I am not a lawyer, so ignore this post: but I believe that the way the RIAA works, you are safe to delete the copyrighted material unless you've been physically served with a subpoena.
IIRC, the suit against your IP address is actually a "john doe" case- you are anonymous until outed by your ISP. Once you are outed, the RIAA drops the john doe suit and begins proceedings against you personally. At that point, you will be served. Once served, destruction of evidence will almost certainly result in sanctions.
The problem with developing a perfect algorithm to predict the market is in recognizing that your algorithm is also a participant in the market. Any actions it takes will also affect what it's predicting. It doesn't introduce much error on small scales, but on any significant investment levels, the distortions on a single stock will be pretty chaotic. It's probably impossible to both perfectly observe the market and to participate in it.
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Mysql may believe this (of course, they believed foreign keys were unnecessary up until pretty recently) but they aren't right, at least, not under the terms of US copyright law.
You can't copyright a protocol. You can copyright the literal words of their description of the protocol, but that in now way binds you in terms of the license. You can't copy their description into a book without permission, but I doubt that the description is licensed under the Gnu FDL.
If you lift their client app and use it to talk to a mysql database then you have a problem; but if you reverse engineer the protocol without doing a literal cut and paste, then they have no leg to stand on.
IANAL, but apparently neither is the hoof-handed choom at Mysql that wrote that whopper.
OpenCMS (http://www.opencms.org/ does what you describe- xhtml is extra work, tho, if you want to use in-place editing (the div's they autogenerate aren't xhtml as far as I can tell).
Not only does it have multilingual support, the workplace is pretty well localized (english, german, japanese, etc)
It is a java application, so if you want all this in php, you'll need to look elsewhere.
If you paint a swastika on your own house and the government forces you to remove it, that's censorship.
If they hire a painting company to remove it for you, then the painting company is performing censorship.
Microsoft is deleting content- hosted, BTW, in the US- at the behest of the government. They are the painters the government has hired to remove your offensive speech.
1) truth is an absolute defence to libel claims. 2) nobody takes what they read on message boards seriously enough to constitute libel. Google for "stephengalton"....
They won't run out of investor buddies any time soon- the investors here are pretty clearly conduits for M$ money. SCO is Microsoft's shill, not an independent corporation.
Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service
It is true that having a monopoly is not illegal; it is the abuse of that monopoly which is illegal. But a monopoly is the fact of exclusive control, not the abuse of that control.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. When running in the local browser, the applet needs to live within very different security constraints, and is running on an unpredictable version of the Java virtual machine.
You can easily port a Java applet to be a standalone java application, but the other path is much harder.
This is also arguable by observable evidence: Why do Google Maps, Gmail, Oddpost, Microsoft Live, et al seem to all be using Ajax techniques- and none of them are using java applets? I haven't seen a major site rely on a java applet for several years now.... there must be a reason beyond geek fashion for this.
Of course, it might be easier to just compile Firefox / Gecko as an activeX control and embed it in IE... then you could hack in an updated ecmascript interpreter.
Re:Good read so far
on
Ajax in Action
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Right- that's my point, actually.
Your cold fusion code is now acting an application tier language- it receives a simple query (give me the answer to my FAQ question number 3), and it queries the DB, formats the result as XML, and goes back to sleep.
However, a classic cold fusion site handles the page layout, loads in whatever resources are appropriate for that locale (english, german, japanese, whatever), queries the database, formats the results as a bunch of table tags, and outputs everything.
So you've effectively split your tasks into three tiers- presentation tier (in javascript), application tier (in cold fusion), and data tier (mysql or whatever). You're using cold fusion as middleware- I'd suggest that this is a fine strategy for a one or two developer site, but that you may wish to look to a more maintainable / suitable language for middle tier development- but that's just my $.02.
Sure, we could use JWS and applets; I've written quite a few. And there's no doubt that java is a better systems language than javascript.
But for some reason, the world has pretty much rejected both technologies. It's probably a combination of things- you need some level of skill before you can just start messing around with java (maybe an IDE, but at least an understanding of how to invoke a compiler and all that). Of course, it's also easy to blame M$ for their adopt and extinguish policy- adopt a craptastic JDK version and let it sit there like a festering boil for seven years until everyone gives up.
