Now, the current owner of the source code, ACCESS, claims "if Herr Korz feels that
he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been using, we're completely unaware
of it, and I'd be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim".
Perhaps some insider can make this issue more clear (yes, I R'd TFA), but this seems like
a non-issue. As I understand it...
This company ACCESS legitimately owns the rights to BeOS. Korz/YellowTAB never had
any right to continue work on it as Zeta, and may even have started the project based on
leaked source code. But PalmSource never cared, and YellowTAB never bothered doing more
than sending nastygrams every few months, probably because they saw no possible financial
incentive to do so.
So overall, this sounds an awfully lot like ACCESS has zero interest in BeOS/Zeta(/Haiku?),
but their lawyers have advised them to send a periodic reminder of "oh, BTW, we own this",
just so they can eat the whole thing on the off chance it ever becomes commercially viable.
So... Why does this count as news? It seems like just the status quo for the past six years,
nothing new here.
All this patent covers is bridging between the Internet and POTS networks. It
shouldn't need "prior art" to be struck down, it should be struck down merely
because it's fucking obvious!
I don't think it does count as that obvious. If you remember the earliest
days of free internet telephony, the biggest limitation (aside from the
annoying lag) came from needing both parties to have a computer with an always-on
connection (or risk missing calls).
Companies like Vonage exist to make a free service un-free solely because
they act as a POTS bridge. Think about that. People will pay for something free
(well, "free" presuming you would have intenet access anyway) because that one little
"fucking obvious" step counts as such a massive leap forward in functionality.
The USPTO has made some phenomenally bad calls in the past, but I don't know if
I can really disagree with this one.
The issue is not bigotry. The issue is respect. The Turks expect us to respect
how they suppress human rights (by, for example, censoring web sites). We should
respect them.
Wow, dude - Truly beautiful troll there! You even got modded UP to
+5 insightful!
I couldn't disagree more with what you've said, but you have my admiration for
saying it so well. Kudos!
I think it would be easy to apply a U.S. perspective to this and cry foul. But if
Japan has publicly funded elections and strict, but fair rules about how candidates
communicate then maybe they are justified in their action.
That makes sense for paid-for "push" marketing. But this?
In the case of a speech making it to YouTube (even if the guy uploaded it
himself) - Any viewers WANT to see it. They didn't see it because
their favorite show got preempted, or because nothing else good comes on
on Thursdays, or because the candidate has the deepest pockets and flooded
every commercial break with his crap. They saw it because they made a
personal choice to go to a computer, pull up YouTube, search for the video
(or click the link a friend sent them), and then sit through the whole
thing.
It seems to me that a slightly stricter approach to election practices might take away
the "guy with the most money wins" mentality that has come to dominate the U.S. process.
For the most part, I agree. Except, in this case, you have exactly the opposite
of the unfair situation you describe. A Tokyo street-musician. Not a megacorp CEO,
not an incumbent career-politician, not even a real celebrity trying to capitolize
on their 15 minutes. No, a street musician, benefitting from the first true
soapbox-of-the-proles. A nobody made a strong showing despite not having
an endless bank-account to throw at the campaign.
You can't get much more fair than that, and damn the law.
/ So, how much has Hillary made so far? // Might vote Republican in 2008 for the first time ever, just because.
Weird, there are several cultures on this planet that consider american
culture "ass-backwards". How do you parse that?
I would agree that the US has its own problems - The WO(s)D, the obsession
with pornography (hell, even nonsexual nudity), the current mess in the Middle
East... I could certainly go on.
I find it somewhat unfortunate, though, that most who chose to disagree with my stance
used some variant of tu quoque. That approach doesn't make Thai king-worship
any less absurd, it just agrees with me on several equally absurd American policies,
traditions, and taboos.
True - Except the EU makes tries to enforce its policies worldwide, not
just within the EU.
So when the EU finally forces Microsoft out completely, that will
count as their choice. But when American companies can't sell "Feta" or
"Cheddar" cheese, in America, we have a problem.
The EU just serves to further prove that all sufficiently-large organizations
will abuse the power of their position (and I don't say that as though
the US hasn't done the same for the last half-century).
