How so? Userspace programs don't link to the kernel; they call it via interrupts. (And this whole GNU legal theory that API == derived work can't apply because there exist independent implementations of the Linux API implemented by 3rd parties over other Unicies. You obviously can't simultaneously "derive" from more than one work via just a single API.)
Most programs interface to the kernel via glibc, but that's under the LGPL and therefore is not viral for the apps either.
That was the problem for me. I went to their site, ready to pay ~$5 for the album (which I think is reasonable for a compressed copy with no printed booklet). I figured that this being the 21st century, they would have an option to use PayPal for such a trivial transaction. Instead, I have to enter my credit card number, phone number, email address and physical address on a foreign website. No thanks. I'd rather not have this ID-theft starter kit sitting in yet another server that might get hacked one day.
I decided that I'll just wait to see how much a real CD costs when it comes out through normal channels.
Too bad. If it's obvious, there shouldn't be a patent. It may not seem "fair", but the whole concept patents isn't necessarily fair in the first place.
64 cpu's. That seems supercomputerish enough for me.
It depends. For those problems that fit within the PS3's cramped memory, this is a supercomputer. For those problems that don't, this is a set of 8 matching doorstops.
It's easy to say the idea is obvious once someone else has thought of it and presented it to you - but was it "obvious" to people before Amazon did it? If so, then why was Amazon the first?
People trot out this same argument every time a bogus patent gets discussed. The main reason in this case was that Amazon was one of the first businesses that was involved in Internet transactions. Nobody did it before because nobody needed to solve that exact problem. That still doesn't mean that the solution wasn't obvious; it just means that the problem didn't exist. You don't deserve a monopoly just because you're one of the first people in a new market.
IMO, the laws for patentability ought to be changed to fix this problem anyway. I say that if something is obvious, even in hindsight, then it shouldn't be patentable. There are plenty of patent claims that I understand after seeing, but which certainly can't be called obvious, even in hindsight. That should be where the bar is set.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don't use GUI file managers to move around more than ~100 files on *any* OS. They always seem to have have a wishy-washy feel, with a lot more effort put into drawing moving icons of floating documents than into ensuring correctness or error handling beyond "freeze the UI".
If there's a big tree of files to move, it's time to break out real tools like rsync.
Michael Jackson purchased most of the Beatles copyrights. He also owns copyrights to the music of many other artists and whomever wants the rights to use those will have to negotiate with him, at least till his control of the copyrights expire.
IIRC, Michael Jackson purchased the publishing rights to the songs, which controls royalties on covers made by other artists, usage in ads, etc. The copyrights on the original Beatles' audio recordings, which determines online availability, are still under control of record labels. (And the earliest Beatles' recording copyrights were set to expire soon in the UK unless that got the Mickey Mouse treatment since I last checked).
That's not true at all. At one time, they provided a crucial service to the PC users in this great nation: a boundless supply of free floppy disks, conveniently delivered almost daily right to our homes and offices. It was only with the demise of the floppy drive that AOL's reason for existence went away.
Since the eye candy is off-loaded to the GPU it doesn't take CPU time
CPU time is not the problem. Raw CPU speed * core count has been increasing as fast as ever lately, but GUI responsiveness has remained almost stagnant. That's because caching and buffering aren't perfect, and ultimately some things are dependent on disk seek time, which has hardly improved at all in the past few years.
Now throw a bunch of eye candy on top of the situation, which is very data intensive and therefore just going to put that much more pressure onto buffer usage, disk drive seeking and bottlenecked I/O buses. That's a recipie for sluggishness.
PCs are already like 60s muscle cars: a huge engine bolted into a crappy budget family sedan with bias-ply tires and drum brakes. A GPU is like bolting in another engine. It's not going to solve fundamental problems with the system that inhibit good all-around performance.
What can or can't be done within the borders of a particular
jurisdiction is up to that jurisdiction to decide.
That's right. And by the act of entering into this treaty, the United States exercised its jurisdiction over its own federal laws, altering them so that they specify compliance with the WTO requirements.
The WTO has
NO PLACE WHATSOEVER in this issue. It's simply trying to override the
sovereignty of an independent state/nation.
That's perfectly within their rights, given that we signed away our independent sovereignty on this issue. If we don't want them meddling in that area, we should withdraw from the WTO treaty. Of course, that would remove many rights we currently enjoy to meddle in other countries' trade practices to our benefit.
Oracle is a Red Hat *competitor*, BTW. If Red Hat is violating patents, why should Oracle care?
