You might be cuffed and locked up for hours, but once you get enough innocent Americans to vouch for your patriotism and loyalty, you'll be released. Whoopee.
Umm, no. You get extra attention at the airport, that means: (1) all stowed luggage gets hand-searched (2) just before getting on the plane, they frisk you and go through all of your carry-on items.
A ten second pat down is an inadequate approach to a hijacker with a small carbon fibre knife strapped to his groin or a bunch of C4 in his shoes or under a fat pad. The system is pointless. The only reason for having a system that says "Danger!" is to justify a more strenuous approach, which means a lengthy strip and questioning that's probably going to make you miss the flight.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the reasoning and am happy to see people stopped when boarding flights. It hasn't happened to me (yet) but I'd like to think I'd be reasonable about it if it does.
My big problem with this system is that in practical terms the chances of ever catching a hijacker with it are about squat, and it punishes me and thee, in a little way, but often. If Bad Men want to get on planes and do Bad Things, they will find a way. We need to solve the problem in the air, or remove the incentive for them to do Bad Things in the first place.
quite a lot of the information (e.g. what restaurants you frequent) could only be discovered by credit card records. [...] Do what I do and use cash whenever possible.
You think? Hey, here comes Joe. We have every conceivable record on Joe. We know Joe made $40,000 last year, but we can only account for $30,000 of it. What did Joe spend that other $10,000 on? We don't know. Did he spend it in cash? What on? What has Joe got to hide?
Let's understand this clearly. Get enough information on anyone, and you can start looking for the holes. This database is about how the government views your actions. If this thing actually gets off the ground, the question won't be "Can they prove I'm guilty", but "Have I proved my innocence?" Remember, at first it will be used to fight the good fight. It's for your own safety. You might be cuffed and locked up for hours, but once you get enough innocent Americans to vouch for your patriotism and loyalty, you'll be released. Whoopee.
This has the potential to make the McCarthy witch hunts look like a friendly tea party. I don't think I'm exaggerating. Our best hope is that it provides so many false positives that it becomes impractical to use. Specifically, let's hope some Senator spends a lot of cash while vacationing incognito with his "niece", and receives a tazering and an anal probe on his return flight as a reward. That should kill this thing pretty quickly.
This article raises a lot more questions than it answers.
If most of the records are going to be on US citizens, are we saying that US citizens pose a real threat? The September 11th murderers were all foreign, travelling openly on foreign passports. I assume we'll tie in the CIA database on foreign citizens, but do we assume a foreigner citizen not in the database is higher risk or lower risk than US citizens in the database? Does "no information" mean "assume innocent" or "assume guilt"?
What are the complete criteria for being promoted up the danger list? Being a member of a state militia? Being a muslim? Being a member of a citizen's right organization that has criticized these plans?
What are the criteria for getting off the danger list? Renounce your evil ways? Join the Republican Party? Report X acts of unpatriotism to the Office of Homeland Security? If you think I'm joking about this last one, go read about the McCarthy Communist witch hunts. This shit actually happened to real people in the USA within living memory, and it can happen again if we allow it to.
Who'll be responsible for administrating the database query? Local law enforcement? The new minimum wage "Federal Security Employees"? The FBI? The NSA?
Who'll oversee the people who run the database querying and ensure that the results and responses are both accurate and appropriate? Are we going to wait until we've tazered and maced the entourage of some royal Saudi scion before we start to question the system?
How do you find out what information is in there about you? Is asking about it unpatriotic and dangerous behaviour? Remember, this is all about how the government views your behaviour, not about facts that have been challenged and proven in a court of law.
How do you get your information corrected if it's wrong? Who do you go to if the administrators refuse to correct it?
Is the system going to pop up a "It is 67% probable that this person is a terrorist" box and let the minimum wage security guard make the decision about how to handle that? Last week, Joe was flipping burgers; this week he's got a shiny new gun and a shiny new badge, and has to make an instant decision about how to confront a presumed armed and dangerous subject. Is the system going to make it easy for Joe, and say "80% probability, recommend taser and mace, call for armed backup"? Or is it just going to set off a binary "Take 'em down!" alarm, based on crossing some arbitrary threshold of probability?
OK, let's hear the arguments in favour of it, but whatever they are, I contend that if we put in place a vast, complex, expensive system that is too problematical to use, then all we're doing is spending Federal money to perform a PR exercise for the airline industry.
And if we do use it, then god help us all. I never, ever want to hear this phrase spoken to me or to anyone else:
"The computer says you're 67% likely to be guilty, based on your past actions and associations. We're not going to release you until you can prove your loyalty."
[My word "copyfree"] means that people are "free" to "copy" the work as long as they refer back to the original author. There is a very good reason I chose Copyfree and not copyright. Also, remember the difference between freedom and free beer.
You, my friend, have a very poor grasp of the issues, and are part of the problem. The big problem with "copyleft" (e.g. GPL) at the moment is that far too many people simply don't understand that it is fully copyrighted, and that to use it you must follow completely the very strict and explicit terms given. One of those terms might be "credit the author", but that's usually the least of the terms you have to comply with to not be engaged in theft, which is grounds for both criminal and civil action. The GPL for example lists many many more terms than "credit the author" and you need to go and read it before contributing any further to this debate.
