Big corporations have deep enough pockets to pay most any fine you can set -- it's the little guy who can't afford to hire the same teams of lawyers who can't afford to pay any fine who would lose out. Besides, since half the reason why corporations file these sorts of patents is to slow their competition by means of lots of litigation, something that wouldn't be reduced (and perhaps would be increased) under your system. If you can prevent your competition from earning a billion dollars, it might be worthwhile to pay a million dollar fine.
You'd just be creating another class of lawyers who would (on contingency) blanket the talk-show airwaves with ads encouraging more people to sue more people. We hardly need more of that.
Reform has to come, but it won't look like that. Perhaps if we start docking the salaries of the USPTO apes who process these patents....:-)
I've found my ability to tolerate Jon Katz has remarkably improved since I started imagining his stories (or at least the summary) read in the voice of Mike Myers playing Linda Richman on SNL: So how many hours do you really work, anyway? Discuss.
Will I be able to get this is Debian/other distribution, or do I have to buy the offical redHad? It only comes with RedHat. If you want Debian, then you have to erase RedHat and install Debian instead.
Will it work in FreeBSD linux emullation? No, it only works in MacOS.
Will it take advantage of SMP to allow two slower (not half speed) CPUs to do the same work? Not until Apple fully supports SMP at the system level.
I can make some guesses: Not open source, $40, PII-250 with 32 meg of ram, Yes, Yes, NO. Those are guesses, but they seem reasonable. I'd say that at least one is wrong though. Nope, wrong on all counts.
Too bad I couldn't find any of that information in the press release. It's too bad CmdrTaco mislead you by saying this is the Virtual Game Station, instead of Virtual PC. At least we know the stellar fact-checking journalism we've come to expect from Slashdot hasn't changed with the recent mergers/acquisitions, right?;-)
Why would Connectix sell a version of Virtual PC that runs an x86 Linux (besides that they can at little cost)? You can already run LinuxPPC or YellowDog on ppc, and while there are some occasional hardware issues and there's no binary compatibility with x86, it's much MUCH faster not to do the bloody emulation. Is it so we can all run the latest Corel WordPerfect binaries? Does anyone really want this?
And why the heck would you spend $100 on the linux version when you can just spend $50 get the DOS version, wipe the virtual hard disk and install your own version of linux? Once you do that and burn your own cd with it, there's even no hit for doing reinstalls. I suppose there's always a market for people who want to waste money, but this is silly.
Virtual PC (which is what's getting shipped here) and Virtual Game Station are two completely different pieces of software. The latter just lets you run playstation games on your computer (mac). The former will let you run x86 operating systems, usually MS Windows, under emulation on the mac. The part where you're wrong is that although you're running it on a ppc chip which is comparatively faster than the equivalent-mhz intel chip, it's not nearly enough to make up for the speed hit you're taking with all the emulation. You can turn a first generation mac into a second generation.
None of this has to do with RedHat, except that Redhat linux is getting bundled with the linux version of Virtual PC.
It's posted on a German site, so you'd better run it through Babelfish first. Ah, that's much better.
[And for those of you with no sense of humor, this is not a time to hit the moderation button. Even though the site's slashdotted and you have nothing better to do.]
There's one conceivable reason why they'd put a hard drive in one of these things. Can anyone say: bundling WebTV? They wouldn't be leveraging a monopoly in either market, so there wouldn't even be a potential antitrust suit. Woe be unto the consumer who buys one of these things.
Remember, it's not the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press that applies to the states here, it's the Fourteenth amendment's guarantee of (substantive) due process in abridging liberty. While the freedom to publish ideas is certainly incorporated into that protected "liberty", there's no reason why the freedom to read those ideas should not also be incorporated.
And if it weren't for the Slaughterhouse Cases back in 1873, we could try to get them under the "privileges and immunities" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment also. Bloody conservative reconstructionist court.
