Staggered releases wouldn't help you if you have to re cut the movie for all markets, true. But that is assuming that you can't make a set of cuts that work for a large cross section of markets. Most of Western Europe have pretty similar restrictions on what can and cannot be shown to various audiences, for instance.
That said, I think that movie releases will come closer and closer worldwide. First there is digital distribution. Secondly, more and more of the marketing channels reach worldwide audiences,
for instance over the internet, either directly or via word of mouth.
The post you referred to were partly right: You can't copyright typefaces in the US. But a typeface != font. A font is the implementation of a typeface - the typeface is the design, while the font is the file that describes the design.
Just as a the general concept of a word processor isn't copyrightable (it might have been patentable if there wasn't prior art), the general concept of the design of a font isn't copyrightable in the US (but it is other places).
As far as using the post you refer to as an authority - the post referred to copyright on names. That is a demonstration as good as any that the person in question doesn't know what he/she is talking about. You can't copyright a name. You may trademark it, but that's completely different.
In other words there are three levels a font designer can protect himself on, one of which doesn't apply in the US: The name, which can be trademarked, the typeface (design) which can be copyrighted outside the US, and the font (the implementation of the design) which is copyrighted everywhere.
There are several reasons for this. One is marketing costs - it may be easier to sustain a high marketing effort if you can focus on market by market. For smaller studios especially, which have limited cash flow, this can certainly be an issue.
Another is the cost of making prints. Making and distributing prints of a movie is not a cheap process, and if you'd have to make separate prints for all the movie theathers - including small theaters that would only show the movie a couple of times, would be cost prohibitive. So they get around it by staggering the release and redistributing prints as and when the movie is taken off somewhere.
The latter may dramatically change with fully digital movies, when there's suddenly a lot of alternatives to cutting cost in the distribution...
That said, it would be very interesting if someone
started working on an open source font design toolset. While you'd need to do manual adjustments,
surely there must be quite a few tasks that can be
automated to a reasonable extent, if not to eliminate all the work then at least to reduce the
drudgery...
And you've just demonstrated that you don't know squat about font design. Modern fonts are far more than "an equation which will define it perfectly for
every possible point size", simply because while that work well for high resolution output devices (read: print), it falls apart dramatically once you're dealing with small fonts, say starting at 5-6 pixels on screen.
As for your view on italics and bold, that's bullshit as well - especially again at low resolutions. Try taking a character that is 8-9
pixels wide and increase the thickness without
any hinting about exceptions...
If it's so easy, why don't you produce some truetype fonts for us?
You are wrong. The font files themselves are copyrighted, and the names can be trademarked. However, AFAIK you can't copyright the general look of the font, only the exact version you have created. Thus there's nothing stopping you from drawing a font that looks extremely close to a copyrighted font, but you can't copy their font data directly. (ObDisclaimer: IANAL)
But would it matter? You'd think you were sleeping with playmates, or whatever does it for you, and driving ferrari's and enjoying any drink you'd have:)
So what if it isn't reality if all your senses tell you it is....
On the other hand, think of the new market this opens for porn... How many people here would be paying big bucks to have porn fed straight to their visual cortex?:-)
If you release the satellite in orbit, then boosting it into another orbit is "cheap" compared to getting it up into orbit in the first place. Many satellites have booster rockets anyway to give them some maneuverability.
First of all, you are pointing to what happened in Zimbabwe without context: Zimbabwe was very concerned about the future of their food production. If they had accepted the GM food, they would lose a very substantial part of their income - longer term that would cause a lot more death than the current famine. Zimbabwes food production is important to many countries in Africa, as it is under normal conditions one of the largest food exporters on the continent.
No matter what a creep Mugabe is, it would have been a distater for Zimbabwe and for Africa in general if he'd let Zimbabwe be bullied into in effect destroying their opportunity of reaching major export markets in the future, effectivel ruining the remainder of the economy in the country.
