Inventing your own currency is probably OK. Stamping "USA" on it and making it resemble official US currency is rather stupid. People who buy paper, supposedly backed by actual precious metal, from a website, aren't really thinking straight. Either the government or a con artist would have made this thing fall apart sooner or later.
Even if you assume US works under US law none of the answers are correct. Many commercial works such as movies are "works for hire" and "life of the creator" is not relevant.
From: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/sl15.html
For anonymous and pseudonymous works and works made for hire, the term will be 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from the year of creation, whichever expires first; If they are going to give this stupid test they should at least have valid correct choices!
I noticed too. Typical solder melting point for surface mount applications is above 180C. So the inside of the hard drive's case was probably above 200C.
ReCAPTCHA seems to work based on voting. You just need a large enough bot net hacking away. Your bot net won't be any more 'correct' then a crappy OCR program but that doesn't matter. Your bot net will always make the SAME bad guesses. You overwhelm the correct guesses made by actual humans. ReCAPTCHA rejects actual humans because their votes don't match your bad guesses. Now you've taken over the web app, created a DOS against legitimate human users, and royally messed up the book digitization project.
You left out a few details. Especially the part about the spot light reflecting off the pizza guy's glasses. The guard mistook this for the glowing eyes of a Goa'uld. When the SGC is under attack you shoot first and ask questions later. So they thought the pizza guy was a Goa'uld and locked him up. The NID was all set to take that Domino's guy off to area51 for study. Fortunately Carter got back from off-world before the NID could arrange transportation. Carter was able to verify that the pizza guy was not Goa'uld so they let him go.
NewYorkCountryLawyer, can I engage you in some speculation?
Why would a judge let them get away with ignoring Daubert?
Is it the judge's intention to let the record company proceed with a weak case which is likely to be appealed? And then let a higher court set a precedent that rips the bottom out of all the RIAA cases?
I thought Judges preferred to avoid being corrected on appeal?
The libraries of the future will be much different. By 2030 shelves full of books will be replaced by holograms of Orlando Jones, a design which will surely last hundreds of millions of years.
This is the most insightful post in the entire thread. (Except the retard part, that's kind of rude.) I hate Microsoft as much as the next slashbot but really, the guys an idiot.
> Our valuation and chance of obtaining funding depends on these patents.
Why?
Perhaps they just want you to have these patents for defensive purposes? But if software patents were abolished then the defense wouldn't really be needed. So the funding people would stop requiring them.
Maybe it's an insurance policy for their investment. Even if your company never amounts to anything they'll still have the patents. Which can be sold or your company can be restructured as a patent troll.
Or perhaps you are founding a patent troll company? Naturally that would require patents. And we won't miss you when they are eliminated. (I kid, I kid.)
One use that doesn't make sense is preventing competition. If a large company comes out with a competing product would you actually sue them? They can tie you up in court for 10 years. You will waste time talking to lawyers and thinking about the court case instead of managing your business. While they take over the market. And they will use their huge patent collection in a counter attack. It is unlikely you can create a useful product without infringing on some large company's patents.
Elimination of software patents will not hurt small companies. In fact it eliminates a huge class of threats to small companies. You won't have to worry about patent trolls. And large companies will be deprived of a weapon against you. And you'll waste less time talking to patent lawyers. I don't really see the problem.
Elimination will hurt two groups. Patent lawyers and patent trolls. Legitimate software companies, large and small, will not miss software patents.
>>Mein Kampf is not banned, or illegal, it just can't be printed.
Umm, WHAT?
Maybe this sort of hypocrisy just legitimizes the Nazi's as a poor repressed underground group?
In the US they are allowed free speech, freedom of assembly, etc. And everyone can see what a bunch of idiots they are. There were big neo-nazi and kkk movements in the US in the 80's. But in the clear light of day they were allowed their hate speech and ignorant ramblings. And any school child could read Anne Frank or their history text book and compare it to what the idiots were saying.
You don't hear much about them anymore. I guess they've faded away. (except maybe for prison gangs?)
