I should be more clear about this. The ONLY reason copyright exists is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". That's it. That means you can't use copyright to hinder the progress of science, which is what would happen (IMO anyway) if computers are essentially made illegal or unusable to preserve copyright. Thus, they can't go after computers, which means copyright will cease to be as powerful as it is today because computers make it so easy to break the privileges that copyright grants to authors. This, I think you need to pick copyright or computers, since both cannot coexist. Well they could coexist if people weren't greedy little fucks that think it's ok to do what they want as long as technology makes it easy. But I am thinking we would need a race transplant to have a world in which computers and copyright can coexist peacefully, since humans aren't gonna let it happen.
making it illegal to INDUCE Congress into using IP and "doing it for the children" as reasons to hinder the progress of Science and Useful Arts by restricting what computers can do.
They will cripple computers because computers are machines that can send, receive, copy, modify, and display huge amounts of arbitrary data. That's really all that computers do. Copyright law allows authors the exclusive right to copy, distribute, make derivative works of, and display or publicly perform the work. Funny, since these restrictions are exactly the things that computers do.
So, computers are copyright breakers. Therefore, the way to preserve copyright is to cripple computers or make them illegal. But that would hinder the progress of science, since computers are NEEDED to advance science these days.
So who will win? I dunno. I would like to think the Constitution will win, but I dunno. My request here is that you minimize the amount of money you give to the copyright industry because they realize that they need to make computers illegal to stay in business. They will just do it in 1000 little baby steps like this law where they make more and more computer uses illegal until you can't do much of anything with these machines without the permission of giant corporations. Then they will decide to just make the machines themselves illegal, and we can all sit around the house watching our perfectly legal Content Appliances wondering how the heck the rest of the world has left us behind.
PICK ONLY ONE: COPYRIGHT COMPUTERS
Oh, and please don't download illegally using Kazaa or whatever.:) You're not helping.
This is a long-running joke/troll here on/. where people post that Stephen King died. I can't believe a non-ac posted the troll. I admire that. Googling stephen king died slashdot, I got this page. which is pretty funny.
This has happened from time to time. IIRC, once a candidate won all of the electoral votes and someone changed his/her vote to keep it from being a 100 percent vote. I think the reason given was that George Washington was the only person elected unanimously, and they wanted to keep it that way. Understandable.
Also, if they did change their votes, they would be fuxxored. The electors are HARDCORE party stalwarts. Being selected to be an Elector is a reward for years of faithful party service. It's doubtful that people want to work that long on something and then burn all of their bridges. (Again, sometimes when it doesn't count, people will make "protest" votes, but it's rare and carefully done.)
I see nothing wrong with allowing people to change their votes because I don't think most of them would since it would be so bad to them personally, but also it's good to have a sanity check on an election. Regardless of the Recent Unpleasantness in Florida, I think it's a good system that gives the little states more of a say when they would otherwise be ignored.
As for what happens if people change votes and the Electoral College doesn't elect anyone, the Supreme Court wouldn't get involved. If another person got the majority, they would win. The person(s) changing their votes would be ostracized, and in many cases might be held liable by their states. If nobody got a majority, it would go to the House of Representatives (1 vote per state) and there are some other rules if that fails.
If I get a machine and use it to create a string of bits that then gets used as a set of instructions to tell other machines what to do, then I do get protection for coming up with that string of bits. It's called "copyright". You patent inventions, you copyright expressions of thought. If software running on a computer is a patentable process, then why not allow patents on a new song or movie or picture? It's a string of bits that makes machines do useful, novel, and nonobvious things, so why not patent it?
The issue I have with software patents isn't that patenting or IP is bad, it's that you have to separate IP into different categories for different situations. Or, if you don't want to do that, then be willing to take things to their logical conclusion and allow patents on music and movies and books and all other expressions of thought that happen to be recorded as strings of bits and happen to be used to make machines do things. When people allow patents on music and books and movies and such, I will support software patents. Because then the people who came up with this idea will prove to me that they get it.
Maybe they're quantum databases containing all possible information, and actually looking at them to copy them would collapse the possibilities into only one state.
There was an episode about 2 months ago where they ran into a copy of Enterprise that went through some time loop thing where some aliens were guarding a spatial shortcut inside of a cloud of gas. The regular Enterprise lost track of the copy at the end of the episode, and I assume what happened is those aliens are the aliens from the cloud and they somehow went back in time and decided to pwn earth.
The Induce Act stands for "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act,"
See? Stop being mean to them. They're not corporate shills trying to control culture and take away computers. They're doing it for the children. Think of the children. Don't you care about the children? I, for one, welcome our new child-protecting overlords.