Just another Boeing-vs-Airbus dispute, except Microsoft has no
European analogue. And that pisses the EU off far, far more
than anything Microsoft itself could ever do.
I think that what they are doing is a great step forward for interoperability.
Interoperability with what? I had to explain to a coworker just last week (after
she made a v8-specific PDF that no one could open)... If you just tell Acrobat to always
save in v4 compatible mode, everyone in the world can read it. Same goes for MS Office.
Just save it Word/Excel 98 mode, and plenty of other programs can open it.
Or to put this another way, for a recent contracting job, I wrote a niche-industry software
package that outputs a totally opaque closed format. I make the only program that
does anything even remotely like it. Should I expect the EU to start threatening me when
the first copy ships to somewhere in the EU later this month for "stifling local competition"?
I do so hope so, as I have no assets there that they can threaten, and gleefully look
forward to telling them to go pound sand...
Someone else already said it, but I'll repeat: EU policies send a very, very clear
message - Don't set up shop in the EU.
I just swapped out a 22" CRT to a 24" LCD panel, and my usage at the wall went from 210W to 150W
Yeah, sure, brag about it.;-)
Not sure how you got 150W, though... All common 24" LCDs have a rated max in the 95-105W range,
and at least from my experience with smaller LCDs, they usually use between half and two-thirds
of that rating under real-world conditions. Granted, you'll have some losses at the power
supply (if it has an external brick, I don't think they need to include that in the rated
consumption), but if you have one that inefficient, getting a nice 90-95% efficient
replacement PS would pay for itself the first month.
Teaching people evolution isn't going to magically stop them
from being religious, so your comment is utterly off-topic.
No, "utterly off-topic" would involve my talking about the best brand
of compressor oil to use in a thread about evolution. My comment, while
you may disagree with it, fell quite on-topic.
I hate to burst your bubble, but a great many people, who are infinitely
smarter than you could possibly be, were devout religious believers.
Right! And why did they hold such absurd beliefs? Because their
culture ingrained those ideas from before they had the rational capacity
to reject them as laughable.
That behavior I meant to direct my comment toward - Indoctrination
of the helpless. We claim to do "anything for the children", yet before
they ever make it to pre-school, their parents have already poisoned their
minds with fantasies of silver cities in the clouds, of a magical Santa-like
being who knows if you've behaved naughty or nice, and either gives you
presents (an afterlife in paradise) or coal (a lake of fire).
Now, I really don't care what people "believe". I myself admitted
to believing in a creator. But when your beliefs prevent me
from having a cloned organ-donor, we've encountered a situation in need
of remedy.
"Well there son, you have a disease called Huntington's Chorea.
In the few decades you have before it kills you, science could probably
cure it. But, that would make the baby Jesus cry, so, just make the best
of it and thank Allah for letting you live to 40 - unless he strikes you
down before then."
Great idea. I just have one question: How does one ban a belief, exactly?
Simple - You don't ban it, you teach people to
consider it a joke. Make it laughably quaint.
And if you don't consider that serious, tell me how
seriously you take the threat of Zeus striking you down
for failing to observe the ancient Greek pantheon.
Come on, who cares? Let people be ignorant. It's not like bringing people of below average
intelligence or fundamentalist mindset into the scientific fold is going to make them valuable
contributors. It'll just be a new type of ignorance to deal with. Let them be.
As much as I may not want to, someday, I will get old.
When that happens, I want stem cell therapies available to fix my
joints and my heart and my cancer and my alzheimers and just about
everything else that might go wrong with me short of sudden death.
And if stem cells don't work, clone me a pithed organ donor. Not
that I plan to live forever, but I would very much like to keep going
at near full capability until the day I drop.
But as long as we have enough ignorant fundamentalists around to vote even
a few of them into places like the whitehouse, where they can block
funding for such research, we have a huge problem.
As the easiest and most obvious solution, we just need to ban
religion (disclaimer - I believe in a creator deity; I just don't
have a big enough ego to pretend I know what it wants). Failing
that, if we can teach a large enough percentage of the population
to (accurately) view books like the Bible and Koran as
"inspirational fiction", then perhaps we'll stop seeing blocks on
federal funding for stem cell research.