Ahh, now I see. You understand literature in a way that I am incapable of. I tend to take things literally and at face value. Since the Bible can not usefully be taken literally, I tend to not see the point in it. You see something I am simply blind to.
I've taken literature classes. Conceptually I can understand things like allegory. But they have to be pretty obvious or I miss them completely. In high school English the teacher was explaining various hidden meanings in Moby Dick. The way she was going on it seemed that each sentence could be interpreted in various ways, each of them much different then the plain meaning. I asked why Melville didn't just spell out what he meant instead of hiding all this stuff. She wasn't amused.
But I am not the only one who is blind to what you see. A significant portion of the US population strongly believes (or wants to believe) in the bible, but they are unable to understand it the way you do. But they stubbornly believe it anyway. And the only ways they can try to understand it are similar to the posts by jabuzz and zulater. (With the more foolish following an exact literal interpretation of a 17th century translation to English.) But that directly conflicts with the reality of fossils in the ground, continental drift, etc. And way too many attempt to address the cognitive dissonance by burying their heads in the sand and assuming the science must be wrong.
These people get really upset when their teenagers come home from science class and ask difficult questions that their parents never wanted to face. The natural solution to this problem? Make sure the schools stop teaching that confusing 'science' stuff so the kids stop asking difficult questions!
You seem to be arguing that Dr Seuss and Mother Goose are literary works on an even footing with the Bible? I'm surprised to see such an argument from a theologian.;)
While "One Fish, Two Fish" seems to just be silly rhymes encouraging children to learn how to read, other works such as "Yertle the Turtle" or "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" are clearly examinations of issues that effect our lives and suggestions on how to live. For those of us who don't want to spend a lifetime studying old books, Dr. Seuss has several distinct advantages over the bible; short, easy to read, written in modern English, no translation issues from dead languages, and differences in interpretation are unlikely to start a war or get your neighbors mad at you.
Is there some way in which the Bible does a better job "of finding a meaning for life or a message" compared to other works of literature?
And if I am looking for advice on how to live, why not get some self-help books? They will provide practical detailed advice applicable to modern life. Literature really won't help much with choosing an insurance policy, or trying to convince my daughter to get her homework done.
But anyway, the point of the posts by jabuzz and zulater is more about arguing with the sort of people who DO read the bible literally. Naturally, these people are uneducated idiots, and don't become Ivy League professors. But Ivy League professors aren't trying to screw with the science curriculum in Kansas and Florida.
Is it paranoia when they really are out to get you? Wertigon's description is exactly what happened with Internet Explorer for Macintosh and Solaris. It's not that far fetched to think they might do the same thing again.
The pollution probably comes from burning the fields to remove leaves from the cane. Sugar cane fields are typically harvested by hand and the sharp edged leaves must be burned off first. Burning cane fields create a lot of foul smelling smoke.
Waste products (cane stalks from which sugar juice has been squeezed) are used in the Brazilian sugar cane industry. Burning stalk fibers generate steam that drive rollers that crush sugar cane. Burning waste products also provide heat for distilling. The use of waste products to drive processing equipment is part of why Brazilians can get the cost of ethanol so low.
Working smoothly on an opensource OS is a requirement for me before I'll buy either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. I don't really mind if I have to download a newer equivalent of libdvdcss from some website in eastern europe. But I'm not going to install windows just to play DVDs.
The bookmarking thing sounds good. Mythtv has a similar feature which works quite well. Is the bookmarking implemented by the DVD player firmware or by the java/fancy menu stuff that comes on the dvd? It sounds great if it works the same on every dvd. But if the implementation is different on each title (or from each studio) then it might be more confusing then useful? And I bet one bookmark is sufficient for most people.
That's really the whole point isn't it? Your post has convinced me that Blue-ray is the better standard.
As a customer I don't actually care how nice the menus or extra features are. Just give me a button to click so the movie will start playing. And the movie should look nice and sound good. The rest is just useless fluff.
So what happens when I recompile my hypervisor? (Whether to hack around the DRM or for any other reason.) Does itunes now refuse to let me play the music I downloaded last week?
