Sorry about the combative tone of my last comment. I wrote it and thought I hit preview yet it submitted it anyway. Ohh well. Anyway, I'd still argue that slashdot is a hosting site, they just do free hosting on a limited basis. Your second argument seems a bit odd. You seem, unless I'm misreading you, to advocate that everyone build electronic gates to their sites lest someone discover it. The fact that I don't have a gate around my yard does not mean that I'm inviting the world to come onto my property. However people with business to transact (such as UPS or Fedex) or friends of mine or other such expected visitors or even the occasional unexpected visitor are welcome to stop by and transact their business or talk to me. But I'd be pretty annoyed if the UPS guy told one of his buddies to invite everyone possible to come party at my house and to invite all their friends because the party is expected to be a megabash and maybe my house'll burn down or my lawn will be destroyed but that's ok because I can rebuild/re-sod it, right? We shouldn't need to gate off the internet just because some people out there think it's just fine to invite everyone to my website without even asking me. It's not hard to ask permission. And slashdot is not known for their current news but for their interesting news. That's why they don't have reporters who investigate but instead wait for submissions and review those submissions all in good time and not immediately (though sometimes it is pretty instant, it just depends). I do like slashdot but its because of their sometimes interesting stories, not their manners. I'm not asking for miracles, I'm asking for courtesy such that people who do write interesting things don't feel compelled to hide their work behind elaborate fences and gateways to keep out random websurfers. You wouldn't want me to invite many thousands of people to party at your house without discussing it with you first, would you?
1. Slashdot is a hosting site in that I can create my own journal on it and they have free membership. 2. Common sense will tell you that if you aren't linking to a major, well known website or some sort of.edu site that it probably cannot handle it (unless it's got a specific disclaimer saying something like 'Bring it on Slashdot!' ). 3. Sorry if you have no patience, but if you're expecting someone else to find news for you then you're already adding what should be, to you, an intolerable delay and instead you should be out combing the web to find news long before it shows up on slashdot. 4. The community automatically STEALS the copyrighted information from these sites without requesting permission or even checking to see if there's any statement allowing reprinting of information. If you're one of those people who thinks 'information wants to be free' you just go ask your local judge whether copying a copyrighted work without permission is illegal or not and see what (s)he says. 5. The guy with the lego site might've been tickled pink. Or he might've been atomic red. At least userfriendly has a little banner that someone can use when they've been selected as a LOTD.
Slashdot is rude in selecting their targets. And I've had submissions rejected before only to see them appear a day later (I'm not bitching about that; I know there're various editors and factors concerning what links are chosen) so timeliness of news really isn't a good argument. While anyone with a geek nature wants to know things ASAP, this really wasn't a time sensitive thing. There was no reason to post this link without dropping a quick email to the site owner and attempting to defend slashdot's editors in this case is like trying to attack an elephant with a fly swatter. Either endeavour will not result in much success.
Copyright infringement is a violation of someone else's rights. If I sit outside your door with a shotgun and tell you I'm going to shoot you if you leave, then while I'm not stealing from you, I am keeping you from going to work and making money (assuming you don't telecommute but then I could cut your phone and cable before sitting down in the lawn chair and we'd be to the same situation). You'd be pretty annoyed and would call the cops to have them take me away and make sure I don't come back to sit outside your door again. Lets flip it around. I write a piece of software, you decrypt it and give it away to everyone. You're effectively preventing me from going out into the world and making money. Except you don't even have the inconvenience of needing to sit outside my door. Copyright infringement is no different than imposing your will (e.g. don't believe in copyrights, think something costs too much) on others by force. Someone gets on a bus with a gun and demands to be taken somewhere. I'd call that terrorism. Someone else doesn't believe in copyright and rips off software and gives it away to such an extent that a company goes bankrupt and the owner, now penniless, starves to death or commits suicide. The ultimate end of copyright infringement is the elimination of programmers, actors, playwrights, musicians, and all other forms of people who entertain us. If you want history of copyrights, check out this site:
http://www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/std/reso ur ces/copyright/history.htm
If you want to debate the length of copyrights, sure. The current system is insane and I'm pulling for a good decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft. Without copyright law though, it'd just end up being contract law. And instead of having things eventually end up in the public domain, the contracts would be crafted in such a way that they never would. I'll take an assured release of material over contractually forbidden one anyday. Which leads into the DMCA, but that's a question for another day.
Actually, if you want to use trade terms, it's copyright infringement, and if you check out Black's Law Dictionary, you'll find that the first three words under the definition of copyright are "A property right". There is also a definition for "cybertheft" which deals with stealing people's property online (the examples they give are credit card numbers and intellectual property). Copyright "violation" isn't a violation in the same way that a traffic ticket is a violation. The law will slam you for copyright violations.
To give an example, if you went to McDonalds, bought a hamburger, studied it, then started making your own hamburgers that'd be fine. If however you started calling your hamburgers McDonalds hamburgers that wouldn't be fine. The same example could be made with any other product. If you want to study how MS Word works and then write your own MS Word like product that's all good. But you can't make it exactly the same and call it MS Word (in essence, copy it).