Why not do what everyone else is doing and leverage the power of the web to make money by....: going IPO! Sell shares in your future potential presidency, and rake in the dough. While you might not actually ever get elected president, companies like Amazon.com might not ever make any money either, and just look at their stock prices. With the IPO revenue, the candidate can effectively smother the competition with expensive far-reaching vote-gathering advertising, and once in office, the stockholding lobbyists can get cabinet positions and dictate executive policy. Sure it violates FEC rules, but existing IPOs are essentially Ponzi schemes and flout the mandate of the FTC, and what's the difference between those TLAs, anyway?
Hey, it's not so different from existing candidates' policies: y'know, this would be a perfect spot for another Texas baseball stadium!
There's exactly one thing Al Gore could do to wrench my vote away from Bill Bradley, and that's to submit a patch to the Linux kernel and get Linus to accept it. C'mon Al: you invented the internet, so now do something to improve the computers that power the internet in the Twenty First Century (tm). Give our children (WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN???) something to hope for, something that will our nation proud again, proud of our bounty and proud of our freedom (GNU!).
That paragraph is just specifically about mac-on-linux, which is an independent project whose gpled software is getting bundled by LinuxPPC and heretofore has not been a normal part of the distribution. It'd be like RedHat bundling Apache and saying "If you have questions about Apache, please direct your questions to the Apache website or to this mailing list we have set up over here." LinuxPPC's support in general is quite decent.
I'm only saying all this because your post was ambiguous as to whether you knew they were just referring to mac-on-linux.
You'd have to be asleep at the corporate wheel not to know by now that the latest fad is making every computing device resemble this purple device over here. Look at where the kerbango's knobs correspond to the imac's speakers, and we needn't say more about the silly colors. It'll pass, and on some future day in 20 years, someone will take the shell off a Dell machine (with the trunk in the back this time) and slap a colored one on and consumers will snatch them up in a massive coordinated fit of orgasmic nostalgia. I plan to be very cranky when it happens.
What the MPAA is trying to do is prevent the user from using the legally purchased dvd even if he's willing to assume all the technical/other risks inherrent in doing so. Two of your justifications are legal/political burdens, which could just as easily be assumed by the user who imports and uses the disc. Your third reason doesn't account for the enormous number of English-speaking foreign nationals.
There is still a buck to be made in catering to backwardlooking governments (of which the US is still one) and to value-added products like translated versions. But none of this is any reason to prevent the willing user from using his legally purchased item. Their current business model may be the most profitable for them under the current circumstances, but we just changed the circumstances -- they'll scream and kick before submitting, but they'll still go home with gads of money.
The movie and TV industries? Of course they're filled with geniuses, look at the brilliant and informative programming that they create.
Just look at the audience, why don't you? It takes a clever person to spoonfeed an entire nation horseshit and convince them it's caviar. If you're depressed by the results, then it's because the American People (tm) are not demanding enough of the producers. You can say the same thing about Congress.
The powers that be could largely wipe out the video pirates market overnight by releasing worldwide at the same time (ok I know there are translation problems etc.)
You're looking for a technical problem where you should really be looking for an economic one. The reason why they don't release movies worldwide at the same time is that it's economically unfeasible to do so -- under the current system, the studios can see which movies succeed and which movies flop in the domestic market, and having figured out which ones are winners (or at least figured out how much they expect each to make), start marketing them on the international market. Releasing them everwhere simultaneously would add a lot more risk to the equation, although there are ways around it -- more sampling, etc.
I agree that law is not strictly like source code, but the picture isn't quite as bleak as you paint it.
There is one market that openlaw forums could address quite well: those silly cdroms of do-it-yourself legal briefs that you buy and fill in the blanks and use. While it's true that it's impossible to foresee how new judges will react to new arguments in new proceedings, some things have been filed and refiled to death and it's silly to pay a lawyer to reinvent the wheel with them.
And you overstate the dissimilarity between source code and law in another fashion: like with new judges in new situations, established source code can break in new environments and hardware configurations. Just as the user will make a bug report and tell the author that the code doesn't always work in a given situation, so will the would-be lawyer when his argument falls on its face. And while code is more reproduceable than is law, any coder will also be quick to tell you that bugs often seem to appear and disappear with the phase of the moon.