Look, I have a blog, and I am pretty sick of people treating blogs, for good
or for ill, as qualitatively different from other types of publications.
Except, your "publication" does differ radically from other forms of
the press...
Most notably, except for a niche readership, you have no reputation.
Perhaps you personally run one of the most famous newsblogs in existance - I still
don't recognize you. That puts you, in terms of journalistic credibility, a few
notches below "National Enquirer". Nothing personal meant there, but
credibility depends mostly on reputation, and most bloggers have little to none.
Second, you choose to publish in a medium and style dominated by attention-whores
and angsty teens and anthropomorphized cats. Perhaps you count as another
Mark Russinovich. Or Salam Pax. Or just another flogger working for Sony. Or a
cat.
Perhaps your blog has some really great material, perhaps not. But when you
complain that people treat it differently, well, look around the playground - Do
you see a lot of cats physically printing their own version of the Washington Post?
Correct me if I am wrong, but if I develop on Linux, that does not necessary mean that I need to
release my code GPL licensed. Am I reading the text wrong?
No, you have that idea right (same idea as why GCC can't force you to license anything created
with it under the GPL). I meant that, since the box itself runs Linux modified to check for a
dongle, you could easily (and AFAIK legally, but IANAL) just recompile a version that doesn't
check for a dongle. Or even one that checks for a dongle with a copy of the GPL on it.
I don't see why this company should be required to turn-over code nor without charging.
Fine, they don't have to turn over the dongle-code.
They can turn over the box firmware so users can recompile it not to check for the
dongle.
Additionally, depending on what this dongle contains, they may have no right to
disallow copying them and giving out copies for free (or even for-profit in direct
competition with the current sellers).
I'll agree that something doesn't sound right here, but it doesn't involve
copyright violation by the end-users.
Translation: Gateway and Dell definitely won't honor the
warranty and wish to remain free from bad press until they
are forced to reveal the truth.
At least on their server liones, Dell semi-officially supports
RHEL and RHAS. I've never tried getting it pre-installed,
but their standard "Installation and Server Management" CD
includes a preloader (basically a crude partition management
tool and GRUB with stage 1.5/2 PERC support built-in).
If they refused to honor a warranty on their hardware for
installing something explicitly included on their support
software, you'd have heard about Dell losing some high-profile
lawsuits already.
for example, you can't buy anything except an iPod and expect it to work with iTunes.
I know, right? Like, just the other day, I needed a driver for an older Radeon but only had the
newewst NVidia ForceWare driver - And it wouldn't recognize the ATI card! What blatantly
anticompetitive behavior, someone should investigate! And don't even get me started on how the
PS3 online store won't let me buy XBox360 games, the rotten bastards.;-)
Sorry, I mostly agree with your point, and normally I lose karma for daring to disagree with The
Steve, but in this case... His toy, his store. And I want nothing to do with either of
the DRM-laden pieces of crap. You can get DRMless MP3 players cheaper than the iPod, and you can
still, last time I checked (yesterday afternoon at around 3:30pm), buy music on CD and rip it yourself.
We are increasing moving away from a free market
We do not now, have never, and will never, have a "free market" economy. The closest
we've ever seen (at least in the US) occurred in the "wild" west in the 1800s,
and in today's black market - But even both of them had strong external influence
on them causing artificial price inflation (gold and unnatural scarcity, respectively).
Most people try and keep their passwords and usernames to a small number so use the same
password and username for several different sites... so a nasty trick could be to try using
the password for flixter against the same username for a different account say google mail
or myspace...
That, however, would fall squarely under the category of "cracking". By
asking for it, they can claim to have (at least as a pretense) your "permission"
to spam your friends and contacts.
I do have to wonder, though, whether this might not count as a DMCA violation
for Flixster, regardless of the
appearance of having your permission... Virtually all free email hosts have
a clause in their terms saying basically that you and only you may use your
account. By using it "on your behalf", Flixster has used your password to
circumvent an access control mechanism, the magical phrase that triggers
a DMCA violation.
Sure, avoid the 6$ on the hundred, however its going to cost ya 30$ to ship it. Plus tax.