You also conveniently ignore that the situation in Zimbabwe was resolved: an agreement was reached to ensure that all donated corn was milled before being handed out.
You are also trying to use Zimbabwe as an excuse for explaining away democracy in the other countries I listed: Yes, Zimbabwe has a leader that most people will agree is a dictator, but Zimbabwe is just one of a whole range of countries with famine at the moment. The original claim was that famine and starvation wouldn't happen in democratic, capitalistic countries. Of the countries near Zimbabwe that currently experience
famine, it is as far as I can see only Zimbabwe and Swaziland that aren't democratic, and all of them have market economies.
Nothing is stopping anyone in these countries from, as suggested, setting up supermarkets all over the place. Nothing is stopping charities from funding that by giving out food coupons. Yet millions still die. Capitalism and democracy isn't a cure for famine.
You also wrote: Famine is nature's populations control. This underlines exactly the cynicism I saw in the original post. You're equating humanity with animals, and in effect saying that we should accept millions dying without doing anything about it.
You end it by pointing to "famine" even in the US, and use it as an argument to stop helping other countries. So you are willing to let millions die, to save a few thousand? Why not do both? The US already spends less on development aid than most other industrialized countries, and at the same time spends less on social security and food aid in USA itself than most other industrialized countries.
Trying to set these up against eachother is just a piss-poor excuse for not spending money on either.
While I don't like Mugabe (he's a power crazed maniac in my eyes) or the way he's handled the land distribution (lots of violence and threats, oppressing the opposition, and violating Zimbabwes own laws), the white farmers got their land in the first place because it was given to them by the UK in some kind of deluded fascist land distribution scheme, where the native population was forced of their land - so Mugabe has just taken a leaf out of the book of the colonial powers that preceded him.
Your "solution" assumes that the government would be able to afford to pay these supermarkets for the food, and that the infrastructure is there to build supermarkets.
Both of these assumptions are flawed for many underdeveloped countries.
And you seem to believe that there aren't starvation in democratic capitalist countries, which is another fundamentally flawed assumption.
Sorry, but the world just doesn't work the way you think it does.
Starvation and poverty is a much more complex issue - most of the third world countries today see starvation now and then because not only is their population to poor to buy imported food, but the government itself is so badly in debt that they have no way of buying themselves out of the disasters.
I agree that food aid won't stop famines from happening, and that yes. Food aid like this is there to save lives when something catastrophic happens, not to bring the countries out of poverty. Not donating money or food to save lives because it won't help long term is just as cynical as not giving people medical treatment because they'll die soon enough anyway...
But food aid alone isn't enough, which is why most rich countries give a lot of their aid to development programs to improve infrastructure, food production and availability of education, clean water etc..
That these famines still occur, even in democratic, capitalist countries. In this case:
Lesotho, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique are all
democratic capitalist countries according to the CIA world factbook, and all of them face famine at the moment just as much as Zimbabwe.
Personally I think that he is a blundering fool, a ruthless dictator, and as a person who the world can not trust... But in this matter I think he's right. Zimbabwe farming sector has been hit badly enough by the forced land reallocation (which he's responsible for), and hurting it further by reducing export opportunities and opening the door for future intellectual property disputes with the US would hardly be a good long term strategy.
Yes, it would probably save lives on the short term to accept the food, but if it reduces
Zimbabwes revenues for years to come then it may
easily cost many more lives if they accept the genetically modified "aid".
These days registration of copyright is only a way of publicly documenting the origination of a copyrighted work in case of disputes over who created the work, and that's about it. In any country that is a signatory to the Berne convention (most of the world), the creation of a work that can be covered by copyright is automatically covered by copyright. In other words, if you write a book, paint a painting, or even write an e-mail, the work is covered by copyright automatically whether or not
you have registered it as long as you have not explicitly relinquished copyright by stating that the work is public domain.