With that said, I have to smirk at what coding would look like if it functioned in the same way that law does in one respect: all those disclaimers about how "I am not a lawyer". Can you imagine what source code would look like if it were sprinkled with comments asserting "This may look like code, and if you try to compile it it might actually work, but I am not a programmer and this is not code."? Feel free to insert a wisecrack about Microsoft here.
While the original poster was correct in using "affect", you're wrong about the rest. Both words can be nouns: to effect something is to bring it into existence, and an affect is a deliberately assumed quirky behavior.
Spritz it with a dilute saline solution and let it evaporate: sweat. If you attach an oscillating brush-tipped appendage to swat the flies away, you'll really be in business.
But the traffic to/from those home computers has to pass through the routers at the ISP. There's no reason for the packets not to be filtered at that location.
"No one has ever orbited a small body in space," he said. "The orbital stability is rather tenuous, and as we travel around Eros our navigation maneuvers must be perfect to keep us from crashing into it."
Well, we all know how much NASA has perfected the art of orbiting large planetary-sized objects without crashing into them, like Mars, right? C'mon, back me up on this one, right? Please, someone tell me they didn't make their calculations in stones and furlongs again?
The spacecraft and the asteroid are both roughly 136 million miles (219 million kilometers) from Earth -- and experts emphasize that there's absolutely no danger that Eros will collide with our planet, at least for the next few million years or so.
Why such emphasis? What are they trying to hide? Big deal, so Eros isn't an Armor or Apollo asteroid. Hey, wait a second: Apollo + NASA == conspiracy, right? Wait 'til I let my friends in on this one.
On a more serious note, I've been waiting for the NEAR for a couple years now. We know all about the chemical composition of most of our planets, but before now, we never knew as much about asteroids, even though there're so many more of them (and there's a much greater chance that one of them will show up at our front door with a pointy reckoning than there is for something like Venus). A kudos to NASA if they pull this one off. As Congress is currently hammering out the new budget, NASA can't afford to mess this one up.
I haven't read it, but I'm assuming it would go something like: "And boom, no more balloon" -- by Newton's third law and without an incredible amount of wind resistance (which would be scarce at high altitudes), your high altitude balloon would probably explode from the sudden thrust. So you have one shot, assuming no one shoots your balloon down first.
This isn't about Windows alone; if Windows were all that MS sold, there'd be no issue here. The issue is with MS using its OS dominance to tie in other MS products. I also prefer being able to choose among W2K, Linux, and a few other options. If Microsoft has its way, then I will not have that choice. That is what this issue is about.
Let events take their course. The best will survive.
Bullshit. The best will win only if all products compete without cheating. MS has a long history of assuring that its inferior products prevail through shady OEM-arm-twisting, secret APIs, and OS integration. It's precisely these tactics that the EU is looking to prevent. Surely you have no problem with that? To paraphrase you: "If W2K really can compete on its own merits, then what are you afraid of?"
I won't go as far as accusing you of astroturfing, but be aware that you're serving the same purpose. If you were astroturfing, at least you'd be getting paid for your act of corporate fellatio. As it is, I can't see why you'd otherwise bother.
The sysadmins in question haven't taken the appropriate (and well known) steps to lock down their systems. And these highbandwidth servers aren't exactly common-place -- a better analogy might be to keeping a dangerous animal in a residential neighborhood; if you're going to do it, you'd better do it correctly. Tort litigation is all about "did the person exercise the same care that the average similarly situated person would/should have exercised", and here the "average similarly situated person" is a sysadmin of a high-profile website, not the average schmuck on the street with a passenger car. If I try to erect a 200 foot obelisk in my back yard and it falls and hurts someone, I'd be liable for not exercising the care exercised by the average architect/construction-worker, not by the average joe-sixpack.
By all means, hold the commercial OS manufacturers at fault also. There's too much shoddy work on all sides, and it's time to shift the burden of that shoddiness back onto the people with the most power to prevent its occurrence and away from the innocent bystanders.
Slashdot Mirror
Big corporations have deep enough pockets to pay most any fine you can set -- it's the little guy who can't afford to hire the same teams of lawyers who can't afford to pay any fine who would lose out. Besides, since half the reason why corporations file these sorts of patents is to slow their competition by means of lots of litigation, something that wouldn't be reduced (and perhaps would be increased) under your system. If you can prevent your competition from earning a billion dollars, it might be worthwhile to pay a million dollar fine.
