The more I read things like this though, the more it seems the downfall of such companies could actually happen. I kinda like it, too. It rumbles in my belly... No, the industry isn't going anywhere. There are some large companies that will likely be shaken up, broken up or re-build as a result of change, but the fundamentals of the music industry are sound. People do want to buy music, it's just that a) the prices have become obscene while the technology has commoditized the "song" b) it's well known that buying music doesn't support artists because of predatory contractual bondage that they must accept from the publishers c) good music (which I define as any music that requires creativity and originality to create) is frequently under-promoted or squelched entirely in favor of over-produced, formula-driven, focus-grouped noise that I'm increasingly convinced is authored by software.
I'd like to see the total devaluation of the "song" and instead a resurgence of routine live performances in public places (stores, plazas, etc.) This is the way it used to be. You never went into a large store (and even most small ones) or a good restaurant without seeing a live performer. I think that would really help the industry transition from this plastic-stamping model to a more service-oriented model where the product isn't a thing, but a performer.
I did not make such a claim... What I did was TALK to him like I could hurt him... IANAL, but I think the term the OP was looking for is "fear of immediate harm." Given the context, I think you're correct in claiming that you did not commit assault, as there was no credible threat of imminent violence (battery). On the other hand, I don't know much about "simple assault".
I also think that five years is too short. Ok, how about 4?;-)
Actually, I'll continue to advocate what I've always advocated:
1) 10 year copyright by default 2) Two available extensions for a total of 30 years 3) Those works that account for the top 1% of copyright-protected gross revenue in each medium in a 10 year period are not eligible for renewal
That last item is the most important. It allows us to put a metric on what our most culturally significant works are. It's not a perfect metric, but it opens up to the commons the most important cultural icons without harming artists (let's face it: if you are one of the top 1% grossing movie producers, then you've gotten your investment back, and you probably have many spin-off sources of revenue including sequels, merchandise, etc. - the one who needs financial protection for another decade or two is the movie that's just barely recapping the money that was spent to make it). The goal is to enrich both the artist AND the commons, not just the artist.
The fact that you "can find at least 3 ways to summarize even really good and innovative patents" should tell you that the patent in question is neither good nor innovative. I think you missed the point. You can't summarize patents. Period. You have to read all of their claims carefully. I could summarize a patent, but I can only do so lossily inn a way that won't help anyone legally. It's a process ONLY useful for making headlines on Slashdot.
Repeat after me: any patent which is summarized by a reporter relates in no way to the actual patent. Unless you've read the entire patent or at least ALL of the claims, you have no idea what the patent is about. Typically I can find at least 3 ways to summarize even really good and innovative patents that would make people pick up their pitchforks and torches. It's just too easy to do, and it turns out that it gets Slashdot some extra readership.:-/
i find it easier to believe this article refers to installed gnutella clients, not specifically limewire. They *could* be counting servents that claim to be LimeWire, but they're almost certainly just counting everyone.
I still use gnutella to serve up free software, my own photos and some music that artists have requested that others distribute for free. Please, feel free to join me.
What I find interesting is that both dark matter and this missing matter exist only as the result of comparing our mathematical extrapolations with observation. When we finally learn the truth (will we?) of what makes up our universe, I have to wonder if it will have any resemblance to our guesses over the last 50 years or so... Personally, I doubt it.
A few months ago I heard someone raving about the usefulness vimdiff at a Perl user group meeting. I looked into it, and it's become one of my favorite tools. In addition to the regular syntax highlighting, it highlights differences in two texts and by default folds areas that are identical. It's fantastic for programmers and also for sysadmins like me who want to compare different versions of configuration files. Vim is, in many ways, a worthy "quick and dirty emacs." Of course, all of these things have existed in emacs for decades, but there are times that you don't want to write lisp to get the job done, and the terse, Unix-derived syntax of vim is a comfort.