That said, courts will limit copyright protection for works for various reasons, and copyright law does not give protection to everything: Try to claim copyright on a word or a short phrase and you'll most likely be laughed out of court in most countries if you try to "defend your copyright". In such cases you are much more likely to succeed in obtaining trademark protection.
It is counter productive for an organization that get the majority of it's support from the technology sector and geeks and related parts of the public to try to pretend they are something else, as that will only serve to alienate potential members and supporters.
As for being taken seriously, numbers (of voters that may turn against you if you don't listen) and money (for lawyers to fight stupid laws when people don't listen) is far more important than being seen as some old, stuffy institution.
Copyright owners have no obligation to defend their copyrights. You may be thinking about trademark owners, who may lose trademark protection if they don't protect their mark.
I'm fully with you about the regulators. As for Buffet, I think the reason he's going for telecom now is that they pose an exceptional opportunity:
The market has fallen extremely far to start with, then the KPNQwest bankrupcy in Europe, the Worldcom scandal and the Qwest investigations, makes telecom take a nosedive. There are bound to be lots of opportunities now.
If Level3 is healthy (I wouldn't know, haven't looked at their numbers), and there's no scandals lurking, they should be in a very good position to steal worried customers from the others, and even if they don't their shareprice should still have a reasonable growth potential when the market rebounds.
I guess he might have seen it as a larger than usual opportunity. But before you run of to buy level 3 stock, remember that Buffet knows people - he may have deals in place that gets him way more
potential from Level 3 than the average investor
will (and btw. I'm referring to legal possibilities here - it gets so much easier to make money when you're already rich and people want to cut deals with you)
No. You would not be able to use this for employees. You could use it for contractors though, but as they point out a business wouldn't save anything doing that as they are taxed on profit, and paying a contractor will reduce your profit, reducing your tax bill regardless.
The purpose is to let individuals enjoy the same kind of tax benefit. Employees are taxed on earnings, not on profit, so if you hire someone to work on open source for you directly it won't affect your tax bill. But if you donate the money to a non-profit that hires the person for you, you can reduce your tax bill.
Considering that this is all within the law, and that it is up to IRS whether or not to accept the validity of what they are doing for the purpose of tax excempt status, calling it a "tax cheat" is certainly not fitting.
This is exactly the same way you can indirectly hire a pastor through a church by donating money, and reduce your tax bill by doing so.
It's all explained on their pages, linked to from the article - why not read them?
Have you even read their pages? The donor gets to decide who will do the work. This is just a way for private individuals to hire someone to do open source development work and be able to deduct it from their taxes.
If you want the original authors
to make money, donate money and specify who you want to do the work.
The scoping issue and the stack depth issue are the same, and the solutions I described are solutions in common use.
And I'm used to dealing with users on the input side. The company I work for operate the.name TLD. Registrars interact with us via XML. Our subcontractors interact with us via XML. We're dealing with far from perfect XML and errors needs to be communicated.
We did use to have an ASCII based format, and we had more problems with that. The advantage of XML is that the users can validate the XML generated pretty well on their side by running it through an XML parser with schema validation support.
This is a very different problem from what you
suggested in the other message, and is can be just as real with REAL documents.
So what you are really saying is that your problem is with ANY system that allow scoping, and where
state is required for each scope until the scope is closed?
The problem with that is that scoping is useful and makes it a lot easier to represent a whole lot of data in a structured form that seems natural to humans.
In other words, an XML parser may require more resources than a parser for a grammar without scoping. But the scoping is allowed for a reason - it provides structure that is hard to provide without it.
The reason you can't make a file that breaks grep is that grep doesn't care about structure. You can easily work on XML files withouth running into the problem as well if you ignore structure. But then you are also losing a whole lot of advantages.
I still don't see this as a problem. You need to handle resource limits regardless. If you have 1MB available, as you originally used in your example, then when you have used that 1MB then you have to fail gracefully. If the only case where you use the whole 1MB is a broken document, then whether you fail because the parser detects it or fail because you don't have more memory is irellevant - the parse failed.