1) "Plus tax?" I think you probably didn't mean to tack that on there, in-context.
2) If I pay FedEx $30 to ship something, the money goes to people employed in
getting my goods to me, providing me with a service. If I pay $6 to the
government, it goes to enforcing the WO(s)D, to killing Iraqis, to free
healthcare for 5th-gen welfare mommies and illegal immigrants. I'll choose
to pay the $30 every time, given that choice.
3) Many online companies offer free shipping if you spend more than a fairly
small amount, like $50. Obviously that cost gets rolled into the price of the
product, but since they still need to compete, you pay the "real" $0.98 shipping
rather than the massively inflated $29.95 S&H. And 2% costs less than 6%.
"Washington state Governor signed a tax bill encouraging out of state businesses to collect sales taxes ...
Looks like Washington-staters won't be able to fib on their tax returns about internet purchases, starting in 2008.
Why? Washington state has NO power to do anything more than "encourage" out-of-state companies
to comply. Not only can't they practically enforce this, trying to do so would violate
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the
US constitution.
States can pass all the stupid laws they want regarding what you have to pay for "use" tax and the
like. But at the end of the day (at least, at the end of April 15th), cash still lets you make
untraceable (and untaxable after-the-fact) purchases.
I will really never understand why we accept "death and taxes" as somehow magically
inevitable. The governments of the world have demonstrated themselves completely incapable of
responsibly allocating the resources of the citizenry for the common good. Why do we still
let them?
We should view tax evasion as one of the most noble of "crimes", depriving aggressive
social parasites of their sole form of food.
These images have value. It is not trivial to shoot a commercial photograph.
Photographers, models, art directors have to be paid and locations, props and
equiptment have to be bought and rented. To obtain an original image of the
equivalent quality would have cost this person far more than the license fee.
And unless talking about a website specifically devoted to high-quality photography,
what ends up online consists of a 17KB 300x200 fragment of the original that any
hack with a 2MP digital could have snapped.
Photo aggregator sites like Corbis serve one purpose and one purpose only - Tagging.
For the purpose of small-scale private web designers, he could almost certainly get
what he wanted from the likes of Flikr, if it didn't take so much effort to find,
for example, "a young brunette woman getting out of a blue sedan in front of a hotel,
shot from the second story across the street".
The ability to find that picture quickly has value - But that value has nothing
to do with photographers, models, art-directors, locations, props, or equipment. Just
convenience.
It's a shame that he got popped for it and I do hope it can be resolved painlessly,
but they have a right to protect their product.
I think you missed the point of the G(G?)P... The FP author made a small
mistake that involves no harm at all, he offered to make good, but
the Dogs of War (aka "lawyers") have decided to try to get blood from a stone rather
than accept his clearing the photos after-the-fact along with a small nuissance-fee
as punishment. That represents the real "crime" here, not the copyright
infringement.
"Hey, guys, I have this great idea - Let's ruin one our regular customers
just because we can! Sure, he'll never, ever use us again, and this
will likely cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run, but
we have the legal high-ground!"
The enemy combatant classification (nor the non-enemy combatant which I think you
probably meant) cannot be applied in this way.
Perhaps you should look up the Jose Padilla case.
From Wikipedia:
José Padilla (born October 18, 1970), also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir
or Muhajir Abdullah, is an United States citizen of white-Hispanic[1] origin, accused of being
a terrorist by the United States government. He was arrested in Chicago on May 8, 2002, and was
detained as a material witness until June 9, 2002, when President Bush designated him an illegal
enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled
to the protection of United States law. On January 3, 2006, he was transferred to a Miami, Florida
jail to face criminal conspiracy charges.
You can still be a good programmer if you know the cost (in terms of
resources) for the operations you choose to make use of.
Don't forget the cost of all pairs of instructions, and
pairing/interleaving of instructions, and memory-reference-density of
instructions, and memory reference order, and branch prediction miss
penalties, and...
You can program without understanding how the hardware actually
executes your code. But a "good" programmer? No. A hack (and not
in the complimentary sense) at best.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, the current owner of the source code, ACCESS, claims "if Herr Korz feels that he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been using, we're completely unaware of it, and I'd be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim".