If you can't be bothered reading or comprehending the GPL, then just stop there and back the fuck off, because you are probably engaged in stealing copyrighted work, and that's a criminal offence. I am sick and tired of explaining this to the programmers in my department, and sooner or later I'm going to let one of them slip GPL code into our closed source product with their name all over it, them I'm going to contact the copyright owner and suggest that they contact our legal department regarding the theft of their work, and I'll not shed one tear for any thieving developers who get strung up by the balls.
Let me spell this out to you: copyfree is a worse term than copyanything-else because it encourages people to not read the license terms. I have heard "But it's free!" from professional software developers engaged in theft of GPL code so often now that it makes my blood boil. Anything that makes it even easier for lazy idiots to become thieves is a bad thing.
Um, look, that's exactly what copyleft is. First and foremost, it's copyright, completely and fully under traditional copyright laws. There are also licensing terms which allow very specific exemptions from copy restriction, as long as the costs are paid.
I would not mind the law being changed to state that Copyright would gracefully change into Copy Left after a certain respectable period of time, with appropriate penalties for alteration and lack of attribution, or false attribution, etc.
It's a noble idea, but you really need to go and have a careful read about what copyleft is. The most important thing about copyleft is that it is fully copyrighted. Everything else depends on that. If it's not copyrighted, you can't enforce the rest of the terms, which allow very specific exceptions to the copyright.
For copyrighted work to change into copyleft, you have to add license terms. There is, in fact, nothing to stop any copy right holder adding copyleft terms to any existing copyright work. Copyleft adds rights.
What would be a problem is enforcing it on all copyrighted works in general, because that punishes rights holders. To enforce the copyleft, you'd have to keep the sanctity of copyright, while adding a whole new set of mandatory licensing terms. We could do it with a determined enough political will, but it'd be a hard one to explain to your average Jane Voter or Joe Politico, let alone Karl Corporate, who would vomit blood at the very thought of having any of his precious rights diluted one second before the final expiry.
I do honestly think that we're better of just having copyright expire after a fixed term and having the work enter the public domain. We'd be better off campaiging for our current Disney whoring politicians to stop extending copyright time limits than to try for a hard to understand, hard to enforce compromise.
If articles are copylefted they can be used without having to ask for that consent provided that they give credit where credit is due.
and they follow all other licence terms, e.g. for the GPL: provide source; do not remove or modify the GPL license; add the GPL license to any including or deriving works; and any other terms, no matter how minor.
I know it was probably just a slip, but it's exactly that kind of sloppiness that leads to me having to ream a developer once every few months for trying to sneak full GPL code into our closed source product because "It's OK, it's free, I kept the copyright notice and I was going to tell tech pubs to put a credit in the documentation."
If, for example, research results are published under copyleft, would that mean that any subsequent work that cites the research would also have to be copyleft? [...] I want my research to be used for any reason, anywhere, by anyone, without worrying about the implications for them.
Copyleft is a bad word to use. It's too vague and open to misinterpretation. If we're talking specifically about the GPL, then yes, that's exactly what it means.
The GPL is an extremely powerful tool. Like most tools, it can hurt the ignorant. I have seen professional software developers sneaking GPL code in closed source projects, then looking at me with hurt puppy dog expressions when I tear into them for trying to steal other people's copyrighted work. "But it's free!" they explain, never having actually read (or understood) the GPL.
The GPL means exactly what it says. Copyleft, free beer, free speech, all of those are irrelevant buzzwords. It says, and it means:
This work is copyrighted. It belongs to the people that wrote it. You can't copy or use it [important pause ] unless you agree to follow these very strict restrictions on how you use it: provide source, do not remove this license, do not modify this license, apply this license to any derivative work including a much larger work that directly includes this work in any way.
Those are the cost of using GPL code. If the cost is too high, don't use it. Pay a different cost to source the information/code/text elsewhere.
In your case, if you find some GPL research that you want to build on, but without making your research GPL, then treat the GPL work as a fully copyrighted work. You can quote selectively from it using the existing fair use defence, put your nuts on the line, and release your work as an original non-GPL (and non-copyrighted, or explicitely "copy without restrictions" work) work. If you want to include the entire GPL work, then you can do that, if you pay the cost, which is to GPL your derivation. If the GPL work is by a single author, hey, feel free to approach them and negotiate for a version of their work without a GPL license, just as you'd do right now to obtain the right to make a substantial copy. The GPL gives you more options, not fewer.
It never fails to amaze me how many people are unaware of the implications of the GPL. Microsoft calls it viral, a cancer. Love it or loathe it, it's absolutely true. That's the point of it! Rejoice in that. You can't strip the GPL off a piece of work, but you can extend it to other works. The body of GPL licensed work will only grow, never shrink.
The only debate is whether that's a bad thing or a good thing. I view it as a good thing, because right now it's giving more options, and you can choose to use non-GPL sources. When we reach the point where there are no non-GPL sources, we might have to start thinking about how this impinges on a few very, very narrow issues, like national security (but not on protecting corporations). That's a long way off though. Until then, the GPL means what it says, and it says: "There's a cost to using this. Pay it, or find another way."
kids are encouraged to learn mechanics, engineering, coding, and other tech skills that will benifit them later in life in professional or technical careers.
