I told you, there's no goddamned agreement when I buy a disk at the store with DRM on it. I do own the disk, and the copy of the music on it. The only thing I don't own is the right to make further copies of that music in most cases for a certain amount of time.
And you're right, I don't need an external moral authority. I know that copyright is an economic stimulus program, not some kind of sacred vow that gets violated every time someone uses their statutory rights. You're free to go on with your peculiar view of the issue; just don't try to project your strange personal value system onto others and call it morality.
True; and the specific rights you acquire over your new shiny MP3 are defined by the terms of the transaction. In other words, if you sign the contract without reading, well that's too bad, so sad.
I signed nothing, nor would I ever sign such limitations. Copyright gives me statutory rights, and those are what define the transaction. This is true irrespective of what DRM they attempt to install on disks I purchase.
I also see that you still have given no reference at all to whatever moral authority gives an author total control over something after he sold it to me; most likely because you realize that there is no such theory.
Oh and please stop using non sequiturs
It matches these fanciful moral principals that you're inventing out of thin air.
Winged unicorns vs respecting property?
Excersise of fair use rights is NOT disrespecting property. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright. The physical item is my property. The only kind of "property" the author retains is a limited lien over my ability to produce further copies of the information on my disk. The author does not retain any other rights over my disk, including rights over how I play it, what I play it in, or what copies I make under the exceptions to the lien that the author holds. (This is true even under the DMCA, which doesn't prevent me from hacking the DRM as long as I don't share knowledge of how I did it.) If anything, DRM schemes are a lame attempt to interfere with my rights over the property I own. Why don't you consider that to be immoral?
By what religious tradition or theory of philosophy do you draw the concept that copyright is a moral right? (And no, Objectivism doesn't qualify as a valid branch of philosophy.)
I understand the author's desire to do with their stuff as they please.
And I have a desire to fly around the country on a winged purple unicorn. That doesn't make it a moral imperative that you give me a flying unicorn.
Really, if the author wants to only do what they please with a work, they should keep it private. It's that simple. Once they publicly publish it and sell it to me, *I* have certain rights over *my* new property.
Copyright is not a moral right. The US constitution explicitly states the goal of copyright: it's an economic incentive to increase the production of works of authorship. It does not say anything along the lines that authors have the inalienable right to "sell things as they choose" such that they retain control of use after the sale. (Nor did any of the great philosophers of history touch on the moral necessity for you to have total control over all copies of everything that you write down or record.)
You only get that impression because the laws that were enacted to implement copyright happen to vaguely make it look that way. However, those laws have big exceptions to letting people "sell things as they choose". You simply never had these rights of total control you think you're "giving up"; they don't exist, and they never did, either government law or natural law.
I often find myself with a feeling of deja vu when I'm on Slashdot, as I've no doubt read the clippings elsewhere a few days prior.
Does that really matter in the big scheme of things? When I was a kid, I found out about stuff like this in places like Popular Science magazine. Most all the tech news I read was already at least a couple of months old by the time I saw it, but despite that I seem to have turned out OK.
Those Exxon/BP/Shell/Total guys have not released a new product in 50 years
Well, each drop of oil they sell is actually distinct from every other drop of oil that has ever been pumped. Microsoft, OTOH, is able to replicate the *same* information and sell it over and over. It's as if the oil companies had wells that contain infinite amounts of oil and still managed to keep the price at $70/bbl.
Given that the first nuclear power stations were built in the mid 1950s, (before digital computers were reliable enough for controlling any continuous process, much less a nuclear reaction), it seems clear that you don't actually need any amount of computing horsepower to run a nuclear power station.
Maybe he was talking about replacing all the analog control systems with a ZX81... Well, I don't doubt that it was fast enough to do the math, but for everyone's sake I would sure hope that nobody accidentally jiggles that RAM expansion pack dangling off the back.
Well, Red Hat's banner was dorky, but it's better than the banner I saw hanging from the balcony in one of Microsoft's lobbies about 12 years ago when I was out there for a meeting. It was a huge bedsheet spraypainted with a skull and crossbones, along with the words of wisdom: "SHIP OR DIE!". It's pretty evident from the quality level of their forthcoming OS that their employees took that advice to heart.
it would be very difficult for startups like TiVo to get funding for research and development if that work is less likely to pay off even if it succeeds.
