal. Furthermore, this tool lets me carry out these illegal acts in a far more efficient manner then, say, a match or a cigarette lighter. The manufacturers of the torch do everything they can reasonably do to prevent illegal use (which, again, amounts to essentially just a warning label). But they can't control their users. Does this mean acetylene torches should be made illegal? Of course not. Why, then, with Napster, a program made with purely benign intentions even if it does have the potential for abuse?
Now, there is one critical flaw with Napster: it only shares MP3's. If it shared all types of files, RIAA's ludicrous argument would have been much weaker. But it is still nothing but a conduit. Rather like the Internet. I can still get MP3's in myriad other ways; should the Net be made illegal because of this? Again, no. That would be stupid. And so is this.
Re:Apple should not be praised for this.
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Who was responsible for the decision to make iMovie arbitrarily unavailable? Apple.
Who uses a proprietary, non-supported, non compatible video format that "breaks the web" for a good few of us? Apple.
Apple "breaks the Web"? Hardly. The only format that doesn't "break the Web" is MPEG, and it's non-supported too. ASF and RM are both proprietary, and neither of those settle for breaking just the Web; they'll go after your computers too if their respective player apps are any indication.
In terms of open, compatible, supported formats, let's take a look. QuickTime's format is open, actually. All the documentation you could possibly want is there Apple may not have Open-Sourced its own implementation of the format, but that is irrelevant; the format is right out there for you to use.
Or are you talking about codecs? You should know that most of QuickTime's codecs don't belong to Apple at all; they couldn't Open-Source them even if they wanted to. There are exceptions, of course, and you can find Open-Source implementations of all of them.
Anyway, let's move on to "supported." Who the hell are you looking for support from? While Apple may be behind in the streaming area, it's still far ahead of the other major formats in terms of support in all other areas, including content creation, editing, and distribution. MPEG is catching up in the distribution area (and that's a Very Good Thing) but not in the others, where it not only isn't catching up but shouldn't be. MPEG was made for distribution and streaming, and the tradeoffs made in the creation of the format make it extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to edit in any sort of practical matter. And if you can't edit it easily, then it's a lousy capture format; what's the point of capturing a movie, losing quality while converting it to an editable format, and then losing more quality converting it back to MPEG? And yes, I know there are cards which caprute direct to MPEG, and even software that allows for simple editing tasks, but I have yet to hear anything but complaints about this, especially editing (which must, incidentally, be done linearly with all the software I've seen; this is a huge pain if you want to tack something onto the front of a 30-minute MPEG since the editor must still process the entire stream).
Now, as for releasing the specs to QT4. I agree, it'd be a Good Thing, though you're extremely misguided in your apparent belief that QuickTime is only about movies (then again, you also thought it was a codec, so I shouldn't be too surprised at this). The major addition to QT4 was Sorenson, and that is not Apple's to Open-Source. Likewise for most of the codecs; I'm not sure Apple developed any of them.
So get off your high horse. You wanted something that could edit MPEG's, I can tell, and I hate to burst your bubble but I doubt there's anything out there that can do that.
Think of it this way, if it helps. MPEG is like a compiled application. It's smaller than the source, and it's faster to run. However, it's nearly impossible to edit in any meaningful way; you can do it if you're a true masochist but it's not worth the trouble.
QuickTime movies, then, are like source code. It's much larger than the source for an app, and if you try running it (you could "run" source code with an interpreter, by the way; that's where I'm getting this) you'll get poorer performance than the compiled app. But source is much easier to change and work with than the compiled app. And you can still compile the app, if you want.
Sure, Apple could Open-Source QuickTime. Now, your next challenge: convince them to do it. I wish you the best of luck.
Would you prefer to pay for content than to view ads? Because content-oriented sites including/.) rely on ads to make money. Otherwise they will have to charge money for subscriptions -- or fold up shop and go home!
Point. However...
Advertisers (tv, web, etc) are doing you a favor by letting you view things for free.
This does not, however, give advertisers the right to track my behavior without my consent. If they want to show me ads, then fine, bring 'em on. But if they're going to track me, then I refuse to even see the ads in the first place. Is that such a bac thing?