Perhaps some insider can make this issue more clear (yes, I R'd TFA), but this seems like a non-issue. As I understand it...
This company ACCESS legitimately owns the rights to BeOS. Korz/YellowTAB never had any right to continue work on it as Zeta, and may even have started the project based on leaked source code. But PalmSource never cared, and YellowTAB never bothered doing more than sending nastygrams every few months, probably because they saw no possible financial incentive to do so.
So overall, this sounds an awfully lot like ACCESS has zero interest in BeOS/Zeta(/Haiku?), but their lawyers have advised them to send a periodic reminder of "oh, BTW, we own this", just so they can eat the whole thing on the off chance it ever becomes commercially viable.
So... Why does this count as news? It seems like just the status quo for the past six years, nothing new here.
All this patent covers is bridging between the Internet and POTS networks. It shouldn't need "prior art" to be struck down, it should be struck down merely because it's fucking obvious!
I don't think it does count as that obvious. If you remember the earliest days of free internet telephony, the biggest limitation (aside from the annoying lag) came from needing both parties to have a computer with an always-on connection (or risk missing calls).
Companies like Vonage exist to make a free service un-free solely because they act as a POTS bridge. Think about that. People will pay for something free (well, "free" presuming you would have intenet access anyway) because that one little "fucking obvious" step counts as such a massive leap forward in functionality.
The USPTO has made some phenomenally bad calls in the past, but I don't know if I can really disagree with this one.
The issue is not bigotry. The issue is respect. The Turks expect us to respect how they suppress human rights (by, for example, censoring web sites). We should respect them.
Wow, dude - Truly beautiful troll there! You even got modded UP to +5 insightful!
I couldn't disagree more with what you've said, but you have my admiration for saying it so well. Kudos!
It sounds like they speed up and slow down a lot, which may be fine on the open road but not as traffic becomes denser.
;-)
Although not quite the same pattern, in heavy traffic, you have no choice but to speed up and slow down a lot. Thus the term "stop-and-go traffic".
A minor point is that in most of the United States, at least, it is illegal to drive barefoot.
Absolutely false. Not a single US state actually has laws against driving barefoot, except Alabama and only for Motorcyclists.
Another related odd little "law" that doesn't exist, no law prevents customers (OSHA does address employees in certain environments, but not customers) from entering any place of business, including food preparation and medical-oriented establishments, barefoot. (Just to avoid the obvious "liability" response, business owners who post signs requiring footwear in their stores for "liability reasons" might be opening themselves up for "duty of care" lawsuits).
I think it would be easy to apply a U.S. perspective to this and cry foul. But if Japan has publicly funded elections and strict, but fair rules about how candidates communicate then maybe they are justified in their action.
// Might vote Republican in 2008 for the first time ever, just because.
That makes sense for paid-for "push" marketing. But this?
In the case of a speech making it to YouTube (even if the guy uploaded it himself) - Any viewers WANT to see it. They didn't see it because their favorite show got preempted, or because nothing else good comes on on Thursdays, or because the candidate has the deepest pockets and flooded every commercial break with his crap. They saw it because they made a personal choice to go to a computer, pull up YouTube, search for the video (or click the link a friend sent them), and then sit through the whole thing.
It seems to me that a slightly stricter approach to election practices might take away the "guy with the most money wins" mentality that has come to dominate the U.S. process.
For the most part, I agree. Except, in this case, you have exactly the opposite of the unfair situation you describe. A Tokyo street-musician. Not a megacorp CEO, not an incumbent career-politician, not even a real celebrity trying to capitolize on their 15 minutes. No, a street musician, benefitting from the first true soapbox-of-the-proles. A nobody made a strong showing despite not having an endless bank-account to throw at the campaign.
You can't get much more fair than that, and damn the law.
/ So, how much has Hillary made so far?
Weird, there are several cultures on this planet that consider american culture "ass-backwards". How do you parse that?
I would agree that the US has its own problems - The WO(s)D, the obsession with pornography (hell, even nonsexual nudity), the current mess in the Middle East... I could certainly go on.
