You do realise that when you buy a copy of Quake 3 at the store for $59.99 you are not buying it, right? You are only buying a licence. In order to buy Quake 3 (if it were ever up for sale), you would probably have to pay some hundreds of milions of dollars.
That's certainly what software companies would like us to believe. My view is that it (used to be) just like buying a book: buying a copy of a book doesn't give you the right to publish it, any more than buying a copy of Photoshop gives you the right to publish it. What you do get, though, is the right to use it for its intended purpose. In the case of the book, to read it. In the case of Photoshop, to run it.
It gets hairy because you have to copy software (to hard drive and/or memory) to run it. So, the software companies decided to try to change things around so that instead of buying a copy of Photoshop, you are buying a "license to use Photoshop." Never mind that you still buy a copy of Cryptonomicon, not a "license to read" Cryptonomicon. Then, after people get used to these little pieces of paper stuck into the software box pretending to be binding contracts, you just pay off some policymakers, and *poof*, they suddenly ARE binding contracts.
In the case of books, there was a court case involving a publisher which printed a clause on the book jacket attempting to place a price floor on sales of used copies of the book. It was ruled unenforceable.
The GPL is much like a Standard EULA. It says "Hey, you can use this all you want, but you've got to agree to *MY* terms." Simple. It's just what the actual terms are that make it different. Just because it doesn't SAY "if these terms are broken, you must destroy all copies of this..." or anything like that, doesn't mean that you're allowed to break the license. It says, Though, that if you don't like The way it's distributed, or the licensing involved, Then you can find yourself another solution.
The big difference with a EULA is that it says "Just because you paid money for this doesn't mean you have the right to use it. You also have to agree to the following terms, which we assert are a binding contract even though the transaction which put this box into your hands was over before you even started to read this document." The GPL says "You don't have to agree to this, but if you don't, then copyright law (not any particular conract) prohibits you from copying it. Use it all you want, but if you want to create a derivative work (which, according to copyright law requires the permision of the copyright holder of the base work) then this document spells out the conditions under which you are allowed to do so."
Depends on how you define market share anyway; % of computers purchased ever? % estimated (by whom?) currently in use? % sold in any channel? For retail? For business? etc.
I'd accuse you of being a $cientology shill, but maybe you just have bad taste. Hubbard's fiction manages, amazingly, to be worse than his "science", and "religious" writings.
Last guy I talked to about it said he read it when he was 15. He was surprised to hear I found it so bad I couldn't finish. He went back to re-read it, and agreed that it really wasn't anywhere as good as he remembered; perhaps it's just nostalgia speaking?
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Re:So felons CAN profit from their crimes now?
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Copyrant
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· Score: 1
violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, if I'm not mistaken, is defined as a felony
If Microsoft has comitted a felony, does that mean it's going to jail? Not that cubicleland anywhere is far off from jail. They've got their own cafeteria service; all they'd have to do is weld the doors shut and downgrade from Sodexho-Marriot Microsoft-grade food to Sodexho-Marriot College Campus-grade food, and you'd be set.
Are we to interpret this as laziness on their part in not changing their standard copyright notice, or are they actually asserting that posting a link on a publicly available site which can be accessed without even a dodgy attempt at a click-through doesn't constitute publishing?
Fact: VA Linux Systems originally attempted to purchase both Freshmeat and Slashdot in late spring/early summer '99. If someone wants proof of this, email me privately, and i'll provide you with it.
Me too. I can especially do without the 90% of my company that clogs the network with all sorts of random pictures and chain emails and shit.
Perhaps if you explained to your boss how non-business-related network usage is getting in the way of your online pornography usage, some sort of fairer policy could be implemented?
About as fast, in all honesty (Well, Ultra/160, as the name says does 160 MB/s). However, IDE drives will almost certainly continue to lag SCSI in seek time, rotational velocity, cache, and efficency.
I'll certainly concede the advantages of SCSI, but how does a SCSI 7200 rpm drive manage to achieve a lower rotational latency than a 7200 rpm IDE drive?