I guess if I were designing an app and could control the execution environment, I'd much prefer to use SWT and communicate back to a remote server with RMI, SOAP, XMLRPC or some such- but if I had to write something that worked in most available browsers, I think I'd see a better compatibility mix from an Ajax / Javascript environment.
The central idea behind Ajax is pretty good IMHO- moving as much of the presentation-tier processing as possible to the client system. It's certainly a cleaner design- separation of concerns means you can get away from some of the nastier (and kludgy) template languages like PHP, Cold Fusion, and their ilk. You can also see a future where JSP, Velocity, and ASPX pretty much go away from the application stack- yes, you still need some templating system to produce the XML or javascript that your application is consuming, but it dramatically decreases in importance. Further, your application tier code can devote itself to modeling your business logic, and not get distracted by trying to simultaneously serve the right stylesheet to Mac IE5 users while calculating shipping to uzbekistan...
The alarm bell ringing in my brain is that all of this is structured around a fairly blunt tool in javascript. It does a great job at what it is designed to do- but it seems to require coercion to handle some more sophisticated needs. When I start building a large, complex application, I really prefer to have namespaces to compartmentalize things. It seems like you need to use tricky external libraries to gain the features needed for external support- with the classic issues around leaky abstractions that this causes.
The book has been a good read so far (I'm halfway through)- but already, it seems like they are bending over backwards to get around the lightweight nature of the language. I'm not arguing for strong typing- but encapsulation would probably help people write better bug-free code. Anyone out there know if there's any reasonable prospect for these structural issues in javascript being addressed at the language level instead of the library level?
In fact, I'm going to create a video game where you are a forensic pathologist, and you have to travel around a city trying to track down a gang of teenagers who are acting out scenes inspired by the latest episode of CSI... you must figure out what the crazy wrapup / plot twist will be in order to stop them. I bet the video game would be a hell of a lot more interesting than their show- and probably about equally gory.
Re:Looks like they crossed the threshold...
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Especially since he's already successfully sued the RIAA for "lost" royalties, and served notice (and got a settlement) from Sony BMG on payola...
Might be an interesting idea for a New York resident to make a phone call to his office...
Looks like they crossed the threshold...
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Looks like Sony crossed the threshold from nuisance to crime. While DOJ is almost certainly going to soft-pedal this, a savvy attorney general with political ambitions from a state unencumbered by Hollywood and the RIAA could probably ride this case into the governor's office....
"Paging Eliot Spitzer, Paging Eliot Spitzer, Mr. Spitzer white courtesy phone..."
the means of production should be not privatly owned but in the hand of the public:
Actually, they aren't in the hands of the public- they are in the hands of the state. And in practice, without exception, the communist state has been in the hands of murderous bastards.
My (admittedly naive) understanding of socialism, was that it was the exclusive province of the government; the government decides to provide some good or service that was otherwise only available through non-state actors- companies, contractors, vendors, or not available at all.
How is this even remotely related to shared intellectual property, contributed by individuals and corporations (non-state actors), to a common good? Especially, as the primary result seems to be the establishment of high-quality standards that private and public players need to adhere to in order to participate in the market?
It seems like a government appropriation of an idea- which is what copyright and patent laws do, they leverage the power of the state against the ownership of an "idea"- is far further along the path to socialism than the free and interested contribution of ideas to a common market.
Frankly, this guy's head is so far up his ass, he can probably see out his nostrils.
Nahh, I'm sure both sets of coders are in India, along with everybody else's coders....:)
But if a marketing droid shows up at/. the same week his company is busted for knowingly distributing software that can break peoples computers, particularly if their title is "president", I think it is entirely fair to ask him why we should trust ANYTHING that his company produces from now on.
I don't think I'm blaming the coders- but he has a responsibility as an officer of the company that is different from line personnel.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a lawyer, so ignore this post: but I believe that the way the RIAA works, you are safe to delete the copyrighted material unless you've been physically served with a subpoena.