I find it somewhat unfortunate, though, that most who chose to disagree with my stance used some variant of tu quoque. That approach doesn't make Thai king-worship any less absurd, it just agrees with me on several equally absurd American policies, traditions, and taboos.
Thailand isn't "medieval" when it comes to morality - it is thai.
Whatever you want to call it, "Ass-Backwards" looks the same in any culture.
I'd call that two blatant examples of trying to enforce your own policies worldwide.
Did you make it two sentences further, or stop reading there?
The EU is protecting the EU.
True - Except the EU makes tries to enforce its policies worldwide, not just within the EU.
So when the EU finally forces Microsoft out completely, that will count as their choice. But when American companies can't sell "Feta" or "Cheddar" cheese, in America, we have a problem.
The EU just serves to further prove that all sufficiently-large organizations will abuse the power of their position (and I don't say that as though the US hasn't done the same for the last half-century).
Just another Boeing-vs-Airbus dispute, except Microsoft has no European analogue. And that pisses the EU off far, far more than anything Microsoft itself could ever do.
I think that what they are doing is a great step forward for interoperability.
Interoperability with what? I had to explain to a coworker just last week (after she made a v8-specific PDF that no one could open)... If you just tell Acrobat to always save in v4 compatible mode, everyone in the world can read it. Same goes for MS Office. Just save it Word/Excel 98 mode, and plenty of other programs can open it.
Or to put this another way, for a recent contracting job, I wrote a niche-industry software package that outputs a totally opaque closed format. I make the only program that does anything even remotely like it. Should I expect the EU to start threatening me when the first copy ships to somewhere in the EU later this month for "stifling local competition"? I do so hope so, as I have no assets there that they can threaten, and gleefully look forward to telling them to go pound sand...
Someone else already said it, but I'll repeat: EU policies send a very, very clear message - Don't set up shop in the EU.
Lots of industries need software to know when the workday starts.
Whereas all computers need to know the time "now".
"All" > "some". Change the damned schedules, leave my clock alone.
I just swapped out a 22" CRT to a 24" LCD panel, and my usage at the wall went from 210W to 150W
;-)
Yeah, sure, brag about it.
Not sure how you got 150W, though... All common 24" LCDs have a rated max in the 95-105W range, and at least from my experience with smaller LCDs, they usually use between half and two-thirds of that rating under real-world conditions. Granted, you'll have some losses at the power supply (if it has an external brick, I don't think they need to include that in the rated consumption), but if you have one that inefficient, getting a nice 90-95% efficient replacement PS would pay for itself the first month.
Teaching people evolution isn't going to magically stop them from being religious, so your comment is utterly off-topic.
No, "utterly off-topic" would involve my talking about the best brand of compressor oil to use in a thread about evolution. My comment, while you may disagree with it, fell quite on-topic.
I hate to burst your bubble, but a great many people, who are infinitely smarter than you could possibly be, were devout religious believers.
Right! And why did they hold such absurd beliefs? Because their culture ingrained those ideas from before they had the rational capacity to reject them as laughable.
That behavior I meant to direct my comment toward - Indoctrination of the helpless. We claim to do "anything for the children", yet before they ever make it to pre-school, their parents have already poisoned their minds with fantasies of silver cities in the clouds, of a magical Santa-like being who knows if you've behaved naughty or nice, and either gives you presents (an afterlife in paradise) or coal (a lake of fire).
Now, I really don't care what people "believe". I myself admitted to believing in a creator. But when your beliefs prevent me from having a cloned organ-donor, we've encountered a situation in need of remedy.
"Well there son, you have a disease called Huntington's Chorea. In the few decades you have before it kills you, science could probably cure it. But, that would make the baby Jesus cry, so, just make the best of it and thank Allah for letting you live to 40 - unless he strikes you down before then."
Sick, sick, sick!
Great idea. I just have one question: How does one ban a belief, exactly?
Simple - You don't ban it, you teach people to consider it a joke. Make it laughably quaint.
And if you don't consider that serious, tell me how seriously you take the threat of Zeus striking you down for failing to observe the ancient Greek pantheon.
Come on, who cares? Let people be ignorant. It's not like bringing people of below average intelligence or fundamentalist mindset into the scientific fold is going to make them valuable contributors. It'll just be a new type of ignorance to deal with. Let them be.