If you sign a noncompete agreement with an employer then leave the company after a few years, you can't turn around and steal their customers or use inside knowledge to benefit from it. So there are times when providing a product that competes with another one (your services in the aforementioned situation) is illegal.
One last note, using the term theft isn't a scare tactic, it's just a warning. The law doesn't use scare tactics because they don't work. The whole point of scare tactics are to keep someone from doing something they're actually allowed to do. You are not allowed to copy software and it is theft and you will be spending time in prison if caught just like a guy who steals cars. You may not agree with the price of software, but making 100 copies of MS Office is like stealing a Mercedes. If you don't agree with the price/license/whatever of the software, don't buy it. But then you'll say that you need it. At that point, if there really are unfair terms, you can bring suit to have them not enforced (yeah, lawsuits can get expensive, and just because corporations have lots of lawyers doesn't mean that injustice will prevail. if your argument is valid, you'll win or you'll sue your lawyer for malpractice if you lose). Also, though you may not believe it, the government really does look into these sorts of things and if there is injustice in the way a company acts, Uncle Sam'll bring down the hammer. To make a long story short, weasel words won't get you off the hook. This guy's going to prison for 33 months. You could be next if you're stealing property (be it cars or movies, the courts don't care).
(Note, I'm a law student, not a lawyer, and anyway none of the above should be construed as legal advice).
If you read the patent itself instead of just trusting whatever person managed to get their story approved, you'll notice that it relates specifically to instant messaging and to a remote user logged into a instant messaging system. Yeah, eliza exists. But emacs is not an instant messaging system and you can't claim that it was. It's possible that maybe for fun once someone did some sort of death pipe to get eliza to read and feed talk or ytalk, but those weren't called instant messaging even. So before bitching about this patent, read it and tell me what the prior art really is
The congressional intent on the 4th amendment was physical searching of your home and seizure of property therefrom. Beyond that it's up to the Supreme Court to decide if you get anything else. Congress writes the laws, if they're confusing then the Supreme Court decides what they mean. But it's the Supreme Court that decides, not the populace at large. So many people in the U.S. think that we're a democracy. We aren't. We're a democratically elected republic. Which means you either run for office yourself, or else you choose who gets to make the laws for you and they choose who gets to decide what those laws mean. Democracy brought Rome and many other republics to empires and empires screwed people over. Just remember that when considering things such as Amendment 17 (that made senators directly electable) and the occasional talk of doing away with the electoral college. Each such step is a step towards a dearth of rights, if history is to be believed (and it should be).
Out of curiosity, why does it matter if "they" spy on you? Who's really going to care if you buy a copy of the South Park movie from Amazon? Or if you get some caffeinated soap from Think Geek? Or any of that. There's so much communication traffic in the world that for someone to pay a particular interest to you you'd have to be subscribing to the Child Porn for Mad Bombers Who Want to Poison Drinking Water with Alfalfa mailing list. Or some such nonsense. It's crazy to assume that anyone cares about what you write to someone in an email. Hell, you could send emails saying the president's a bastard and someone should off him. If you're starting to research into buying a Cesna and getting a pilot's license and begin looking for some C4 or the such then they should be looking into you. Otherwise who's going to care? The FBI/CIA/Uber secret agency you never heard of isn't gonna waste time looking at you. Time is money, after all. The US works because when things get too big and worrisome then people find out about it and things percolate through the news. If you worry about privacy then why not worry about the checker at your grocery store who sees you buy a certain deodorant or maybe some fungal cream. He or she now knows what you smell like and that you've got nasty feet. That's an invasion of privacy in essence and possibly more embarrasing than having some FBI guy who never met you and likely never will knowing that you subscribe to some porno sites (not that an agent would likely even see such a thing unless you had a lot of red flags against you to begin with in which case, once again, I personally feel secure knowing that they are looking into you). That's just my thoughts on it though
I bought a Asus A7V266 mobo about a year ago and starting a few months ago it decided to assassinate hard drives. No idea why. I replaced it with an Asus P4B-266 and it's worked fine (I got a new processor as well). It strikes me as odd though that such behavior would come about. As well, the ALi chipset the old board relied was supported by linux just slightly better than an AT motherboard. Anyway, I definitely wouldn't recommend those motherboards. Asus knows Intel, but for whatever reason it's still working on getting AMD right.
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
As a guy who's going into law school to study this stuff, I think I can answer.:) There're most certainly some people out there who have never studied history and have no idea about the way things really work. Disregarding them (and crazy opinions they may have), the main problem really is the lack of qualified investigators. The USPTO can add investigators as fast as they want. But they've already sullied their name among the online community. I'm not sure that there're actually any software patents out there that have prior art that would've disqualified them. But if I had to put money on it I'd bet that there are. And the USPTO can't go back and just remove a patent they granted without a challenge being brought against it. The cost of lawsuits against patents and the (to my knowledge) patent holder friendly nature of such a suit makes it unlikely for all but the most limiting and undeserved patents to be challenged. If there was a system whereby someone could submit prior art (perhaps encurring a small fee to discourage limitless and dubious submissions) for a patent with which they disagree and have that prior art reviewed and the patent, assuming the prior art was very strong, revoked then people might be more content with the system. But ideas like that are the types of things that need lots of consideration before being implemented in some form (if at all).
The purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is simple. An inventor/creator is given for a limited period of time a monopoly over his/her creation. The time limits are meant to be long enough for the person to recoup costs of creation and make a profit off of it thereby encouraging people to create. There're two problems now. The current time limit in the US for copyrights is bizarre. It discourages people from creating more than once, assuming they create something enjoyed on a mass scale the first time. The authors life + X years system also encourages an intellectual nobility in that the children and possibly grandchildren will continue to benefit from the invention of a parent thereby having no incentive to create. The most you could justify is something along the lines of authors life or 30 years, whichever is longer. That way you avoid a situation in which the primary wage earner dies unexpectedly and thereby leaves his/her family out in the cold. I'd be in favor of a flat 40 years, myself. Plenty of time to recoup costs and make a nice amount of money, not so much time that it stretches into the bizarre. However I'd temper that with the condition that a copyright held by a corporation lasts only 25 years. As for patents, 14 years is fine. The problem is the silly nature of some patents granted these days. The solution for this is for congress to begin properly funding the USPTO again. The USPTO is currently reliant on people filing for patents and trademarks for its funding. It's underfunded with a builtin incentive to grant patents to encourage people to continue filing. Patents only last 14 years and if they're too stupid they are challengeable, but the granting of somewhat silly patents can slow down scientific progress. Trademark law seems mostly fine with a few exceptions (the despair.com frownie comes to mind). But those are only valid if enforced anyway. If someone with a common speech/use trademark ever brought suit it'd get struck down (think kleenex).
The kernel drivers are open source, yes. But all they are is an interface between the kernel and the closed source unified binary driver that actually controls the hardware. And many people, myself included, have had trouble with it. But some seem to think that AC's the one to send reports to when they should go to Nvidia. Oh well
He is more likely than most on slashdot to understand copyright. Copyrights and patents have their beginnings in Britain. The crown would give to inventors/creators the right to produce certain things in exchange for a hefty kickback. It was a method of controlling information as well. No grant from the crown = no ability to publish/produce. These were also used to halt manufacturing developments in the American colonies and people could be put to death if found guilty of relaying secrets relating to how certain machines worked. So that's what he meant by oppressive regimes.
The key thing about such a marker is: whether they think it's wonderful or they think it means death, they'll still think about it. Which means that if they're anywhere near where we are they'll study it and research it and move in slowly. As well, if archaeologists started digging something up and their skin and hair started falling out, I think they'd stop. A primitive culture is likely to fear and respect a large marking showing death and if it starts killing them they'll stay away. An advanced culture will likely study and research a large marking showing death and if they don't think to use geiger counters or the such then at the very least if they start dying then they'll back up a lot and try to figure out why. Either way, a symbol of death is likely to provoke thought of some sort and at best only a tiny proportion of the population of humans or whatever may follow us will be exposed to a death thing and they'll likely realize to stay away fairly quickly. Whether the skull and bones is a positive or negative thing in the future, given its variance in human cultures, chances are that it will bear some importance and thereby merit attention and caution/interest. That's why it's a great symbol to use. But that's just my two cents.
For a pure and simple "You're gonna die" motif, you just can't beat the tried and true skull and cross bones. We may evolve, but we know what our ancestor creatures looked like and it they'd marked anything with something that looked like a skull with bones we'd know to avoid it. That's my two cents.
That's the key point I was trying to make though. Yeah, they make their EULA's as unclear as they possibly can. If it's too unclear though, then there's a chance that it's not legally valid. In contractual issues, a judge generally favors the lessee over the lessor if the terms are unclear. Up to a point anyway. But if you don't like/can't understand what their license is saying then don't use it. Accepting these wretched licenses only emboldens them to continue to create them. And just because a license is disagreeable to and/or unreadable by you, it is not legally invalid if you accept it. Anyway, that's the only real point I was trying to make. Go with the old U.S. anti-drug slogan and just say no.
Yeah, sure, I'm gonna be flamed. But how is it possible for "the original authors" to be "ripping you off"? They wrote the code. Not you. How is it a rip off? Do I have a serious logical gap? It seems to me that the reverse is true. I don't like spyware/adware/whateverotherinsidiousnameyouwantto callitware. So I use linux and avoid such program completely. It seems to me that people using programs like adaway/adaware/whatever are in fact ripping off the original programmers. As are the people who designed said programs. If you don't like what these companies (e.g. the Kazaa people) are doing with their software, don't use it. The chief principle of the GPL is almost entirely that. If you don't want to use it as they say you can, you cannot use it. If someone violates the GPL there's a general uproar. Yet someone violates a different software license and people are complaining about the writers of that license? Stop and think about what I'm saying for a minute before I get mod'd to never-never land. That's all
Another important argument to consider is this: Flash lives and breathes off of the size of its market. Should the number of users who have the flash plugin on their computer ever take a serious hit (read: they start charging for the plugin), the number of sites that will use it will plummit. Either that or the sites will just stick with the older version of flash that's still available. Either way it'd be financial suicide. Macromedia is in a position where they throw away money on the player in order to ensure good sales of the development tools. The player is made by them to ensure that everyone has the ability to view flash without any quality problems (or as few as possible). Users like flash and don't need to pay for it = developers pay money to create flash. So Macromedia has to throw away the money on developing the flash plugin in order to recoup it many times over on sales of the flash creator. That's just my view of it though. It definitely isn't a free/open product though. It just seems that way from the POV of web users.
