Along those lines, perhaps far enough in the future, humans could develop the technology to engineer genes into these simple life forms that will evolve into hominiod (or other more advanced) beings after so many generational iterations in the given planet's environment.
You left out the part where the hominiods came back to earth and attempt to destroy it, only to be defeated by a virus uploaded using an Apple product.
Every time I see a restaurant cut Wi-Fi, they go out of business in six to eight months. Most often it's because the owners are delusional about how many turns a WiFi camper is preventing. By delusional, I mean 10-15 turns (which amounts to about $150-250 in revenue) instead of 1-2 turns (which is about $10-$20). The rest of the time, it's because something else has gone incredibly wrong, and the hired help is blaming WiFi instead of their toxic customer service and/or bad kitchen management.
So instead of focusing on why traffic is down, the owner attacks the WiFi using regulars, who never come back, and never bring their friends, and never will say anything good about you. WiFi campers are regulars, so it's a lot like tossing Norm, Fraiser and Cliff out of Cheers because they aren't drinking enough. Regulars are important because they bring in others.
Also, where camping is a real problem, all that is required is a manager willing to have a polite conversation with the customer: "Would you mind coming back when we're not as busy? I've got six groups waiting for a seat, and well, I hate to ask... but we really need your table so we can get the line down. Would you mind?" The answer is nearly always, "Sure, and I really appreciate you having WiFi."
Gates is right - but not in the way people are reading him. He's not saying universities are a rip off - he's clumsily saying that the model needs to change. I send my kids to a K-12 academy. It's two days per week in the classroom and three days of self paced, internet based coursework. Under this model, teachers can handle two entire classes in the same time their traditional counterparts can handle one (Blue Fifth Grade on Monday and Thurs, Green Fifth Grade on Tues and Fridays with Wed for administrata and one on ones). If you compare to a traditional public school, that means you need 50% of the staff, 50% of the buildings, and use 50% of the energy. On work at home days, there are often live classes on the internet the kids attend as well.
The result is that my kids have accelerated their learning, and I've got something that helps me as a parent: rigorous progress tracking. Because everything is online, I know if homework isn't done or if my child is having problems with the transitive property. Likewise, teachers know what to help kids with one-on-one, and so fewer kids fall through the cracks or fall off-pace.
Gates is right about books, too. Far too many of the books I had in college were basically used minimally. The prof would have handouts, a guide, and what amounted to a home made textbook you bought at the local copy shop. The book would cost $190, and the other materials, $15. It got to the point that by my senior year I would buy the $15 and borrow a friends textbook if it was needed (I think that happened once).
The materials my kids get with their K-12 school are fantastic, and are clearly not made for a committee. The result is the books do not require a teacher or parent to explain what the book is really saying, and kids become used to reading, trying to figure it out, then asking for help, which is often how independent learning happen in the real world.
What does not seem normal is the Army being there.
Why is it surprising that the Army had a few questions for the developer of software that was apparently involved in a major disclosure of confidential information? The Army does have police powers (not everyone, but those to whom it's delegated) like many agencies.
The police have the right to ask questions to people who may have evidence germane to an investigation. Sometimes that involves detaining someone briefly (3 hours is brief). None of this means that Appelbaum is being investigated or that he is being accused of any sort of crime. The presence of the Army is not shocking giving they have an ongoing criminal investigation. There's literally nothing in the news story that is worthy of more than making a note that the bad guys might have used Tor.
Cheesethegreat - Since you are an attorney, maybe you can explain better than I what someone's rights are when answering police questions when you are not a person being investigated, and there is not an expectation that a question could possibly be incriminating to you? I seem to recall from my service in the Navy that people have their constitutional rights, but are not Mirandized or given Miranda rights (remain silent, attorney present, phone call, etc...) nor do they have the right to remain silent where the question could not possibly be self incriminating and the subject of the investigation is not themselves.
I own a credit card processing firm (we run a gateway). Credit card companies can help, but their help is really limited to resolving consumer disputes:
1. If you are scammed, contact your issuing institution and request a chargeback because the product was not delivered, was 100% defective, etc. Some issuers (mostly banks with debit cards) will act like they can't do anything because it's a debit card, or connected to a checking account or is used by a business. This is BS. Immediately call the number for Visa or Mastercard on the back and tell them about your situation. Once the chargeback process has been initiated, here's what to expect:
2. You will have to fill out some forms, provide any evidence and fax it in quickly. You may or may not get an immediate refund. If you do get a refund with a debit card, keep in mind that the refund is actually a "provisional credit" which means if you lose the dispute you will have that money taken from your account.