If you need to give more specific error messages, you can do that fairly easily, by, when you've filled memory scanning the remainder of the document to determine whether any of the outer tags will EVER get closed.
If you want to recover from unclosed tags, the standard way of doing that for HTML and XML is to define which start tags you want to autoclose which types of open tags for.
This is a straightforward mechanism that works well, in particular in the presence of a schema or DTD where you can easily determine where leaving a tag open means the document is malformed where it may possibly be wellformed if the tag is closed.
I haven't implemented it for XML, but I have implemented in an HTML filter that needed to handle particularly broken HTML.
In the real world this is a problem only if you don't think about it and design your software to handle it, just as not thinking your design through in general leads to broken software.
I read the article you referred to, and did not find it KDE bashing. On the contrary, the article makes a big point out of separating persons from the project as whole, and that says that to ensure that people don't connect the KDE project with views such as the ones referred to in the messages he quote, it would be useful to make that separation clearer.
It adressed the problem of how it would not be good for KDE if the project got associated with extreme political views, which, whether right or wrong, are unpopular with most people, because of posts made from kde.org articles with no disclaimers anywhere.
If you go to the article now you might notice an update telling that new messages to that mailing list now have a disclaimer attached to it to avoid any confusion over what views represent the KDE project and what are personal opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I think that movie releases will come closer and closer worldwide. First there is digital distribution. Secondly, more and more of the marketing channels reach worldwide audiences, for instance over the internet, either directly or via word of mouth.
The post you referred to were partly right: You can't copyright typefaces in the US. But a typeface != font. A font is the implementation of a typeface - the typeface is the design, while the font is the file that describes the design.
Just as a the general concept of a word processor isn't copyrightable (it might have been patentable if there wasn't prior art), the general concept of the design of a font isn't copyrightable in the US (but it is other places).
As far as using the post you refer to as an authority - the post referred to copyright on names. That is a demonstration as good as any that the person in question doesn't know what he/she is talking about. You can't copyright a name. You may trademark it, but that's completely different.
In other words there are three levels a font designer can protect himself on, one of which doesn't apply in the US: The name, which can be trademarked, the typeface (design) which can be copyrighted outside the US, and the font (the implementation of the design) which is copyrighted everywhere.
Another is the cost of making prints. Making and distributing prints of a movie is not a cheap process, and if you'd have to make separate prints for all the movie theathers - including small theaters that would only show the movie a couple of times, would be cost prohibitive. So they get around it by staggering the release and redistributing prints as and when the movie is taken off somewhere.
The latter may dramatically change with fully digital movies, when there's suddenly a lot of alternatives to cutting cost in the distribution...
That said, it would be very interesting if someone started working on an open source font design toolset. While you'd need to do manual adjustments, surely there must be quite a few tasks that can be automated to a reasonable extent, if not to eliminate all the work then at least to reduce the drudgery...
As for your view on italics and bold, that's bullshit as well - especially again at low resolutions. Try taking a character that is 8-9 pixels wide and increase the thickness without any hinting about exceptions...
If it's so easy, why don't you produce some truetype fonts for us?
variable width != truetype. The variable width fonts are PCF fonts, which means they are still bitmaps.
You are wrong. The font files themselves are copyrighted, and the names can be trademarked. However, AFAIK you can't copyright the general look of the font, only the exact version you have created. Thus there's nothing stopping you from drawing a font that looks extremely close to a copyrighted font, but you can't copy their font data directly. (ObDisclaimer: IANAL)
So what if it isn't reality if all your senses tell you it is....
On the other hand, think of the new market this opens for porn... How many people here would be paying big bucks to have porn fed straight to their visual cortex? :-)
If you release the satellite in orbit, then boosting it into another orbit is "cheap" compared to getting it up into orbit in the first place. Many satellites have booster rockets anyway to give them some maneuverability.