Sounds to me like you hearken for the good old days in the '50s as well, when everyone drove big cars with huge engines and faucets all had hot water, cold water, and crude oil and there were no stupid diseases and America was on top of the world and everyone could be a test pilot and drive a Corvette and....... get over it. I was there in the early days of the web too. The content then sucked. The difference between then and now is that the web in the old days was an old boys club and you could all but post your credit card number online without fear. Now there're a lot more people using it and so it mirrors the real world that you're trying to escape from. Content is the almighty god of web users for bizarre reasons undeterminable to anyone. It's like a state religion accepted without question. You know what the real key to the internet is? Entertainment. If I'm looking for news online I'm headed to news.bbc.co.uk or www.nytimes.com or the such. I'm not going to buckaroobobsbackofthetrucknewssite.com. On the other hand, there're days when the news is just pretty damned dull. So I look for something entertaining instead. The key to finding what you want isn't to eliminate the stuff you don't like, it's to have good searching mechanisms. I notice that no one has ever created a successful pay to search site. Why not? Because you'd deplore "the death of the web" if they did. But maybe a pay to use search engine would be useful. Because then they'd have the money to really research links well and even host their own content. You'd pay for an encyclopedia but you wouldn't pay for one that is gracious enough to point you to information they don't own? Bah. This rant has gone on too long I fear. I agree that the web is in a state of decay, but it's decaying because people are bored with it. Want a perfect analogue? Go out and buy/borrow a movie you haven't seen before. Watch it. Assuming it's reasonably good you'll pay attention to it. Watch it again. Then again. Then again and again and again... you will hate it by the 50th time. It's the same movie. It's just a different you. Punch a bucket of water and the little ripples in it will change. Punch a bucket of ice and your hand will hurt. All things change and indeed all things need to change. The world would be a very boring place if they didn't. Sorry for the rant, I don't mean to offend. Just thought the other side of the coin should be seen as well.
This is only sorta on topic I realize. But isn't it convenient that all of us got to post comments to the first RPFJ and right after all the comments were in they release a new version of it. Is it just me or does that totally slam the purpose of the Tunney Act? I commented on the original document by reading it thoroughly and writing my specific problems with each section. Given their changes, sections of my commentary (and undoubtably numerous other's commentaries as well) are irrelevant, and things I would've commented on are not included as it was impossible to know these changes.
Step One: Release a bad settlement Step Two: Accept public commentary Step Three: Modify the bad settlement slighty to give the appearance of having listened to the commentary in order to get the settlement originally desired, not allowing the public to comment on it Step Four: Laugh all the way to the bank
I think there should be a new Tunney Act period for the new settlement. But hey, what do I know anyway. It's not like they listened to my original comments...
O'Reilly avoids it through splitting books up into many mini books. Think about it. ~20 Perl books. But they do a good job of splitting things up so it's all good by me
I think the real problem with your sig is that it's inflammatory by its very nature. Implying that Win2K is an "upgrade" from Linux 2.4 is inherently going to draw negative criticism to you. Perhaps you just enjoy attention. Regardless, you cannot argue that Windows is a more technically superior solution and at the same time reduce someone else's arguments to nothing because you're looking at it from a "desktop user's" perspective. Desktop user implies through its connotation someone who is not very technically apt and therefore has no basis to judge a product as such. As for a Win2K running faster on a strictly desktop system, that's a pantload in my opinion. You seem to be going by your own observations and my observations tell me that the only application that starts faster on Windows is IE and that's because they tied it into the operating system. If you hate waiting for a browser so much when you use Linux just keep one open all the time. With X it's possible to have multiple virtual desktops making it easy to have a perma-webbrowser that isn't taking up space. And given that Unix apps in general are much better about memory management than Windows (though I do admit that Microsoft has been trying to fix that) it doesn't cause a problem to do that. Anyway, don't complain about the RAMdisk solution for konqueror because that's essentially exactly what windows does except they don't tell you that explicity and linux would much rather give you the option to not have precious ram space sucked up by an application that is permanently nearly running. Regardless, get rid of the inflammatory sig and you won't have people complaining to you. Keep it and you'll continue getting attention I'm sure (though the quality of the attention will continue to decline).
If you read the 1.0 standard, RPM is the official package format.
http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/gLSB/gLSB/swinstal l. html#PKGFORMAT
Not that I personally agree with RPM but I've heard that the RPM format is getting more robust and might actually offer all the things needed to have a unified packaging format. It'll be interesting to see if Debian and Slackware (along with other smaller non-RPM distros) go along with this though.