3. Money will be pulled from the merchant's depository account immediately. The merchant will have some time to issue a response to your dispute.
4. The decision on your dispute is pretty easy for the credit card people. If the merchant can prove they delivered the goods and they are honoring their warranty, the merchant wins.
Even if you lose you dispute, you may help others because processors tend to quickly fire customers who have high chargeback rates. Chargebacks are expensive and time consuming and often merchants will run out of cash and fail to pay chargebacks and fees. In our case, we see less than a.2% chargeback rate from our clients and when we have a customer with high (meaning 60 days over.4%) we reevaluate the merchant. Over 1% two months in a row, we usually close the account. If the merchant doesn't pay outstanding fees and chargebacks, they are reported to an industry registry that will prevent the business entity and it's owners from being able to get a merchant account from anyone else in the industry.
Spouting off cases as if they might be precedent, or represent the law of the land in a contract dispute should be left to attorneys arguing before judges. Someone may read your poorly thought out and dangerous legal opinion and act on it with dire and expensive consequences in the future.
Here's why you are completely and utterly wrong to base your theory on your trinity of copyright cases:
Gallob v. Nintendo - This case legalized the Game Genie. It would be tough to explain how a game genie works just like a word press theme, mainly because what amounts to an idiot proofed hardware debugger isn't the same thing as blogging software.
Brown Bag - I'm assuming you are talking about the look and feel lawsuit and not the adult toy lawsuit. This case was about the Brown Bag feeling that their GUI was similar to a Symantec product (I seem to recall it was outlining software). The GUIs were so different that the judge looked at the screens of both and immediately (as in pre-trial summary judgment motion) ruled in the defendant's favor.
Computer Associates v. Altai is a case about employee misappropriation of code where somoene left CA and went to Altai, and took a program with them. By the time CA sued, Altai had re-written the sofware and removed all CA code. The court ruled that the current version Altai's product did not infringe and that CA had sued the wrong party for the initial version - Altai was not liable (because the infringement was long gone in the porduct), but the former CA employee who stole the code might be (the employee was never sued - probably blood from a stone).
I would probably fire an attorney that tried to convince me to use the set of irrelevant cases that you are citing as precedent. More than likely you would end up losing on pretrial motions because these cases are simply not relevant, and the judge would see that the plaintiff is simply trying to bamboozle the court. It would be embarrassing, expensive and probably waste a lot of everyone's time.
Now on to your use of language to advocate your position. You say the words "derivative work" and "incorporation" mean something very specific in copyright law. They do. But courts are not restricted to using only Black's to understand the English language. At the end of the day, though, one of the legal (meaning from the law dictionary) definitions of "incorporation" seems to fit the context of the GPL perfectly:
"To cause to merge or combine together into a united whole."
Which perfectly describes the combination of a WordPress theme with WordPress itself.
The GPL is one of the best thought out license agreements out there. It does what it's supposed to do. It's been around for a long time and has generally held up when litigated. The fact that it is not often litigated speaks volumes: it's unwise to litigate against such a clear contract that so clearly expresses the author's willingness to share, so long as you share, too.// Enjoyed the spirited discussion.
You do not understand how WordPress and WP themes work. They are not standalone applications that "call" WordPress.
The Theme is loaded by WordPress. The theme is completely dependent on Wordpress and cannot function without a working copy of Wordpress.
Based on that, I'd say the derivative work argument has some merit, but less than an argument based on incorporation.
All you do when you split hairs like this is go from violating the license to willfully violating the license and showing your intent is to skirt the agreement. None of which will endear you to juries, judges or copyright holders. After all, it's the opinion of the copyright holder that will land you in court, and the opinion of the jury that will determine facts, and the opinion of the judge that will limit your ability to advance your case.
Also, your suggestion that it's ok to sell a product that cannot be used by the buyer without breaking a license agreement is a bad idea.
Finally, it's probably bad business to piss off an open source community over the terms of the license that lets the community exist to begin with. EVEN if you are within your rights to do so.