You're wrong, sadly (or gladly, really). In the U.S., you cannot be prosecuted for knowing that down the street, Joe Crack peddles his product.
If some person walks up to you and asks where he can buy crack, and you tell him, and he is able to buy crack there, and the person is a cop doing a sting, you will go to jail for conspiracy/facilitation/whatever else they feel like charging you with.
As far as the mathematics are concerned, you can reproduce a band-limited analog signal of finite length perfectly from a finite number of sample points. In your square wave example, the waveform would be reconstructed as a sine wave, not a square wave. For this perfect reproduction, you would have picked a sample rate such that the nyquist frequency exceeded the highest frequency component of the source signal. A square wave would contain harmonics far above the nyquist frequency associated with your sample rate, thus it would not be the reconstructed output of the sample points. The mathematical reconstruction of the input signal is *NOT* to "connect the dots".
There *is* quantization noise if your samples are of finite precision, but the sine wave components of the reconstructed signals aren't stair-stepped, there is merely error/noise associated with their amplitudes (just as there is with an analog signal). The advantage to the digital approach is that you can bound the error for all eternity by selecting a suitably precise number of bits per sample.
The real world misses the mathematical reality in a couple of places; first, the sample points are quantized, which introduces noise into the output signal, and the reconstruction can suck ass if the D/A stage of your equipment isn't very good. This is an engineering reality.
However, as far as the mathematics are concerned, if you start with a band-limited signal, reconstruction from a sample rate whose nyquist frequency meets the highest frequency component of the input signal is lossless. If you're worried about quantization noise, you can make the precision of the samples as high as you like, until it is dwarfed by the noise that would be introduced into your sound system from the electrical interference of your brain cells expending far too much effort worrying about all this.
Doing a RCPT TO doesn't mean much with some mailservers. Like exim:
220 localhost ESMTP Exim 2.04 #1 Thu, 1 Jun 2000 16:36:21 -0700 HELO localhost 250 localhost Hello user at localhost [127.0.0.1] MAIL FROM: bob@bob.bob 250 is syntactically correct RCPT TO: whatever@bob.bob 250 is syntactically correct
IIRC, buying a DVD isn't the same as buying the property on the DVD. You're buying a license to view the property...if you read the terms, it blah-blah-blahs about private viewing only, no public performances, etc.
When you buy something, unless you agree specificly to a more restrictive contract, you generally have the right to do whatever the hell you want with it so long as you don't break the law. Until UCITA passes in my state, the DVD companies can write whatever they want to in fine print on the back, but the situation is still as follows:
I bought the DVD, so I can play it in my home for personal use, because that doesn't break the law. (Unless I were to be watching it under Linux, of course:P)
Am I allowed to copy it without restrictions? No, because I'm not the copyright owner, so doing so would break the law.
Am I allowed to exhibit it in public for profit? No, again because of copyright law.
It has nothing to do with any supposed "license" that the IP owner would like to trick you into thinking you've agreed to. It has everything to do with copyright law.
Once you buy a DVD, you -own- it. The law may restrict what you're legally allowed to do with this property you own, but you still own it, just as you may own your car, but you're not allowed to, say, run over people with it. This is because vehicular homicide is illegal, not because your "license" to the car from the car company prohibits it.
On the contrary, the storyline was why I was so fond of the Marathon series of games. They weren't necesarily graphicly advanced for their time, but the plot was engaging.
I've heard the opposite. I'm not inclined to believe either view without an attempt at proof. Are there publicly available benchmarks for this sort of thing?
If you were to rewrite the Linux kernel (as you suggest would be a good thing), how would what you ended up with still be the Linux kernel as oppsed to YA UNIX-flavored OS?
Yes... They do sell at a loss. The reason they make money off of games is that the Sony Playstation refuses to play games that don't have a digital version of some Sony Trademarked image at a certain location on the cd. The only way a developer gets licensed to put the trademarked item on the CD is if they pay a per-game-sold fee.