Most definitely. I hope that in a few years I won't be adding the tag comment "sadly so" to this, but we'll see. Anyway, these are my feelings now and thanks for paying attention
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry about the combative tone of my last comment. I wrote it and thought I hit preview yet it submitted it anyway. Ohh well. Anyway, I'd still argue that slashdot is a hosting site, they just do free hosting on a limited basis. Your second argument seems a bit odd. You seem, unless I'm misreading you, to advocate that everyone build electronic gates to their sites lest someone discover it. The fact that I don't have a gate around my yard does not mean that I'm inviting the world to come onto my property. However people with business to transact (such as UPS or Fedex) or friends of mine or other such expected visitors or even the occasional unexpected visitor are welcome to stop by and transact their business or talk to me. But I'd be pretty annoyed if the UPS guy told one of his buddies to invite everyone possible to come party at my house and to invite all their friends because the party is expected to be a megabash and maybe my house'll burn down or my lawn will be destroyed but that's ok because I can rebuild/re-sod it, right? We shouldn't need to gate off the internet just because some people out there think it's just fine to invite everyone to my website without even asking me. It's not hard to ask permission. And slashdot is not known for their current news but for their interesting news. That's why they don't have reporters who investigate but instead wait for submissions and review those submissions all in good time and not immediately (though sometimes it is pretty instant, it just depends). I do like slashdot but its because of their sometimes interesting stories, not their manners. I'm not asking for miracles, I'm asking for courtesy such that people who do write interesting things don't feel compelled to hide their work behind elaborate fences and gateways to keep out random websurfers. You wouldn't want me to invite many thousands of people to party at your house without discussing it with you first, would you?
My worthless answer to your opinion:
.edu site that it probably cannot handle it (unless it's got a specific disclaimer saying something like 'Bring it on Slashdot!' ).
1. Slashdot is a hosting site in that I can create my own journal on it and they have free membership.
2. Common sense will tell you that if you aren't linking to a major, well known website or some sort of
3. Sorry if you have no patience, but if you're expecting someone else to find news for you then you're already adding what should be, to you, an intolerable delay and instead you should be out combing the web to find news long before it shows up on slashdot.
4. The community automatically STEALS the copyrighted information from these sites without requesting permission or even checking to see if there's any statement allowing reprinting of information. If you're one of those people who thinks 'information wants to be free' you just go ask your local judge whether copying a copyrighted work without permission is illegal or not and see what (s)he says.
5. The guy with the lego site might've been tickled pink. Or he might've been atomic red. At least userfriendly has a little banner that someone can use when they've been selected as a LOTD.
Slashdot is rude in selecting their targets. And I've had submissions rejected before only to see them appear a day later (I'm not bitching about that; I know there're various editors and factors concerning what links are chosen) so timeliness of news really isn't a good argument. While anyone with a geek nature wants to know things ASAP, this really wasn't a time sensitive thing. There was no reason to post this link without dropping a quick email to the site owner and attempting to defend slashdot's editors in this case is like trying to attack an elephant with a fly swatter. Either endeavour will not result in much success.
Copyright infringement is a violation of someone else's rights. If I sit outside your door with a shotgun and tell you I'm going to shoot you if you leave, then while I'm not stealing from you, I am keeping you from going to work and making money (assuming you don't telecommute but then I could cut your phone and cable before sitting down in the lawn chair and we'd be to the same situation). You'd be pretty annoyed and would call the cops to have them take me away and make sure I don't come back to sit outside your door again. Lets flip it around. I write a piece of software, you decrypt it and give it away to everyone. You're effectively preventing me from going out into the world and making money. Except you don't even have the inconvenience of needing to sit outside my door. Copyright infringement is no different than imposing your will (e.g. don't believe in copyrights, think something costs too much) on others by force. Someone gets on a bus with a gun and demands to be taken somewhere. I'd call that terrorism. Someone else doesn't believe in copyright and rips off software and gives it away to such an extent that a company goes bankrupt and the owner, now penniless, starves to death or commits suicide. The ultimate end of copyright infringement is the elimination of programmers, actors, playwrights, musicians, and all other forms of people who entertain us. If you want history of copyrights, check out this site:
o ur ces/copyright/history.htm
http://www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/std/res
If you want to debate the length of copyrights, sure. The current system is insane and I'm pulling for a good decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft. Without copyright law though, it'd just end up being contract law. And instead of having things eventually end up in the public domain, the contracts would be crafted in such a way that they never would. I'll take an assured release of material over contractually forbidden one anyday. Which leads into the DMCA, but that's a question for another day.
Actually, if you want to use trade terms, it's copyright infringement, and if you check out Black's Law Dictionary, you'll find that the first three words under the definition of copyright are "A property right". There is also a definition for "cybertheft" which deals with stealing people's property online (the examples they give are credit card numbers and intellectual property). Copyright "violation" isn't a violation in the same way that a traffic ticket is a violation. The law will slam you for copyright violations.
To give an example, if you went to McDonalds, bought a hamburger, studied it, then started making your own hamburgers that'd be fine. If however you started calling your hamburgers McDonalds hamburgers that wouldn't be fine. The same example could be made with any other product. If you want to study how MS Word works and then write your own MS Word like product that's all good. But you can't make it exactly the same and call it MS Word (in essence, copy it).
If you sign a noncompete agreement with an employer then leave the company after a few years, you can't turn around and steal their customers or use inside knowledge to benefit from it. So there are times when providing a product that competes with another one (your services in the aforementioned situation) is illegal.