I find Scrapheap Challenge (the original UK title of Junkyard Wars) very bitter sweet. One the one hand it's wonderful watching new toys being made, but on the other hand, the custom car builder in me wails in anguish at all those irreplacable and beautiful old donor vehicles being angle ground into pieces.
I rather fear that general engineering skills are becoming niche hobbyist skills rather than valuable vocational tools. Sad, but that's progress, I suppose.
I am assuming, since this is coming from the Junkyard Wars standpoint and not necessarily Battlebots, are these vehicles manned? [...] Unmanned cars, so a huge-scale battlebots thing.... pretty cool, and very expensive... cool to watch I'm sure. But I doubt this is the format.
Doubt ye not. There was a Scrapheap Challenge (the original UK title) battle of the champions event in the UK using exactly this format. Two salvage cars, radio controlled with salvaged motors turning the wheels and pushing the pedals, and just ramming the bejeesus out of each other in an old quarry.
It was splendidly entertaining, with a few flaws that could easily be ironed out (i.e. don't put a high scoring scoring target area on the top of the car then count any old trailing bit of chain that hits it). Both teams tried to put clever weapons on their vehicles, but ended up just smashing lumps out of each other, which is what we really want to see, right?
You're right about the safety aspect though. One of the cars jammed on full throttle, and they had to drive it in circles, then up the quarry wall until it tipped over. A bit scary for the production crew, but top fun for the viewers.
your idea of grown meat may have major benefit to people that already eat meat. Prices would likely drop since better cuts would be just as easy to produce
OK, let's design us a machine that can turn cheap renewable resouces (e.g. grass) into a tasty haunch fattening nutrient stream!
First you'd want to grind the grass. Let's grow us some SimTeeth. Real cows seem to do that pretty well, so we'll just grow us up a cow head. Then we'll grow a SimThroat to take it to the multiple SimStomachs (hey, cows do that real well, let's grow some cow parts again and fill them full of cow bacteria rather than using expensive chemicals), add a SimCardiovascularSystem to carry nutrients and oxygen around, and a SimBowel to excrete the waste. Let's add some SimLegs so that it can feed and exercise itself, and a simple SimBrain to provide the electrical impulses for that. Hey, wouldn't it be neat if instead of manufacturing and repairing these, they had some sort of built in capability? Let's grow up some SimReproduction and SimImmune systems.
Then it's just 2,000 hours of surgery to put it altogther and bingo, we've built us a SimCow! It's great because while it cost us a billion bucks, it looks, acts and tastes just like the real thing, while being completely cruelty free!
<sarcasm> aside, if you can come up with a cheaper, more efficient way of turning grass into SimHaunch than a real cow, let's hear it.
When will we be able to eat juicy steaks without having to actually kill the cow? Anytime soon? Could be the end of the entire vegetarian scene. Major cultural shock aproaching
Nice point. Let's follow that thinking through. Where does that leave the taboo about cannibalism, especially if it's auto-cannibalism? What's the difference between eating a vat grown Haunch-O-U and eating your own placenta for medical reasons (or just for kicks)
A short, shallow review of something that might be the script for Episode II hardly qualifies stopping th presses.
A decent script is neither a guarantee of quality, nor necessary for it. The script for Episode IV looks like a fourth grader wrote it, and yet it produced a film that both children and adults loved. The magic happens in the casting, sets, costume, makeup, acting, lighting, camerawork, direction, FX and post production editing. Even if it's a genuine script (what reason have we to believe that? There must be dozens of fan scripts doing the rounds) then the final product might be almost unrecognisable.
It's an interesting bit of speculation, but I'm giving it no more credence nor weight than any other fan generated hype.
While the work is commercial in nature, it's also satirical in nature. Satire is specifically mentioned as allowable, therefore the count should stand at 3:1 not 2:2.
No, let me be clearer. Being satire or parody makes your derivative work eligible for fair use protection. The criteria that a court uses to decide whether it is fair use are: commercialism, type of work (creative/entertainment or informational), amount of copying, effect on the original. The judgement can focus on any or all of these, and the court can also consider other factors, if it is so minded.
There seems to be some confusion about the point I was making. All I'm doing is providing a link to a quick reference and saying that there is prima facia grounds for a case and an injunction. I find the Austin Powers franchise clumsy and not particularly funny, but I believe that it is very clearly fair use (including use of the name and character of Goldmember/Goldfinger), but it will have to prove that. You don't get a presumption of innocence in a civil case, it's all down to balance of probabilities, which is why it's a very good idea to at least ask the rights owners if you can use their work, to try and flush out any complaints early in the process.
One does not have to prevail on all four factors to be considered fair use -- consider Campbell v. Acuff-Rose (commercial). As I see it, this is a classic case of fair use, very similar to the above case
Very true, I didn't mean to imply that Goldmember wasn't fair use. I think it very clearly is, I'm just making the point that there is a plethora of case law and Idiot's Guides out there that posters could maybe do a search for to see why there is grounds for having a preliminary injunction granted (which is all the rights owners really need to force a quick settlement).
I just get so tired of reading masses of knee jerk uninformed babble about copyright and fair use law every time this issue is raised here. My god, the whole story is practically -1 Troll, -1 Offtopic.