The dreamcast uses the trademark bit, the sony copy protection is straight CRC errors. VGS currently will NOT play a gold disc without a software crack, just as a regular PS won't play a gold disc without a hardware crack.
I'm running MacOS 9 on my iMac, and its interface is frankly none too impressive. The lack of a task display of some sort (like a taskbar or icon row),
You can "tear-off" the application menu to get a floating taskbar window
the use of that single fucking shared menu
That's probably just one of those religious issues; I've gotten used to moving for the specific menu I want when I use windows/u*ix, but I like being able to "slam" the mouse up against the top of the screen to hit the menubar.
Slashdot Mirror
In general, that'd be trademarks which you lose the right to enforce if you're not vigilant, not patents or copyright.
That's certainly what software companies would like us to believe. My view is that it (used to be) just like buying a book: buying a copy of a book doesn't give you the right to publish it, any more than buying a copy of Photoshop gives you the right to publish it. What you do get, though, is the right to use it for its intended purpose. In the case of the book, to read it. In the case of Photoshop, to run it.
It gets hairy because you have to copy software (to hard drive and/or memory) to run it. So, the software companies decided to try to change things around so that instead of buying a copy of Photoshop, you are buying a "license to use Photoshop." Never mind that you still buy a copy of Cryptonomicon, not a "license to read" Cryptonomicon. Then, after people get used to these little pieces of paper stuck into the software box pretending to be binding contracts, you just pay off some policymakers, and *poof*, they suddenly ARE binding contracts.
In the case of books, there was a court case involving a publisher which printed a clause on the book jacket attempting to place a price floor on sales of used copies of the book. It was ruled unenforceable.
The big difference with a EULA is that it says "Just because you paid money for this doesn't mean you have the right to use it. You also have to agree to the following terms, which we assert are a binding contract even though the transaction which put this box into your hands was over before you even started to read this document." The GPL says "You don't have to agree to this, but if you don't, then copyright law (not any particular conract) prohibits you from copying it. Use it all you want, but if you want to create a derivative work (which, according to copyright law requires the permision of the copyright holder of the base work) then this document spells out the conditions under which you are allowed to do so."
Depends on how you define market share anyway; % of computers purchased ever? % estimated (by whom?) currently in use? % sold in any channel? For retail? For business? etc.
I'd accuse you of being a $cientology shill, but maybe you just have bad taste. Hubbard's fiction manages, amazingly, to be worse than his "science", and "religious" writings.
Last guy I talked to about it said he read it when he was 15. He was surprised to hear I found it so bad I couldn't finish. He went back to re-read it, and agreed that it really wasn't anywhere as good as he remembered; perhaps it's just nostalgia speaking?
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If Microsoft has comitted a felony, does that mean it's going to jail? Not that cubicleland anywhere is far off from jail. They've got their own cafeteria service; all they'd have to do is weld the doors shut and downgrade from Sodexho-Marriot Microsoft-grade food to Sodexho-Marriot College Campus-grade food, and you'd be set.
From the top of the release notes:
Copyright © 2000 Lucent Technologies Inc.
All Rights Reserved
THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES INC.
The copyright notice above does not evidence any actual or
intended publication of such source code.
All Rights Reserved
Are we to interpret this as laziness on their part in not changing their standard copyright notice, or are they actually asserting that posting a link on a publicly available site which can be accessed without even a dodgy attempt at a click-through doesn't constitute publishing?
Why not just post this proof publicly?
Perhaps if you explained to your boss how non-business-related network usage is getting in the way of your online pornography usage, some sort of fairer policy could be implemented?
I'll certainly concede the advantages of SCSI, but how does a SCSI 7200 rpm drive manage to achieve a lower rotational latency than a 7200 rpm IDE drive?
Apple says that network transparency for Quartz will be a "third party opportunity".
If some person walks up to you and asks where he can buy crack, and you tell him, and he is able to buy crack there, and the person is a cop doing a sting, you will go to jail for conspiracy/facilitation/whatever else they feel like charging you with.