One last note, using the term theft isn't a scare tactic, it's just a warning. The law doesn't use scare tactics because they don't work. The whole point of scare tactics are to keep someone from doing something they're actually allowed to do. You are not allowed to copy software and it is theft and you will be spending time in prison if caught just like a guy who steals cars. You may not agree with the price of software, but making 100 copies of MS Office is like stealing a Mercedes. If you don't agree with the price/license/whatever of the software, don't buy it. But then you'll say that you need it. At that point, if there really are unfair terms, you can bring suit to have them not enforced (yeah, lawsuits can get expensive, and just because corporations have lots of lawyers doesn't mean that injustice will prevail. if your argument is valid, you'll win or you'll sue your lawyer for malpractice if you lose). Also, though you may not believe it, the government really does look into these sorts of things and if there is injustice in the way a company acts, Uncle Sam'll bring down the hammer. To make a long story short, weasel words won't get you off the hook. This guy's going to prison for 33 months. You could be next if you're stealing property (be it cars or movies, the courts don't care).
(Note, I'm a law student, not a lawyer, and anyway none of the above should be construed as legal advice).
If you read the patent itself instead of just trusting whatever person managed to get their story approved, you'll notice that it relates specifically to instant messaging and to a remote user logged into a instant messaging system. Yeah, eliza exists. But emacs is not an instant messaging system and you can't claim that it was. It's possible that maybe for fun once someone did some sort of death pipe to get eliza to read and feed talk or ytalk, but those weren't called instant messaging even. So before bitching about this patent, read it and tell me what the prior art really is
The congressional intent on the 4th amendment was physical searching of your home and seizure of property therefrom. Beyond that it's up to the Supreme Court to decide if you get anything else. Congress writes the laws, if they're confusing then the Supreme Court decides what they mean. But it's the Supreme Court that decides, not the populace at large. So many people in the U.S. think that we're a democracy. We aren't. We're a democratically elected republic. Which means you either run for office yourself, or else you choose who gets to make the laws for you and they choose who gets to decide what those laws mean. Democracy brought Rome and many other republics to empires and empires screwed people over. Just remember that when considering things such as Amendment 17 (that made senators directly electable) and the occasional talk of doing away with the electoral college. Each such step is a step towards a dearth of rights, if history is to be believed (and it should be).
Out of curiosity, why does it matter if "they" spy on you? Who's really going to care if you buy a copy of the South Park movie from Amazon? Or if you get some caffeinated soap from Think Geek? Or any of that. There's so much communication traffic in the world that for someone to pay a particular interest to you you'd have to be subscribing to the Child Porn for Mad Bombers Who Want to Poison Drinking Water with Alfalfa mailing list. Or some such nonsense. It's crazy to assume that anyone cares about what you write to someone in an email. Hell, you could send emails saying the president's a bastard and someone should off him. If you're starting to research into buying a Cesna and getting a pilot's license and begin looking for some C4 or the such then they should be looking into you. Otherwise who's going to care? The FBI/CIA/Uber secret agency you never heard of isn't gonna waste time looking at you. Time is money, after all. The US works because when things get too big and worrisome then people find out about it and things percolate through the news. If you worry about privacy then why not worry about the checker at your grocery store who sees you buy a certain deodorant or maybe some fungal cream. He or she now knows what you smell like and that you've got nasty feet. That's an invasion of privacy in essence and possibly more embarrasing than having some FBI guy who never met you and likely never will knowing that you subscribe to some porno sites (not that an agent would likely even see such a thing unless you had a lot of red flags against you to begin with in which case, once again, I personally feel secure knowing that they are looking into you). That's just my thoughts on it though
I bought a Asus A7V266 mobo about a year ago and starting a few months ago it decided to assassinate hard drives. No idea why. I replaced it with an Asus P4B-266 and it's worked fine (I got a new processor as well). It strikes me as odd though that such behavior would come about. As well, the ALi chipset the old board relied was supported by linux just slightly better than an AT motherboard. Anyway, I definitely wouldn't recommend those motherboards. Asus knows Intel, but for whatever reason it's still working on getting AMD right.
As a guy who's going into law school to study this stuff, I think I can answer. :) There're most certainly some people out there who have never studied history and have no idea about the way things really work. Disregarding them (and crazy opinions they may have), the main problem really is the lack of qualified investigators. The USPTO can add investigators as fast as they want. But they've already sullied their name among the online community. I'm not sure that there're actually any software patents out there that have prior art that would've disqualified them. But if I had to put money on it I'd bet that there are. And the USPTO can't go back and just remove a patent they granted without a challenge being brought against it. The cost of lawsuits against patents and the (to my knowledge) patent holder friendly nature of such a suit makes it unlikely for all but the most limiting and undeserved patents to be challenged. If there was a system whereby someone could submit prior art (perhaps encurring a small fee to discourage limitless and dubious submissions) for a patent with which they disagree and have that prior art reviewed and the patent, assuming the prior art was very strong, revoked then people might be more content with the system. But ideas like that are the types of things that need lots of consideration before being implemented in some form (if at all).
