Without copyright, *any* leak of the source code will be the end of the secrecy. Very few companies have enough security to prevent that, and there would be no repercussions for insiders leaking the code. Additionally, decompilers would undoubtedly be developed into a fine art. Even if somehow people couldn't get the source, they could still use Evilcorp's programs free of charge.
If Autodesk tried to charge $300K per copy for support, 3rd parties would jump in to support it for less. At the end of the day, competition would ensure that a fair price for support would be reached.
You could claim that no decent CAD software would ever get written without copyrights. I think that's doubtful given the clear need for such software, and the existence of high-quality free software products in other markets, such as OS kernels and various Internet protocol servers. Right now, the CAD market is satisfied by the combination of paying customers and piracy of proprietary products, so there's not much demand for professional-grade free solutions. If that changed due to lack of copyrights, free solutions would get created out of necessity.
Of course, there's no need for you to fret about this hypothetical situation anyway. It's never going to happen.
The people who wrote the GPL were trying to simulate a world without copyrights by using copyrights in an unusual way. In a world without copyrights, there would be no need for such a simulation.
The victims of a botnet attack would not necessarily buy, pirate or use any Microsoft product. The people who STOLE [sic] and ran Microsoft's attack vector are *not* the ones I'm talking about. It's the people who were targeted by those attacks that could sue, and they're going to sue the responsible party with the money, not 2-bit downloaders.
Criminal prosecution and civil liability are largely orthogonal. Even if someone managed to track down and prosecute spammers and virus writers (yeah, as if), Microsoft would still be liable for writing and distributing shoddy merchandise that's trivially used as an attack vector. Their EULA won't protect them from attack victims who aren't Microsoft customers. The potential damages from a DOS attack on a major business or industry could be huge, even by Microsoft standards. With this in mind, it's in Microsoft's interest to make sure that their least shoddy products are in widespread use.
So that means the dinosaurs (huge cold blooded reptiles) were an evolutionary dead end?
During the extended sunless period after the K-T boundary impact, most any animal that wasn't a scavenger found themselves at an evolutionary dead end.
Nothing in that sentence says that home recording is legal.
The part reading "or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings." means what it explicitly says: It's legal for consumers to make noncommercial recordings.
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
Wow, that is an extraordinary claim. You have some evidence you can show us, right?
The Jupiter C rocket was capable of orbiting a satellite prior to October, 1957:
Re-entry vehicle test booster and satellite launcher derived from Redstone missile. The Jupiter A version of the Redstone missile was modified with upper stages to test Jupiter re-entry vehicle configurations. Von Braun's team was ordered to ballast the upper stage with sand to prevent any 'inadvertent' artificial satellites from stealing thunder from the official Vanguard program. Korolev's R-7 orbited the first earth satellite instead.
This tragic explosion was the result of idiot low level managers ordering ill-advised experiments with all of the control rods pulled out of the Dyson Sphere.
we would describe this as accommodating a certain element who needs more time
"A certain element" brings to mind people like communists, terrorists and deviants. Now we'll have to add Vista deniers to the list. Maybe they should be branded as as "countervistarian subversives" and shunned appropriately.
Yes, it is. Patent attorneys, bureaucrats and judges have been working for decades to try to redefine common English words like "obvious" to drum up more business for themselves. (And that business is buying and selling restrictions on other peoples' work.)
Various times I've had arguments on threads with patent industry types who keep claiming that "obvious" has some double-secret meaning that only they can divine, but which essentially is "not exactly described by an existing US patent". I kept telling them that that's hogwash. Now the US Supreme Court has backed me up on that. It turns out that I knew more about the issue than these patent "experts" and their manufactured case law doublethink.
It's natural that people whose jobs depend on patents would hem and haw rather than admit that this patent *is* in fact obvious to even people with below-average skills who had never seen the alleged "invention". They're still pulling out the legal mumbo-jumbo to try to keep the scope of patentability, and therefore the breeding ground for fees, salaries and promotions, as large as possible. That still doesn't change the truth.