In this case, so what? The PVR is a poster child example of an idea so obvious that it would inevitably get independently reinvented dozens of times. It's not like we somehow wouldn't have PVRs today if TiVo weren't around. And this isn't rocket science; it would be profitable for many companies to bring a PVR to market even without patent protection because it really doesn't require all that much development work.
Well, to be precise I assumed that if the spent fuel had economically useable amounts of heat, they would presumably shuffle them off to a part of the system where fission isn't going on. Maybe it would be used to preheat the incoming water. However, they don't actually produce enough heat energy to make this worth while, so they just stack them in pools.
As it had to be. Business travellers routinely carry laptop computers with confidential client information on them, they would be negligent if they checked them into the current baggage handling system.
...and then most of them leave it in their rental car or unattended in a 3rd party meeting room when they head out for lunch. Later, they leave it in their hotel room while they go out for dinner and drinks.
To not be negligent, they really need to keep any sensitive data in a laptop encrypted.
well...the "Fear" of anything nuclear (it's funny how all those environmentalists bitch and moan about a few kilograms of uranium when many tons of it was released into the atmosphere due to coal power plants
You've just shown that you have no understanding of this issue. For example: your 145,000 tons of uranium is an isotope with a half-life of about 4 billion years. (The small amount of U235 has a half life of 700 million years, and doesn't change the overall total much.)
Thorium is similar: it has a half-life of 14 billion years.
An RTG is filled with plutonium 238, which has a half life of 88 years, so it decays about 49 million times as fast as U238. So the total radioactivity of all that coal-based uranium is similar to that of 3 kilograms of Pu238, which is only enough fuel to provide a few kilowatts of RTG power. So it's no wonder environmentalists bitch and moan about a few kilograms of material: that few kilograms is about as radioactive as the total annual emissions of the entire coal industry.
So bottom line, to provide their electrical energy from RTGs, each household would need to manage an amount of radioactivity which is a significant fraction of the grand total emitted by all US coal burning plants. Coal plant heavy metal emissions are dangerous, but mainly because heavy metals are toxic chemicals, not because of radioactivity.
A more practical problem is the fact that Pu238 is outrageously hard to collect and there are only a few kilograms in existence worldwide. Other kinds of radioactive waste isn't generally hot enough to create a useful amount of work; otherwise, they would have left it in the reactor longer to generate more power.
Java - the current, close source Java - is unstable enough that most commerical Java applications come bundled with a specific JRE that's the ONLY JRE they'll run under.So for every Java application I have installed, I get to waste 50MB on yet another JRE install for whichever patch level of Java is required for that given application.
Sun can't keep their own internal, closed version of Java stable between releases. It's no wonder they don't think anyone else can, either.
So you've just proved that more Java forks won't create any problems that people don't already have. And I agree: you'd have to be crazy not to ship nontrivial Java-based software without the exact JRE that it was tested with.
Hopefully, Sun will remove the onerous requirement to ship *all* of their cruft with each JRE. That way, most private JRE installations could probably get stripped down to a more manageable 5MB or so.
What about encoding floats as a pair of ints or longs: one to express the numerical value, and the other its tenth power; id est, decimal arithmetic?
Is there any fundamental reason why decimal arithmetic in a computer should be more accurate than binary arithmetic in a computer? Both are approximations that use some small subset of the rational numbers to try to represent the entire continuous range of real numbers. Probably the only reason that decimal computer arithmetic seems better to people like accountants is that the errors it generates are the same errors that they've been manually creating for centuries.
whilst the first 8088 or 8086 IBMs and compatibles struggled on with 80x25 character displays, a beeper and crude user interfaces, the Mac + Atari + Amiga people had bitmapped colour displays, digital audio and WIMP.
For business applications, after evaluating both those early color displays and the IBM monochrome text displays, most people would have chosen the the text display. For the time it was very crisp, with a nice font and special long-persistence phosphors. Early color displays (including IBM's) were fuzzy with garish colors. The IBM monochrome monitor (along with the outstanding keyboard) was designed to match the look and feel of their well-respected mainframe terminals. The WIMP GUI software of the time was too primitive to offer an improvement over well designed character mode apps for most business software.
