There was a Supreme Court case where somebody actually tried this reasoning. I don't have enough recall of details to google it, I tried. But of course there's always the Candlmaker's Petition.
You're right. My bad. I should have said "there's not enough that will pay the bills and feed your kids".
No wonder I get so pissed off at people trying to pervert the language. It creeps in: "useful"=="somebody richer than you will give you money"? They got in.
Because that deal is part of the Constitution, for one. For another, even though recording and distributing mp3s or oggs or aiffs or wavs is getting dirt cheap, not to mention easy, betting that a group will become wildly popular, giving them enough money to live on before they've done so, helping get their name out there, doing a lot of the grunt work to arrange gigs — i.e. backing their opinions with money and effort on the artists' behalf, yes, it does deserve protection, and reward.
You got a better idea how to make sure that happens, everybody's all ears. Copyright's just the best so far. The only crime I see is trying to turn the reward for the artists and the people who bet on them into corpodroid welfare. It's contemptible. No matter that contempt is always thoughtless and wrong — surely you can see the gaping hole in your paypal proposition if you think about it — it's also human, and the RIAA are helping to wreck a good thing.
Not disagreeing with the rest — not competent to judge — but I know enough to know that. Guilt-by-association damn near fatally weakens your argument, though.
(as always, read "I think [ should]" everyplace grammatically possible)
You've lost the distinction between "criminal" and "illegal". Don't let them do that to you. A lot of what the RIAA do is perfectly fine: they do in fact deserve protection for finding and supporting and publishing new music. What they don't get is the accumulating effects of their (and others') utter contempt for morals that produced the repeated extensions of copyright lifetimes. They built their house upon sand, and it's falling down: their utterly corrupt example is being followed.
This, if it passes, is simply an attempt at more extortion-by-corrupt-law. If it passes, it will make things illegal that shouldn't be: i.e. it will make things illegal that are not criminal. And that is criminal.
I was going to not post a snide remark containing the phrase "tone-deaf to sarcasm", but I decided instead to post a straight opinion on a simple question:
why lie to ourselves about what we are doing
The kid's lying to himself because he knows he's taking the low ground. The RIAA are lying to themselves, if they are, because somewhere in there they know a huge fraction of their revenue is the result of a successful candlemaker's petition, and most of them are feeding their kids on an utterly morally bankrupt premise.
He's not in denial, and he's not stupid. He's just conforming his morals to the RIAA's: he's willing to say anything to conceal the true nature of what he's doing from the thoughtless.
The problem here is that they've flat out said what the cynics have asserted all along: the RIAA believe they should be paid every time anybody hears anything. He didn't take it out of context. He identified the context RIAA are trying to establish: that to shuffle papers and holler and scream in the press and drag people to court and demand everybody's money for work other people did forty years ago somehow makes them useful members of society.
It's real simple. They're not the only ones caught in this bind. There are too many people on this planet, and not enough useful to do. It's hard to tell thousands of people to go practice the frenchfry question. Nobody wants to do that. Nobody. So we leave niches open for them. They can play War on Some Drugs, or be Direct Marketers. "Deficits are meaningless. Reagan proved that." That's one of the guys running our sock puppet. Translation: at the level of national policy, money has long since been utterly decoupled from value. The name of the game has become musical rice-bowls, and most politicians are rice-bowl manufacturers. The RIAA are hoping they can get another before the music stops.
There's no question that recording a copyrighted broadcast is legal. It's legal. Distributing that recording isn't; performing that recording in public isn't. That attempt to categorize the mere possibility of recording off a broadcast as "disseminating" is another reframing attempt, exactly like you're trying to do with "legitimate".
I think it's important to acknowledge that binary-only drivers were the catalyst for the GPL in the first place. Printer drivers, if I recall correctly.
The ideal world? Everybody can see the hardware interface and produce their own drivers. Everybody can see the driver source and make it do ever hotter things ever faster.
The choice? As always: full loaf, half a loaf, none.
The question? Whether the GPL authorizes Linux's authors to forbid the half-a-loaf choice.
If kernel<->shim<->driver produces a derived work, whether the production is deferred to runtime or not, the driver/shim combo is plainly a spirit-of-the-law violation, and what's being done is at least ethically wrong; whether the letter of the GPL actually covers the situation is a question for lawyers and courts and similar appalling wastes of the human soul.
That's a different question than whether what nVidia are doing will produce the world the GPL was built to achieve. There isn't any question at all about this: it won't. It doesn't help. "Should" means something entirely different when you take the question of derivative-ness out of the picture; it still matters, but it slides much farther towards the philosophy end of the ethics-philosophy scale.