That's why I filter out ads (I use WebFree on the MacOS side to do this; it's a great little program). If you can show me an ad company that makes no attempt whatsoever to track its viewers' behavior, I will gladly remove it from my block list. Until that happens, however, I'll be blocking every ad I come across.
Here's the deal with analog...
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It doesn't look like it can support analog directly. However, there's a way around that. Capture your movies as analog, then export them as DV streams. Then iMovie can import them easily (put them in the project folder), and all is right with the world.
I don't think DVHS is meant for standard movie distribution. As some other people have said, DVHS has been out for quite some time, but I haven't yet seen a single movie sold commercially on DVHS.
The reason: I think the movie industry is trying to set up DVHS as The Poor Man's DVD. They can use this standard to get away with never releasing commercial DVD recorders (not DVD-RAM drives here; I'm talking about set-top stuff) by claiming that you can record on these tapes now. It keeps DVD squarely in the hands of the rich corporations. Neat trick, that.
DVHS will end up working in the markets of the home video-camera owner, or the person who tapes TV shows. It will also likely thrive in the anime fansubbing community once it starts to catch on there, because of the very high quality (note that, once again, it also makes fansubbers easier for the ingrate industry to track down and pounce on).
But is this meant for commercial distribution? Very doubtful. As I said, this seems more likely to become the MPAA's proposed substitute for releasing recordable DVD than anything else.
If you study what the framers of the Constitution intended, you discover that they were talking about Free Political speech. Free Political speech guarantees the right to participate in political activities without your voice being censored. It has nothing to do with frivolous things like pornography.
Wrong. So wrong it's laughable. Read the other writings of these people, at least those who have other writings out there. In some cases (such as Thomas Jefferson) it's more dramatic, but in every single work you will find a common thread: the necessity of the spread of knowledge and freedom. Knowledge is not always political; I may know that the sky is blue but I fail to see how that could possibly become politically important.
No, read the other writings of the Framers, and you'll find that they truly believed in freedom, including freedom for all speech. And yes, this does mean that you will be offended sometimes. You don't, however, have the right to be an immature clod and demand that it be eradicated; we were supposed to have evolved beyong that long ago. Yes, everyone feels the urge to censor sometimes; even me. But it's as wrong as killing, for while murder takes a human life, censorship takes the human spirit, and I'm not sure which is worse.
It's ridiculous how much this has been twisted in the time since then.
Indeed it has. By people like you who would destroy beliefs opposed to your own. The Constitution is an extremely specific document. Do you have any idea how much time was spent poring over the wording, just to ensure it could not be twisted? The Framers would not possibly have allowed such an oversight as to omit the word "political" from "free speech" unless they wanted all speech to be covered.
And I apologize in advance to those who are disturbed when common sense is interjected into these discussions. Sorry.
Apologizing to oneself is generally a sign of self-esteem problems. I suggest you see someone. And while you're at it, I suggest you learn to respect beliefs other than your own, no matter how much you may disagree. I deplore pedophilia. I consider it among the sickest perversions in existence. But I have no right to condemn those who have not acted out on their sick fantasies, and someone who merely downloads kiddie-porn is not acting out. Those who make the stuff generally are, but even then there can be exceptions; I refer you to my post "A question for you..." in reply to another respondent in this thread. What, then, do you do about that?
Then what is it? Please, feel free to enlighten us. Very likely, you won't be able to link it to anything else which is not already protected, and you cannot apply double-standards.
"free speech" is not absolute. If it were, there would be no such things as libel and slander.
Again, correct, however this is not quite the same thing. Free speech is absolute. But that does not mean you can use it to commit some other crime. For example, libel and slander are crimes of defamation (or character assassination, if you prefer). Free speech will not protect you from that. As to where kiddie porn fits here, I refer you to my post "A question for you..." in reply to another respondent to this thread.
You are correct. Chold pornography, in its current state, is made using some of the most hideous abuses of children possible. This abuse is illegal and has every right to be.