My biggest beef with it is his comment about hardware rentals:
I sure hope someone's been paying my software and memory rent. I haven't been, at least the last little while.
Isn't this essentially what Sun and Microsoft are talking about when they say the cost of hardware goes to 0? Isn't this one of the goals of the DRM crowd? To make it so you don't own anything, but instead you just license it and use it according to their terms? Amazing how things keep coming back...
I agree with you. It's a terrible thing that IBM responded to SCO's copyright/contract/whatever claims with software patent claims. Even when it looks like SCO's original claims are flimsy.
WhatI never understood is, if buying and selling are illegal, why don't they just delete players when they whine? If you admit that you got screwed then you admit you were buying/selling (probably buying) and people would stop doing it. It would make you lose customers but it would also cut down on the customer service costs.:)
And this is the reason to combine player-based advancement with character-based advancement. If players don't have anything holding them in the game (a built up character/ship/whatever) then what's keeping them there besides the social aspect?
There's no difference. Downloaders and router companies do it for financial gain. Each of them wants something that someone else made and they don't want to pay for it. Also, your argument about the disproportionte values of the copyrighted material seems to be backwards. The record companies expect to make a profit, and therefore do have something to lose, and the netfilter people don't appear to be out for money (but I could be wrong if it's buried in their page someplace).So, they're not losing anything monetarily. Therefore, stealing a song is worse than stealing GPL'ed software in cases like this where the software writers don't appear to expect money. Right? Because it's all about the money?
No. Actually it's not about the money. It's all the same. If someone is using Kazaa to steal music/movies, they're just as bad as someone at Microsoft who steals pieces of the Linux kernel to put into Windows.
PS: The parent used the phrase "stealing GPL'ed code" so I use the word "steal" to mean "copyright infringement" since I feel that they have the same (nonlegal, common sense) meaning. So if this bothers you, bitch at the parent plz, too.
There's a reason I'm watching less TV, and it's not all because of EverCrack. Thank god for Netflix.
You do realize that all of the copyright industries are in cahoots and by renting DVD's you're helping to get the broadcast flag brought into existence, right?
Good point. I couldn't find the example now, but I remember somewhere on the Internet (so it must be true) that someone released software into the PD and some people used it in some project at a company and somehow the original author got sued for some reason. It seemed silly to me at the time, but I took it at face value, and now I don't know where it is. Oh well.
After all, licenses like BSD and MIT/X are basically public domain anyway. The only difference is that they explicitly disclaim warranty. This is the only reason why I have released software into MIT/X instead of PD. I don't want to get sued if I release it under PD. This would mean I would have to register everything I do with the copyright office or it's automatically under PD? I would support this if there was a way to release writings into PD without incurring any liability for how they are used. I hope they take that into account.
I do feel for you, but I don't know what to do about the problem.
Here's the problem as I see it: Computers are machines that are designed to send, receive, copy, modify, and present huge amounts of arbitrary data.
The four rights you can restrict when you copyright something are the ability to copy, the ability to distribute, the ability to modify (create derivative works) and the ability to perform or display the copyrighted work.
The essential problem is that computers are designed to break copyright (not intentionally, but that's what they do) so the choice is copyright or computers. I don't know how to get around this problem, but I can't imagine restricting computers will succeed because they're too important to science, and you can't use IP to hinder the progress of science, you can only use it to promote the progress of science. (Assuming the Constitution still counts for something.)
I don't know how to help people who work for copyright, but what I would support is a separate and independent distribution and playback system where things are locked up in hardware and such (content appliances as opposed to computers), as long as people leave real computers alone. Think juiced up cable boxes hooked up to TVs/terminals in each room in a house.
I think for a reasonable price, people would be willing to get their content from devices like that, but it might not be as much money as people get now.
However, I don't see how to help independents at all since anything that will make copyright protections succeed will require massive amounts of control in hardware and the network, which means it will require giant corporations to implement, and they will still want to control the distribution channels. I think it will be impossible for indies to get good copyright protection without becoming a part of a giant corporate machine since there's nothing in it for them really.
Slashdot Mirror
...what stupid people can do with a lot of money
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greed. They want you to misunderestimate them.
No I didn't miss the point, and in fact I knew what you were going to say A YEAR AGO! I Rock. Bow down plz. Thx!
Enjoy!