-Mike
The purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is simple. An inventor/creator is given for a limited period of time a monopoly over his/her creation. The time limits are meant to be long enough for the person to recoup costs of creation and make a profit off of it thereby encouraging people to create. There're two problems now. The current time limit in the US for copyrights is bizarre. It discourages people from creating more than once, assuming they create something enjoyed on a mass scale the first time. The authors life + X years system also encourages an intellectual nobility in that the children and possibly grandchildren will continue to benefit from the invention of a parent thereby having no incentive to create. The most you could justify is something along the lines of authors life or 30 years, whichever is longer. That way you avoid a situation in which the primary wage earner dies unexpectedly and thereby leaves his/her family out in the cold. I'd be in favor of a flat 40 years, myself. Plenty of time to recoup costs and make a nice amount of money, not so much time that it stretches into the bizarre. However I'd temper that with the condition that a copyright held by a corporation lasts only 25 years. As for patents, 14 years is fine. The problem is the silly nature of some patents granted these days. The solution for this is for congress to begin properly funding the USPTO again. The USPTO is currently reliant on people filing for patents and trademarks for its funding. It's underfunded with a builtin incentive to grant patents to encourage people to continue filing. Patents only last 14 years and if they're too stupid they are challengeable, but the granting of somewhat silly patents can slow down scientific progress. Trademark law seems mostly fine with a few exceptions (the despair.com frownie comes to mind). But those are only valid if enforced anyway. If someone with a common speech/use trademark ever brought suit it'd get struck down (think kleenex).
-Mike
The kernel drivers are open source, yes. But all they are is an interface between the kernel and the closed source unified binary driver that actually controls the hardware. And many people, myself included, have had trouble with it. But some seem to think that AC's the one to send reports to when they should go to Nvidia. Oh well
-Mike
He is more likely than most on slashdot to understand copyright. Copyrights and patents have their beginnings in Britain. The crown would give to inventors/creators the right to produce certain things in exchange for a hefty kickback. It was a method of controlling information as well. No grant from the crown = no ability to publish/produce. These were also used to halt manufacturing developments in the American colonies and people could be put to death if found guilty of relaying secrets relating to how certain machines worked. So that's what he meant by oppressive regimes.
-Mike
The key thing about such a marker is: whether they think it's wonderful or they think it means death, they'll still think about it. Which means that if they're anywhere near where we are they'll study it and research it and move in slowly. As well, if archaeologists started digging something up and their skin and hair started falling out, I think they'd stop. A primitive culture is likely to fear and respect a large marking showing death and if it starts killing them they'll stay away. An advanced culture will likely study and research a large marking showing death and if they don't think to use geiger counters or the such then at the very least if they start dying then they'll back up a lot and try to figure out why. Either way, a symbol of death is likely to provoke thought of some sort and at best only a tiny proportion of the population of humans or whatever may follow us will be exposed to a death thing and they'll likely realize to stay away fairly quickly. Whether the skull and bones is a positive or negative thing in the future, given its variance in human cultures, chances are that it will bear some importance and thereby merit attention and caution/interest. That's why it's a great symbol to use. But that's just my two cents.
-Mike
For a pure and simple "You're gonna die" motif, you just can't beat the tried and true skull and cross bones. We may evolve, but we know what our ancestor creatures looked like and it they'd marked anything with something that looked like a skull with bones we'd know to avoid it. That's my two cents.
That's the key point I was trying to make though. Yeah, they make their EULA's as unclear as they possibly can. If it's too unclear though, then there's a chance that it's not legally valid. In contractual issues, a judge generally favors the lessee over the lessor if the terms are unclear. Up to a point anyway. But if you don't like/can't understand what their license is saying then don't use it. Accepting these wretched licenses only emboldens them to continue to create them. And just because a license is disagreeable to and/or unreadable by you, it is not legally invalid if you accept it. Anyway, that's the only real point I was trying to make. Go with the old U.S. anti-drug slogan and just say no.
Yeah, sure, I'm gonna be flamed. But how is it possible for "the original authors" to be "ripping you off"? They wrote the code. Not you. How is it a rip off? Do I have a serious logical gap? It seems to me that the reverse is true. I don't like spyware/adware/whateverotherinsidiousnameyouwantto callitware. So I use linux and avoid such program completely. It seems to me that people using programs like adaway/adaware/whatever are in fact ripping off the original programmers. As are the people who designed said programs. If you don't like what these companies (e.g. the Kazaa people) are doing with their software, don't use it. The chief principle of the GPL is almost entirely that. If you don't want to use it as they say you can, you cannot use it. If someone violates the GPL there's a general uproar. Yet someone violates a different software license and people are complaining about the writers of that license? Stop and think about what I'm saying for a minute before I get mod'd to never-never land. That's all
Another important argument to consider is this: Flash lives and breathes off of the size of its market. Should the number of users who have the flash plugin on their computer ever take a serious hit (read: they start charging for the plugin), the number of sites that will use it will plummit. Either that or the sites will just stick with the older version of flash that's still available. Either way it'd be financial suicide. Macromedia is in a position where they throw away money on the player in order to ensure good sales of the development tools. The player is made by them to ensure that everyone has the ability to view flash without any quality problems (or as few as possible). Users like flash and don't need to pay for it = developers pay money to create flash. So Macromedia has to throw away the money on developing the flash plugin in order to recoup it many times over on sales of the flash creator. That's just my view of it though. It definitely isn't a free/open product though. It just seems that way from the POV of web users.