Mullenweg and the SFLC are wrong to bring up derivative works, unless someone bases their work on another GPL'd theme.
Incorporation is the issue, and here is no practical way to make a WordPress theme that involves not calling the theme's code from within WordPress and incorporating (in both the legal and technical sense) the theme into WordPress.If WP had a theme engine that interpeted or compiled theme files, then incorporation would likely not be an issue.
Sorry, but I just can't see any license other than the GPL being acceptable for WordPress themes.
What you are saying is that the authors of the GPL don't know what it means. Assuming you know more than the author is a very naive, ignorant and silly position most of the time.
Section 10 of the GPL is what you are looking for, which deals with combined works. It's pretty blunt and easy to understand:
If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission.
Apparently WordPress's author didn't quite give permission.
No. Wordpress themes are simply an add on library that Wordpress calls. Everything else you've said is hypothetical and does not exist in the real world.
Derivative work has nothing to do with this issue at all, unless the problem is one where someone started with another GPL package, in which case, they would be subject to the GPL as a derivative work.
The language was from the GPL's postscript which would absolutely be used to give the judge guidance on the meaning of the license and intent of the licensor.
What is true for OpenOffice may not, and probably is not true for all applications. CorelDraw, yes, I'm looking at you. That purple is supposed to be blue.
WordPress themes are simply PHP libraries that WordPress calls when rendering a page. The license status of Wordpress themes are very much dealt with in finality by the GPL, and there is absolutely no question that the PHP files must be licensed per the GPL.
From the GPL's narrative:
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General Public License instead of this License.
My understanding is that a derivative work would be more like a fork, where I built a content manager and started with WordPress as my code base. Many themes are derivative works because the authors started with the a GPL'd theme as the basis for their theme's code.
I'm glad to see the WordPress community wrestling with the licensing issue as there are many plugin distributors who are using obfuscators like ioncube - and I can see the themers heading there in the future. Every CMS that grows up goes through a period where the opportunists move in and do well for a while with proprietary extensions. Then the community and authors wake up, and the opportunist suddenly discovers two competing plug ins that are open source and more functional, or the features their plug in offer are written into the next core.
Lots of people here are recommending using tools that are built for very large scale projects. Based on the fact you have a DOS based system that likely used a pretty common library for storing the data (something like c-tree, btrieve, a dbase library or simply saving binary data using whatever language the app was written in), using any RDBMS like MySQL or even SQLite probably would do the job. PHP, Python, Ruby and Perl would probably make writing the actual application a snap - and be able to handle more of a load that the DOS app could.
Here's to hoping you can get the data. Hopefully the vendor that pulled the database down realizes how important to marketing it is and reverses course.
In short, the problem used to be that artists with broad appeal would make a ton of money and artists with niche appeal would scrape by, but now artists with broad appeal are scraping by and niche artists are out. If only a small fraction of your listeners pays then the whole industry changes. You can't point to one album that suffered, they have all suffered, even ones that didn't get made. It's a systemic problem.
Those who are using a horse and buggy model in the era of the automobile are having problems. The vast majority of musicians that I know are having a resurgence of being able to do what they love because if they play gigs, they make more money off selling self published CDs and online music. I've had a few friends I've grown up with quit their day jobs because they are making it.
If anything, local music scenes have improved as artists are able to make a living off of playing. Now you can do more than play for whatever the bar is paying (like I did back in the day when I thought I'd grow up an play bass in a band). Now bands can produce ($150/hour for studio time is a thing of the past), get CDs pressed for a couple of bucks and sell them at gigs, get people to friend them on Facebook and MySpace for marketing and sell more music off of iTunes and their own websites than they ever would have back when you were either starving or filling up the local stadium. BTW - you have to sell A METRIC TON of CDs via a traditional label to make what you would selling 1000 CDs off your own website for $7 (or $10 or $15 or $5 or Whatever). It's pretty cool seeing people make $10-$15,000 where 10 years ago, they'd get enough to pay for one hotel room and a bottle of scotch after each show after filling up the car, buying new strings and fixing where the union guy at the venue dropped the drummer's snare.
As for getting performance royalties, composers royalties and so on, it's not that tough to set up your own label (or use a self-publish label), get set up with ASCAP or any of the other performing rights groups and get paid when say, you get radio play or CNN uses your music for cuts to commercials or something.