The Pentagon has already evaluated an Apple-based combat system. They rejected it because it turned out that the combination of black turtleneck sweater uniforms and shiny white weapons resulted in extremely poor camouflage.
Now, can someone unfamiliar with a particular field, nay, a sub-discipline of that field, recognize these assumptions for what they are?
They might, if you're able to clearly phrase your assumptions in terms of things like widths of a human hair, the volume of an Olympic swimming pool, or the speed of a rifle bullet.
I would argue that Internet mp3 downloads ought to get a different mandatory royalty rate than hard media copies, just like radio gets a different rate. Since the inherent cost of distribution is much lower, the retail price could be much lower assuming efficient operation. If the mandatory royalty rate were adjusted to represent a reasonable fraction of a lower price, then demand could go up considerably, and artists could end up making more even with lower royalties per song.
IMO, 10 cents is probably too low to cover the costs of Internet distribution, but 25 cents might work if royalties dropped to something like 3 cents per song. At that pricepoint, music would most likely become a semi-disposable impulse buy for most people. I think that it's likely that between many people deciding that piracy isn't worth the hassle and guilt at that price, along with people who buy music now buying considerably more music, overall revenue would probably increase for both artists and distributors.
Of course with so many vested interests keen on keeping the status quo, it probably ain't going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Having government dictate the terms of my employment doesn't sound like a great plan to me.
Before the government started dictating terms of employment, working 12 hours per day, 6 days per week was the norm. Maybe you want to go back to that plan.
Microsoft already has a patch in the works to help users overcome this issue. Whenever the user types a '*' in a formula, an animated sprite of Charles Babbage's head will pop up. It will show this bubble caption:
"It looks like you're trying to multiply two numbers. I can help show you how to use the Method of Finite Differences to find a good approximation of your answer using only addition and subtraction. Would you like me to bring up a wizard so that we can get started on finding an appropriate power series?"
If they didn't, there'd be a hell of a lot less concerts since most artists can't afford to tour without financial support from their label.
What? Without the big labels and their computer analysis-directed funding, only a relatively few good artists would have a viable business? The ones that are *actually* good enough to generate a genuine following? Perish the thought!
saying there must be some undetectable, magical force acting on all the matter in the universe because the calculations we've come up with so far are inaccurate strikes me as lazy and uncreative.
You don't think that scientists are working to figure out a way to detect them? Currently, dark matter and energy are placeholders that people use while they characterize the anomalies that brought the concepts about. If we assume that *something* causes the anomalies, then we can study it until we know enough about it to try to detect it directly. If we refuse to even think about the whole thing because it's "uncreative", then we're never going to solve anything.
They have the idea that they're going to store heat in huge steam accumulators. As TFA points out, however, it hasn't been proven that those would actually be workable at the necessary scale.
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If Autodesk tried to charge $300K per copy for support, 3rd parties would jump in to support it for less. At the end of the day, competition would ensure that a fair price for support would be reached.
You could claim that no decent CAD software would ever get written without copyrights. I think that's doubtful given the clear need for such software, and the existence of high-quality free software products in other markets, such as OS kernels and various Internet protocol servers. Right now, the CAD market is satisfied by the combination of paying customers and piracy of proprietary products, so there's not much demand for professional-grade free solutions. If that changed due to lack of copyrights, free solutions would get created out of necessity.
Of course, there's no need for you to fret about this hypothetical situation anyway. It's never going to happen.
The people who wrote the GPL were trying to simulate a world without copyrights by using copyrights in an unusual way. In a world without copyrights, there would be no need for such a simulation.
The victims of a botnet attack would not necessarily buy, pirate or use any Microsoft product. The people who STOLE [sic] and ran Microsoft's attack vector are *not* the ones I'm talking about. It's the people who were targeted by those attacks that could sue, and they're going to sue the responsible party with the money, not 2-bit downloaders.