Settling out of court never sets legal prescedent, whatever the jurisdiction.
As far as the mathematics are concerned, you can reproduce a band-limited analog signal of finite length perfectly from a finite number of sample points. In your square wave example, the waveform would be reconstructed as a sine wave, not a square wave. For this perfect reproduction, you would have picked a sample rate such that the nyquist frequency exceeded the highest frequency component of the source signal. A square wave would contain harmonics far above the nyquist frequency associated with your sample rate, thus it would not be the reconstructed output of the sample points. The mathematical reconstruction of the input signal is *NOT* to "connect the dots".
There *is* quantization noise if your samples are of finite precision, but the sine wave components of the reconstructed signals aren't stair-stepped, there is merely error/noise associated with their amplitudes (just as there is with an analog signal). The advantage to the digital approach is that you can bound the error for all eternity by selecting a suitably precise number of bits per sample.
The real world misses the mathematical reality in a couple of places; first, the sample points are quantized, which introduces noise into the output signal, and the reconstruction can suck ass if the D/A stage of your equipment isn't very good. This is an engineering reality.
However, as far as the mathematics are concerned, if you start with a band-limited signal, reconstruction from a sample rate whose nyquist frequency meets the highest frequency component of the input signal is lossless. If you're worried about quantization noise, you can make the precision of the samples as high as you like, until it is dwarfed by the noise that would be introduced into your sound system from the electrical interference of your brain cells expending far too much effort worrying about all this.
It's not even really MPEG-4; it's video compression based on MPEG-4, using avi or asf as the file format.
Doing a RCPT TO doesn't mean much with some mailservers. Like exim:
220 localhost ESMTP Exim 2.04 #1 Thu, 1 Jun 2000 16:36:21 -0700
HELO localhost
250 localhost Hello user at localhost [127.0.0.1]
MAIL FROM: bob@bob.bob
250 is syntactically correct
RCPT TO: whatever@bob.bob
250 is syntactically correct
When you buy something, unless you agree specificly to a more restrictive contract, you generally have the right to do whatever the hell you want with it so long as you don't break the law. Until UCITA passes in my state, the DVD companies can write whatever they want to in fine print on the back, but the situation is still as follows:
I bought the DVD, so I can play it in my home for personal use, because that doesn't break the law. (Unless I were to be watching it under Linux, of course :P)
Am I allowed to copy it without restrictions? No, because I'm not the copyright owner, so doing so would break the law.
Am I allowed to exhibit it in public for profit? No, again because of copyright law.
It has nothing to do with any supposed "license" that the IP owner would like to trick you into thinking you've agreed to. It has everything to do with copyright law.
Once you buy a DVD, you -own- it. The law may restrict what you're legally allowed to do with this property you own, but you still own it, just as you may own your car, but you're not allowed to, say, run over people with it. This is because vehicular homicide is illegal, not because your "license" to the car from the car company prohibits it.
On the contrary, the storyline was why I was so fond of the Marathon series of games. They weren't necesarily graphicly advanced for their time, but the plot was engaging.
I've heard the opposite. I'm not inclined to believe either view without an attempt at proof. Are there publicly available benchmarks for this sort of thing?
If you were to rewrite the Linux kernel (as you suggest would be a good thing), how would what you ended up with still be the Linux kernel as oppsed to YA UNIX-flavored OS?
I've heard that the US was fully in compiance with WIPO even -without- the DMCA; the DMCA was just icing on the cake for American IP owners.
The dreamcast uses the trademark bit, the sony copy protection is straight CRC errors. VGS currently will NOT play a gold disc without a software crack, just as a regular PS won't play a gold disc without a hardware crack.
You can "tear-off" the application menu to get a floating taskbar window
That's probably just one of those religious issues; I've gotten used to moving for the specific menu I want when I use windows/u*ix, but I like being able to "slam" the mouse up against the top of the screen to hit the menubar.
Software that stays on one machine is certainly not distributed. If they circulate the software internally, though, why isn't that distribution?