When the PC came out, the Mac was still years in the future, and in comparison the Apple II and its ilk had poor ergonomics for someone trying to use the machine for serious work all day long.
CP/M was one of the OSes that IBM offered on the PC. So the PC itself didn't kill CP/M, rather it was probably Microsoft's much lower pricepoint for PC-DOS, along with all the customers who didn't feel that CP/M offered enough additional value to justify the extra cost.
Ok, please enlighten me with the 50's era micrcode-tranlation CPU you are referring to, because I've never heard of such a device.
The roots of microcoding started in 1947, and reached a more modern form by 1951. Now you've heard of such a device.
And to buy you a clue, you haven't been programming any X86 CPU to anything near the "bare metal" since the Pentium II came out. Maybe you should go read up on the actual internal architecture of modern CPUs before spouting off.
Any guy who got shafted by the crude blunt instrument of the patent process cares.
But I don't have a problem with the general utilitarian model of incentives and exclusivity.
I'm sure you don't. Being a lawyer, you get paid either way, and in fact the artificial scarcities created by granting exclusive entitlements like these ensure that they'll be plenty of legal squabbles that provide rich opportunities for new revenue streams.
As someone who is actually trying to develop new software products in the current patent minefield, I have a different viewpoint. The software industry did just great in its first 40 years without any significant patent coverage. It really didn't need a bunch of carpetbaggers in suits coming in starting to stake questionable claims over vast swaths of landscape.
Maybe the exclusive grant of rights to a single inventor made some sense slower paced days when there were only a handful of people working on a few mechanical devices. After all, how many people were really likely to reinvent the same type of steam valve over the life of a patent in the early 19th century? Now things are different. The USPTO routinely hands out software and business method patents that will undoubtedly get independently reinvented thousands of times over the life of the patent. It is probably impossible to create a non-trivial software application today that does not infringe on a bunch of these exclusive claims. Each software product contains many thousands or even millions of ideas, each one of which might infringe on any of millions of outstanding claims. Just cross referencing the two sets is an infeasible task.
One principle of medicine is: "First, do no harm." That is something that needs to be applied to the patent regime. Unfortunately, in many areas the concept of granting exclusive rights to a single party who claims to be "first" has extended well beyond the point where it does more good than harm.
An inventor is the first person to develop a discovery or technology. The second guy to do so, even if he does so independently, is ultimately just an also-ran.
If he did it independently, he's just as much an inventor as the first one. That's why the whole concept of patents is fundamentally flawed: it unjustly punishes anybody who independently invents something that someone else by chance has also recently done. Being "first" does not mean that you should magically "deserve" a monopoly at the expense of someone else who has also been doing honest work to make similar improvements.
However, the current system has been in effect for so long, most people can't understand that point anymore. They think that the world needs to be a horserace, and the first one to cross the finish line at the USPTO is somehow the only one morally suitable for this government entitlement, and everyone else deserves government-sponsored punishment in the form of royalties and cease-and-desist letters. Your use of the term "also-ran" shows that you are one of these people who have been brainwashed by the current system.
In my book, AOL became obsolete the day they started sending their spam on useless CDs instead of floppy disks. They switched from being my free supply of removable media to becoming a totally useless annoyance. You'd think that they'd at least have the courtesy of sending their junk on CD-R/Ws, but no, all they sent was shiny coasters.
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And you're right, I don't need an external moral authority. I know that copyright is an economic stimulus program, not some kind of sacred vow that gets violated every time someone uses their statutory rights. You're free to go on with your peculiar view of the issue; just don't try to project your strange personal value system onto others and call it morality.
I signed nothing, nor would I ever sign such limitations. Copyright gives me statutory rights, and those are what define the transaction. This is true irrespective of what DRM they attempt to install on disks I purchase.
I also see that you still have given no reference at all to whatever moral authority gives an author total control over something after he sold it to me; most likely because you realize that there is no such theory.
It matches these fanciful moral principals that you're inventing out of thin air.