Source code that can't be improved and recompiled is nearly useless. It doesn't make sense to call something open if I don't have the ability to edit the code, fix bugs, and use the improved software. Just ship the binary and stop pretending to be open source. In fact calling it open source borders on lying. And using GPLv2 code that way is unethical even if it might be legal. I'm really glad GPLv3 puts a stop to that. The more I think about it the more I agree with RMS. Treacherous indeed.
Open source software, trusted computing, and strong DRM are mutually incompatible. It is not possible to design a system that truly does all three.
Either the DRM will be trivial to defeat, or some critical parts of the hardware/software are not actually open. (And I don't mean just the key in the TPM chip.)
For the system you described, all the video decoding, internet communications to the itunes site, and interaction with the TPM chip must be locked down. Also all the software between those three must be locked down. If any part of it is truly open then it can be modified to intercept communications with itunes (and play tricks by swaping hash values around), or grab the decoded media, trick the TPM chip into providing the hash for the unmodified player/decoder, or emulate the behavior of the TPM chip.
Open Trusted Computing might be useful for preventing hackers from running their code on my system.
But I can't see how Open Trusted Computing would be useful to the media companies for distributing DRM media that will play with open source players.
What does trusted computing? Traditional trusted computing means the big corps trust it to do their bidding. That means the user should call it treacherous. But the big corps can trust it to implement DRM correctly. Open trusted computing means I can trust the computer to only do what I want. But the big corps can not trust it to do what they want. So the big corps can not trust it to implement DRM.
The use of various technologies can't change the fact that either my computer does what I tell it to or it does what some corporation tells it to. And if it follows orders from some corporation then that's a bug. So I will fix the bug. If I can't fix the bug then it is not really open is it?
Slashdot Mirror
Inventing your own currency is probably OK.
Stamping "USA" on it and making it resemble official US currency is rather stupid.
People who buy paper, supposedly backed by actual precious metal, from a website, aren't really thinking straight. Either the government or a con artist would have made this thing fall apart sooner or later.
Even if you assume US works under US law none of the answers are correct. Many commercial works such as movies are "works for hire" and "life of the creator" is not relevant.
From: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/sl15.html For anonymous and pseudonymous works and works made for hire, the term will be 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from the year of creation, whichever expires first; If they are going to give this stupid test they should at least have valid correct choices!
The code in question is the Linux Kernel. So the penguin and the gnu are both relevant.
I noticed too. Typical solder melting point for surface mount applications is above 180C. So the inside of the hard drive's case was probably above 200C.
ReCAPTCHA seems to work based on voting. You just need a large enough bot net hacking away. Your bot net won't be any more 'correct' then a crappy OCR program but that doesn't matter. Your bot net will always make the SAME bad guesses. You overwhelm the correct guesses made by actual humans. ReCAPTCHA rejects actual humans because their votes don't match your bad guesses. Now you've taken over the web app, created a DOS against legitimate human users, and royally messed up the book digitization project.
You left out a few details. Especially the part about the spot light reflecting off the pizza guy's glasses. The guard mistook this for the glowing eyes of a Goa'uld. When the SGC is under attack you shoot first and ask questions later. So they thought the pizza guy was a Goa'uld and locked him up. The NID was all set to take that Domino's guy off to area51 for study. Fortunately Carter got back from off-world before the NID could arrange transportation. Carter was able to verify that the pizza guy was not Goa'uld so they let him go.
NewYorkCountryLawyer, can I engage you in some speculation?
Why would a judge let them get away with ignoring Daubert?
Is it the judge's intention to let the record company proceed with a weak case which is likely to be appealed? And then let a higher court set a precedent that rips the bottom out of all the RIAA cases?
I thought Judges preferred to avoid being corrected on appeal?
The libraries of the future will be much different. By 2030 shelves full of books will be replaced by holograms of Orlando Jones, a design which will surely last hundreds of millions of years.
This is the most insightful post in the entire thread. (Except the retard part, that's kind of rude.) I hate Microsoft as much as the next slashbot but really, the guys an idiot.
Somebody forgot to pay the astroturfers. Or it's Friday and they went home early?
> Our valuation and chance of obtaining funding depends on these patents.
Why?