In the end, if it's a parody (Ie. Making fun of, or making funny.) it's protected and a non-issue
Please do me the favour of going and reading the publaw link. Parody does not make it a non issue. It makes your derivative work eligible for protection. If you parody someone else's work, you'd better understand the issues: commercial nature of your work, intended audience of your work, degree of copying, and the effect on the sales or potential sales of the original. And the most important issue: do I have enough money to prove my innocence in a court that considers both parties to be starting off equally and deals in degrees of probability,
rather than an assumption of "innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt" in the defendent.
Wied Al has the clout to defend himself, which makes him far less liable to get sued. Goldmember does likewise, but the timing of the suit (after the title was fixed and promotional material had been produced) means that they have to come to a compromise, and quickly, rather than screw their release schedule fighting a case, even one that they can almost certainly win.
Copyright is an exception to the law. Fair use is an exception to the exception, that ensures the rights of the author guaranteed by copyright don't trample the rights of the public, guaranteed by the constitution
That's a fully fledged bastard of a good point, and I accept your correction in good grace. It's possible to get so caught up in the letter of what the law says that it's easy to forget why the law exists, or what the need was that created it.
while you're on your moral high horse about "M$" [...] consider that people would like to get their work done, instead of arguing day-in, day-out about which is better.
Nice guess, but four out of the five systems I use regularly run Windows, and the Linux laptop is a productivity machine, not a development toy (now that I'm running StarOffice 6 beta). The language used was in response to the poster. Don't confuse the manner of delivery with the message: the substance of what I said actually agree with you.
Goldmember falls flat on 2 out of 4 fair use criteria. Fair use is an exception to the very clear copyright law, and it's a civil action, so it's "balance of probabilities" not "beyond all reasonable doubt". It's not prior restraint on publication either, as the name is already being used in marketing (c.f. the recalled material). The copyright owners are well within their rights to take this action, and Mike should have been ready to defend it from day one.
It's no big whoop though. We're looking at a quick out of court settlement, balanced against free publicity for both franchises. A couple of PR guys lose out... unless the whole issue is a well managed PR stunt to scam publicity for all parties.
For the benefit of the hordes who will post "I thought satire/fair use yadda yadda yadda", don't speculate, go and read about it.
There is a specific codification of fair use for parody or satire, but satire alone is not automatically enough to protect you.
The factors relevant to this case are:
Commercial/non commercial. Goldmember is a commercial production. This counts against it.
Nature of work. Goldmember is "creative" rather than "informational". This counts against it.
Amount of copyrighted work used. Probably just a small member. This counts for it.
Effect on potential market or value of the copyrighted work. Minimal, I'd have thought. Goldmember won't compete directly with Goldfinger, nor will it cheapen a franchise that includes characters like Pussy Galore and Dr Goodhead. This counts for it.
Prima facia, it's about 50-50. Mike is trading on someone else's idea for profit, but in a small way compared to his original content. Using the character in the title was rather asking for it though. Mel Brooks got away with that, and with significant use of Star Wars material in Spaceballs, because he also parodied at least another 21 sources, and used his borrowed characters to perform a fair amount of critical commentary ("moichandising, moichandising").
Remember that but fair use is an exception to the law, and as Mike is clear about where he's taking his material from, it really is up to him to prove his innocence. He shouldn't have much trouble doing so, and this is likely just a well timed gambit to land a quick out of court settlement, one that the Goldmember people really should have anticipated and prepared for. But heck, it lands them free publicity, so the only losers here are a few PR executives.
(Incidentally, I agree with other posters that this article really is -1 Offtopic. If we really care IP issues, then why not run my submission on how all the sound and fury about IP on Slashdot has failed to translate into actual support for the WIPOUT essay competition. For gods' sake, all you have to do is CC your usual Slashdot rants to them!).
Since Gnumeric's native file format is based on XML, it should be possible to have it sensibly parsed and displayed in a browser that does support XML, including IE [...] If this would work, it would illustrate a major point: How much more flexible these products are. Those who have experienced all M$ lock-ins and unreadable documents can suddenly access a document in a format they've never heard of.
Earth to KjetilK. If it opens in M$ lockinware, the Microserfs will learn exactly nothing - except maybe that M$ apps are so 5up3r 1337 that they can read anything, so no need for Joe Windows to change.
If I were back in grad school again, I would focus exclusively on developing commercially viable or militarily useful things, and avoid publishing the details
Hear hear. But really, why even bother staying in academia? As a graduate comp sci researcher, I found that the situation even six years ago was that the only funding available was either from corporate sources with big nasty NDA's attached, or was a fucking pittance that would have seen me eating cold canned beans and shopping for clothes in store dumpsters for the rest of my adult life.
I reckoned that if I was going to whore for a corporation, I'd do it directly, make a living wage, and compete with average developers, not the super-dedicated types who stayed in academia. It's working out pretty well so far, and open source projects take care of scratching the Greater Good itch.
Incidentally, the thing that swung my decision was a conversation with my department head, where he stated flat out that if I did original research which was later patented or otherwise claimed as IP by a corporation, the university would not support or defend me if I chose to publish and got the arse sued off of me, even if it was prima facia evident that I was publishing prior art. Given that the only funding open to me that would even let me publish was of the cold-beans-and-dumpsters type, I reckoned that sounded like a bad bet and headed for the hills.