Now, a question. Suppose that someone drew child-porn pictures, using no live models. In other words, not a single child was exploited to create the image. Or perhaps they were created using other means which, again, do not involve actual children in any way, shape, or form. What would you say then?
I don't like kiddie porn. i'd love to see it all disappear from the Net in one huge system crash. As for rape/snuff film, I'd rather not see those disappear immediately, but rather have the last of the films be made starring the people who had made them before (can you tell I really don't like this?)
But no one has the right to force these things to disappear, least of all the governments. I don't think Gnutella will affect production of either of these much; the spread in popularity that might occur due to increased availability is more or less negated by the fact that no one makes any money off of it. But at least un the U.S., "free speech" is supposed to mean all speech, and that's simply the way it has to be; it's the only totally fair way. And yeah, it means we have to put up like crap like kiddie porn, but it's better than the alternative: a world where we have to watch very carefully what we say or totally innocent speech will land us in front of government and/or private death squads or worse.
My point in all this? It's one thing to protest the availability of kiddie porn on the Net. Protest all you want; you have as much of a right to free speech as the sickos do to download their pr0n. But this crosses the line. This is simple, outright invasion of privacy.
However, I do think it's time for a new feature to be added into Gnutella programs, one which could help cancel out these attacks on Gnutella users without changing the protocol. Simply put: an Ignore list. You put an IP in this list, and your machine will ignore any messages that come from it and reject any actual attempts it makes to connect. If enough Gnutella users do this, you do have an effective ban, but the fact that it's distributed means that the user has to be doing something particularly heinous (such as, say, a Wall of Shame) for everyone else to agree, and it would have to be more or less everyone else to care enough to make it work out.
And even if you didn't get a full ban (probably more like a Usenet Death Penalty, actually), it would still allow individuals to filter out servers they didn't like. A useful feature even if it never actually gets someone effectively kicked off of Gnutella.
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Mesa cannot legally call itself an implementation of OpenGL, because it has not taken SGI's hideously expensive testing process. Pretty much everyone agrees that it's "close enough" (even SGI) so this is more a semantic point than anything else. But stupid as it is, that's enough to scare away some businesses.
Epic has already made a ton of money off of all three operating systems. And yet they would do something which would hinder that strategy? Particularly with an inferior 3D API?
I'm not worried about the Mac port; Westlake (who did the Unreal and UT ports to MacOS) has a lot of experience converting DirectX to interoperable API's (heck, most of The Sims is Windows-specific but they've already got it playable, albeit not yet at Alpha). But this could spell big trouble for the Linux port.
It's yet another of Microsoft's Broken Promises (tm). The Mac compatibility layer for DirectX was due years ago, according to Microsoft itself. And with a public API, a Linux layer would have been far easier to implement.
Now, let's look for a moment at layers:
DirectX
Pro - Easily controlled if you're in bed with MS, as Epic admits to being. Relatively easy to program.
Con - Windows-specific.
QuickDraw3D
Pro - Very easy to program. Available on many platforms via the Quesa project (already nearly complete). (and available on at MacOS and Windows in its original, closed implementation) Open-Source, again via Quesa. Implements a standard file format (3DMF, the basis for VRML97).
Con - No longer being actively developed by Apple.
OpenGL
Pro - The most powerful API out there. Already has the non-game marketshare by an overwhelming margin. Runs almost anywhere (hell, it even runs on PalmPilots!) Has Open-Source "alternatives."
Con - Few primitives, making it harder to program. Eats resources like you wouldn't believe; requires hardware acceleration for decent results. No true Open-Source "implementations," though that's more a technicality than anything else.
So which is the best? Each has its pros and cons. I'm more partial to the underappreciated QD3D (which, incidentally, Quesa implements on top of OpenGL). I will say that DirectX's platform specificity is a big problem unless you only plan to port the thing to the X-Box. But again, if you're in bed with MS, you can change the API practically at will. OpenGL really doesn't have that big a share of the gaming market (though overall it's overwhelmingly the most popular), but it's more powerful than any of the others. QD3D has ease of programming, but it never really caught on for some reason.