And the question about how Kororaa is distributed is just pathetic. Force people to download separately? Bollocks. If that's enough to avoid trouble then they weren't doing anything ethically wrong in the first place. The only substantial issue is whether Linux with a loaded, running shim/driver is a derived work; all else is childish drivel no matter how many high-powered lawyers spout it.
I don't believe the combination is a derivative work. No matter how you slice it, the binding between the kernel and the driver is every bit as well-defined, and severable, as the binding between the kernel and any other piece of proprietary software you might have. Sticking VM or system call or thread boundaries between the shim and the driver seems entirely possible. It'd just slow things down. It wouldn't change anything but timing.
In other words, I believe that shim is not just a fig leaf, that it's a substantial and important piece of work: if the Linux interfaces change, we now know exactly what to change to keep the nVidia drivers working, and we have the source; that there is no part of what the GPL is legally, ethically or philosophically within its rights to demand that is not satisfied by this arrangement.
Whoops. I've seen the other MSN bloatware, didn't actually check the search page. My bad.
I didn't address the search result quality because others had already done that. I agree they're often comparable, but Google is IMTrulyHO better at filtering out the crap.
Terraserver afaict doesn't do what Earth does. You tried it? That 3D flying thing is utterly cool, and it has global coverage. It's not at all hard to get a LEO view at 768K (you might have to do it slow if you want all the detail, but still). And it's not limited to LEO. Detail obviously suffers drastically in a lot of places, but they've got the cities and an impressive amount of the rest covered beautifully, every major landmark I could think of, plus of course lots of places of national interest:-). Tou want to see e.g. Yosemite from the valley? From Tenaya Lake? From the top of Half Dome? I've been to all of them. The top of Half Dome, looking down over the cliff; climbing the cable ladder looking at Angel's Cap: it actually catches some of that feeling. Do I spend a lot of time at it? No, and Google are no doubt betting not many people will: that's major bandwidth even by their standards. But in a classroom? You want a sense of just how big and beautiful this place is? Siddown, kid. Play with this a while. Zoom in on your house, take a trip.
And then there are the layers. MS made a lot of noise recently about how they're going to do local searches for things, it's going to be the Eighth Wonder Of The World, yaddayadda. Earth does that now. The live updates on restaurant waits etc part? I ain't buying it. And MS have this history of not delivering on the marvelous things they talk about.
Only real point was that mainframes can manage direct access to the drives all by themselves. Mainframes maintain a separate dataset catalog (in addition to the on-volume one), that pretty much everybody uses. So when you ask for a dataset, the OS finds it, picks one (or more if you want) drives, gets it mounted, spins the tape to the right dataset if you've got them stacked, and feeds it to you. It's on tape and you need random access, well, what'd you write it to tape in the first place for? you either copy it to disk yourself or let the OS's HSM (or the pretty HSM manager that comes with the library) manage the roll-on/off for you. But most apps don't, so the notion of waiting for serial access to a dataset while the library offloads enough data to cover your request, then loads yours, is just ludicrous. Thus my "keepaway" comment.
I could probably switch to Yahoo or MSN search tomorrow and not really notice the difference.
You'll look long and hard for a slow-loading Google page. I suppose you could bloat your own. You won't find even PNGs, let alone blinking banners or flash. What happens when you follow that nice "More..." button on MSN and Yahoo? After Google, theirs just seem lame. Got a box that will run Google Earth? Google do awe-inspiring things and give them away. Sure they're going to make money. That's how they stay in business. But they make money with people who use their tools to make money, and they know, no matter how counterintuitive it seems, that those aren't their most important customers. They treat all their customers right. The guys at Yahoo sorta get it. Microsoft... well:
They have a history of making great partnership deals which REALLY boost thier products
They seem to be running out of willing partners. I wonder how that happened?
What's up with this? The linux, unix, bsd search has the United States nowhere in the top ten searching countries. Everybody in the States already has their sites bookmarked I guess?
At the end of the day, I'm not sure they really care a whole lot what OS everyone uses.
Why should they? They saw what they wanted, but it didn't have anything to do with philosophy or idealism. They thought it was the best investment available. It seems to be working for them. I suspect a large part of the value for IBM is the GPL itself: they know they're going to at least get a look at everything others do, so they don't have to worry about unscrupulous competitors (criminal competitors they do have to worry about, but there aren't any of those around).
