And what if God actually created the world five minutes ago, instilling in us the belief that we had lived lives prior to that. What if this hasn't happened yet, but is about to?
Actually, I have fundie relatives who believe God put the fossils in the ground. Why would he do that? It's not ours to question why.
Wouldn't that be illegal product bundling? If you buy Apple hardware they're not allowed to even void the warranty just because you don't buy their ram, for example. Lexmark can't force you to buy their paper, etc.
If you steal an idea and then give it away, then not only do you take away from the expected profit from the product, but giving it away also lowers the market value for the product.
The exact same thing happens if I make a better, competing product and sell it for less money--I take away from your expected product, and lower the market value (by creating a substitute good). Shall we ban competition?
Even people who do approve of IP might well question whether advances in the color and shape of a computer case is of sufficient importance to the people to warrant protecting by law. From that point of view, the imac case and the qube case are identical.
This particular case is apparantly over trademark and trade dress issues--the machine is called a (PowerMac G4) Cube, which Cobalt feels is confusingly close to "Qube".
The point of trademark, trade dress, and design patent law isn't to promote innovation, but to prevent predatory marketing and avoid customer confusion.
Here's why I don't think it's stealing: when you copy something, the original still exists. When you steal something, the original person doesn't have it anymore. It impacts/potential/ profits (as do a great many other acts, many of which are legal) but it doesn't deprive anyone of anything which they already had in their posession.
I don't think it's wrong to tape something off the radio, and trade tapes with your friends. I think it's wrong to make a copy of a CD and sell it to someone. Massive online trading is, for me, a grey area in the middle of which I can see both sides. The Law doesn't deal much in right and wrong anyway, though, so it's moot.
Better to ask the average Komolgorov complexity of a picture; it doesn't do a whole lot of good to compress images down to their entropic minimum when that method turns out to be to equivilant to assigning each image an ID, and looking up the decompressed version in a database.
Maybe you want a webpad. Maybe you want to use it for portable photoshop. Maybe you want a portable machine the size of the LCD panel on a laptop.
Maybe if you don't like it, you don't have to buy one, and you can just buy a different company's product, or even an Apple product which HAS a keyboard.
So when a menu is on your screen, the background apps and windows get no processor time? Is that what I am hearing? I never understood this completely?
Unfortunately, this is basicly correct. There are three exceptions here. First, some programs (the good mp3 players, for example) use asynchronous i/o with completion routines running at interrupt time. These run even if the system-wide cooperative task isn't running. Second, there was a hack called the "menutasking enabler" which modified the system menubar routines to give background applications processing time while the foreground app had a menu pulled down. I'd be surprised if it still worked under OS 9, and it was buggy (if a background app scrolled some graphics "underneath" the menu, then the menu got moved too) but it was still very clever. Third, if a background app has launched any preemptive threads (using the multiprocessing manager, which you can do even on a single-processor machine) then these will continue to run, although they're not allowed to make any user-interaction related system calls.
License? What license? I bought a DVD. I am allowed to do anything with it which is legal to do. Copyright law has certain restrictions as to what I may do with it--I may not copy it except for fair use, I may not exhibit it publicly without permission of the copyright holder. The studios sold me a DVD, and first sale doctrine gives me the right to use it for its intended purpose.
When you buy a car, you're not allowed to use it to run over someone on purpose. That's because running over somebody on purpose is illegal, NOT because I'm violating my car's "license agreement" from Ford. Movie studios may want you to think things have been licensed rather than sold, but that's (currently) a fiction. You don't need a "license" from them to do anything that isn't against the law. Prior to DMCA, there was nothing about private viewing which was against copyright law. Now there is, and that's where it gets tricky.
First, The United States is not a democracy. We are a constitutional republic.
Typical elitist statement, usually used to try to make some point about how the commoners can't be trusted. It's also demonstrably false, as we are both a democracy and a constitutinoal republic. Look up "democracy" and you will find, among other things:
Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
Government by popular representation; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but is indirectly exercised through a system of representation and delegated authority periodically renewed; a constitutional representative government; a republic.
(Sources are the American Heritage Dictionary, and Webster's Revised Unabridged)
What you are forgetting is that you cannot define healthy without unhealthy, or cheerful without sad, and attractive without unattractive. If everyone was attractive, it would be the norm and have no meaning to you.