I should be more clear about this. The ONLY reason copyright exists is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". That's it. That means you can't use copyright to hinder the progress of science, which is what would happen (IMO anyway) if computers are essentially made illegal or unusable to preserve copyright. Thus, they can't go after computers, which means copyright will cease to be as powerful as it is today because computers make it so easy to break the privileges that copyright grants to authors. This, I think you need to pick copyright or computers, since both cannot coexist. Well they could coexist if people weren't greedy little fucks that think it's ok to do what they want as long as technology makes it easy. But I am thinking we would need a race transplant to have a world in which computers and copyright can coexist peacefully, since humans aren't gonna let it happen.
making it illegal to INDUCE Congress into using IP and "doing it for the children" as reasons to hinder the progress of Science and Useful Arts by restricting what computers can do.
:) You're not helping.
They will cripple computers because computers are machines that can send, receive, copy, modify, and display huge amounts of arbitrary data. That's really all that computers do. Copyright law allows authors the exclusive right to copy, distribute, make derivative works of, and display or publicly perform the work. Funny, since these restrictions are exactly the things that computers do.
So, computers are copyright breakers. Therefore, the way to preserve copyright is to cripple computers or make them illegal. But that would hinder the progress of science, since computers are NEEDED to advance science these days.
So who will win? I dunno. I would like to think the Constitution will win, but I dunno. My request here is that you minimize the amount of money you give to the copyright industry because they realize that they need to make computers illegal to stay in business. They will just do it in 1000 little baby steps like this law where they make more and more computer uses illegal until you can't do much of anything with these machines without the permission of giant corporations. Then they will decide to just make the machines themselves illegal, and we can all sit around the house watching our perfectly legal Content Appliances wondering how the heck the rest of the world has left us behind.
PICK ONLY ONE:
COPYRIGHT
COMPUTERS
Oh, and please don't download illegally using Kazaa or whatever.
When did Stephen King die?
/. where people post that Stephen King died. I can't believe a non-ac posted the troll. I admire that. Googling stephen king died slashdot, I got this page. which is pretty funny.
This is a long-running joke/troll here on
This has happened from time to time. IIRC, once a candidate won all of the electoral votes and someone changed his/her vote to keep it from being a 100 percent vote. I think the reason given was that George Washington was the only person elected unanimously, and they wanted to keep it that way. Understandable.
Also, if they did change their votes, they would be fuxxored. The electors are HARDCORE party stalwarts. Being selected to be an Elector is a reward for years of faithful party service. It's doubtful that people want to work that long on something and then burn all of their bridges. (Again, sometimes when it doesn't count, people will make "protest" votes, but it's rare and carefully done.)
I see nothing wrong with allowing people to change their votes because I don't think most of them would since it would be so bad to them personally, but also it's good to have a sanity check on an election. Regardless of the Recent Unpleasantness in Florida, I think it's a good system that gives the little states more of a say when they would otherwise be ignored.
As for what happens if people change votes and the Electoral College doesn't elect anyone, the Supreme Court wouldn't get involved. If another person got the majority, they would win. The person(s) changing their votes would be ostracized, and in many cases might be held liable by their states. If nobody got a majority, it would go to the House of Representatives (1 vote per state) and there are some other rules if that fails.
If I get a machine and use it to create a string of bits that then gets used as a set of instructions to tell other machines what to do, then I do get protection for coming up with that string of bits. It's called "copyright". You patent inventions, you copyright expressions of thought. If software running on a computer is a patentable process, then why not allow patents on a new song or movie or picture? It's a string of bits that makes machines do useful, novel, and nonobvious things, so why not patent it?
The issue I have with software patents isn't that patenting or IP is bad, it's that you have to separate IP into different categories for different situations. Or, if you don't want to do that, then be willing to take things to their logical conclusion and allow patents on music and movies and books and all other expressions of thought that happen to be recorded as strings of bits and happen to be used to make machines do things. When people allow patents on music and books and movies and such, I will support software patents. Because then the people who came up with this idea will prove to me that they get it.
What, are they all on drugs? What are they smoking over there, and can I get some?
Looser!
Ya know... I'm not saying that you did a good job of insulting him, I'm not saying that you didn't. But. ITYM "Loser!".
Or, maybe you knew this and IBHT IHL IWHAND.
Maybe they're quantum databases containing all possible information, and actually looking at them to copy them would collapse the possibilities into only one state.
But alien nazis back in time? W T F?
There was an episode about 2 months ago where they ran into a copy of Enterprise that went through some time loop thing where some aliens were guarding a spatial shortcut inside of a cloud of gas. The regular Enterprise lost track of the copy at the end of the episode, and I assume what happened is those aliens are the aliens from the cloud and they somehow went back in time and decided to pwn earth.