I still use both vim and emacs, though more and more of my work lends itself to vim these days. If you're still thinking that the difference between vim and emacs is intuitively obvious try this:
Yeah, so there it is... everything that a casual user has come to think of as "emacsisms". There are defining differences between the two (in terms of the self-documentation of emacs or the language pluggability of vim), but not the ones that most people think of.
Actually, if you read the article, the issue of revealing more than you meant to is only half of the scope of the problem. There's also the fact that email isn't seen as formal communication, which means that you can typically find email that's anything but "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," and yet it's entered into court records as evidence as if it were.
I think the real problem that we have is that we view email as if it were written communication after the fact, but when we're writing it, most of us think of it roughly the same way that we view casual conversation.
I don't exaggerate. Most individuals can't get past the stage of hiring a lawyer who's good enough to defend that point. I did point this out in my original message, which you don't seem to have read.
Coal to refrigerate seeds against a catastrophic worlwide ecological disaster in part caused by a large amount of coal? Ye gods, I'm tired of the global warming meme.
1) Coal is dangerous because of the levels of mercury that burning it releases. Burning coal could kill 100 children a day by firing laser beams at them, and the mercury would still be the most important reason not to use it. 2) You're talking about such a tiny operation that there's no functional way to measure the possible impact.
If you want to get tough on coal, do so with respect to large electric utilities, and do so for the right reasons. Let's leave the seed bank alone on this one.
Sadly, it's not typical to reboot after testing. After all, no one expects the game to have modified the system such that it won't boot.
Be fair to QA people though. How often do developers reboot after unit testing their work? It's a hard problem that's fundamentally a Windows bug. On any other system with a package manager, the new patch would have had a file conflict with the OS and that would have been caught on day one.
However, $300,000 fine for an unknowing user having wireless and someone doing something criminal on it is just way too much. No... you don't get it. The unknowing user whose home wifi got hijacked (or who mistakenly downloaded the wrong thing) goes to jail for a very long time and is systematically raped and tortured by the inmates for being a "child molester" only to have to register as a sex offender for the rest of their lives when/if they get out, because of existing laws. It's the companies that can afford to mount a more coherent legal defense that this law will attack, and that's why the Slashdot blurb speaks about the economic impact on small, free WiFi operators. Oh, and it also makes community WiFi impractical, which just happens to benefit the phone companies who can afford to mount massive wiretapping operations to find and remove users with questionable content.
This law is a fundamentally awful idea in every way, but it stands atop many, existing fundamentally awful laws.
Truckers don't look at Road Signs! They do, but there's a complicated heuristic involved in how they respond to them.
I live on a street that as a clearly posted sign that says trucks may not drive down it after 10PM. However, it's the primary city street connecting central Cambridge, MA (USA) to downtown Somerville, MA. These two cities have a lot of trucking between them, and many truckers simply ignore the signs, knowing that police don't patrol the street.
I'd really like it if GPS maps were more up-to-date with this info so that they could select the right path for a truck, but frankly until they do, it's the truckers' fault (they should not simply rely on the GPS to think for them).
And what about those who either choose not to have a cellphone, or can't afford one? What about them?
I don't mean to sound harsh, but honestly this is just not one of the phone company's concerns. They're a business, not the corner phone maintenance division of your city government. If you want a phone on every corner, lobby your local government to put one there, and be ready to pay for it with your taxes. Public phones just don't make enough money to cover their costs anymore.
Its a fair point, but I don't think selective enforcement against ONE live CD distributor is wise, there. Unless you're going to press that issue with all live CD distributors, you're likely to get shot down in court.
I suppose you also believe that evolution, intelligent design and the Flying Spaghetti Monster should have equal representation in the school curriculum? Should? Yes. Is practical to do so? No.
ID should be a whole year of High School, but we don't have time for that kind of extension to the social studies program in modern high schools, so we have to cut it short. Still, if you cover just one U.S. Federal Court case, the ID case would go to the top of my list. It was a wonderful microcosm of the entire debate.