Excersise of fair use rights is NOT disrespecting property. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright. The physical item is my property. The only kind of "property" the author retains is a limited lien over my ability to produce further copies of the information on my disk. The author does not retain any other rights over my disk, including rights over how I play it, what I play it in, or what copies I make under the exceptions to the lien that the author holds. (This is true even under the DMCA, which doesn't prevent me from hacking the DRM as long as I don't share knowledge of how I did it.) If anything, DRM schemes are a lame attempt to interfere with my rights over the property I own. Why don't you consider that to be immoral?
And I have a desire to fly around the country on a winged purple unicorn. That doesn't make it a moral imperative that you give me a flying unicorn.
Really, if the author wants to only do what they please with a work, they should keep it private. It's that simple. Once they publicly publish it and sell it to me, *I* have certain rights over *my* new property.
You only get that impression because the laws that were enacted to implement copyright happen to vaguely make it look that way. However, those laws have big exceptions to letting people "sell things as they choose". You simply never had these rights of total control you think you're "giving up"; they don't exist, and they never did, either government law or natural law.
The software market is currently over 50 years old. Just how old do you want it to get before they start to narrow the scope of patents?
Does that really matter in the big scheme of things? When I was a kid, I found out about stuff like this in places like Popular Science magazine. Most all the tech news I read was already at least a couple of months old by the time I saw it, but despite that I seem to have turned out OK.
Well, each drop of oil they sell is actually distinct from every other drop of oil that has ever been pumped. Microsoft, OTOH, is able to replicate the *same* information and sell it over and over. It's as if the oil companies had wells that contain infinite amounts of oil and still managed to keep the price at $70/bbl.
Maybe he was talking about replacing all the analog control systems with a ZX81... Well, I don't doubt that it was fast enough to do the math, but for everyone's sake I would sure hope that nobody accidentally jiggles that RAM expansion pack dangling off the back.
Well, Red Hat's banner was dorky, but it's better than the banner I saw hanging from the balcony in one of Microsoft's lobbies about 12 years ago when I was out there for a meeting. It was a huge bedsheet spraypainted with a skull and crossbones, along with the words of wisdom: "SHIP OR DIE!". It's pretty evident from the quality level of their forthcoming OS that their employees took that advice to heart.
In this case, so what? The PVR is a poster child example of an idea so obvious that it would inevitably get independently reinvented dozens of times. It's not like we somehow wouldn't have PVRs today if TiVo weren't around. And this isn't rocket science; it would be profitable for many companies to bring a PVR to market even without patent protection because it really doesn't require all that much development work.
Well, to be precise I assumed that if the spent fuel had economically useable amounts of heat, they would presumably shuffle them off to a part of the system where fission isn't going on. Maybe it would be used to preheat the incoming water. However, they don't actually produce enough heat energy to make this worth while, so they just stack them in pools.
To not be negligent, they really need to keep any sensitive data in a laptop encrypted.
You've just shown that you have no understanding of this issue. For example: your 145,000 tons of uranium is an isotope with a half-life of about 4 billion years. (The small amount of U235 has a half life of 700 million years, and doesn't change the overall total much.) Thorium is similar: it has a half-life of 14 billion years.
An RTG is filled with plutonium 238, which has a half life of 88 years, so it decays about 49 million times as fast as U238. So the total radioactivity of all that coal-based uranium is similar to that of 3 kilograms of Pu238, which is only enough fuel to provide a few kilowatts of RTG power. So it's no wonder environmentalists bitch and moan about a few kilograms of material: that few kilograms is about as radioactive as the total annual emissions of the entire coal industry.
So bottom line, to provide their electrical energy from RTGs, each household would need to manage an amount of radioactivity which is a significant fraction of the grand total emitted by all US coal burning plants. Coal plant heavy metal emissions are dangerous, but mainly because heavy metals are toxic chemicals, not because of radioactivity.
A more practical problem is the fact that Pu238 is outrageously hard to collect and there are only a few kilograms in existence worldwide. Other kinds of radioactive waste isn't generally hot enough to create a useful amount of work; otherwise, they would have left it in the reactor longer to generate more power.