Have your town's attorney review the ordinances and contracts governing Comcast's franchise (right to deliver cable to your town). If they are out of compliance on anything, then your town can force the issue by either penalizing them financially or revoking their franchise (this is the best solution for anti-customer utilities like Comcast). Just the mere threat of this on city letterhead with the appropriate signatures should take care of your issue. Bonus: Comcast has increasingly become predatory towards their customers and has earned the title of one of the country's most hated companies and the local politicians can score big with voters by beating up on them.
It's about time this DMCA carp hits politically sensitive people
I suspect hitting politically sensitive people with a carp may get you arrested, and possibly motivate a rewrite of the laws pertaining to assault with a large freshwater fish.
I'm as delighted that you've made this monument celebrating both your freedom and ability to use the word 'fuck' in discussions on the internet. In fact, I'm sure your future potential employers, romantic interests and others will be as delighted as I am in your celebration of your ability to express yourself. Hopefully they join you in your celebration and realize that you really were not being crass, highlighting a lack of eduction, exhibiting a profound inability to get a long with others or covering up a limited vocabulary.
Judging by your posts, though, it looks like you work in a cubicle for an political action committee that spends all day astroturfing global warming stories.
You've hit the nail on the head. Climategate wasn't a crisis of science, it was a crisis of integrity. Those emails painted a picture of people who were willing to do anything to get the results they wanted, and were much like recently fired Gen McCrystal, engaged in a conversation that they knew they should never be having if their cause mattered.
When we put everything on a timeline, and imagine what the world would be like without humans, we get a rough estimate of what the world should be like.
I suppose humans don't have an important role in the ecosystem, then? We've occupied an important role for quite some time... tens of thousands of years really. What is fascinating is that we are starting to question that role, and how we can change the environment. Shouldn't our question be how can we make the world better, rather than simply focusing on averting some cataclysmic disaster.
Oh, and 100% of the people who have projected the end of the world to date have been wrong. It would of course, suck if one would happen to be right.
Slashdot Mirror
Along those lines, perhaps far enough in the future, humans could develop the technology to engineer genes into these simple life forms that will evolve into hominiod (or other more advanced) beings after so many generational iterations in the given planet's environment.
You left out the part where the hominiods came back to earth and attempt to destroy it, only to be defeated by a virus uploaded using an Apple product.
Every time I see a restaurant cut Wi-Fi, they go out of business in six to eight months. Most often it's because the owners are delusional about how many turns a WiFi camper is preventing. By delusional, I mean 10-15 turns (which amounts to about $150-250 in revenue) instead of 1-2 turns (which is about $10-$20). The rest of the time, it's because something else has gone incredibly wrong, and the hired help is blaming WiFi instead of their toxic customer service and/or bad kitchen management.
So instead of focusing on why traffic is down, the owner attacks the WiFi using regulars, who never come back, and never bring their friends, and never will say anything good about you. WiFi campers are regulars, so it's a lot like tossing Norm, Fraiser and Cliff out of Cheers because they aren't drinking enough. Regulars are important because they bring in others.
Also, where camping is a real problem, all that is required is a manager willing to have a polite conversation with the customer: "Would you mind coming back when we're not as busy? I've got six groups waiting for a seat, and well, I hate to ask... but we really need your table so we can get the line down. Would you mind?" The answer is nearly always, "Sure, and I really appreciate you having WiFi."
Gates is right - but not in the way people are reading him. He's not saying universities are a rip off - he's clumsily saying that the model needs to change. I send my kids to a K-12 academy. It's two days per week in the classroom and three days of self paced, internet based coursework. Under this model, teachers can handle two entire classes in the same time their traditional counterparts can handle one (Blue Fifth Grade on Monday and Thurs, Green Fifth Grade on Tues and Fridays with Wed for administrata and one on ones). If you compare to a traditional public school, that means you need 50% of the staff, 50% of the buildings, and use 50% of the energy. On work at home days, there are often live classes on the internet the kids attend as well.
The result is that my kids have accelerated their learning, and I've got something that helps me as a parent: rigorous progress tracking. Because everything is online, I know if homework isn't done or if my child is having problems with the transitive property. Likewise, teachers know what to help kids with one-on-one, and so fewer kids fall through the cracks or fall off-pace.