If something goes wrong at the labs, everyone dies, and then your concerns for their safety and mental stability don't count for very much.
It's right that the top priority for now is the lab's integrity. Get the people out of immediate danger. Then worry about the rest.
As it was, the lab's presence was only coincidental. The fire could have happened anywhere. The lab itself had nothing to do with the fires except that it happened to be sitting in their path. However, it does pose a potential threat to the safety of the city; now that the fires are out it is the biggest potential threat. Therefore, it's much better that this threat is taken care of. There will be time to care for the people when the lab's integrity is assured. Your concern is admirable, but it doesn't do any good if they all die because something went wrong in the lab.
What do we do if the companies decide to get greedy like Fraunhoefer and clamp down on Open-Source players (as FhG is planning to do with AAC) as well as encoders (as FhG does with mp3)?
This is why I think ISO shouldn't be accepting patent-encumbered stuff as open standards. Companies do have a right to their work and their intellectual property. But they shouldn't be allowed to hold that out to the public as an "open standard" then force people to jump through hoops. You want to patent stuff, fine. You want to open it as an indistry standard, fine. But you shouldn't be able to have your cake and eat it too. Nowhere else in the universe do things work that way. Why, then, should standards?
It is quite true that it was a really, really big brush fire. And a catastrophic one. It was a terrible thing, and I feel for the people who lost their homes to the blaze.
But in terms of the laboratory, it was still "just" a brush fire. That lab was probably built to itself withstand a nuclear assault. A brush fire, no matter how big it is, is not going to do very much to it.
Someone should have told that to Red Hat before they started making a lot of money selling Open-Source software.
People just don'e Get It. Free Software != $0 pricing. It does mean you have to change your business model. Substantially, in fact. And because of this, businesses are afraid to try it. But it is quite possible to make money, even a ton of money, with Open-Source software.
The only question now is, when are we going to see an actual standard released? All I've seen so far is Microsoft's proprietary implementations of MPEG4 drafts, and those certainly couldn't be called cross-platform. DivX is just a hack of the Microsoft codec, so that's just as closed in the end (though I do hope that contest will help speed things up as concerns platform adoption, particularly since that implementation is to be Open-Source).
As a (more or less) native of the DC area, I see your point about representation, however the solution I would propose is different. Frankly, I believe the residential areas of DC should be given back to Maryland (Virginia already took its half of DC back when it seceded). The whole point of making a federal enclave was that it should not be in any state; it was where national business was to be conducted on neutral ground. As such, there's only two people who actually have any business living there: the President and Vice President (and their respective families, of course). The other residential and commercial districts really ought to be given back to the state that handed them over in the first place; DC was never intended to be a place for people to live.
Of course, Maryland doesn't want DC back, and this could cause problems. But it's really the only totally fair way to do it. The citizens of (what was) DC get their congressional representation, which it is only fair that they get. DC itself can get back on track as pertains to its original purpose. Everybody's happy (except maybe Maryland's government and that of Montgomery County, into which the former DC would likely go).
HTML is certainly copyrightable. I think it falls under the same copyright laws as any other written works.
However, contracts might have reassigned those rights. Look into those as carefully as possible. It is possible, depending on the terms of the first company's contract, that they could have a case. IANAL, of course, but that's how it seems based on previous stories like this.
By the way, I doubt that the "DreamWeaver defense" would hold up in court. So much stuff is generated by computer nowadays that I get the feeling that the program used to generate it is basically ignored by the law.
The purpose of patents is to reward inventors.
I'll start with your last statement, because it's the easiest to definitively disprove.
Patents were seen as very important by the founders of this nation. So important, in fact, that the patent office is defined in the Constitution, before the office of President is even mentioned. And why did they do this? Well, they spell it out right there. Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
The emphasis is mine, but look at it again. The purpose of patents is not to reward inventors; that is only a means to the real end. Patents are actually made to benefit the people by encouraging the growth of the arts and sciences. It works like this: an inventor agrees to give up all rights to an invention and release it all to the public. In return for this, the government will first allow that inventor exclusive rights to that invention for some time (currently up to seventeen years, which was fine in less technologically-advanced times but is now far too long; technology makes a seventeen-year time period way too easy to abuse).