:-)
You'd just be creating another class of lawyers who would (on contingency) blanket the talk-show airwaves with ads encouraging more people to sue more people. We hardly need more of that.
Reform has to come, but it won't look like that. Perhaps if we start docking the salaries of the USPTO apes who process these patents....
I've found my ability to tolerate Jon Katz has remarkably improved since I started imagining his stories (or at least the summary) read in the voice of Mike Myers playing Linda Richman on SNL:
So how many hours do you really work, anyway? Discuss.
What is the license?
;-)
The liscense is the typical "Give us $100 and we'll let you have one copy".
What is the cost?
$100. See above.
If it's like the Windows98 version, it'll be a G3, MacOS8, half a gig of hard disk space, 64 megs of ram, and a cd rom.
Will I be able to get this is Debian/other distribution, or do I have to buy the offical redHad?
It only comes with RedHat. If you want Debian, then you have to erase RedHat and install Debian instead.
Will it work in FreeBSD linux emullation?
No, it only works in MacOS.
Will it take advantage of SMP to allow two slower (not half speed) CPUs to do the same work?
Not until Apple fully supports SMP at the system level.
I can make some guesses: Not open source, $40, PII-250 with 32 meg of ram, Yes, Yes, NO. Those are guesses, but they seem reasonable. I'd say that at least one is wrong though.
Nope, wrong on all counts.
Too bad I couldn't find any of that information in the press release.
It's too bad CmdrTaco mislead you by saying this is the Virtual Game Station, instead of Virtual PC. At least we know the stellar fact-checking journalism we've come to expect from Slashdot hasn't changed with the recent mergers/acquisitions, right?
Why would Connectix sell a version of Virtual PC that runs an x86 Linux (besides that they can at little cost)? You can already run LinuxPPC or YellowDog on ppc, and while there are some occasional hardware issues and there's no binary compatibility with x86, it's much MUCH faster not to do the bloody emulation. Is it so we can all run the latest Corel WordPerfect binaries? Does anyone really want this?
And why the heck would you spend $100 on the linux version when you can just spend $50 get the DOS version, wipe the virtual hard disk and install your own version of linux? Once you do that and burn your own cd with it, there's even no hit for doing reinstalls. I suppose there's always a market for people who want to waste money, but this is silly.
Virtual PC (which is what's getting shipped here) and Virtual Game Station are two completely different pieces of software. The latter just lets you run playstation games on your computer (mac). The former will let you run x86 operating systems, usually MS Windows, under emulation on the mac. The part where you're wrong is that although you're running it on a ppc chip which is comparatively faster than the equivalent-mhz intel chip, it's not nearly enough to make up for the speed hit you're taking with all the emulation. You can turn a first generation mac into a second generation.
None of this has to do with RedHat, except that Redhat linux is getting bundled with the linux version of Virtual PC.
It's posted on a German site, so you'd better run it through Babelfish first. Ah, that's much better.
[And for those of you with no sense of humor, this is not a time to hit the moderation button. Even though the site's slashdotted and you have nothing better to do.]
There's one conceivable reason why they'd put a hard drive in one of these things. Can anyone say: bundling WebTV? They wouldn't be leveraging a monopoly in either market, so there wouldn't even be a potential antitrust suit. Woe be unto the consumer who buys one of these things.
Remember, it's not the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press that applies to the states here, it's the Fourteenth amendment's guarantee of (substantive) due process in abridging liberty. While the freedom to publish ideas is certainly incorporated into that protected "liberty", there's no reason why the freedom to read those ideas should not also be incorporated.
And if it weren't for the Slaughterhouse Cases back in 1873, we could try to get them under the "privileges and immunities" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment also. Bloody conservative reconstructionist court.