Gates is right about books, too. Far too many of the books I had in college were basically used minimally. The prof would have handouts, a guide, and what amounted to a home made textbook you bought at the local copy shop. The book would cost $190, and the other materials, $15. It got to the point that by my senior year I would buy the $15 and borrow a friends textbook if it was needed (I think that happened once).
The materials my kids get with their K-12 school are fantastic, and are clearly not made for a committee. The result is the books do not require a teacher or parent to explain what the book is really saying, and kids become used to reading, trying to figure it out, then asking for help, which is often how independent learning happen in the real world.
Well, I guess we'll agree to disagree.
One day this will get litigated and we'll get to see what really ends up happening.
What does not seem normal is the Army being there.
Why is it surprising that the Army had a few questions for the developer of software that was apparently involved in a major disclosure of confidential information? The Army does have police powers (not everyone, but those to whom it's delegated) like many agencies.
The police have the right to ask questions to people who may have evidence germane to an investigation. Sometimes that involves detaining someone briefly (3 hours is brief). None of this means that Appelbaum is being investigated or that he is being accused of any sort of crime. The presence of the Army is not shocking giving they have an ongoing criminal investigation. There's literally nothing in the news story that is worthy of more than making a note that the bad guys might have used Tor.
Cheesethegreat - Since you are an attorney, maybe you can explain better than I what someone's rights are when answering police questions when you are not a person being investigated, and there is not an expectation that a question could possibly be incriminating to you? I seem to recall from my service in the Navy that people have their constitutional rights, but are not Mirandized or given Miranda rights (remain silent, attorney present, phone call, etc...) nor do they have the right to remain silent where the question could not possibly be self incriminating and the subject of the investigation is not themselves.
I own a credit card processing firm (we run a gateway). Credit card companies can help, but their help is really limited to resolving consumer disputes:
1. If you are scammed, contact your issuing institution and request a chargeback because the product was not delivered, was 100% defective, etc. Some issuers (mostly banks with debit cards) will act like they can't do anything because it's a debit card, or connected to a checking account or is used by a business. This is BS. Immediately call the number for Visa or Mastercard on the back and tell them about your situation. Once the chargeback process has been initiated, here's what to expect:
2. You will have to fill out some forms, provide any evidence and fax it in quickly. You may or may not get an immediate refund. If you do get a refund with a debit card, keep in mind that the refund is actually a "provisional credit" which means if you lose the dispute you will have that money taken from your account.
3. Money will be pulled from the merchant's depository account immediately. The merchant will have some time to issue a response to your dispute.
4. The decision on your dispute is pretty easy for the credit card people. If the merchant can prove they delivered the goods and they are honoring their warranty, the merchant wins.
Even if you lose you dispute, you may help others because processors tend to quickly fire customers who have high chargeback rates. Chargebacks are expensive and time consuming and often merchants will run out of cash and fail to pay chargebacks and fees. In our case, we see less than a .2% chargeback rate from our clients and when we have a customer with high (meaning 60 days over .4%) we reevaluate the merchant. Over 1% two months in a row, we usually close the account. If the merchant doesn't pay outstanding fees and chargebacks, they are reported to an industry registry that will prevent the business entity and it's owners from being able to get a merchant account from anyone else in the industry.
Spouting off cases as if they might be precedent, or represent the law of the land in a contract dispute should be left to attorneys arguing before judges. Someone may read your poorly thought out and dangerous legal opinion and act on it with dire and expensive consequences in the future.
Here's why you are completely and utterly wrong to base your theory on your trinity of copyright cases:
Gallob v. Nintendo - This case legalized the Game Genie. It would be tough to explain how a game genie works just like a word press theme, mainly because what amounts to an idiot proofed hardware debugger isn't the same thing as blogging software.
Brown Bag - I'm assuming you are talking about the look and feel lawsuit and not the adult toy lawsuit. This case was about the Brown Bag feeling that their GUI was similar to a Symantec product (I seem to recall it was outlining software). The GUIs were so different that the judge looked at the screens of both and immediately (as in pre-trial summary judgment motion) ruled in the defendant's favor.
Computer Associates v. Altai is a case about employee misappropriation of code where somoene left CA and went to Altai, and took a program with them. By the time CA sued, Altai had re-written the sofware and removed all CA code. The court ruled that the current version Altai's product did not infringe and that CA had sued the wrong party for the initial version - Altai was not liable (because the infringement was long gone in the porduct), but the former CA employee who stole the code might be (the employee was never sued - probably blood from a stone).