Neat article, but the conclusion is badly flawed. The main thrust seems to be "Cocoa/OpenGL doesn't require you to map out your VRAM like Playstation 1 did, so that makes it easy to write games!"
Does it hell. It removes one obstacle, but it's not going to write the game for you, nor is it going to make the Mac a more attractive proposition - technically or as a market - than DirectX, either XBox or generic PC Windoze versions. Hobbyists take note, but commercial developers, don't get too excited.
OpenGL is a fine API, and I'll happily accept that Cocoa is nice too, but the whole DirectX SDK really has matured into something usable. Many AAA Windows games now ship with only D3D (no OpenGL) 3D support (Max Payne, Operation:Flashpoint spring immediately to mind) and it doesn't hurt them. The big downside to using DirectX is cross platform portability (porting the app, and the DirectPlay network component), but commercialism comes into play again: it's better for a game to work really well under DirectX only than to work fairly well under DirectX and on Macs (or Linux for that matter).
If this means anything to anyone, I used to work for a company that was writing native D3D Retained Mode games, back in the DirectX 3/5 days. It was a suicidally stupid thing to do, and the games side of that company did indeed collapse under the weight of ripping the thing apart and starting over with D3DIM / OpenGL / glide support. I've no historical reason to love DirectX, or to think that apps hardwired to a specific API are a good idea. But even given that, I still think that a native DirectX 8 game makes a lot more sense, both technically and commercially, than OpenGL/Cocoa on a Mac platform.
Sorry guys, but this reads like another "I love Macs, so here comes the cognitive dissonance," article designed to get people on board the Macwagon. The only thing I can completely agree with is that developing for the Playstation 1 was like trying to teach a chimp to recite Shakespeare translated into Latin.
The cinemas in Hong Kong would run the western movies at about 22-24 frames/second to speed up the movies
Your Bulemic Frog Style arithmetic is weak! My Petulant Budgerigar Style arithmetic will defeat you! (and so on)
US movies are made at 24fps. To speed them up you have to show them at more than 24fps, not less. For example, UK spec PAL runs at 25fps (matches 50Hz AC current and TV refresh better) and so movies are typically 96% of the US run time.
Slashdot Mirror
- You might be cuffed and locked up for hours, but once you get enough innocent Americans to vouch for your patriotism and loyalty, you'll be released. Whoopee.
Umm, no. You get extra attention at the airport, that means: (1) all stowed luggage gets hand-searched (2) just before getting on the plane, they frisk you and go through all of your carry-on items.A ten second pat down is an inadequate approach to a hijacker with a small carbon fibre knife strapped to his groin or a bunch of C4 in his shoes or under a fat pad. The system is pointless. The only reason for having a system that says "Danger!" is to justify a more strenuous approach, which means a lengthy strip and questioning that's probably going to make you miss the flight.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the reasoning and am happy to see people stopped when boarding flights. It hasn't happened to me (yet) but I'd like to think I'd be reasonable about it if it does.
My big problem with this system is that in practical terms the chances of ever catching a hijacker with it are about squat, and it punishes me and thee, in a little way, but often. If Bad Men want to get on planes and do Bad Things, they will find a way. We need to solve the problem in the air, or remove the incentive for them to do Bad Things in the first place.
You think? Hey, here comes Joe. We have every conceivable record on Joe. We know Joe made $40,000 last year, but we can only account for $30,000 of it. What did Joe spend that other $10,000 on? We don't know. Did he spend it in cash? What on? What has Joe got to hide?
Let's understand this clearly. Get enough information on anyone, and you can start looking for the holes. This database is about how the government views your actions. If this thing actually gets off the ground, the question won't be "Can they prove I'm guilty", but "Have I proved my innocence?" Remember, at first it will be used to fight the good fight. It's for your own safety. You might be cuffed and locked up for hours, but once you get enough innocent Americans to vouch for your patriotism and loyalty, you'll be released. Whoopee.
This has the potential to make the McCarthy witch hunts look like a friendly tea party. I don't think I'm exaggerating. Our best hope is that it provides so many false positives that it becomes impractical to use. Specifically, let's hope some Senator spends a lot of cash while vacationing incognito with his "niece", and receives a tazering and an anal probe on his return flight as a reward. That should kill this thing pretty quickly.
This article raises a lot more questions than it answers.
OK, let's hear the arguments in favour of it, but whatever they are, I contend that if we put in place a vast, complex, expensive system that is too problematical to use, then all we're doing is spending Federal money to perform a PR exercise for the airline industry.
And if we do use it, then god help us all. I never, ever want to hear this phrase spoken to me or to anyone else:
"The computer says you're 67% likely to be guilty, based on your past actions and associations. We're not going to release you until you can prove your loyalty."
You, my friend, have a very poor grasp of the issues, and are part of the problem. The big problem with "copyleft" (e.g. GPL) at the moment is that far too many people simply don't understand that it is fully copyrighted, and that to use it you must follow completely the very strict and explicit terms given. One of those terms might be "credit the author", but that's usually the least of the terms you have to comply with to not be engaged in theft, which is grounds for both criminal and civil action. The GPL for example lists many many more terms than "credit the author" and you need to go and read it before contributing any further to this debate.