Criminal prosecution and civil liability are largely orthogonal. Even if someone managed to track down and prosecute spammers and virus writers (yeah, as if), Microsoft would still be liable for writing and distributing shoddy merchandise that's trivially used as an attack vector. Their EULA won't protect them from attack victims who aren't Microsoft customers. The potential damages from a DOS attack on a major business or industry could be huge, even by Microsoft standards. With this in mind, it's in Microsoft's interest to make sure that their least shoddy products are in widespread use.
During the extended sunless period after the K-T boundary impact, most any animal that wasn't a scavenger found themselves at an evolutionary dead end.
The part reading "or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings." means what it explicitly says: It's legal for consumers to make noncommercial recordings.
You exhibit a rather unique sort of pedantry.
The Jupiter C rocket was capable of orbiting a satellite prior to October, 1957:
This tragic explosion was the result of idiot low level managers ordering ill-advised experiments with all of the control rods pulled out of the Dyson Sphere.
"A certain element" brings to mind people like communists, terrorists and deviants. Now we'll have to add Vista deniers to the list. Maybe they should be branded as as "countervistarian subversives" and shunned appropriately.
Maybe because SQL is a horribly awkward and cumbersome language for doing the arithmetic-oriented things that spreadsheets are typically used for.
Yes, it is. Patent attorneys, bureaucrats and judges have been working for decades to try to redefine common English words like "obvious" to drum up more business for themselves. (And that business is buying and selling restrictions on other peoples' work.)
Various times I've had arguments on threads with patent industry types who keep claiming that "obvious" has some double-secret meaning that only they can divine, but which essentially is "not exactly described by an existing US patent". I kept telling them that that's hogwash. Now the US Supreme Court has backed me up on that. It turns out that I knew more about the issue than these patent "experts" and their manufactured case law doublethink.
It's natural that people whose jobs depend on patents would hem and haw rather than admit that this patent *is* in fact obvious to even people with below-average skills who had never seen the alleged "invention". They're still pulling out the legal mumbo-jumbo to try to keep the scope of patentability, and therefore the breeding ground for fees, salaries and promotions, as large as possible. That still doesn't change the truth.
It isn't. Either situation means that you're living in a police state.
The Pentagon has already evaluated an Apple-based combat system. They rejected it because it turned out that the combination of black turtleneck sweater uniforms and shiny white weapons resulted in extremely poor camouflage.
Undoubtedly they are. Anybody with a shred of rationality would have canned this stunted overbudget white elephant well over a decade ago.
They might, if you're able to clearly phrase your assumptions in terms of things like widths of a human hair, the volume of an Olympic swimming pool, or the speed of a rifle bullet.
IMO, 10 cents is probably too low to cover the costs of Internet distribution, but 25 cents might work if royalties dropped to something like 3 cents per song. At that pricepoint, music would most likely become a semi-disposable impulse buy for most people. I think that it's likely that between many people deciding that piracy isn't worth the hassle and guilt at that price, along with people who buy music now buying considerably more music, overall revenue would probably increase for both artists and distributors.
Of course with so many vested interests keen on keeping the status quo, it probably ain't going to happen in the foreseeable future.
Having to hire 3 shifts instead of 2 *is* investing more in people. This is true regardless of how much technology is used in production.
Before the government started dictating terms of employment, working 12 hours per day, 6 days per week was the norm. Maybe you want to go back to that plan.
"It looks like you're trying to multiply two numbers. I can help show you how to use the Method of Finite Differences to find a good approximation of your answer using only addition and subtraction. Would you like me to bring up a wizard so that we can get started on finding an appropriate power series?"
What? Without the big labels and their computer analysis-directed funding, only a relatively few good artists would have a viable business? The ones that are *actually* good enough to generate a genuine following? Perish the thought!
You don't think that scientists are working to figure out a way to detect them? Currently, dark matter and energy are placeholders that people use while they characterize the anomalies that brought the concepts about. If we assume that *something* causes the anomalies, then we can study it until we know enough about it to try to detect it directly. If we refuse to even think about the whole thing because it's "uncreative", then we're never going to solve anything.
They have the idea that they're going to store heat in huge steam accumulators. As TFA points out, however, it hasn't been proven that those would actually be workable at the necessary scale.