When they see a business-user distro they like, they'll start talking it up and offering service. Me, I think that'll be a long time coming. Windows just makes it too easy on the brainless, the guys no one is willing to support without cash up front. And Windows has too many wage thralls. They won't go away except by attrition.
If you want to rail against someone for the loss of privacy, rail against the great silent majority
Do you know how many of the men who established this country's government spoke against that silent majority's attitude, and felt that it was one of the major responsibilities of that government to restrain itself in situations like this?
Remember when the neocons were namedropping "the Founding Fathers" at every opportunity? Care to guess why they stopped?
But you don't have to be a Sci-Fi author to imagine crazy abuses of this data.
It's getting time to collect a list of dystopian sf and separate it by still-sf, starting-to-look-prescient, it's-happening, and what-it-was-ever-NOT-that-way? It's-happening: The Right to Read. 1984. The Sheep Look Up (the pollution part will be back soon; the rest is on target). Starting-to-look-prescient: Neuromancer. Remember the little symbol on the shower, meant it was ok to touch your skin but don't let it get in your eyes? Anybody want to take bets on how long before we see that in the US? We're taking water from food production to wash people NOW. Never mind thetechnicalstuff.
There is no doubt that, unlike other volunteer, peer review projects in academia or on-line projects such as Slashdot, a peer review system for patents implicates large fortunes and vicious competition.
I understand your point, having come from a mainframe background
You should have stopped there.
Or, even better, googled "SL8500" and checked thedatasheets. IBM specs the z9 at over 1Tb/s. You think customers who'll pay for that are going to let the library use 2,048 tape drives to play keepaway with their petabytes?
Slashdot Mirror
IBM aren't known for vaporware.
Tons of people starts somewhere between twenty and forty people. You British?
Don't need this breakthrough. We can already do that.
There was a Supreme Court case where somebody actually tried this reasoning. I don't have enough recall of details to google it, I tried. But of course there's always the Candlmaker's Petition.
No wonder I get so pissed off at people trying to pervert the language. It creeps in: "useful"=="somebody richer than you will give you money"? They got in.
You got a better idea how to make sure that happens, everybody's all ears. Copyright's just the best so far. The only crime I see is trying to turn the reward for the artists and the people who bet on them into corpodroid welfare. It's contemptible. No matter that contempt is always thoughtless and wrong — surely you can see the gaping hole in your paypal proposition if you think about it — it's also human, and the RIAA are helping to wreck a good thing.
Not disagreeing with the rest — not competent to judge — but I know enough to know that. Guilt-by-association damn near fatally weakens your argument, though.
Thank you for that link! It contains this one, which I also didn't know about and makes important distinctions.
You've lost the distinction between "criminal" and "illegal". Don't let them do that to you. A lot of what the RIAA do is perfectly fine: they do in fact deserve protection for finding and supporting and publishing new music. What they don't get is the accumulating effects of their (and others') utter contempt for morals that produced the repeated extensions of copyright lifetimes. They built their house upon sand, and it's falling down: their utterly corrupt example is being followed.
This, if it passes, is simply an attempt at more extortion-by-corrupt-law. If it passes, it will make things illegal that shouldn't be: i.e. it will make things illegal that are not criminal. And that is criminal.
He's not in denial, and he's not stupid. He's just conforming his morals to the RIAA's: he's willing to say anything to conceal the true nature of what he's doing from the thoughtless.
It's real simple. They're not the only ones caught in this bind. There are too many people on this planet, and not enough useful to do. It's hard to tell thousands of people to go practice the frenchfry question. Nobody wants to do that. Nobody. So we leave niches open for them. They can play War on Some Drugs, or be Direct Marketers. "Deficits are meaningless. Reagan proved that." That's one of the guys running our sock puppet. Translation: at the level of national policy, money has long since been utterly decoupled from value. The name of the game has become musical rice-bowls, and most politicians are rice-bowl manufacturers. The RIAA are hoping they can get another before the music stops.
There's no question that recording a copyrighted broadcast is legal. It's legal. Distributing that recording isn't; performing that recording in public isn't. That attempt to categorize the mere possibility of recording off a broadcast as "disseminating" is another reframing attempt, exactly like you're trying to do with "legitimate".
The ideal world? Everybody can see the hardware interface and produce their own drivers. Everybody can see the driver source and make it do ever hotter things ever faster.
The choice? As always: full loaf, half a loaf, none.
The question? Whether the GPL authorizes Linux's authors to forbid the half-a-loaf choice.