"And without evil there can be no good, so it must be good to be evil sometimes" -- Satan, the South Park movie.
It's not a useful argument; you may not be able to define 'healthy' without 'unhealthy', but that doesn't mean if there weren't unhealthy people that the benefits of being healthy wouldn't still exist just because we didn't happen to have a word for it. We didn't need to distinguish between daytime baseball and nighttime baseball until we started to have the latter. That didn't take anything away from the former before we bothered to differentiate between the two.
My point is that your MAC may have been completely secure, but how useful was it (and if you left a menu select or a dialog box unconfirmed, does it really hang the whole system until you click okay?).
Dialog boxes are not blocking; background tasks still get time. Menus block, but if you leave them dropped down for more than a certain time period, they go away on their own.
While I don't mean to quash anyone's healthy paranoia, I am not aware of statistics (as opposed to anecdotes) indicating that unauthorized wiretaps are in widespread use.
The LA Times had a story in 1998 about extensive illegal wiretaps performed by the LAPD.
There's nothing inherently Wintel-specific about COM or DCOM, it's just that that's where 99% of it happens to be implemented. I have a COM-freak friend who gets trigger happy whenever anyone talks about COM as being MS-specific. "It's publicly documented" he begins to froth...
RPM doesn't tell the whole story; data density also plays an important role. As data densities increase, the amount of data accessed in a single rotation also increases. So, while more RPMs are always nice, a 5400 RPM drive made today is going to have a greater transfer rate than one from a few years ago.
Children are indeed citizens, and have constitutional rights. In Tinker v. Des Moines, the supreme court ruled that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." This doesn't make sense unless they have those rights to begin with. Pornography is a different case, because (though I personally think it's stupid) "obscenity" isn't constitutionally protected. Some cases of government interference with free access to information has been ruled unconstitutional, because a free press is useless if the government can keep you from reading the output.
It's not at all clear-cut that this is constitutional. It hinges entirely on whether playiing a video game is free expression, and if so, whether the government can display a compelling (compelling enough for the court to override the 1st ammendment, which they are at least somewhat reluctant to do) interest in interfering with such expression.
You are wrong there. This will give parents the discretion for whether their children play those games or not. Hopefully, it will force parents to also explain to their children why they are not allowed to go.
And what if a parent wants a child to be able to play the video games? The parent has to show up in person and sit around waiting while the kid plays. This clearly penalizes resonsible parents at the expense of those who want the government to do their job for them.
To me, "Information wants to be free" just means that since it is intangible, can be copied easily, and can be "stolen" without depriving the original owner, it is acting as if it were a sentient entity which wanted to be free.
Don't confuse that with "people want information to be free" because many people don't. That much isn't a contradiction. Thus, no, you may not have my SSN.
Just so we're clear, you didn't like scheme because it was "too functional" and you didn't get to use mutable variables, so you almost became a -math- major instead?
BTW, the primary obstacles to such a filesystem are Microsoft and Apple.
That's BS and you know it. Both MS and Apple's OSes have publicly documented interfaces for custom filesystem modules.
"tar" may be a standard for reading a disk, but it isn't a standard for mounting a disk. You can untar encrypted files as you need them, but that leaves plaintext files on the HD. An encrypted filesystem tool would be smart about that to make sure there weren't bits of plaintext crud left on the disk.
Any utility written, such as PGPdisk, to mount an encrypted filesystem would have to be specially written for every OS, not just for MS and Apple's, because filesystem interfaces differ.
Currently, legal entanglements make it impossible for a university to censor the child porn newsgroups. If they do censor, they can get sued for all (netnews, ftp, http, blahp) content that the is on the university network storage.
That's funny, my university didn't carry "child-porn newsgroups". It didn't carry -any- adult newsgroups. You might get in trouble if you attempt to censor individual messages, because then you might have liability for messages you missed, but nothing says you have to accept all of alt.binaries.* if you're going to run a newsfeed from a university.