First of all, you are pointing to what happened in Zimbabwe without context: Zimbabwe was very concerned about the future of their food production. If they had accepted the GM food, they would lose a very substantial part of their income - longer term that would cause a lot more death than the current famine. Zimbabwes food production is important to many countries in Africa, as it is under normal conditions one of the largest food exporters on the continent.
No matter what a creep Mugabe is, it would have been a distater for Zimbabwe and for Africa in general if he'd let Zimbabwe be bullied into in effect destroying their opportunity of reaching major export markets in the future, effectivel ruining the remainder of the economy in the country.
You also conveniently ignore that the situation in Zimbabwe was resolved: an agreement was reached to ensure that all donated corn was milled before being handed out.
You are also trying to use Zimbabwe as an excuse for explaining away democracy in the other countries I listed: Yes, Zimbabwe has a leader that most people will agree is a dictator, but Zimbabwe is just one of a whole range of countries with famine at the moment. The original claim was that famine and starvation wouldn't happen in democratic, capitalistic countries. Of the countries near Zimbabwe that currently experience famine, it is as far as I can see only Zimbabwe and Swaziland that aren't democratic, and all of them have market economies.
Nothing is stopping anyone in these countries from, as suggested, setting up supermarkets all over the place. Nothing is stopping charities from funding that by giving out food coupons. Yet millions still die. Capitalism and democracy isn't a cure for famine.
You also wrote: Famine is nature's populations control. This underlines exactly the cynicism I saw in the original post. You're equating humanity with animals, and in effect saying that we should accept millions dying without doing anything about it.
You end it by pointing to "famine" even in the US, and use it as an argument to stop helping other countries. So you are willing to let millions die, to save a few thousand? Why not do both? The US already spends less on development aid than most other industrialized countries, and at the same time spends less on social security and food aid in USA itself than most other industrialized countries.
Trying to set these up against eachother is just a piss-poor excuse for not spending money on either.
While I don't like Mugabe (he's a power crazed maniac in my eyes) or the way he's handled the land distribution (lots of violence and threats, oppressing the opposition, and violating Zimbabwes own laws), the white farmers got their land in the first place because it was given to them by the UK in some kind of deluded fascist land distribution scheme, where the native population was forced of their land - so Mugabe has just taken a leaf out of the book of the colonial powers that preceded him.
Both of these assumptions are flawed for many underdeveloped countries.
And you seem to believe that there aren't starvation in democratic capitalist countries, which is another fundamentally flawed assumption.
Sorry, but the world just doesn't work the way you think it does.
Starvation and poverty is a much more complex issue - most of the third world countries today see starvation now and then because not only is their population to poor to buy imported food, but the government itself is so badly in debt that they have no way of buying themselves out of the disasters.
I agree that food aid won't stop famines from happening, and that yes. Food aid like this is there to save lives when something catastrophic happens, not to bring the countries out of poverty. Not donating money or food to save lives because it won't help long term is just as cynical as not giving people medical treatment because they'll die soon enough anyway...
But food aid alone isn't enough, which is why most rich countries give a lot of their aid to development programs to improve infrastructure, food production and availability of education, clean water etc..
That these famines still occur, even in democratic, capitalist countries. In this case: Lesotho, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique are all democratic capitalist countries according to the CIA world factbook, and all of them face famine at the moment just as much as Zimbabwe.
Yes, it would probably save lives on the short term to accept the food, but if it reduces Zimbabwes revenues for years to come then it may easily cost many more lives if they accept the genetically modified "aid".
That said, courts will limit copyright protection for works for various reasons, and copyright law does not give protection to everything: Try to claim copyright on a word or a short phrase and you'll most likely be laughed out of court in most countries if you try to "defend your copyright". In such cases you are much more likely to succeed in obtaining trademark protection.
(ObDisclaimer: IANAL)
As for being taken seriously, numbers (of voters that may turn against you if you don't listen) and money (for lawyers to fight stupid laws when people don't listen) is far more important than being seen as some old, stuffy institution.