MP3 was an invention about math and science, not about code.
Hold on; you're confused. Fraunhoefer did NOT patent MP3. It patented several algorithms which are typically used in creating MP3's, but FhG holds no patents on MP3 itself. It would like you to think it held "virtual patents" on MP3 by means of "irreplacable" algorithms, but this is not necessarily the case. It is quite possible that the LAME team has managed to completely replace all of the patented algorithms with new ones, not stepping on a single patent in the process. This is their right, just as it was FhG's right to invent the "old" algorithms. It's a little thing called competition.
People had to figure out how human audio perception works...
This was not FhG's doing, I should point out. They built upon earlier research for that part of the bargain. Now, to continue...
and figure out how to mathematically transform audio signals in a way that reduced their information content without altering how they would be perceived by humans.
That last bit is arguable; I know plenty of people who claim they can hear the difference (I can't, and I don't see how they could, but I'll believe them). It's not that relevant, though. The fact remains that Fraunhoefer never patented MP3; no one did, no one can. If someone can make an MP3 encoder that doesn't tread on a single FhG patent, then more power to them; that patent has been abused in some pretty disgusting ways and a legitimate way around it would be nothing short of poetic justice.
I can't believe that you are actually *boasting* about the fact that Fraunhofer can't protect their intellectual works.
What do you mean? Fraunhoefer's got its intellecual works perfectly intact. That would, incidentally, be the code it produced. And the LAME team basically said "Screw you, Fraunhoefer, we can make MP3's without using your precious 'intellectual works'" and went and wrote their own. What's the matter with that? That's perfectly legal and moral. We didn't want to use their stuff, so we made our own stuff. When has that ever been bad?
Remember, Scum^H^H^H^HFraunhoefer didn't patent the ISO code. They patented the algorithms they use in their encoder. That means any code that uses that algorithm violates their patents.
Now, despite what FhG says, it probably is possible to create an MP3 encoder without using those algorithms. But only if the LAME team managed that is LAME totally legal. And by the way, no one has managed to do it yet.
Yeah, it's a stupid patent; you're not supposed to be able to patent mathematical equations. But it's the way it is, and we've got to work within the system while we fight to change it.
Actually, there is a port for MacOS. You can find it at http://www.well.com/user/random/MacLame/. Or rather, you would be able to find it there, but the porter's been evicted and you won't be able to download the stuff until he gets set up again, whenever that is.
Not quite. RedHat reveals all the source that it has to release, makes its distro available for download, and allows for myriad distros based off of it (see Mandrake and all the PPC-based distros except Debian). This is very different from a truly proprietary vendor, which won't do any of these.
Last I checked, the video portion of the DivX codec set was Microsoft's proprietary implementation of MPEG4. While it's true they have yet to pounce on the original DivX :-) (I think the smiley actually is officially part of the name, but is silent when spoken), isn't it possible they might get mad about an Open-Source version? Consider who we're talking about, after all.
Then again, chalk this up as yet another reason to do it: Pissing Off Micro$oft. Not to mention the MPAA; if this becomes popular I'd be willing to bet it'll throw MPAA into a tizzy, ratrher like MP3 with RIAA.
You're comparison of Napster to an atom bomb is completely inappropriate, not to mention outright wrong. An atom bomb was clearly meant for one purpose: destruction (both of peoperty and of life). Napster was never intended for such things, or anything illegal at all.
99%+ of the files on Napster at a given time are copyrighted works. The huge, vast, overwhelming majority of folk do not use napster for anything else.
So? This fight is over intent. The atom bomb, to continue your example, was never meant to actually be used either. You cann my comparison of Napster to an acetylene torch to be a silly extreme; your atom bomb example is both sillier and more extreme.
And for an honest question: what do you think of the legalization of drugs? For the record, I'm against, but I do think it would be interesting to see what you think of it.
No, they actually didn't do anything, unlike say ebay, which actually has people sifting through e mails and auctions attempting to keep their hands clean.