Oh, and by the way...there is nothing natural about homosexuality...both scientifically (a penis inside an anus serves no reproductive purposes) and religiously (against religious command)
Homosexuality, prostitution, masturbation, oral sex, pedophilia, and in general sex for purposes other than reproduction occur in the animal kingdom as well; just look at bonobo monkeys. If "nature" didn't "want" the penis to be able to ejaculate into an anus, there are all kinds of ways to engineer around that; require some sort of chemical marker found only in the vagina to trigger the ejaculation response, for example. Of course, "nature" doesn't "want" anything, and people who make claims that non-reproductive sex is "unnatural" (claims which are demonstrably false, as such activities occur ammong non-human animals who are somehow "natural" in a way humans aren't) are merely trying to push their personal agenda. Pushing an agenda is fine, but pretending that "nature is on your side" is silly.
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And what if God actually created the world five minutes ago, instilling in us the belief that we had lived lives prior to that. What if this hasn't happened yet, but is about to?
Actually, I have fundie relatives who believe God put the fossils in the ground. Why would he do that? It's not ours to question why.
Why isn't PDF a standard in your book? Adobe has publicly documented the format, and there are non-propriatary viewers. What more do you want?
Wouldn't that be illegal product bundling? If you buy Apple hardware they're not allowed to even void the warranty just because you don't buy their ram, for example. Lexmark can't force you to buy their paper, etc.
If you steal an idea and then give it away, then not only do you take away from the expected profit from the product, but giving it away also lowers the market value for the product.
The exact same thing happens if I make a better, competing product and sell it for less money--I take away from your expected product, and lower the market value (by creating a substitute good). Shall we ban competition?
This particular case is apparantly over trademark and trade dress issues--the machine is called a (PowerMac G4) Cube, which Cobalt feels is confusingly close to "Qube".
The point of trademark, trade dress, and design patent law isn't to promote innovation, but to prevent predatory marketing and avoid customer confusion.
Here's why I don't think it's stealing: when you copy something, the original still exists. When you steal something, the original person doesn't have it anymore. It impacts /potential/ profits (as do a great many other acts, many of which are legal) but it doesn't deprive anyone of anything which they already had in their posession.
I don't think it's wrong to tape something off the radio, and trade tapes with your friends. I think it's wrong to make a copy of a CD and sell it to someone. Massive online trading is, for me, a grey area in the middle of which I can see both sides. The Law doesn't deal much in right and wrong anyway, though, so it's moot.
No, mpeg4 is for a great many things, including both 2-d video -and- polygon meshes.
Better to ask the average Komolgorov complexity of a picture; it doesn't do a whole lot of good to compress images down to their entropic minimum when that method turns out to be to equivilant to assigning each image an ID, and looking up the decompressed version in a database.
What I meant was something like Gnutella is harder to shut down than Napster as it's open source and no central file server.
Gnutella isn't open source. It was going to be, but then got shut down by AOL. There are compatable clients, some of which are open source.
Maybe you want a webpad. Maybe you want to use it for portable photoshop. Maybe you want a portable machine the size of the LCD panel on a laptop.
Maybe if you don't like it, you don't have to buy one, and you can just buy a different company's product, or even an Apple product which HAS a keyboard.
Unfortunately, this is basicly correct. There are three exceptions here. First, some programs (the good mp3 players, for example) use asynchronous i/o with completion routines running at interrupt time. These run even if the system-wide cooperative task isn't running. Second, there was a hack called the "menutasking enabler" which modified the system menubar routines to give background applications processing time while the foreground app had a menu pulled down. I'd be surprised if it still worked under OS 9, and it was buggy (if a background app scrolled some graphics "underneath" the menu, then the menu got moved too) but it was still very clever. Third, if a background app has launched any preemptive threads (using the multiprocessing manager, which you can do even on a single-processor machine) then these will continue to run, although they're not allowed to make any user-interaction related system calls.
License? What license? I bought a DVD. I am allowed to do anything with it which is legal to do. Copyright law has certain restrictions as to what I may do with it--I may not copy it except for fair use, I may not exhibit it publicly without permission of the copyright holder. The studios sold me a DVD, and first sale doctrine gives me the right to use it for its intended purpose.
When you buy a car, you're not allowed to use it to run over someone on purpose. That's because running over somebody on purpose is illegal, NOT because I'm violating my car's "license agreement" from Ford. Movie studios may want you to think things have been licensed rather than sold, but that's (currently) a fiction. You don't need a "license" from them to do anything that isn't against the law. Prior to DMCA, there was nothing about private viewing which was against copyright law. Now there is, and that's where it gets tricky.