Perhaps they just want you to have these patents for defensive purposes? But if software patents were abolished then the defense wouldn't really be needed. So the funding people would stop requiring them.
Maybe it's an insurance policy for their investment. Even if your company never amounts to anything they'll still have the patents. Which can be sold or your company can be restructured as a patent troll.
Or perhaps you are founding a patent troll company? Naturally that would require patents. And we won't miss you when they are eliminated. (I kid, I kid.)
One use that doesn't make sense is preventing competition. If a large company comes out with a competing product would you actually sue them? They can tie you up in court for 10 years. You will waste time talking to lawyers and thinking about the court case instead of managing your business. While they take over the market. And they will use their huge patent collection in a counter attack. It is unlikely you can create a useful product without infringing on some large company's patents.
Elimination of software patents will not hurt small companies. In fact it eliminates a huge class of threats to small companies. You won't have to worry about patent trolls. And large companies will be deprived of a weapon against you. And you'll waste less time talking to patent lawyers. I don't really see the problem.
Elimination will hurt two groups. Patent lawyers and patent trolls. Legitimate software companies, large and small, will not miss software patents.
Thanks for the clarification.
>>Mein Kampf is not banned, or illegal, it just can't be printed.
Umm, WHAT?
Maybe this sort of hypocrisy just legitimizes the Nazi's as a poor repressed underground group?
In the US they are allowed free speech, freedom of assembly, etc. And everyone can see what a bunch of idiots they are. There were big neo-nazi and kkk movements in the US in the 80's. But in the clear light of day they were allowed their hate speech and ignorant ramblings. And any school child could read Anne Frank or their history text book and compare it to what the idiots were saying.
You don't hear much about them anymore. I guess they've faded away. (except maybe for prison gangs?)
Ahh, now I see. You understand literature in a way that I am incapable of. I tend to take things literally and at face value. Since the Bible can not usefully be taken literally, I tend to not see the point in it. You see something I am simply blind to.
I've taken literature classes. Conceptually I can understand things like allegory. But they have to be pretty obvious or I miss them completely. In high school English the teacher was explaining various hidden meanings in Moby Dick. The way she was going on it seemed that each sentence could be interpreted in various ways, each of them much different then the plain meaning. I asked why Melville didn't just spell out what he meant instead of hiding all this stuff. She wasn't amused.
But I am not the only one who is blind to what you see. A significant portion of the US population strongly believes (or wants to believe) in the bible, but they are unable to understand it the way you do. But they stubbornly believe it anyway. And the only ways they can try to understand it are similar to the posts by jabuzz and zulater. (With the more foolish following an exact literal interpretation of a 17th century translation to English.) But that directly conflicts with the reality of fossils in the ground, continental drift, etc. And way too many attempt to address the cognitive dissonance by burying their heads in the sand and assuming the science must be wrong.
These people get really upset when their teenagers come home from science class and ask difficult questions that their parents never wanted to face. The natural solution to this problem? Make sure the schools stop teaching that confusing 'science' stuff so the kids stop asking difficult questions!
Sorry, I was being absurd. You might have missed the emoticon at the end of that first line?
-Cheers
You seem to be arguing that Dr Seuss and Mother Goose are literary works on an even footing with the Bible? I'm surprised to see such an argument from a theologian. ;)
While "One Fish, Two Fish" seems to just be silly rhymes encouraging children to learn how to read, other works such as "Yertle the Turtle" or "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" are clearly examinations of issues that effect our lives and suggestions on how to live. For those of us who don't want to spend a lifetime studying old books, Dr. Seuss has several distinct advantages over the bible; short, easy to read, written in modern English, no translation issues from dead languages, and differences in interpretation are unlikely to start a war or get your neighbors mad at you.
Is there some way in which the Bible does a better job "of finding a meaning for life or a message" compared to other works of literature?
And if I am looking for advice on how to live, why not get some self-help books? They will provide practical detailed advice applicable to modern life. Literature really won't help much with choosing an insurance policy, or trying to convince my daughter to get her homework done.