As much as I may not want to, someday, I will get old.
When that happens, I want stem cell therapies available to fix my joints and my heart and my cancer and my alzheimers and just about everything else that might go wrong with me short of sudden death. And if stem cells don't work, clone me a pithed organ donor. Not that I plan to live forever, but I would very much like to keep going at near full capability until the day I drop.
But as long as we have enough ignorant fundamentalists around to vote even a few of them into places like the whitehouse, where they can block funding for such research, we have a huge problem.
As the easiest and most obvious solution, we just need to ban religion (disclaimer - I believe in a creator deity; I just don't have a big enough ego to pretend I know what it wants). Failing that, if we can teach a large enough percentage of the population to (accurately) view books like the Bible and Koran as "inspirational fiction", then perhaps we'll stop seeing blocks on federal funding for stem cell research.
Look, I have a blog, and I am pretty sick of people treating blogs, for good or for ill, as qualitatively different from other types of publications.
Except, your "publication" does differ radically from other forms of the press...
Most notably, except for a niche readership, you have no reputation. Perhaps you personally run one of the most famous newsblogs in existance - I still don't recognize you. That puts you, in terms of journalistic credibility, a few notches below "National Enquirer". Nothing personal meant there, but credibility depends mostly on reputation, and most bloggers have little to none.
Second, you choose to publish in a medium and style dominated by attention-whores and angsty teens and anthropomorphized cats. Perhaps you count as another Mark Russinovich. Or Salam Pax. Or just another flogger working for Sony. Or a cat.
Perhaps your blog has some really great material, perhaps not. But when you complain that people treat it differently, well, look around the playground - Do you see a lot of cats physically printing their own version of the Washington Post?
Correct me if I am wrong, but if I develop on Linux, that does not necessary mean that I need to release my code GPL licensed. Am I reading the text wrong?
No, you have that idea right (same idea as why GCC can't force you to license anything created with it under the GPL). I meant that, since the box itself runs Linux modified to check for a dongle, you could easily (and AFAIK legally, but IANAL) just recompile a version that doesn't check for a dongle. Or even one that checks for a dongle with a copy of the GPL on it.
I don't see why this company should be required to turn-over code nor without charging.
Fine, they don't have to turn over the dongle-code.
They can turn over the box firmware so users can recompile it not to check for the dongle.
Additionally, depending on what this dongle contains, they may have no right to disallow copying them and giving out copies for free (or even for-profit in direct competition with the current sellers).
I'll agree that something doesn't sound right here, but it doesn't involve copyright violation by the end-users.
Translation: Gateway and Dell definitely won't honor the warranty and wish to remain free from bad press until they are forced to reveal the truth.
At least on their server liones, Dell semi-officially supports RHEL and RHAS. I've never tried getting it pre-installed, but their standard "Installation and Server Management" CD includes a preloader (basically a crude partition management tool and GRUB with stage 1.5/2 PERC support built-in).
If they refused to honor a warranty on their hardware for installing something explicitly included on their support software, you'd have heard about Dell losing some high-profile lawsuits already.
for example, you can't buy anything except an iPod and expect it to work with iTunes.
;-)
I know, right? Like, just the other day, I needed a driver for an older Radeon but only had the newewst NVidia ForceWare driver - And it wouldn't recognize the ATI card! What blatantly anticompetitive behavior, someone should investigate! And don't even get me started on how the PS3 online store won't let me buy XBox360 games, the rotten bastards.
Sorry, I mostly agree with your point, and normally I lose karma for daring to disagree with The Steve, but in this case... His toy, his store. And I want nothing to do with either of the DRM-laden pieces of crap. You can get DRMless MP3 players cheaper than the iPod, and you can still, last time I checked (yesterday afternoon at around 3:30pm), buy music on CD and rip it yourself.
We are increasing moving away from a free market
We do not now, have never, and will never, have a "free market" economy. The closest we've ever seen (at least in the US) occurred in the "wild" west in the 1800s, and in today's black market - But even both of them had strong external influence on them causing artificial price inflation (gold and unnatural scarcity, respectively).