The Induce Act stands for "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act,"
See? Stop being mean to them. They're not corporate shills trying to control culture and take away computers. They're doing it for the children. Think of the children. Don't you care about the children? I, for one, welcome our new child-protecting overlords.
My biggest beef with it is his comment about hardware rentals:
I sure hope someone's been paying my software and memory rent. I haven't been, at least the last little while.
Isn't this essentially what Sun and Microsoft are talking about when they say the cost of hardware goes to 0? Isn't this one of the goals of the DRM crowd? To make it so you don't own anything, but instead you just license it and use it according to their terms? Amazing how things keep coming back...
I have the pleasure of working with a lot of people who think they're god's gift to humanity. Quite frankly I wish I had the receipt.
That's going into my quotes file.
PHD pilled high and deep
They're taking a lot of prescription drugs?
It's "Military Intelligence". At least use the correct joke in your "Witty and Ironic Slashdot Post".
I agree with you. It's a terrible thing that IBM responded to SCO's copyright/contract/whatever claims with software patent claims. Even when it looks like SCO's original claims are flimsy.
WhatI never understood is, if buying and selling are illegal, why don't they just delete players when they whine? If you admit that you got screwed then you admit you were buying/selling (probably buying) and people would stop doing it. It would make you lose customers but it would also cut down on the customer service costs. :)
And this is the reason to combine player-based advancement with character-based advancement. If players don't have anything holding them in the game (a built up character/ship/whatever) then what's keeping them there besides the social aspect?
There's no difference. Downloaders and router companies do it for financial gain. Each of them wants something that someone else made and they don't want to pay for it. Also, your argument about the disproportionte values of the copyrighted material seems to be backwards. The record companies expect to make a profit, and therefore do have something to lose, and the netfilter people don't appear to be out for money (but I could be wrong if it's buried in their page someplace).So, they're not losing anything monetarily. Therefore, stealing a song is worse than stealing GPL'ed software in cases like this where the software writers don't appear to expect money. Right? Because it's all about the money?
No. Actually it's not about the money. It's all the same. If someone is using Kazaa to steal music/movies, they're just as bad as someone at Microsoft who steals pieces of the Linux kernel to put into Windows.
PS: The parent used the phrase "stealing GPL'ed code" so I use the word "steal" to mean "copyright infringement" since I feel that they have the same (nonlegal, common sense) meaning. So if this bothers you, bitch at the parent plz, too.
There's a reason I'm watching less TV, and it's not all because of EverCrack. Thank god for Netflix.
You do realize that all of the copyright industries are in cahoots and by renting DVD's you're helping to get the broadcast flag brought into existence, right?
Good point. I couldn't find the example now, but I remember somewhere on the Internet (so it must be true) that someone released software into the PD and some people used it in some project at a company and somehow the original author got sued for some reason. It seemed silly to me at the time, but I took it at face value, and now I don't know where it is. Oh well.
After all, licenses like BSD and MIT/X are basically public domain anyway. The only difference is that they explicitly disclaim warranty. This is the only reason why I have released software into MIT/X instead of PD. I don't want to get sued if I release it under PD. This would mean I would have to register everything I do with the copyright office or it's automatically under PD? I would support this if there was a way to release writings into PD without incurring any liability for how they are used. I hope they take that into account.
I do feel for you, but I don't know what to do about the problem.
Here's the problem as I see it: Computers are machines that are designed to send, receive, copy, modify, and present huge amounts of arbitrary data.
The four rights you can restrict when you copyright something are the ability to copy, the ability to distribute, the ability to modify (create derivative works) and the ability to perform or display the copyrighted work.
The essential problem is that computers are designed to break copyright (not intentionally, but that's what they do) so the choice is copyright or computers. I don't know how to get around this problem, but I can't imagine restricting computers will succeed because they're too important to science, and you can't use IP to hinder the progress of science, you can only use it to promote the progress of science. (Assuming the Constitution still counts for something.)
I don't know how to help people who work for copyright, but what I would support is a separate and independent distribution and playback system where things are locked up in hardware and such (content appliances as opposed to computers), as long as people leave real computers alone. Think juiced up cable boxes hooked up to TVs/terminals in each room in a house.
I think for a reasonable price, people would be willing to get their content from devices like that, but it might not be as much money as people get now.
However, I don't see how to help independents at all since anything that will make copyright protections succeed will require massive amounts of control in hardware and the network, which means it will require giant corporations to implement, and they will still want to control the distribution channels. I think it will be impossible for indies to get good copyright protection without becoming a part of a giant corporate machine since there's nothing in it for them really.
Lexmark is winning this case although I think appeals are still going on.