But anyway, the point of the posts by jabuzz and zulater is more about arguing with the sort of people who DO read the bible literally. Naturally, these people are uneducated idiots, and don't become Ivy League professors. But Ivy League professors aren't trying to screw with the science curriculum in Kansas and Florida.
Is it paranoia when they really are out to get you? Wertigon's description is exactly what happened with Internet Explorer for Macintosh and Solaris. It's not that far fetched to think they might do the same thing again.
The pollution probably comes from burning the fields to remove leaves from the cane. Sugar cane fields are typically harvested by hand and the sharp edged leaves must be burned off first. Burning cane fields create a lot of foul smelling smoke.
Waste products (cane stalks from which sugar juice has been squeezed) are used in the Brazilian sugar cane industry.
Burning stalk fibers generate steam that drive rollers that crush sugar cane.
Burning waste products also provide heat for distilling.
The use of waste products to drive processing equipment is part of why Brazilians can get the cost of ethanol so low.
Do you think Microsoft cares about moral obligations? They don't even care about legal obligations.
Working smoothly on an opensource OS is a requirement for me before I'll buy either HD-DVD or Blu-ray.
I don't really mind if I have to download a newer equivalent of libdvdcss from some website in eastern europe. But I'm not going to install windows just to play DVDs.
The bookmarking thing sounds good. Mythtv has a similar feature which works quite well.
Is the bookmarking implemented by the DVD player firmware or by the java/fancy menu stuff that comes on the dvd?
It sounds great if it works the same on every dvd. But if the implementation is different on each title (or from each studio) then it might be more confusing then useful? And I bet one bookmark is sufficient for most people.
# Better audio
# Better video
That's really the whole point isn't it?
Your post has convinced me that Blue-ray is the better standard.
As a customer I don't actually care how nice the menus or extra features are.
Just give me a button to click so the movie will start playing.
And the movie should look nice and sound good.
The rest is just useless fluff.
Everyone is missing the most simple explanation.
Harvard students never download music illegally. So there is nothing to sue for.
And they never go over the speed limit, drink under age at a frat party or cut the tags off their mattresses either.
I guess they're just better then the rest of us:)
When you see a hamster analogy, you just know your dealing with quality journalism.
College students citing Wikipedia as a source?
Don't even waste your time...
Just give them an F and move on to the next paper.
So what happens when I recompile my hypervisor? (Whether to hack around the DRM or for any other reason.) Does itunes now refuse to let me play the music I downloaded last week?
Source code that can't be improved and recompiled is nearly useless.
It doesn't make sense to call something open if I don't have the ability to edit the code, fix bugs, and use the improved software.
Just ship the binary and stop pretending to be open source.
In fact calling it open source borders on lying.
And using GPLv2 code that way is unethical even if it might be legal.
I'm really glad GPLv3 puts a stop to that.
The more I think about it the more I agree with RMS. Treacherous indeed.
Open source software, trusted computing, and strong DRM are mutually incompatible.
It is not possible to design a system that truly does all three.
Either the DRM will be trivial to defeat, or some critical parts of the hardware/software are not actually open. (And I don't mean just the key in the TPM chip.)
For the system you described, all the video decoding, internet communications to the itunes site, and interaction with the TPM chip must be locked down. Also all the software between those three must be locked down. If any part of it is truly open then it can be modified to intercept communications with itunes (and play tricks by swaping hash values around), or grab the decoded media, trick the TPM chip into providing the hash for the unmodified player/decoder, or emulate the behavior of the TPM chip.
Open Trusted Computing might be useful for preventing hackers from running their code on my system.
But I can't see how Open Trusted Computing would be useful to the media companies for distributing DRM media that will play with open source players.
What does trusted computing?
Traditional trusted computing means the big corps trust it to do their bidding. That means the user should call it treacherous. But the big corps can trust it to implement DRM correctly.
Open trusted computing means I can trust the computer to only do what I want. But the big corps can not trust it to do what they want. So the big corps can not trust it to implement DRM.
The use of various technologies can't change the fact that either my computer does what I tell it to or it does what some corporation tells it to. And if it follows orders from some corporation then that's a bug. So I will fix the bug. If I can't fix the bug then it is not really open is it?