Typical elitist statement, usually used to try to make some point about how the commoners can't be trusted. It's also demonstrably false, as we are both a democracy and a constitutinoal republic. Look up "democracy" and you will find, among other things:
(Sources are the American Heritage Dictionary, and Webster's Revised Unabridged)
"And without evil there can be no good, so it must be good to be evil sometimes" -- Satan, the South Park movie.
It's not a useful argument; you may not be able to define 'healthy' without 'unhealthy', but that doesn't mean if there weren't unhealthy people that the benefits of being healthy wouldn't still exist just because we didn't happen to have a word for it. We didn't need to distinguish between daytime baseball and nighttime baseball until we started to have the latter. That didn't take anything away from the former before we bothered to differentiate between the two.
Dialog boxes are not blocking; background tasks still get time. Menus block, but if you leave them dropped down for more than a certain time period, they go away on their own.
The LA Times had a story in 1998 about extensive illegal wiretaps performed by the LAPD.
There's nothing inherently Wintel-specific about COM or DCOM, it's just that that's where 99% of it happens to be implemented. I have a COM-freak friend who gets trigger happy whenever anyone talks about COM as being MS-specific. "It's publicly documented" he begins to froth...
RPM doesn't tell the whole story; data density also plays an important role. As data densities increase, the amount of data accessed in a single rotation also increases. So, while more RPMs are always nice, a 5400 RPM drive made today is going to have a greater transfer rate than one from a few years ago.
Children are indeed citizens, and have constitutional rights. In Tinker v. Des Moines, the supreme court ruled that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." This doesn't make sense unless they have those rights to begin with. Pornography is a different case, because (though I personally think it's stupid) "obscenity" isn't constitutionally protected. Some cases of government interference with free access to information has been ruled unconstitutional, because a free press is useless if the government can keep you from reading the output.
It's not at all clear-cut that this is constitutional. It hinges entirely on whether playiing a video game is free expression, and if so, whether the government can display a compelling (compelling enough for the court to override the 1st ammendment, which they are at least somewhat reluctant to do) interest in interfering with such expression.
And what if a parent wants a child to be able to play the video games? The parent has to show up in person and sit around waiting while the kid plays. This clearly penalizes resonsible parents at the expense of those who want the government to do their job for them.
To me, "Information wants to be free" just means that since it is intangible, can be copied easily, and can be "stolen" without depriving the original owner, it is acting as if it were a sentient entity which wanted to be free.
Don't confuse that with "people want information to be free" because many people don't. That much isn't a contradiction. Thus, no, you may not have my SSN.
Just so we're clear, you didn't like scheme because it was "too functional" and you didn't get to use mutable variables, so you almost became a -math- major instead?
That's BS and you know it. Both MS and Apple's OSes have publicly documented interfaces for custom filesystem modules.
"tar" may be a standard for reading a disk, but it isn't a standard for mounting a disk. You can untar encrypted files as you need them, but that leaves plaintext files on the HD. An encrypted filesystem tool would be smart about that to make sure there weren't bits of plaintext crud left on the disk.
Any utility written, such as PGPdisk, to mount an encrypted filesystem would have to be specially written for every OS, not just for MS and Apple's, because filesystem interfaces differ.
That's funny, my university didn't carry "child-porn newsgroups". It didn't carry -any- adult newsgroups. You might get in trouble if you attempt to censor individual messages, because then you might have liability for messages you missed, but nothing says you have to accept all of alt.binaries.* if you're going to run a newsfeed from a university.
Homosexuality, prostitution, masturbation, oral sex, pedophilia, and in general sex for purposes other than reproduction occur in the animal kingdom as well; just look at bonobo monkeys. If "nature" didn't "want" the penis to be able to ejaculate into an anus, there are all kinds of ways to engineer around that; require some sort of chemical marker found only in the vagina to trigger the ejaculation response, for example. Of course, "nature" doesn't "want" anything, and people who make claims that non-reproductive sex is "unnatural" (claims which are demonstrably false, as such activities occur ammong non-human animals who are somehow "natural" in a way humans aren't) are merely trying to push their personal agenda. Pushing an agenda is fine, but pretending that "nature is on your side" is silly.