If you can't be bothered reading or comprehending the GPL, then just stop there and back the fuck off, because you are probably engaged in stealing copyrighted work, and that's a criminal offence. I am sick and tired of explaining this to the programmers in my department, and sooner or later I'm going to let one of them slip GPL code into our closed source product with their name all over it, them I'm going to contact the copyright owner and suggest that they contact our legal department regarding the theft of their work, and I'll not shed one tear for any thieving developers who get strung up by the balls.
Let me spell this out to you: copyfree is a worse term than copyanything-else because it encourages people to not read the license terms. I have heard "But it's free!" from professional software developers engaged in theft of GPL code so often now that it makes my blood boil. Anything that makes it even easier for lazy idiots to become thieves is a bad thing.
Um, look, that's exactly what copyleft is. First and foremost, it's copyright, completely and fully under traditional copyright laws. There are also licensing terms which allow very specific exemptions from copy restriction, as long as the costs are paid.
It makes complete sense to retain the © symbol in any copyleft document, as it helps to stop lazy or ignorant derivers ignoring your licensing terms and just passing copies around left right and centre, eventually making the work (illegally) public domain after a few copies. That doesn't help the copyleft cause at all.
It's a noble idea, but you really need to go and have a careful read about what copyleft is. The most important thing about copyleft is that it is fully copyrighted. Everything else depends on that. If it's not copyrighted, you can't enforce the rest of the terms, which allow very specific exceptions to the copyright.
For copyrighted work to change into copyleft, you have to add license terms. There is, in fact, nothing to stop any copy right holder adding copyleft terms to any existing copyright work. Copyleft adds rights.
What would be a problem is enforcing it on all copyrighted works in general, because that punishes rights holders. To enforce the copyleft, you'd have to keep the sanctity of copyright, while adding a whole new set of mandatory licensing terms. We could do it with a determined enough political will, but it'd be a hard one to explain to your average Jane Voter or Joe Politico, let alone Karl Corporate, who would vomit blood at the very thought of having any of his precious rights diluted one second before the final expiry.
I do honestly think that we're better of just having copyright expire after a fixed term and having the work enter the public domain. We'd be better off campaiging for our current Disney whoring politicians to stop extending copyright time limits than to try for a hard to understand, hard to enforce compromise.
and they follow all other licence terms, e.g. for the GPL: provide source; do not remove or modify the GPL license; add the GPL license to any including or deriving works; and any other terms, no matter how minor.
I know it was probably just a slip, but it's exactly that kind of sloppiness that leads to me having to ream a developer once every few months for trying to sneak full GPL code into our closed source product because "It's OK, it's free, I kept the copyright notice and I was going to tell tech pubs to put a credit in the documentation."
Copyleft is a bad word to use. It's too vague and open to misinterpretation. If we're talking specifically about the GPL, then yes, that's exactly what it means.
The GPL is an extremely powerful tool. Like most tools, it can hurt the ignorant. I have seen professional software developers sneaking GPL code in closed source projects, then looking at me with hurt puppy dog expressions when I tear into them for trying to steal other people's copyrighted work. "But it's free!" they explain, never having actually read (or understood) the GPL.
The GPL means exactly what it says. Copyleft, free beer, free speech, all of those are irrelevant buzzwords. It says, and it means:
This work is copyrighted. It belongs to the people that wrote it. You can't copy or use it [important pause ] unless you agree to follow these very strict restrictions on how you use it: provide source, do not remove this license, do not modify this license, apply this license to any derivative work including a much larger work that directly includes this work in any way.Those are the cost of using GPL code. If the cost is too high, don't use it. Pay a different cost to source the information/code/text elsewhere.
In your case, if you find some GPL research that you want to build on, but without making your research GPL, then treat the GPL work as a fully copyrighted work. You can quote selectively from it using the existing fair use defence, put your nuts on the line, and release your work as an original non-GPL (and non-copyrighted, or explicitely "copy without restrictions" work) work. If you want to include the entire GPL work, then you can do that, if you pay the cost, which is to GPL your derivation. If the GPL work is by a single author, hey, feel free to approach them and negotiate for a version of their work without a GPL license, just as you'd do right now to obtain the right to make a substantial copy. The GPL gives you more options, not fewer.
It never fails to amaze me how many people are unaware of the implications of the GPL. Microsoft calls it viral, a cancer. Love it or loathe it, it's absolutely true. That's the point of it! Rejoice in that. You can't strip the GPL off a piece of work, but you can extend it to other works. The body of GPL licensed work will only grow, never shrink.
The only debate is whether that's a bad thing or a good thing. I view it as a good thing, because right now it's giving more options, and you can choose to use non-GPL sources. When we reach the point where there are no non-GPL sources, we might have to start thinking about how this impinges on a few very, very narrow issues, like national security (but not on protecting corporations). That's a long way off though. Until then, the GPL means what it says, and it says: "There's a cost to using this. Pay it, or find another way."
I find Scrapheap Challenge (the original UK title of Junkyard Wars) very bitter sweet. One the one hand it's wonderful watching new toys being made, but on the other hand, the custom car builder in me wails in anguish at all those irreplacable and beautiful old donor vehicles being angle ground into pieces.