Napster is not EBay. Napster cannot do anything, nothing which is reliable, legal, and fair, at any rate. Any method can at least get one of these, maybe two, but there is no way all three can be done. It's simply limitations of today's technology. Let's look at some of the methods...
- Looking at filenames. This is truly idiotic, because filenames are trivially easy to change.
- Analyzing the streams. Again stupid. All one has to do is decode an MP3 and re-encode it, and enough noise is introduced to fool detectors (but not enough for a human to hear). Besides this, please keep in mind that terabytes of data pass through Napster every single day. To analyze all of that data in real time (which is what you'd have to do)... have you any concept of the computing power that requires? Let me put it this way; it would take a second Napster network, working with all the computers distributed, to get enough power to do something like this. In fact it would probably take more than that.
You got any other ideas? Let's hear them.Napster on the other hand has done absolutely nothing until this whole challenge to provide "lists" of abusers - which I'll wager, they were real surprised and upset Metallica decided to take them up on.
Oh, yes, this reminds me; is there any fair way to punish users? Not really. You can cancel their accounts, but that's no big deal; they'll just grab other ones. Dynamic IP's make IP-banning unreliable, and banning a whole ISP for the sake of a few abusers is just plain unfair.
If you're going to support free music, at least support something like Gnutella, where the anti copyright sentiment and non-commercialism IS pure, even if I don't agree with it at all.
Actually, I do support Gnutella. And you'd be surprised at how little music is up there. And it's not about anti-copyright there either. You just don't get it, I suppose. It's not about anti-copyright, it's about the free flow of information. Yes, some people will abuse that; there are people who will abuse anything given the chance. But does that mean that we should take away everything with potential for abuse? Certainly not; that would leave us with nothing at all.
Sometimes I wonder. It seems as though the US is ruled by corporations now. Otherwise how could such an injustice as this occur?
Napster was never intended for illegal acts. They do absolutely everything they can legally and fairly do to prevent piracy; granted this isn't much (a copyright warning in the splash screen is all you can do), but they do everything they can. Simply because something can be used illegally is not grounds to criminalize it. Take acetylene torches. I can use such a torch to help me build or service machinery; this is totally legal. I can also use it to kill someone or burn a building to the ground; this is clearly illegal. Furthermore, this tool lets me carry out these illegal acts in a far more efficient manner then, say, a match or a cigarette lighter. The manufacturers of the torch do everything they can reasonably do to prevent illegal use (which, again, amounts to essentially just a warning label). But they can't control their users. Does this mean acetylene torches should be made illegal? Of course not. Why, then, with Napster, a program made with purely benign intentions even if it does have the potential for abuse?
Now, there is one critical flaw with Napster: it only shares MP3's. If it shared all types of files, RIAA's ludicrous argument would have been much weaker. But it is still nothing but a conduit. Rather like the Internet. I can still get MP3's in myriad other ways; should the Net be made illegal because of this? Again, no. That would be stupid. And so is this.
Who was responsible for the decision to make iMovie arbitrarily unavailable? Apple.
Who uses a proprietary, non-supported, non compatible video format that "breaks the web" for a good few of us? Apple.
Apple "breaks the Web"? Hardly. The only format that doesn't "break the Web" is MPEG, and it's non-supported too. ASF and RM are both proprietary, and neither of those settle for breaking just the Web; they'll go after your computers too if their respective player apps are any indication.
In terms of open, compatible, supported formats, let's take a look. QuickTime's format is open, actually. All the documentation you could possibly want is there Apple may not have Open-Sourced its own implementation of the format, but that is irrelevant; the format is right out there for you to use.
Or are you talking about codecs? You should know that most of QuickTime's codecs don't belong to Apple at all; they couldn't Open-Source them even if they wanted to. There are exceptions, of course, and you can find Open-Source implementations of all of them.