Because Oracle distributes an exact clone of Red Hat linux. If it the court finds that Red Hat infringes on the patent, then Oracle is in the exact same boat. And that boat is: paying big bucks to the patent troll.
Old-fashioned dual-ported VRAM is an excellent solution for an e-commerce site. You can be loading customer transactions and one-click purchases from the VRAMs' random-access ports while you're simultaneously serving web pages from the serial-access ports. Your performance will double!
Now if you want truly blazing speed, you can track down some of that dual-ported static RAM that came in 40-pin DIPs. Full random access on both ports would let you serve dynamic web pages while you run customer transactions, all with zero wait states on the ISA bus!
What the hell does that have to do with how fast the drive can read data off of the disk? If you could shove a Pentium in there, it wouldn't make the mechanics or the read head any faster.
The mechanics were fine. Back in the day I shelled out a good bit of money to buy a plug-in ROM upgrade that sped up floppy access by ~8X. The bad performance was a software problem, probably made worse by the overdesigned floppy drive that could execute more bloated software than the job required.
Sure, the C64 booted in a jiffy. Then it took 5 minutes to load a 50 KB app from the floppy drive. (Which is kind of silly, since the floppy drive had a CPU inside with as much horsepower as the main system unit itself.)
You have a fundamental ignorance of how copyright works. A "work" is not owned by its creator. A work is not owned by anyone. It is as free as the air. A particular physical medium that contains a copy of a work is owned by whoever bought it. The only thing that the creator owns is the government-granted entitlement to restrict others from creating new copies of the work for a set amount of time in most circumstances.
Without copyright, the ability to restrict new copies is lost. Now if I have access a physical copy of a work, I can create further copies and transfer ownership of those to whomever I please.
That's it. I'm tired of talking to somebody who has a mental block with the density of a brick wall. Goodbye.
The producer would still fully own and control the work under the law--only now, you'd have no rights whatsoever.
Mere possession of the work without permission would be grounds for massive legal retaliation
Ok, I see where you're coming from. You're simply deluded.
Look, in the absence of copyright, there simply is no legal theory or mechanism that would make possession of any work illegal. None. It's copyright itself that controls distribution of works. Take away copyright, and you take away any restriction on the distribution or use of works. It would all be in the public domain. I don't know how you got those ideas into your head, but they're just plain wrong. Without copyrights, he users default rights == public domain.
If you think that you can find some kind of law or legal theory to back up your absurd claims, please post a link.
I don't care if your head explodes at the thought, in this hypothetical world where there were no copyright, then I could do whatever the hell I want with the fruits of your labor. Full stop.
I wouldn't sign any stinking contract with you, so if I got my grubby hands on your software, I'd crack the DRM and run it, and there wouldn't be a goddamned thing that you could do about it. And I'd be fully entitled to do so, all your Objectivist prattle notwithstanding.
And Evilcorp would aggressively shut down unauthorized users, because at that sum of money and that narrow a set of customers, it would be easy to target and disable those who steal.
Slashdot Mirror
How so? Userspace programs don't link to the kernel; they call it via interrupts. (And this whole GNU legal theory that API == derived work can't apply because there exist independent implementations of the Linux API implemented by 3rd parties over other Unicies. You obviously can't simultaneously "derive" from more than one work via just a single API.)
Most programs interface to the kernel via glibc, but that's under the LGPL and therefore is not viral for the apps either.
I decided that I'll just wait to see how much a real CD costs when it comes out through normal channels.
Too bad. If it's obvious, there shouldn't be a patent. It may not seem "fair", but the whole concept patents isn't necessarily fair in the first place.
It depends. For those problems that fit within the PS3's cramped memory, this is a supercomputer. For those problems that don't, this is a set of 8 matching doorstops.
People trot out this same argument every time a bogus patent gets discussed. The main reason in this case was that Amazon was one of the first businesses that was involved in Internet transactions. Nobody did it before because nobody needed to solve that exact problem. That still doesn't mean that the solution wasn't obvious; it just means that the problem didn't exist. You don't deserve a monopoly just because you're one of the first people in a new market.
IMO, the laws for patentability ought to be changed to fix this problem anyway. I say that if something is obvious, even in hindsight, then it shouldn't be patentable. There are plenty of patent claims that I understand after seeing, but which certainly can't be called obvious, even in hindsight. That should be where the bar is set.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don't use GUI file managers to move around more than ~100 files on *any* OS. They always seem to have have a wishy-washy feel, with a lot more effort put into drawing moving icons of floating documents than into ensuring correctness or error handling beyond "freeze the UI".