FSM is a less interesting phenomenon, and is fundamentally part of the ID phenomenon, so I would cover the two together.
Oh wait... were you talking about ID as a biology topic?!
You do not have to distribute "changes in the form of a diff", or "distribute your code changes" in particular.
You must distribute (or offer to) the complete source code corresponding to the binaries you distribute. The whole purpose of the GPL is that someone getting a binary can get the full source for the binary. Yes, you're correct, but as others pointed out, you already get that via the package system that comes with the CD. You don't need the MPAA to provide you what the CD already does.
The problem was that they modified something. Providing the diffs for that something, given that you're already providing the source to the original would more than satisfy the GPL, as I read it.
Misquoted by the Slashdot story as usual. FTA: Over 99 percent spam blocking means fewer than one mistake in every 100 messages processed. That's 10 to 100 times fewer mistakes than any other available systems. And since most spam filtering systems were hitting 99.9% back in the early days, this is not interesting.
The software appears to be junk, but I only say this based on the slim article they wrote about it, which is essentially all marketing. Take a look at their bar charts for amusement. They're exactly the same graphs, with one being colored differently than the other, and line drawn differently. They make it sound as if there's any difference at all between the two graphs, but they contain identical information. Move along, nothing to see here.
Your last paragraph basically described the Xbox. Except for:
* It doesn't come with a keyboard * It doesn't run generic apps without hacking it * It can't run a decent browser without hacking it * It can't be upgraded later on when it's last year's console
Other than that, it's exactly like what I'm tired of, yes.
Why are consoles "next gen". Why isn't a real computer with standardized hardware that everyone can write software for "next gen". Why are we still living in the backwater of the disposable $500 computer for games?
The console is valuable, not because it's powerful (they're not). It's valuable because it presents a stable target for developers to write games for. They only have to support one (or a limited number of very similar) graphics subsystems. They get a known set of controller types that everyone will have at least a simple version of. Overall, it's a stable way to write games. It's also valuable because the vendor of the platform markets your games for you (to an extent) because they make money from them too.
So why hasn't someone specified a PC into the ground, making deals with a graphics vendor, motherboard vendor, etc. to produce a set of hardware to a specific set of specs and then started partner with game authors to produce games for it? I don't even know of a console that comes stock with a keyboard yet, much less makes it easy to do any ordinary task like add up numbers (a computer that can't be used to compute... what an idea).
Having been on both sides of about 10 corporate acquisitions, both being the buyer and the buyee, I can guarantee you, *every single acquisition* gets told this. And in every single case, it is a complete lie. Well, now hold on. I didn't say that this was going to have no impact on the company, and I think that it's clear it will. What they've said is that they're not changing WoW's staff or its goals. That's probably true. After all, WoW is their cash cow. What they want to do is replicate that success in other games and build even larger player bases. How they'll do that is another question.
First they can bully their way through to getting a critics name. Next they won't have to bully because it'll become common practice. Its sad... can anyone else feel it? One by one our freedoms are being taken away Oh please. This is a battle that has gone on as long as this country has had a free press (e.g. longer than it's had the first amendment).
It's new ground when it comes to the Web, so we have things to iron out, but there's no one getting the jack boots ready based on this case. It's about as routine an evaluation of the press's relationship to the government as you're likely to see and comes to the courts about every 5 years.
1985, first domain. Which is kind of odd, since, by 1987 when I got to college, just about every technical company and University that I had regular dealings with had a domain name. It goes to show how fast it scaled.
Does it make sense to register a COM domain? As in Commercial? Actually, in the beginning, ".com" was a dumping ground for those commercial organizations that were considered "just barely worthy." The perception was that the Internet was for the.mil and.edu crowd who were the founders of the Apranet..com was created for those companies that wanted to be able to do business with the Internet-savvy types in the universities and military via email or offer ftp access to software updates and the like. There was no real sense that.com was for commercial exploitation of the Net.