I rather fear that general engineering skills are becoming niche hobbyist skills rather than valuable vocational tools. Sad, but that's progress, I suppose.
Doubt ye not. There was a Scrapheap Challenge (the original UK title) battle of the champions event in the UK using exactly this format. Two salvage cars, radio controlled with salvaged motors turning the wheels and pushing the pedals, and just ramming the bejeesus out of each other in an old quarry.
It was splendidly entertaining, with a few flaws that could easily be ironed out (i.e. don't put a high scoring scoring target area on the top of the car then count any old trailing bit of chain that hits it). Both teams tried to put clever weapons on their vehicles, but ended up just smashing lumps out of each other, which is what we really want to see, right?
You're right about the safety aspect though. One of the cars jammed on full throttle, and they had to drive it in circles, then up the quarry wall until it tipped over. A bit scary for the production crew, but top fun for the viewers.
OK, let's design us a machine that can turn cheap renewable resouces (e.g. grass) into a tasty haunch fattening nutrient stream!
First you'd want to grind the grass. Let's grow us some SimTeeth. Real cows seem to do that pretty well, so we'll just grow us up a cow head. Then we'll grow a SimThroat to take it to the multiple SimStomachs (hey, cows do that real well, let's grow some cow parts again and fill them full of cow bacteria rather than using expensive chemicals), add a SimCardiovascularSystem to carry nutrients and oxygen around, and a SimBowel to excrete the waste. Let's add some SimLegs so that it can feed and exercise itself, and a simple SimBrain to provide the electrical impulses for that. Hey, wouldn't it be neat if instead of manufacturing and repairing these, they had some sort of built in capability? Let's grow up some SimReproduction and SimImmune systems.
Then it's just 2,000 hours of surgery to put it altogther and bingo, we've built us a SimCow! It's great because while it cost us a billion bucks, it looks, acts and tastes just like the real thing, while being completely cruelty free!
<sarcasm> aside, if you can come up with a cheaper, more efficient way of turning grass into SimHaunch than a real cow, let's hear it.
Nice point. Let's follow that thinking through. Where does that leave the taboo about cannibalism, especially if it's auto-cannibalism? What's the difference between eating a vat grown Haunch-O-U and eating your own placenta for medical reasons (or just for kicks)
A short, shallow review of something that might be the script for Episode II hardly qualifies stopping th presses.
A decent script is neither a guarantee of quality, nor necessary for it. The script for Episode IV looks like a fourth grader wrote it, and yet it produced a film that both children and adults loved. The magic happens in the casting, sets, costume, makeup, acting, lighting, camerawork, direction, FX and post production editing. Even if it's a genuine script (what reason have we to believe that? There must be dozens of fan scripts doing the rounds) then the final product might be almost unrecognisable.
It's an interesting bit of speculation, but I'm giving it no more credence nor weight than any other fan generated hype.
No, let me be clearer. Being satire or parody makes your derivative work eligible for fair use protection. The criteria that a court uses to decide whether it is fair use are: commercialism, type of work (creative/entertainment or informational), amount of copying, effect on the original. The judgement can focus on any or all of these, and the court can also consider other factors, if it is so minded.
There seems to be some confusion about the point I was making. All I'm doing is providing a link to a quick reference and saying that there is prima facia grounds for a case and an injunction. I find the Austin Powers franchise clumsy and not particularly funny, but I believe that it is very clearly fair use (including use of the name and character of Goldmember/Goldfinger), but it will have to prove that. You don't get a presumption of innocence in a civil case, it's all down to balance of probabilities, which is why it's a very good idea to at least ask the rights owners if you can use their work, to try and flush out any complaints early in the process.
Very true, I didn't mean to imply that Goldmember wasn't fair use. I think it very clearly is, I'm just making the point that there is a plethora of case law and Idiot's Guides out there that posters could maybe do a search for to see why there is grounds for having a preliminary injunction granted (which is all the rights owners really need to force a quick settlement).
I just get so tired of reading masses of knee jerk uninformed babble about copyright and fair use law every time this issue is raised here. My god, the whole story is practically -1 Troll, -1 Offtopic.
Please do me the favour of going and reading the publaw link. Parody does not make it a non issue. It makes your derivative work eligible for protection. If you parody someone else's work, you'd better understand the issues: commercial nature of your work, intended audience of your work, degree of copying, and the effect on the sales or potential sales of the original. And the most important issue: do I have enough money to prove my innocence in a court that considers both parties to be starting off equally and deals in degrees of probability, rather than an assumption of "innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt" in the defendent.
Wied Al has the clout to defend himself, which makes him far less liable to get sued. Goldmember does likewise, but the timing of the suit (after the title was fixed and promotional material had been produced) means that they have to come to a compromise, and quickly, rather than screw their release schedule fighting a case, even one that they can almost certainly win.
That's a fully fledged bastard of a good point, and I accept your correction in good grace. It's possible to get so caught up in the letter of what the law says that it's easy to forget why the law exists, or what the need was that created it.
I'm sorry sir, your methyl alcohol fuel cell is a safety hazard. Can I get you some scotch to take your mind off that?
Nice guess, but four out of the five systems I use regularly run Windows, and the Linux laptop is a productivity machine, not a development toy (now that I'm running StarOffice 6 beta). The language used was in response to the poster. Don't confuse the manner of delivery with the message: the substance of what I said actually agree with you.