Anyway, let's move on to "supported." Who the hell are you looking for support from? While Apple may be behind in the streaming area, it's still far ahead of the other major formats in terms of support in all other areas, including content creation, editing, and distribution. MPEG is catching up in the distribution area (and that's a Very Good Thing) but not in the others, where it not only isn't catching up but shouldn't be. MPEG was made for distribution and streaming, and the tradeoffs made in the creation of the format make it extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to edit in any sort of practical matter. And if you can't edit it easily, then it's a lousy capture format; what's the point of capturing a movie, losing quality while converting it to an editable format, and then losing more quality converting it back to MPEG? And yes, I know there are cards which caprute direct to MPEG, and even software that allows for simple editing tasks, but I have yet to hear anything but complaints about this, especially editing (which must, incidentally, be done linearly with all the software I've seen; this is a huge pain if you want to tack something onto the front of a 30-minute MPEG since the editor must still process the entire stream).
Now, as for releasing the specs to QT4. I agree, it'd be a Good Thing, though you're extremely misguided in your apparent belief that QuickTime is only about movies (then again, you also thought it was a codec, so I shouldn't be too surprised at this). The major addition to QT4 was Sorenson, and that is not Apple's to Open-Source. Likewise for most of the codecs; I'm not sure Apple developed any of them.
So get off your high horse. You wanted something that could edit MPEG's, I can tell, and I hate to burst your bubble but I doubt there's anything out there that can do that.
Think of it this way, if it helps. MPEG is like a compiled application. It's smaller than the source, and it's faster to run. However, it's nearly impossible to edit in any meaningful way; you can do it if you're a true masochist but it's not worth the trouble.
QuickTime movies, then, are like source code. It's much larger than the source for an app, and if you try running it (you could "run" source code with an interpreter, by the way; that's where I'm getting this) you'll get poorer performance than the compiled app. But source is much easier to change and work with than the compiled app. And you can still compile the app, if you want.
Sure, Apple could Open-Source QuickTime. Now, your next challenge: convince them to do it. I wish you the best of luck.
Would you prefer to pay for content than to view ads? Because content-oriented sites including /.) rely on ads to make money. Otherwise they will have to charge money for subscriptions -- or fold up shop and go home!
Point. However...
Advertisers (tv, web, etc) are doing you a favor by letting you view things for free.
This does not, however, give advertisers the right to track my behavior without my consent. If they want to show me ads, then fine, bring 'em on. But if they're going to track me, then I refuse to even see the ads in the first place. Is that such a bac thing?
That's why I filter out ads (I use WebFree on the MacOS side to do this; it's a great little program). If you can show me an ad company that makes no attempt whatsoever to track its viewers' behavior, I will gladly remove it from my block list. Until that happens, however, I'll be blocking every ad I come across.
It doesn't look like it can support analog directly. However, there's a way around that. Capture your movies as analog, then export them as DV streams. Then iMovie can import them easily (put them in the project folder), and all is right with the world.
I don't think DVHS is meant for standard movie distribution. As some other people have said, DVHS has been out for quite some time, but I haven't yet seen a single movie sold commercially on DVHS.
The reason: I think the movie industry is trying to set up DVHS as The Poor Man's DVD. They can use this standard to get away with never releasing commercial DVD recorders (not DVD-RAM drives here; I'm talking about set-top stuff) by claiming that you can record on these tapes now. It keeps DVD squarely in the hands of the rich corporations. Neat trick, that.
DVHS will end up working in the markets of the home video-camera owner, or the person who tapes TV shows. It will also likely thrive in the anime fansubbing community once it starts to catch on there, because of the very high quality (note that, once again, it also makes fansubbers easier for the ingrate industry to track down and pounce on).
But is this meant for commercial distribution? Very doubtful. As I said, this seems more likely to become the MPAA's proposed substitute for releasing recordable DVD than anything else.
If you study what the framers of the Constitution intended, you discover that they were talking about Free Political speech. Free Political speech guarantees the right to participate in political activities without your voice being censored. It has nothing to do with frivolous things like pornography.
Wrong. So wrong it's laughable. Read the other writings of these people, at least those who have other writings out there. In some cases (such as Thomas Jefferson) it's more dramatic, but in every single work you will find a common thread: the necessity of the spread of knowledge and freedom. Knowledge is not always political; I may know that the sky is blue but I fail to see how that could possibly become politically important.