Most people try and keep their passwords and usernames to a small number so use the same password and username for several different sites... so a nasty trick could be to try using the password for flixter against the same username for a different account say google mail or myspace...
That, however, would fall squarely under the category of "cracking". By asking for it, they can claim to have (at least as a pretense) your "permission" to spam your friends and contacts.
I do have to wonder, though, whether this might not count as a DMCA violation for Flixster, regardless of the appearance of having your permission... Virtually all free email hosts have a clause in their terms saying basically that you and only you may use your account. By using it "on your behalf", Flixster has used your password to circumvent an access control mechanism, the magical phrase that triggers a DMCA violation.
Sure, avoid the 6$ on the hundred, however its going to cost ya 30$ to ship it. Plus tax.
1) "Plus tax?" I think you probably didn't mean to tack that on there, in-context.
2) If I pay FedEx $30 to ship something, the money goes to people employed in getting my goods to me, providing me with a service. If I pay $6 to the government, it goes to enforcing the WO(s)D, to killing Iraqis, to free healthcare for 5th-gen welfare mommies and illegal immigrants. I'll choose to pay the $30 every time, given that choice.
3) Many online companies offer free shipping if you spend more than a fairly small amount, like $50. Obviously that cost gets rolled into the price of the product, but since they still need to compete, you pay the "real" $0.98 shipping rather than the massively inflated $29.95 S&H. And 2% costs less than 6%.
"Washington state Governor signed a tax bill encouraging out of state businesses to collect sales taxes
...
Looks like Washington-staters won't be able to fib on their tax returns about internet purchases, starting in 2008.
Why? Washington state has NO power to do anything more than "encourage" out-of-state companies to comply. Not only can't they practically enforce this, trying to do so would violate Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the US constitution.
States can pass all the stupid laws they want regarding what you have to pay for "use" tax and the like. But at the end of the day (at least, at the end of April 15th), cash still lets you make untraceable (and untaxable after-the-fact) purchases.
I will really never understand why we accept "death and taxes" as somehow magically inevitable. The governments of the world have demonstrated themselves completely incapable of responsibly allocating the resources of the citizenry for the common good. Why do we still let them?
We should view tax evasion as one of the most noble of "crimes", depriving aggressive social parasites of their sole form of food.
These images have value. It is not trivial to shoot a commercial photograph. Photographers, models, art directors have to be paid and locations, props and equiptment have to be bought and rented. To obtain an original image of the equivalent quality would have cost this person far more than the license fee.
And unless talking about a website specifically devoted to high-quality photography, what ends up online consists of a 17KB 300x200 fragment of the original that any hack with a 2MP digital could have snapped.
Photo aggregator sites like Corbis serve one purpose and one purpose only - Tagging. For the purpose of small-scale private web designers, he could almost certainly get what he wanted from the likes of Flikr, if it didn't take so much effort to find, for example, "a young brunette woman getting out of a blue sedan in front of a hotel, shot from the second story across the street". The ability to find that picture quickly has value - But that value has nothing to do with photographers, models, art-directors, locations, props, or equipment. Just convenience.
It's a shame that he got popped for it and I do hope it can be resolved painlessly, but they have a right to protect their product.
I think you missed the point of the G(G?)P... The FP author made a small mistake that involves no harm at all, he offered to make good, but the Dogs of War (aka "lawyers") have decided to try to get blood from a stone rather than accept his clearing the photos after-the-fact along with a small nuissance-fee as punishment. That represents the real "crime" here, not the copyright infringement.
"Hey, guys, I have this great idea - Let's ruin one our regular customers just because we can! Sure, he'll never, ever use us again, and this will likely cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run, but we have the legal high-ground!"
Perhaps you should look up the Jose Padilla case.
From Wikipedia:
You can still be a good programmer if you know the cost (in terms of resources) for the operations you choose to make use of.
Don't forget the cost of all pairs of instructions, and pairing/interleaving of instructions, and memory-reference-density of instructions, and memory reference order, and branch prediction miss penalties, and...
You can program without understanding how the hardware actually executes your code. But a "good" programmer? No. A hack (and not in the complimentary sense) at best.