I would probably fire an attorney that tried to convince me to use the set of irrelevant cases that you are citing as precedent. More than likely you would end up losing on pretrial motions because these cases are simply not relevant, and the judge would see that the plaintiff is simply trying to bamboozle the court. It would be embarrassing, expensive and probably waste a lot of everyone's time.
Now on to your use of language to advocate your position. You say the words "derivative work" and "incorporation" mean something very specific in copyright law. They do. But courts are not restricted to using only Black's to understand the English language. At the end of the day, though, one of the legal (meaning from the law dictionary) definitions of "incorporation" seems to fit the context of the GPL perfectly:
"To cause to merge or combine together into a united whole."
Which perfectly describes the combination of a WordPress theme with WordPress itself.
The GPL is one of the best thought out license agreements out there. It does what it's supposed to do. It's been around for a long time and has generally held up when litigated. The fact that it is not often litigated speaks volumes: it's unwise to litigate against such a clear contract that so clearly expresses the author's willingness to share, so long as you share, too. // Enjoyed the spirited discussion.
You do not understand how WordPress and WP themes work. They are not standalone applications that "call" WordPress.
The Theme is loaded by WordPress. The theme is completely dependent on Wordpress and cannot function without a working copy of Wordpress.
Based on that, I'd say the derivative work argument has some merit, but less than an argument based on incorporation.
All you do when you split hairs like this is go from violating the license to willfully violating the license and showing your intent is to skirt the agreement. None of which will endear you to juries, judges or copyright holders. After all, it's the opinion of the copyright holder that will land you in court, and the opinion of the jury that will determine facts, and the opinion of the judge that will limit your ability to advance your case.
Also, your suggestion that it's ok to sell a product that cannot be used by the buyer without breaking a license agreement is a bad idea.
Finally, it's probably bad business to piss off an open source community over the terms of the license that lets the community exist to begin with. EVEN if you are within your rights to do so.
Mullenweg and the SFLC are wrong to bring up derivative works, unless someone bases their work on another GPL'd theme.
Incorporation is the issue, and here is no practical way to make a WordPress theme that involves not calling the theme's code from within WordPress and incorporating (in both the legal and technical sense) the theme into WordPress.If WP had a theme engine that interpeted or compiled theme files, then incorporation would likely not be an issue.
Sorry, but I just can't see any license other than the GPL being acceptable for WordPress themes.
What you are saying is that the authors of the GPL don't know what it means. Assuming you know more than the author is a very naive, ignorant and silly position most of the time.
Section 10 of the GPL is what you are looking for, which deals with combined works. It's pretty blunt and easy to understand:
If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission.
Apparently WordPress's author didn't quite give permission.
No. Wordpress themes are simply an add on library that Wordpress calls. Everything else you've said is hypothetical and does not exist in the real world.
In other words, it could be, but it isn't.
Derivative work has nothing to do with this issue at all, unless the problem is one where someone started with another GPL package, in which case, they would be subject to the GPL as a derivative work.
The language was from the GPL's postscript which would absolutely be used to give the judge guidance on the meaning of the license and intent of the licensor.
What is true for OpenOffice may not, and probably is not true for all applications. CorelDraw, yes, I'm looking at you. That purple is supposed to be blue.
WordPress themes are simply PHP libraries that WordPress calls when rendering a page. The license status of Wordpress themes are very much dealt with in finality by the GPL, and there is absolutely no question that the PHP files must be licensed per the GPL.
From the GPL's narrative:
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into
proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Lesser General
Public License instead of this License.
My understanding is that a derivative work would be more like a fork, where I built a content manager and started with WordPress as my code base. Many themes are derivative works because the authors started with the a GPL'd theme as the basis for their theme's code.
I'm glad to see the WordPress community wrestling with the licensing issue as there are many plugin distributors who are using obfuscators like ioncube - and I can see the themers heading there in the future. Every CMS that grows up goes through a period where the opportunists move in and do well for a while with proprietary extensions. Then the community and authors wake up, and the opportunist suddenly discovers two competing plug ins that are open source and more functional, or the features their plug in offer are written into the next core.
No, it's a defective product.