If kernel<->shim<->driver produces a derived work, whether the production is deferred to runtime or not, the driver/shim combo is plainly a spirit-of-the-law violation, and what's being done is at least ethically wrong; whether the letter of the GPL actually covers the situation is a question for lawyers and courts and similar appalling wastes of the human soul.
That's a different question than whether what nVidia are doing will produce the world the GPL was built to achieve. There isn't any question at all about this: it won't. It doesn't help. "Should" means something entirely different when you take the question of derivative-ness out of the picture; it still matters, but it slides much farther towards the philosophy end of the ethics-philosophy scale.
And the question about how Kororaa is distributed is just pathetic. Force people to download separately? Bollocks. If that's enough to avoid trouble then they weren't doing anything ethically wrong in the first place. The only substantial issue is whether Linux with a loaded, running shim/driver is a derived work; all else is childish drivel no matter how many high-powered lawyers spout it.
I don't believe the combination is a derivative work. No matter how you slice it, the binding between the kernel and the driver is every bit as well-defined, and severable, as the binding between the kernel and any other piece of proprietary software you might have. Sticking VM or system call or thread boundaries between the shim and the driver seems entirely possible. It'd just slow things down. It wouldn't change anything but timing.
In other words, I believe that shim is not just a fig leaf, that it's a substantial and important piece of work: if the Linux interfaces change, we now know exactly what to change to keep the nVidia drivers working, and we have the source; that there is no part of what the GPL is legally, ethically or philosophically within its rights to demand that is not satisfied by this arrangement.
OBTW to get reasonable response on the flying thing, turn off all the layers.
I didn't address the search result quality because others had already done that. I agree they're often comparable, but Google is IMTrulyHO better at filtering out the crap.
Terraserver afaict doesn't do what Earth does. You tried it? That 3D flying thing is utterly cool, and it has global coverage. It's not at all hard to get a LEO view at 768K (you might have to do it slow if you want all the detail, but still). And it's not limited to LEO. Detail obviously suffers drastically in a lot of places, but they've got the cities and an impressive amount of the rest covered beautifully, every major landmark I could think of, plus of course lots of places of national interest :-). Tou want to see e.g. Yosemite from the valley? From Tenaya Lake? From the top of Half Dome? I've been to all of them. The top of Half Dome, looking down over the cliff; climbing the cable ladder looking at Angel's Cap: it actually catches some of that feeling. Do I spend a lot of time at it? No, and Google are no doubt betting not many people will: that's major bandwidth even by their standards. But in a classroom? You want a sense of just how big and beautiful this place is? Siddown, kid. Play with this a while. Zoom in on your house, take a trip.
And then there are the layers. MS made a lot of noise recently about how they're going to do local searches for things, it's going to be the Eighth Wonder Of The World, yaddayadda. Earth does that now. The live updates on restaurant waits etc part? I ain't buying it. And MS have this history of not delivering on the marvelous things they talk about.
Only real point was that mainframes can manage direct access to the drives all by themselves. Mainframes maintain a separate dataset catalog (in addition to the on-volume one), that pretty much everybody uses. So when you ask for a dataset, the OS finds it, picks one (or more if you want) drives, gets it mounted, spins the tape to the right dataset if you've got them stacked, and feeds it to you. It's on tape and you need random access, well, what'd you write it to tape in the first place for? you either copy it to disk yourself or let the OS's HSM (or the pretty HSM manager that comes with the library) manage the roll-on/off for you. But most apps don't, so the notion of waiting for serial access to a dataset while the library offloads enough data to cover your request, then loads yours, is just ludicrous. Thus my "keepaway" comment.
What's up with this? The linux, unix, bsd search has the United States nowhere in the top ten searching countries. Everybody in the States already has their sites bookmarked I guess?
If you DISTRIBUTE your changes, you must also supply your source changes.
You're perfectly free to keep your changes private.
When they see a business-user distro they like, they'll start talking it up and offering service. Me, I think that'll be a long time coming. Windows just makes it too easy on the brainless, the guys no one is willing to support without cash up front. And Windows has too many wage thralls. They won't go away except by attrition.
Remember when the neocons were namedropping "the Founding Fathers" at every opportunity? Care to guess why they stopped?
Wish I had modpoints. You've got tears streaming out of my eyes. Maybe I'm just tired, but thanks either way.
Or, even better, googled "SL8500" and checked the datasheets. IBM specs the z9 at over 1Tb/s. You think customers who'll pay for that are going to let the library use 2,048 tape drives to play keepaway with their petabytes?