IIRC, the suit against your IP address is actually a "john doe" case- you are anonymous until outed by your ISP. Once you are outed, the RIAA drops the john doe suit and begins proceedings against you personally. At that point, you will be served. Once served, destruction of evidence will almost certainly result in sanctions.
The problem with developing a perfect algorithm to predict the market is in recognizing that your algorithm is also a participant in the market. Any actions it takes will also affect what it's predicting. It doesn't introduce much error on small scales, but on any significant investment levels, the distortions on a single stock will be pretty chaotic. It's probably impossible to both perfectly observe the market and to participate in it.
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
(we report, you decide).
Mysql may believe this (of course, they believed foreign keys were unnecessary up until pretty recently) but they aren't right, at least, not under the terms of US copyright law.
You can't copyright a protocol. You can copyright the literal words of their description of the protocol, but that in now way binds you in terms of the license. You can't copy their description into a book without permission, but I doubt that the description is licensed under the Gnu FDL.
If you lift their client app and use it to talk to a mysql database then you have a problem; but if you reverse engineer the protocol without doing a literal cut and paste, then they have no leg to stand on.
IANAL, but apparently neither is the hoof-handed choom at Mysql that wrote that whopper.
24 email addresses in the bcc: header for each of 50,000 distinct emails = 1.2 million subscribers getting the mail.
They probably test the AOL spam filters regularly, and rotate their hashbust text for each message group.
OpenCMS (http://www.opencms.org/ does what you describe- xhtml is extra work, tho, if you want to use in-place editing (the div's they autogenerate aren't xhtml as far as I can tell).
Not only does it have multilingual support, the workplace is pretty well localized (english, german, japanese, etc)
It is a java application, so if you want all this in php, you'll need to look elsewhere.
especially, when, ya know, it's HIS website...
If you paint a swastika on your own house and the government forces you to remove it, that's censorship.
If they hire a painting company to remove it for you, then the painting company is performing censorship.
Microsoft is deleting content- hosted, BTW, in the US- at the behest of the government. They are the painters the government has hired to remove your offensive speech.
1) truth is an absolute defence to libel claims.
2) nobody takes what they read on message boards seriously enough to constitute libel. Google for "stephengalton"....
They won't run out of investor buddies any time soon- the investors here are pretty clearly conduits for M$ money. SCO is Microsoft's shill, not an independent corporation.
From Dictionary.com:
It is true that having a monopoly is not illegal; it is the abuse of that monopoly which is illegal. But a monopoly is the fact of exclusive control, not the abuse of that control.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. When running in the local browser, the applet needs to live within very different security constraints, and is running on an unpredictable version of the Java virtual machine.
You can easily port a Java applet to be a standalone java application, but the other path is much harder.
This is also arguable by observable evidence: Why do Google Maps, Gmail, Oddpost, Microsoft Live, et al seem to all be using Ajax techniques- and none of them are using java applets? I haven't seen a major site rely on a java applet for several years now.... there must be a reason beyond geek fashion for this.
Of course, it might be easier to just compile Firefox / Gecko as an activeX control and embed it in IE... then you could hack in an updated ecmascript interpreter.
Right- that's my point, actually.
Your cold fusion code is now acting an application tier language- it receives a simple query (give me the answer to my FAQ question number 3), and it queries the DB, formats the result as XML, and goes back to sleep.
However, a classic cold fusion site handles the page layout, loads in whatever resources are appropriate for that locale (english, german, japanese, whatever), queries the database, formats the results as a bunch of table tags, and outputs everything.
So you've effectively split your tasks into three tiers- presentation tier (in javascript), application tier (in cold fusion), and data tier (mysql or whatever). You're using cold fusion as middleware- I'd suggest that this is a fine strategy for a one or two developer site, but that you may wish to look to a more maintainable / suitable language for middle tier development- but that's just my $.02.
Sure, we could use JWS and applets; I've written quite a few. And there's no doubt that java is a better systems language than javascript.
But for some reason, the world has pretty much rejected both technologies. It's probably a combination of things- you need some level of skill before you can just start messing around with java (maybe an IDE, but at least an understanding of how to invoke a compiler and all that). Of course, it's also easy to blame M$ for their adopt and extinguish policy- adopt a craptastic JDK version and let it sit there like a festering boil for seven years until everyone gives up.