Lots of people here are recommending using tools that are built for very large scale projects. Based on the fact you have a DOS based system that likely used a pretty common library for storing the data (something like c-tree, btrieve, a dbase library or simply saving binary data using whatever language the app was written in), using any RDBMS like MySQL or even SQLite probably would do the job. PHP, Python, Ruby and Perl would probably make writing the actual application a snap - and be able to handle more of a load that the DOS app could.
Here's to hoping you can get the data. Hopefully the vendor that pulled the database down realizes how important to marketing it is and reverses course.
In short, the problem used to be that artists with broad appeal would make a ton of money and artists with niche appeal would scrape by, but now artists with broad appeal are scraping by and niche artists are out. If only a small fraction of your listeners pays then the whole industry changes. You can't point to one album that suffered, they have all suffered, even ones that didn't get made. It's a systemic problem.
Those who are using a horse and buggy model in the era of the automobile are having problems. The vast majority of musicians that I know are having a resurgence of being able to do what they love because if they play gigs, they make more money off selling self published CDs and online music. I've had a few friends I've grown up with quit their day jobs because they are making it.
If anything, local music scenes have improved as artists are able to make a living off of playing. Now you can do more than play for whatever the bar is paying (like I did back in the day when I thought I'd grow up an play bass in a band). Now bands can produce ($150/hour for studio time is a thing of the past), get CDs pressed for a couple of bucks and sell them at gigs, get people to friend them on Facebook and MySpace for marketing and sell more music off of iTunes and their own websites than they ever would have back when you were either starving or filling up the local stadium. BTW - you have to sell A METRIC TON of CDs via a traditional label to make what you would selling 1000 CDs off your own website for $7 (or $10 or $15 or $5 or Whatever). It's pretty cool seeing people make $10-$15,000 where 10 years ago, they'd get enough to pay for one hotel room and a bottle of scotch after each show after filling up the car, buying new strings and fixing where the union guy at the venue dropped the drummer's snare.
As for getting performance royalties, composers royalties and so on, it's not that tough to set up your own label (or use a self-publish label), get set up with ASCAP or any of the other performing rights groups and get paid when say, you get radio play or CNN uses your music for cuts to commercials or something.
Have your town's attorney review the ordinances and contracts governing Comcast's franchise (right to deliver cable to your town). If they are out of compliance on anything, then your town can force the issue by either penalizing them financially or revoking their franchise (this is the best solution for anti-customer utilities like Comcast). Just the mere threat of this on city letterhead with the appropriate signatures should take care of your issue. Bonus: Comcast has increasingly become predatory towards their customers and has earned the title of one of the country's most hated companies and the local politicians can score big with voters by beating up on them.
Yes Comcast, you suck that much.
It's about time this DMCA carp hits politically sensitive people
I suspect hitting politically sensitive people with a carp may get you arrested, and possibly motivate a rewrite of the laws pertaining to assault with a large freshwater fish.
I'm as delighted that you've made this monument celebrating both your freedom and ability to use the word 'fuck' in discussions on the internet. In fact, I'm sure your future potential employers, romantic interests and others will be as delighted as I am in your celebration of your ability to express yourself. Hopefully they join you in your celebration and realize that you really were not being crass, highlighting a lack of eduction, exhibiting a profound inability to get a long with others or covering up a limited vocabulary.
Judging by your posts, though, it looks like you work in a cubicle for an political action committee that spends all day astroturfing global warming stories.
Or fail to paint that picture for someone who is programmed to believe the end justify the means.
You've hit the nail on the head. Climategate wasn't a crisis of science, it was a crisis of integrity. Those emails painted a picture of people who were willing to do anything to get the results they wanted, and were much like recently fired Gen McCrystal, engaged in a conversation that they knew they should never be having if their cause mattered.
When we put everything on a timeline, and imagine what the world would be like without humans, we get a rough estimate of what the world should be like.
I suppose humans don't have an important role in the ecosystem, then? We've occupied an important role for quite some time... tens of thousands of years really. What is fascinating is that we are starting to question that role, and how we can change the environment. Shouldn't our question be how can we make the world better, rather than simply focusing on averting some cataclysmic disaster.
Oh, and 100% of the people who have projected the end of the world to date have been wrong. It would of course, suck if one would happen to be right.
Here's my question:
Why aren't we looking for an technological or engineered solution to the problem?