Yeah, it sucks that there's not some some huge global information network where we could go to learn about fair use issues rather than just speculating about them.
Goldmember falls flat on 2 out of 4 fair use criteria. Fair use is an exception to the very clear copyright law, and it's a civil action, so it's "balance of probabilities" not "beyond all reasonable doubt". It's not prior restraint on publication either, as the name is already being used in marketing (c.f. the recalled material). The copyright owners are well within their rights to take this action, and Mike should have been ready to defend it from day one.
It's no big whoop though. We're looking at a quick out of court settlement, balanced against free publicity for both franchises. A couple of PR guys lose out... unless the whole issue is a well managed PR stunt to scam publicity for all parties.
For the benefit of the hordes who will post "I thought satire/fair use yadda yadda yadda", don't speculate, go and read about it.
There is a specific codification of fair use for parody or satire, but satire alone is not automatically enough to protect you.
The factors relevant to this case are:
Prima facia, it's about 50-50. Mike is trading on someone else's idea for profit, but in a small way compared to his original content. Using the character in the title was rather asking for it though. Mel Brooks got away with that, and with significant use of Star Wars material in Spaceballs, because he also parodied at least another 21 sources, and used his borrowed characters to perform a fair amount of critical commentary ("moichandising, moichandising").
Remember that but fair use is an exception to the law, and as Mike is clear about where he's taking his material from, it really is up to him to prove his innocence. He shouldn't have much trouble doing so, and this is likely just a well timed gambit to land a quick out of court settlement, one that the Goldmember people really should have anticipated and prepared for. But heck, it lands them free publicity, so the only losers here are a few PR executives.
(Incidentally, I agree with other posters that this article really is -1 Offtopic. If we really care IP issues, then why not run my submission on how all the sound and fury about IP on Slashdot has failed to translate into actual support for the WIPOUT essay competition. For gods' sake, all you have to do is CC your usual Slashdot rants to them!).
Earth to KjetilK. If it opens in M$ lockinware, the Microserfs will learn exactly nothing - except maybe that M$ apps are so 5up3r 1337 that they can read anything, so no need for Joe Windows to change.
Hear hear. But really, why even bother staying in academia? As a graduate comp sci researcher, I found that the situation even six years ago was that the only funding available was either from corporate sources with big nasty NDA's attached, or was a fucking pittance that would have seen me eating cold canned beans and shopping for clothes in store dumpsters for the rest of my adult life.
I reckoned that if I was going to whore for a corporation, I'd do it directly, make a living wage, and compete with average developers, not the super-dedicated types who stayed in academia. It's working out pretty well so far, and open source projects take care of scratching the Greater Good itch.
Incidentally, the thing that swung my decision was a conversation with my department head, where he stated flat out that if I did original research which was later patented or otherwise claimed as IP by a corporation, the university would not support or defend me if I chose to publish and got the arse sued off of me, even if it was prima facia evident that I was publishing prior art. Given that the only funding open to me that would even let me publish was of the cold-beans-and-dumpsters type, I reckoned that sounded like a bad bet and headed for the hills.
Neat article, but the conclusion is badly flawed. The main thrust seems to be "Cocoa/OpenGL doesn't require you to map out your VRAM like Playstation 1 did, so that makes it easy to write games!"
Does it hell. It removes one obstacle, but it's not going to write the game for you, nor is it going to make the Mac a more attractive proposition - technically or as a market - than DirectX, either XBox or generic PC Windoze versions. Hobbyists take note, but commercial developers, don't get too excited.
OpenGL is a fine API, and I'll happily accept that Cocoa is nice too, but the whole DirectX SDK really has matured into something usable. Many AAA Windows games now ship with only D3D (no OpenGL) 3D support (Max Payne, Operation:Flashpoint spring immediately to mind) and it doesn't hurt them. The big downside to using DirectX is cross platform portability (porting the app, and the DirectPlay network component), but commercialism comes into play again: it's better for a game to work really well under DirectX only than to work fairly well under DirectX and on Macs (or Linux for that matter).
If this means anything to anyone, I used to work for a company that was writing native D3D Retained Mode games, back in the DirectX 3/5 days. It was a suicidally stupid thing to do, and the games side of that company did indeed collapse under the weight of ripping the thing apart and starting over with D3DIM / OpenGL / glide support. I've no historical reason to love DirectX, or to think that apps hardwired to a specific API are a good idea. But even given that, I still think that a native DirectX 8 game makes a lot more sense, both technically and commercially, than OpenGL/Cocoa on a Mac platform.
Sorry guys, but this reads like another "I love Macs, so here comes the cognitive dissonance," article designed to get people on board the Macwagon. The only thing I can completely agree with is that developing for the Playstation 1 was like trying to teach a chimp to recite Shakespeare translated into Latin.
Your Bulemic Frog Style arithmetic is weak! My Petulant Budgerigar Style arithmetic will defeat you! (and so on)
US movies are made at 24fps. To speed them up you have to show them at more than 24fps, not less. For example, UK spec PAL runs at 25fps (matches 50Hz AC current and TV refresh better) and so movies are typically 96% of the US run time.