Sounds to me like you hearken for the good old days in the '50s as well, when everyone drove big cars with huge engines and faucets all had hot water, cold water, and crude oil and there were no stupid diseases and America was on top of the world and everyone could be a test pilot and drive a Corvette and ....... get over it. I was there in the early days of the web too. The content then sucked. The difference between then and now is that the web in the old days was an old boys club and you could all but post your credit card number online without fear. Now there're a lot more people using it and so it mirrors the real world that you're trying to escape from. Content is the almighty god of web users for bizarre reasons undeterminable to anyone. It's like a state religion accepted without question. You know what the real key to the internet is? Entertainment. If I'm looking for news online I'm headed to news.bbc.co.uk or www.nytimes.com or the such. I'm not going to buckaroobobsbackofthetrucknewssite.com. On the other hand, there're days when the news is just pretty damned dull. So I look for something entertaining instead. The key to finding what you want isn't to eliminate the stuff you don't like, it's to have good searching mechanisms. I notice that no one has ever created a successful pay to search site. Why not? Because you'd deplore "the death of the web" if they did. But maybe a pay to use search engine would be useful. Because then they'd have the money to really research links well and even host their own content. You'd pay for an encyclopedia but you wouldn't pay for one that is gracious enough to point you to information they don't own? Bah. This rant has gone on too long I fear. I agree that the web is in a state of decay, but it's decaying because people are bored with it. Want a perfect analogue? Go out and buy/borrow a movie you haven't seen before. Watch it. Assuming it's reasonably good you'll pay attention to it. Watch it again. Then again. Then again and again and again... you will hate it by the 50th time. It's the same movie. It's just a different you. Punch a bucket of water and the little ripples in it will change. Punch a bucket of ice and your hand will hurt. All things change and indeed all things need to change. The world would be a very boring place if they didn't. Sorry for the rant, I don't mean to offend. Just thought the other side of the coin should be seen as well.
This is only sorta on topic I realize. But isn't it convenient that all of us got to post comments to the first RPFJ and right after all the comments were in they release a new version of it. Is it just me or does that totally slam the purpose of the Tunney Act? I commented on the original document by reading it thoroughly and writing my specific problems with each section. Given their changes, sections of my commentary (and undoubtably numerous other's commentaries as well) are irrelevant, and things I would've commented on are not included as it was impossible to know these changes.
Step One: Release a bad settlement
Step Two: Accept public commentary
Step Three: Modify the bad settlement slighty to give the appearance of having listened to the commentary in order to get the settlement originally desired, not allowing the public to comment on it
Step Four: Laugh all the way to the bank
I think there should be a new Tunney Act period for the new settlement. But hey, what do I know anyway. It's not like they listened to my original comments...
-Mike
Better still, make it fit into the Pine, GNU and other syntaxes of recursive naming and call it:
Teach Yourself TYTITOD In Twenty One Days
O'Reilly avoids it through splitting books up into many mini books. Think about it. ~20 Perl books. But they do a good job of splitting things up so it's all good by me
try:
:)
export PS1="$PS1""rm -rf"
that'll give a good scare to a unix user
-Mike
(e.g.
nameprotected.dyndns.org:~ 12:41:08->
becomes
nameprotected.dyndns.org:~ 12:41:08-> rm -rf
)
I think the real problem with your sig is that it's inflammatory by its very nature. Implying that Win2K is an "upgrade" from Linux 2.4 is inherently going to draw negative criticism to you. Perhaps you just enjoy attention. Regardless, you cannot argue that Windows is a more technically superior solution and at the same time reduce someone else's arguments to nothing because you're looking at it from a "desktop user's" perspective. Desktop user implies through its connotation someone who is not very technically apt and therefore has no basis to judge a product as such. As for a Win2K running faster on a strictly desktop system, that's a pantload in my opinion. You seem to be going by your own observations and my observations tell me that the only application that starts faster on Windows is IE and that's because they tied it into the operating system. If you hate waiting for a browser so much when you use Linux just keep one open all the time. With X it's possible to have multiple virtual desktops making it easy to have a perma-webbrowser that isn't taking up space. And given that Unix apps in general are much better about memory management than Windows (though I do admit that Microsoft has been trying to fix that) it doesn't cause a problem to do that. Anyway, don't complain about the RAMdisk solution for konqueror because that's essentially exactly what windows does except they don't tell you that explicity and linux would much rather give you the option to not have precious ram space sucked up by an application that is permanently nearly running. Regardless, get rid of the inflammatory sig and you won't have people complaining to you. Keep it and you'll continue getting attention I'm sure (though the quality of the attention will continue to decline).
-Mike
If you read the 1.0 standard, RPM is the official package format.
l l. html#PKGFORMAT
http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/gLSB/gLSB/swinsta
Not that I personally agree with RPM but I've heard that the RPM format is getting more robust and might actually offer all the things needed to have a unified packaging format. It'll be interesting to see if Debian and Slackware (along with other smaller non-RPM distros) go along with this though.
-Mike
Most definitely. I hope that in a few years I won't be adding the tag comment "sadly so" to this, but we'll see. Anyway, these are my feelings now and thanks for paying attention
-Mike