If there's a big tree of files to move, it's time to break out real tools like rsync.
IIRC, Michael Jackson purchased the publishing rights to the songs, which controls royalties on covers made by other artists, usage in ads, etc. The copyrights on the original Beatles' audio recordings, which determines online availability, are still under control of record labels. (And the earliest Beatles' recording copyrights were set to expire soon in the UK unless that got the Mickey Mouse treatment since I last checked).
That's not true at all. At one time, they provided a crucial service to the PC users in this great nation: a boundless supply of free floppy disks, conveniently delivered almost daily right to our homes and offices. It was only with the demise of the floppy drive that AOL's reason for existence went away.
Thankfully, there's essentially zero chance that this kookocracy of yours is ever going to be tried in the real world.
CPU time is not the problem. Raw CPU speed * core count has been increasing as fast as ever lately, but GUI responsiveness has remained almost stagnant. That's because caching and buffering aren't perfect, and ultimately some things are dependent on disk seek time, which has hardly improved at all in the past few years.
Now throw a bunch of eye candy on top of the situation, which is very data intensive and therefore just going to put that much more pressure onto buffer usage, disk drive seeking and bottlenecked I/O buses. That's a recipie for sluggishness.
PCs are already like 60s muscle cars: a huge engine bolted into a crappy budget family sedan with bias-ply tires and drum brakes. A GPU is like bolting in another engine. It's not going to solve fundamental problems with the system that inhibit good all-around performance.
I'm sure that capitalism has a magic way to completely change how hard drives are manufactured on 45 days notice.
That's right. And by the act of entering into this treaty, the United States exercised its jurisdiction over its own federal laws, altering them so that they specify compliance with the WTO requirements.
That's perfectly within their rights, given that we signed away our independent sovereignty on this issue. If we don't want them meddling in that area, we should withdraw from the WTO treaty. Of course, that would remove many rights we currently enjoy to meddle in other countries' trade practices to our benefit.
Because Oracle distributes an exact clone of Red Hat linux. If it the court finds that Red Hat infringes on the patent, then Oracle is in the exact same boat. And that boat is: paying big bucks to the patent troll.
Why?
Now if you want truly blazing speed, you can track down some of that dual-ported static RAM that came in 40-pin DIPs. Full random access on both ports would let you serve dynamic web pages while you run customer transactions, all with zero wait states on the ISA bus!
The mechanics were fine. Back in the day I shelled out a good bit of money to buy a plug-in ROM upgrade that sped up floppy access by ~8X. The bad performance was a software problem, probably made worse by the overdesigned floppy drive that could execute more bloated software than the job required.
Sure, the C64 booted in a jiffy. Then it took 5 minutes to load a 50 KB app from the floppy drive. (Which is kind of silly, since the floppy drive had a CPU inside with as much horsepower as the main system unit itself.)
Auctions? eBay still has auctions?
Maybe, but only if you consider (Reserved Price = $1.99), (Buy It Now ® price = $1.99), (shipping = $17.99) to be an "auction".
Without copyright, the ability to restrict new copies is lost. Now if I have access a physical copy of a work, I can create further copies and transfer ownership of those to whomever I please.
That's it. I'm tired of talking to somebody who has a mental block with the density of a brick wall. Goodbye.
In fact, there WAS NO full private control before copyright.
Show me a specific statute or legal theory to back up your position, or STFU.
Ok, I see where you're coming from. You're simply deluded.
Look, in the absence of copyright, there simply is no legal theory or mechanism that would make possession of any work illegal. None. It's copyright itself that controls distribution of works. Take away copyright, and you take away any restriction on the distribution or use of works. It would all be in the public domain. I don't know how you got those ideas into your head, but they're just plain wrong. Without copyrights, he users default rights == public domain.
If you think that you can find some kind of law or legal theory to back up your absurd claims, please post a link.
I wouldn't sign any stinking contract with you, so if I got my grubby hands on your software, I'd crack the DRM and run it, and there wouldn't be a goddamned thing that you could do about it. And I'd be fully entitled to do so, all your Objectivist prattle notwithstanding.
...After all, if the telcos didn't do anything wrong, they should have nothing to hide.
Right. And without copyright, anybody would be perfectly entitled, both legally and morally, to take, copy, or use any software.
Stealing? WTF are you talking about?