I guess if I were designing an app and could control the execution environment, I'd much prefer to use SWT and communicate back to a remote server with RMI, SOAP, XMLRPC or some such- but if I had to write something that worked in most available browsers, I think I'd see a better compatibility mix from an Ajax / Javascript environment.
The central idea behind Ajax is pretty good IMHO- moving as much of the presentation-tier processing as possible to the client system. It's certainly a cleaner design- separation of concerns means you can get away from some of the nastier (and kludgy) template languages like PHP, Cold Fusion, and their ilk. You can also see a future where JSP, Velocity, and ASPX pretty much go away from the application stack- yes, you still need some templating system to produce the XML or javascript that your application is consuming, but it dramatically decreases in importance. Further, your application tier code can devote itself to modeling your business logic, and not get distracted by trying to simultaneously serve the right stylesheet to Mac IE5 users while calculating shipping to uzbekistan...
The alarm bell ringing in my brain is that all of this is structured around a fairly blunt tool in javascript. It does a great job at what it is designed to do- but it seems to require coercion to handle some more sophisticated needs. When I start building a large, complex application, I really prefer to have namespaces to compartmentalize things. It seems like you need to use tricky external libraries to gain the features needed for external support- with the classic issues around leaky abstractions that this causes.
The book has been a good read so far (I'm halfway through)- but already, it seems like they are bending over backwards to get around the lightweight nature of the language. I'm not arguing for strong typing- but encapsulation would probably help people write better bug-free code. Anyone out there know if there's any reasonable prospect for these structural issues in javascript being addressed at the language level instead of the library level?
That sounds like a great episode.
In fact, I'm going to create a video game where you are a forensic pathologist, and you have to travel around a city trying to track down a gang of teenagers who are acting out scenes inspired by the latest episode of CSI... you must figure out what the crazy wrapup / plot twist will be in order to stop them. I bet the video game would be a hell of a lot more interesting than their show- and probably about equally gory.
Especially since he's already successfully sued the RIAA for "lost" royalties, and served notice (and got a settlement) from Sony BMG on payola...
Might be an interesting idea for a New York resident to make a phone call to his office...
Looks like Sony crossed the threshold from nuisance to crime. While DOJ is almost certainly going to soft-pedal this, a savvy attorney general with political ambitions from a state unencumbered by Hollywood and the RIAA could probably ride this case into the governor's office....
"Paging Eliot Spitzer, Paging Eliot Spitzer, Mr. Spitzer white courtesy phone..."
Actually, they aren't in the hands of the public- they are in the hands of the state. And in practice, without exception, the communist state has been in the hands of murderous bastards.
My (admittedly naive) understanding of socialism, was that it was the exclusive province of the government; the government decides to provide some good or service that was otherwise only available through non-state actors- companies, contractors, vendors, or not available at all.
How is this even remotely related to shared intellectual property, contributed by individuals and corporations (non-state actors), to a common good? Especially, as the primary result seems to be the establishment of high-quality standards that private and public players need to adhere to in order to participate in the market?
It seems like a government appropriation of an idea- which is what copyright and patent laws do, they leverage the power of the state against the ownership of an "idea"- is far further along the path to socialism than the free and interested contribution of ideas to a common market.
Frankly, this guy's head is so far up his ass, he can probably see out his nostrils.
No, it makes perfect sense-
Sony wants to make sure they can come out with rootkits for mainframes, in case people start buying them again.
Nahh, I'm sure both sets of coders are in India, along with everybody else's coders.... :)
/. the same week his company is busted for knowingly distributing software that can break peoples computers, particularly if their title is "president", I think it is entirely fair to ask him why we should trust ANYTHING that his company produces from now on.
But if a marketing droid shows up at
I don't think I'm blaming the coders- but he has a responsibility as an officer of the company that is different from line personnel.
Why should we trust any software that Sony wants us to install on our computers, after the recent well-known rootkit incident?
What are you going to do to get out from under this rock?
You forgot Negligence, as in, Amazon and Walmart selling bad CDs with rootkits baked in, after being warned that the products were defective.
Sony is weak and stumbling- walmart's got nice deep pockets.