But, bluntly, why should any flower shop or manufacturer of beer bottles register "his" domain in the 80s? It was hardly their topic, and hardly any sensible way to sell their goods without an audience willing and able to buy via the net. And really, they should not have. They had no business (I mean that literally) using the Internet of that day. In the 90s, with the advent of the Web, everything changed. But remember that the Net predates the Web, and back in those days it wasn't really a place that flower shops could have gotten anything from.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see the total devaluation of the "song" and instead a resurgence of routine live performances in public places (stores, plazas, etc.) This is the way it used to be. You never went into a large store (and even most small ones) or a good restaurant without seeing a live performer. I think that would really help the industry transition from this plastic-stamping model to a more service-oriented model where the product isn't a thing, but a performer.
For more detail, I refer you to Wikipedia's entry on American treatment of Assault or Findlaw's Assault entry.
Actually, I'll continue to advocate what I've always advocated:
1) 10 year copyright by default
2) Two available extensions for a total of 30 years
3) Those works that account for the top 1% of copyright-protected gross revenue in each medium in a 10 year period are not eligible for renewal
That last item is the most important. It allows us to put a metric on what our most culturally significant works are. It's not a perfect metric, but it opens up to the commons the most important cultural icons without harming artists (let's face it: if you are one of the top 1% grossing movie producers, then you've gotten your investment back, and you probably have many spin-off sources of revenue including sequels, merchandise, etc. - the one who needs financial protection for another decade or two is the movie that's just barely recapping the money that was spent to make it). The goal is to enrich both the artist AND the commons, not just the artist.
Repeat after me: any patent which is summarized by a reporter relates in no way to the actual patent. Unless you've read the entire patent or at least ALL of the claims, you have no idea what the patent is about. Typically I can find at least 3 ways to summarize even really good and innovative patents that would make people pick up their pitchforks and torches. It's just too easy to do, and it turns out that it gets Slashdot some extra readership. :-/
I still use gnutella to serve up free software, my own photos and some music that artists have requested that others distribute for free. Please, feel free to join me.
What I find interesting is that both dark matter and this missing matter exist only as the result of comparing our mathematical extrapolations with observation. When we finally learn the truth (will we?) of what makes up our universe, I have to wonder if it will have any resemblance to our guesses over the last 50 years or so... Personally, I doubt it.
I still use both vim and emacs, though more and more of my work lends itself to vim these days. If you're still thinking that the difference between vim and emacs is intuitively obvious try this: Yeah, so there it is... everything that a casual user has come to think of as "emacsisms". There are defining differences between the two (in terms of the self-documentation of emacs or the language pluggability of vim), but not the ones that most people think of.
Actually, if you read the article, the issue of revealing more than you meant to is only half of the scope of the problem. There's also the fact that email isn't seen as formal communication, which means that you can typically find email that's anything but "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," and yet it's entered into court records as evidence as if it were.
I think the real problem that we have is that we view email as if it were written communication after the fact, but when we're writing it, most of us think of it roughly the same way that we view casual conversation.
I don't exaggerate. Most individuals can't get past the stage of hiring a lawyer who's good enough to defend that point. I did point this out in my original message, which you don't seem to have read.
1) Coal is dangerous because of the levels of mercury that burning it releases. Burning coal could kill 100 children a day by firing laser beams at them, and the mercury would still be the most important reason not to use it.
2) You're talking about such a tiny operation that there's no functional way to measure the possible impact.
If you want to get tough on coal, do so with respect to large electric utilities, and do so for the right reasons. Let's leave the seed bank alone on this one.
Sadly, it's not typical to reboot after testing. After all, no one expects the game to have modified the system such that it won't boot.
Be fair to QA people though. How often do developers reboot after unit testing their work? It's a hard problem that's fundamentally a Windows bug. On any other system with a package manager, the new patch would have had a file conflict with the OS and that would have been caught on day one.