Why not do what everyone else is doing and leverage the power of the web to make money by....: going IPO! Sell shares in your future potential presidency, and rake in the dough. While you might not actually ever get elected president, companies like Amazon.com might not ever make any money either, and just look at their stock prices. With the IPO revenue, the candidate can effectively smother the competition with expensive far-reaching vote-gathering advertising, and once in office, the stockholding lobbyists can get cabinet positions and dictate executive policy. Sure it violates FEC rules, but existing IPOs are essentially Ponzi schemes and flout the mandate of the FTC, and what's the difference between those TLAs, anyway?
Hey, it's not so different from existing candidates' policies: y'know, this would be a perfect spot for another Texas baseball stadium!
There's exactly one thing Al Gore could do to wrench my vote away from Bill Bradley, and that's to submit a patch to the Linux kernel and get Linus to accept it. C'mon Al: you invented the internet, so now do something to improve the computers that power the internet in the Twenty First Century (tm). Give our children (WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN???) something to hope for, something that will our nation proud again, proud of our bounty and proud of our freedom (GNU!).
That paragraph is just specifically about mac-on-linux, which is an independent project whose gpled software is getting bundled by LinuxPPC and heretofore has not been a normal part of the distribution. It'd be like RedHat bundling Apache and saying "If you have questions about Apache, please direct your questions to the Apache website or to this mailing list we have set up over here." LinuxPPC's support in general is quite decent.
I'm only saying all this because your post was ambiguous as to whether you knew they were just referring to mac-on-linux.
You'd have to be asleep at the corporate wheel not to know by now that the latest fad is making every computing device resemble this purple device over here. Look at where the kerbango's knobs correspond to the imac's speakers, and we needn't say more about the silly colors. It'll pass, and on some future day in 20 years, someone will take the shell off a Dell machine (with the trunk in the back this time) and slap a colored one on and consumers will snatch them up in a massive coordinated fit of orgasmic nostalgia. I plan to be very cranky when it happens.
What the MPAA is trying to do is prevent the user from using the legally purchased dvd even if he's willing to assume all the technical/other risks inherrent in doing so. Two of your justifications are legal/political burdens, which could just as easily be assumed by the user who imports and uses the disc. Your third reason doesn't account for the enormous number of English-speaking foreign nationals.
There is still a buck to be made in catering to backwardlooking governments (of which the US is still one) and to value-added products like translated versions. But none of this is any reason to prevent the willing user from using his legally purchased item. Their current business model may be the most profitable for them under the current circumstances, but we just changed the circumstances -- they'll scream and kick before submitting, but they'll still go home with gads of money.
The movie and TV industries? Of course they're filled with geniuses, look at the brilliant and informative programming that they create.
Just look at the audience, why don't you? It takes a clever person to spoonfeed an entire nation horseshit and convince them it's caviar. If you're depressed by the results, then it's because the American People (tm) are not demanding enough of the producers. You can say the same thing about Congress.
The powers that be could largely wipe out the video pirates market overnight by releasing worldwide at the same time (ok I know there are translation problems etc.)
You're looking for a technical problem where you should really be looking for an economic one. The reason why they don't release movies worldwide at the same time is that it's economically unfeasible to do so -- under the current system, the studios can see which movies succeed and which movies flop in the domestic market, and having figured out which ones are winners (or at least figured out how much they expect each to make), start marketing them on the international market. Releasing them everwhere simultaneously would add a lot more risk to the equation, although there are ways around it -- more sampling, etc.
I agree that law is not strictly like source code, but the picture isn't quite as bleak as you paint it.
There is one market that openlaw forums could address quite well: those silly cdroms of do-it-yourself legal briefs that you buy and fill in the blanks and use. While it's true that it's impossible to foresee how new judges will react to new arguments in new proceedings, some things have been filed and refiled to death and it's silly to pay a lawyer to reinvent the wheel with them.
And you overstate the dissimilarity between source code and law in another fashion: like with new judges in new situations, established source code can break in new environments and hardware configurations. Just as the user will make a bug report and tell the author that the code doesn't always work in a given situation, so will the would-be lawyer when his argument falls on its face. And while code is more reproduceable than is law, any coder will also be quick to tell you that bugs often seem to appear and disappear with the phase of the moon.