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Hopefully, Sun will remove the onerous requirement to ship *all* of their cruft with each JRE. That way, most private JRE installations could probably get stripped down to a more manageable 5MB or so.
Is there any fundamental reason why decimal arithmetic in a computer should be more accurate than binary arithmetic in a computer? Both are approximations that use some small subset of the rational numbers to try to represent the entire continuous range of real numbers. Probably the only reason that decimal computer arithmetic seems better to people like accountants is that the errors it generates are the same errors that they've been manually creating for centuries.
You can't help but win, in your own mind, when you sidestep every point others make with pedantic semantic quibbling. Congratulations.
For business applications, after evaluating both those early color displays and the IBM monochrome text displays, most people would have chosen the the text display. For the time it was very crisp, with a nice font and special long-persistence phosphors. Early color displays (including IBM's) were fuzzy with garish colors. The IBM monochrome monitor (along with the outstanding keyboard) was designed to match the look and feel of their well-respected mainframe terminals. The WIMP GUI software of the time was too primitive to offer an improvement over well designed character mode apps for most business software.
When the PC came out, the Mac was still years in the future, and in comparison the Apple II and its ilk had poor ergonomics for someone trying to use the machine for serious work all day long.
CP/M was one of the OSes that IBM offered on the PC. So the PC itself didn't kill CP/M, rather it was probably Microsoft's much lower pricepoint for PC-DOS, along with all the customers who didn't feel that CP/M offered enough additional value to justify the extra cost.
Or maybe you just enjoy posting long lists of strawman questions?
The roots of microcoding started in 1947, and reached a more modern form by 1951. Now you've heard of such a device.
And to buy you a clue, you haven't been programming any X86 CPU to anything near the "bare metal" since the Pentium II came out. Maybe you should go read up on the actual internal architecture of modern CPUs before spouting off.
Any guy who got shafted by the crude blunt instrument of the patent process cares.
I'm sure you don't. Being a lawyer, you get paid either way, and in fact the artificial scarcities created by granting exclusive entitlements like these ensure that they'll be plenty of legal squabbles that provide rich opportunities for new revenue streams.
As someone who is actually trying to develop new software products in the current patent minefield, I have a different viewpoint. The software industry did just great in its first 40 years without any significant patent coverage. It really didn't need a bunch of carpetbaggers in suits coming in starting to stake questionable claims over vast swaths of landscape.
Maybe the exclusive grant of rights to a single inventor made some sense slower paced days when there were only a handful of people working on a few mechanical devices. After all, how many people were really likely to reinvent the same type of steam valve over the life of a patent in the early 19th century? Now things are different. The USPTO routinely hands out software and business method patents that will undoubtedly get independently reinvented thousands of times over the life of the patent. It is probably impossible to create a non-trivial software application today that does not infringe on a bunch of these exclusive claims. Each software product contains many thousands or even millions of ideas, each one of which might infringe on any of millions of outstanding claims. Just cross referencing the two sets is an infeasible task.
One principle of medicine is: "First, do no harm." That is something that needs to be applied to the patent regime. Unfortunately, in many areas the concept of granting exclusive rights to a single party who claims to be "first" has extended well beyond the point where it does more good than harm.
If he did it independently, he's just as much an inventor as the first one. That's why the whole concept of patents is fundamentally flawed: it unjustly punishes anybody who independently invents something that someone else by chance has also recently done. Being "first" does not mean that you should magically "deserve" a monopoly at the expense of someone else who has also been doing honest work to make similar improvements.
However, the current system has been in effect for so long, most people can't understand that point anymore. They think that the world needs to be a horserace, and the first one to cross the finish line at the USPTO is somehow the only one morally suitable for this government entitlement, and everyone else deserves government-sponsored punishment in the form of royalties and cease-and-desist letters. Your use of the term "also-ran" shows that you are one of these people who have been brainwashed by the current system.
In my book, AOL became obsolete the day they started sending their spam on useless CDs instead of floppy disks. They switched from being my free supply of removable media to becoming a totally useless annoyance. You'd think that they'd at least have the courtesy of sending their junk on CD-R/Ws, but no, all they sent was shiny coasters.