This law is a fundamentally awful idea in every way, but it stands atop many, existing fundamentally awful laws.
I live on a street that as a clearly posted sign that says trucks may not drive down it after 10PM. However, it's the primary city street connecting central Cambridge, MA (USA) to downtown Somerville, MA. These two cities have a lot of trucking between them, and many truckers simply ignore the signs, knowing that police don't patrol the street.
I'd really like it if GPS maps were more up-to-date with this info so that they could select the right path for a truck, but frankly until they do, it's the truckers' fault (they should not simply rely on the GPS to think for them).
I don't mean to sound harsh, but honestly this is just not one of the phone company's concerns. They're a business, not the corner phone maintenance division of your city government. If you want a phone on every corner, lobby your local government to put one there, and be ready to pay for it with your taxes. Public phones just don't make enough money to cover their costs anymore.
Its a fair point, but I don't think selective enforcement against ONE live CD distributor is wise, there. Unless you're going to press that issue with all live CD distributors, you're likely to get shot down in court.
ID should be a whole year of High School, but we don't have time for that kind of extension to the social studies program in modern high schools, so we have to cut it short. Still, if you cover just one U.S. Federal Court case, the ID case would go to the top of my list. It was a wonderful microcosm of the entire debate.
FSM is a less interesting phenomenon, and is fundamentally part of the ID phenomenon, so I would cover the two together.
Oh wait... were you talking about ID as a biology topic?!
You must distribute (or offer to) the complete source code corresponding to the binaries you distribute. The whole purpose of the GPL is that someone getting a binary can get the full source for the binary. Yes, you're correct, but as others pointed out, you already get that via the package system that comes with the CD. You don't need the MPAA to provide you what the CD already does.
The problem was that they modified something. Providing the diffs for that something, given that you're already providing the source to the original would more than satisfy the GPL, as I read it.
Over 99 percent spam blocking means fewer than one mistake in every 100 messages processed. That's 10 to 100 times fewer mistakes than any other available systems. And since most spam filtering systems were hitting 99.9% back in the early days, this is not interesting.
The software appears to be junk, but I only say this based on the slim article they wrote about it, which is essentially all marketing. Take a look at their bar charts for amusement. They're exactly the same graphs, with one being colored differently than the other, and line drawn differently. They make it sound as if there's any difference at all between the two graphs, but they contain identical information. Move along, nothing to see here.
* It doesn't come with a keyboard
* It doesn't run generic apps without hacking it
* It can't run a decent browser without hacking it
* It can't be upgraded later on when it's last year's console
Other than that, it's exactly like what I'm tired of, yes.
Why are consoles "next gen". Why isn't a real computer with standardized hardware that everyone can write software for "next gen". Why are we still living in the backwater of the disposable $500 computer for games?
The console is valuable, not because it's powerful (they're not). It's valuable because it presents a stable target for developers to write games for. They only have to support one (or a limited number of very similar) graphics subsystems. They get a known set of controller types that everyone will have at least a simple version of. Overall, it's a stable way to write games. It's also valuable because the vendor of the platform markets your games for you (to an extent) because they make money from them too.
So why hasn't someone specified a PC into the ground, making deals with a graphics vendor, motherboard vendor, etc. to produce a set of hardware to a specific set of specs and then started partner with game authors to produce games for it? I don't even know of a console that comes stock with a keyboard yet, much less makes it easy to do any ordinary task like add up numbers (a computer that can't be used to compute... what an idea).
Why are consoles the "next gen" again?!
It's new ground when it comes to the Web, so we have things to iron out, but there's no one getting the jack boots ready based on this case. It's about as routine an evaluation of the press's relationship to the government as you're likely to see and comes to the courts about every 5 years.
They have claimed, on the community forums, that not a single change will occur as a result in any way that will affect WoW.
That said, Blizzard is currently hiring for "next-Gen MMO" developers....