With that said, I have to smirk at what coding would look like if it functioned in the same way that law does in one respect: all those disclaimers about how "I am not a lawyer". Can you imagine what source code would look like if it were sprinkled with comments asserting "This may look like code, and if you try to compile it it might actually work, but I am not a programmer and this is not code."? Feel free to insert a wisecrack about Microsoft here.
While the original poster was correct in using "affect", you're wrong about the rest. Both words can be nouns: to effect something is to bring it into existence, and an affect is a deliberately assumed quirky behavior.
That's been around for over a year now. Just put in the # of characters after which the comment gets the +1 bonus. Putting in 0 disables it.
Zdnet
CNN
and in case the 9th circuit site gets slashdotted, there's findlaw.
Naturally, Sony's pressreleases are conspicuously absent.
Spritz it with a dilute saline solution and let it evaporate: sweat.
If you attach an oscillating brush-tipped appendage to swat the flies away, you'll really be in business.
But the traffic to/from those home computers has to pass through the routers at the ISP. There's no reason for the packets not to be filtered at that location.
"No one has ever orbited a small body in space," he said. "The orbital stability is rather tenuous, and as we travel around Eros our navigation maneuvers must be perfect to keep us from crashing into it."
Well, we all know how much NASA has perfected the art of orbiting large planetary-sized objects without crashing into them, like Mars, right? C'mon, back me up on this one, right? Please, someone tell me they didn't make their calculations in stones and furlongs again?
The spacecraft and the asteroid are both roughly 136 million miles (219 million kilometers) from Earth -- and experts emphasize that there's absolutely no danger that Eros will collide with our planet, at least for the next few million years or so.
Why such emphasis? What are they trying to hide? Big deal, so Eros isn't an Armor or Apollo asteroid. Hey, wait a second: Apollo + NASA == conspiracy, right? Wait 'til I let my friends in on this one.
On a more serious note, I've been waiting for the NEAR for a couple years now. We know all about the chemical composition of most of our planets, but before now, we never knew as much about asteroids, even though there're so many more of them (and there's a much greater chance that one of them will show up at our front door with a pointy reckoning than there is for something like Venus). A kudos to NASA if they pull this one off. As Congress is currently hammering out the new budget, NASA can't afford to mess this one up.
I haven't read it, but I'm assuming it would go something like: "And boom, no more balloon" -- by Newton's third law and without an incredible amount of wind resistance (which would be scarce at high altitudes), your high altitude balloon would probably explode from the sudden thrust. So you have one shot, assuming no one shoots your balloon down first.
This isn't about Windows alone; if Windows were all that MS sold, there'd be no issue here. The issue is with MS using its OS dominance to tie in other MS products. I also prefer being able to choose among W2K, Linux, and a few other options. If Microsoft has its way, then I will not have that choice. That is what this issue is about.
Let events take their course. The best will survive.
Bullshit. The best will win only if all products compete without cheating. MS has a long history of assuring that its inferior products prevail through shady OEM-arm-twisting, secret APIs, and OS integration. It's precisely these tactics that the EU is looking to prevent. Surely you have no problem with that? To paraphrase you: "If W2K really can compete on its own merits, then what are you afraid of?"
I won't go as far as accusing you of astroturfing, but be aware that you're serving the same purpose. If you were astroturfing, at least you'd be getting paid for your act of corporate fellatio. As it is, I can't see why you'd otherwise bother.
The sysadmins in question haven't taken the appropriate (and well known) steps to lock down their systems. And these highbandwidth servers aren't exactly common-place -- a better analogy might be to keeping a dangerous animal in a residential neighborhood; if you're going to do it, you'd better do it correctly. Tort litigation is all about "did the person exercise the same care that the average similarly situated person would/should have exercised", and here the "average similarly situated person" is a sysadmin of a high-profile website, not the average schmuck on the street with a passenger car. If I try to erect a 200 foot obelisk in my back yard and it falls and hurts someone, I'd be liable for not exercising the care exercised by the average architect/construction-worker, not by the average joe-sixpack.
By all means, hold the commercial OS manufacturers at fault also. There's too much shoddy work on all sides, and it's time to shift the burden of that shoddiness back onto the people with the most power to prevent its occurrence and away from the innocent bystanders.