Copyright owners have no obligation to defend their copyrights. You may be thinking about trademark owners, who may lose trademark protection if they don't protect their mark.
Linux already runs on several 64bit platforms, including IA 64, so that argument is bullshit.
The market has fallen extremely far to start with, then the KPNQwest bankrupcy in Europe, the Worldcom scandal and the Qwest investigations, makes telecom take a nosedive. There are bound to be lots of opportunities now.
If Level3 is healthy (I wouldn't know, haven't looked at their numbers), and there's no scandals lurking, they should be in a very good position to steal worried customers from the others, and even if they don't their shareprice should still have a reasonable growth potential when the market rebounds.
I guess he might have seen it as a larger than usual opportunity. But before you run of to buy level 3 stock, remember that Buffet knows people - he may have deals in place that gets him way more potential from Level 3 than the average investor will (and btw. I'm referring to legal possibilities here - it gets so much easier to make money when you're already rich and people want to cut deals with you)
The purpose is to let individuals enjoy the same kind of tax benefit. Employees are taxed on earnings, not on profit, so if you hire someone to work on open source for you directly it won't affect your tax bill. But if you donate the money to a non-profit that hires the person for you, you can reduce your tax bill.
Considering that this is all within the law, and that it is up to IRS whether or not to accept the validity of what they are doing for the purpose of tax excempt status, calling it a "tax cheat" is certainly not fitting.
This is exactly the same way you can indirectly hire a pastor through a church by donating money, and reduce your tax bill by doing so.
It's all explained on their pages, linked to from the article - why not read them?
If you want the original authors to make money, donate money and specify who you want to do the work.
Well, for someone that believe in a god believing in a virgin giving birth shouldn't exactly be that much of a stretch...
And I'm used to dealing with users on the input side. The company I work for operate the .name TLD. Registrars interact with us via XML. Our subcontractors interact with us via XML. We're dealing with far from perfect XML and errors needs to be communicated.
We did use to have an ASCII based format, and we had more problems with that. The advantage of XML is that the users can validate the XML generated pretty well on their side by running it through an XML parser with schema validation support.
So what you are really saying is that your problem is with ANY system that allow scoping, and where state is required for each scope until the scope is closed?
The problem with that is that scoping is useful and makes it a lot easier to represent a whole lot of data in a structured form that seems natural to humans.
In other words, an XML parser may require more resources than a parser for a grammar without scoping. But the scoping is allowed for a reason - it provides structure that is hard to provide without it.
The reason you can't make a file that breaks grep is that grep doesn't care about structure. You can easily work on XML files withouth running into the problem as well if you ignore structure. But then you are also losing a whole lot of advantages.
I still don't see this as a problem. You need to handle resource limits regardless. If you have 1MB available, as you originally used in your example, then when you have used that 1MB then you have to fail gracefully. If the only case where you use the whole 1MB is a broken document, then whether you fail because the parser detects it or fail because you don't have more memory is irellevant - the parse failed.
If you need to give more specific error messages, you can do that fairly easily, by, when you've filled memory scanning the remainder of the document to determine whether any of the outer tags will EVER get closed.
If you want to recover from unclosed tags, the standard way of doing that for HTML and XML is to define which start tags you want to autoclose which types of open tags for.
This is a straightforward mechanism that works well, in particular in the presence of a schema or DTD where you can easily determine where leaving a tag open means the document is malformed where it may possibly be wellformed if the tag is closed.
I haven't implemented it for XML, but I have implemented in an HTML filter that needed to handle particularly broken HTML.
In the real world this is a problem only if you don't think about it and design your software to handle it, just as not thinking your design through in general leads to broken software.
It adressed the problem of how it would not be good for KDE if the project got associated with extreme political views, which, whether right or wrong, are unpopular with most people, because of posts made from kde.org articles with no disclaimers anywhere.
If you go to the article now you might notice an update telling that new messages to that mailing list now have a disclaimer attached to it to avoid any confusion over what views represent the KDE project and what are personal opinion.