No, read the other writings of the Framers, and you'll find that they truly believed in freedom, including freedom for all speech. And yes, this does mean that you will be offended sometimes. You don't, however, have the right to be an immature clod and demand that it be eradicated; we were supposed to have evolved beyong that long ago. Yes, everyone feels the urge to censor sometimes; even me. But it's as wrong as killing, for while murder takes a human life, censorship takes the human spirit, and I'm not sure which is worse.
It's ridiculous how much this has been twisted in the time since then.
Indeed it has. By people like you who would destroy beliefs opposed to your own. The Constitution is an extremely specific document. Do you have any idea how much time was spent poring over the wording, just to ensure it could not be twisted? The Framers would not possibly have allowed such an oversight as to omit the word "political" from "free speech" unless they wanted all speech to be covered.
And I apologize in advance to those who are disturbed when common sense is interjected into these discussions. Sorry.
Apologizing to oneself is generally a sign of self-esteem problems. I suggest you see someone. And while you're at it, I suggest you learn to respect beliefs other than your own, no matter how much you may disagree. I deplore pedophilia. I consider it among the sickest perversions in existence. But I have no right to condemn those who have not acted out on their sick fantasies, and someone who merely downloads kiddie-porn is not acting out. Those who make the stuff generally are, but even then there can be exceptions; I refer you to my post "A question for you..." in reply to another respondent in this thread. What, then, do you do about that?
child pornography is not "speech".
Then what is it? Please, feel free to enlighten us. Very likely, you won't be able to link it to anything else which is not already protected, and you cannot apply double-standards.
"free speech" is not absolute. If it were, there would be no such things as libel and slander.
Again, correct, however this is not quite the same thing. Free speech is absolute. But that does not mean you can use it to commit some other crime. For example, libel and slander are crimes of defamation (or character assassination, if you prefer). Free speech will not protect you from that. As to where kiddie porn fits here, I refer you to my post "A question for you..." in reply to another respondent to this thread.
You are correct. Chold pornography, in its current state, is made using some of the most hideous abuses of children possible. This abuse is illegal and has every right to be.
Now, a question. Suppose that someone drew child-porn pictures, using no live models. In other words, not a single child was exploited to create the image. Or perhaps they were created using other means which, again, do not involve actual children in any way, shape, or form. What would you say then?
I don't like kiddie porn. i'd love to see it all disappear from the Net in one huge system crash. As for rape/snuff film, I'd rather not see those disappear immediately, but rather have the last of the films be made starring the people who had made them before (can you tell I really don't like this?)
But no one has the right to force these things to disappear, least of all the governments. I don't think Gnutella will affect production of either of these much; the spread in popularity that might occur due to increased availability is more or less negated by the fact that no one makes any money off of it. But at least un the U.S., "free speech" is supposed to mean all speech, and that's simply the way it has to be; it's the only totally fair way. And yeah, it means we have to put up like crap like kiddie porn, but it's better than the alternative: a world where we have to watch very carefully what we say or totally innocent speech will land us in front of government and/or private death squads or worse.
My point in all this? It's one thing to protest the availability of kiddie porn on the Net. Protest all you want; you have as much of a right to free speech as the sickos do to download their pr0n. But this crosses the line. This is simple, outright invasion of privacy.
However, I do think it's time for a new feature to be added into Gnutella programs, one which could help cancel out these attacks on Gnutella users without changing the protocol. Simply put: an Ignore list. You put an IP in this list, and your machine will ignore any messages that come from it and reject any actual attempts it makes to connect. If enough Gnutella users do this, you do have an effective ban, but the fact that it's distributed means that the user has to be doing something particularly heinous (such as, say, a Wall of Shame) for everyone else to agree, and it would have to be more or less everyone else to care enough to make it work out.
And even if you didn't get a full ban (probably more like a Usenet Death Penalty, actually), it would still allow individuals to filter out servers they didn't like. A useful feature even if it never actually gets someone effectively kicked off of Gnutella.