I completely trashed any plans I had for ever visiting the US when I heard from my friends that not only were they fingerprinted when they flew into the US, they also had their retinas photographed.
One wasn't even staying in the US, he just had to change planes so he could continue onto Mexico.
It gets even dafter when you consider that the same thing happens to passengers (and presumably crews) when they are not even changing planes. I wonder what it would take for an Air New Zealand captain to decide that the "technical stop" on the Auckland to London route should be in Vancover:)
1. For a sufficiently competent programmer, the documentation supplied is enough to achieve 100% feature parity with the proprietary drivers.
In practice they may not want to do this. Instead they may want a feature set which works well with X.org. Which could easily wind up doing some things the proprietary driver dosn't and not do some things it does.
There are three reasons why nVidia claims they can't open source their drivers:
This isn't what they are being asked for. They are being asked for specifications, there are people perfectly prepared to write drivers.
1) They incorporate third party proprietary code. This is almost certainly the case. I'm betting that some or maybe even all of it isn't secret, but it is still licensed none the less. That means they'd have to either change the driver to leave those features out and/or rewrite the code themselves which could involve some expensive clean room/dirty room techniques. Remember that they can't play the Xvid game of "Well we don't distribute it compiled so don't need to pay a license." Ya that won't won't work for a company who is providing the code for the clear purpose of making their cards work. They'd get sued (and they'd lose).
None of it's secret since they make all sorts of binaries available. Indeed having multiple binaries for the same piece of hardware may make reverse engineering easier.
I don't understand nVidia and other companies. One of the arguments is that the driver makes the difference between higher- or lowerpriced cards, thus open-sourcing this stuff will make the differences go away.
If that were the case you'd expect to see hacks for getting a higherprice driver to work with a lowerpriced card. Removing any hardcoded restrictions in such a driver is probably trivial compared with removing DRM from the typical game.
I've often typed too quickly and ended up with.co . I don't know how many squatters are sitting on Colombia's TLD. I would suspect.con would see some value for typosquatters as well.
Or maybe.con should be reserved for elected politicans...
# apt-get source foo Downloads the source of "foo" from the Debian server
Even if it's not using a Debian server (or an official mirror) it still tends to be the case that it comes from one of the places apt could get the binary from. There are non Debian sites providing software for Debian distributions, e.g. VLC.
IANAL. But I think you are wrong. If they (re)used somebody's else work verbatim, then they are users - they are not obliged to host somebody's else work.
According to the GPL they are.
There is no case of derivative work.
The derived work is the binary object code, which they have created by compiling the source code. It is that source code which is the original work.
Or to put it otherwise. They provide both BusyBox and Linux source code readily - you can also (immediately) access it: just go to BusyBox.net and Linux.org.
The version of the software used need not be the most recent version, there's no reason to assume that these websites will have any old versions...
BTW, it works the same in Linux distributions in general and in Debian in particualr: they do not provide you with sources of the packages - they just (1) link to original URL of tarball package and (2, if applicable) give you a patch with changes. If there were no changes, then it can be said that Debian also violates GPL: it doesn't ship the sources - it just links to them. (Debian Archives)
Debian (and debian derivatives) can obtain source code using the same software as binaries. A quick look in/etc/apt/sources.list shows that sources typically come from exactly the same repositories as binaries.
I thought you weren't allowed to simply point to the original source unless you had made an agreement with the repository,since the source code can change,be dropped from the repository,etc leaving your customers without access to the actual source you used.
This is especially the case if the original repository only distributes source. The "at least 3 years" condition applies only to people distributing binaries. A source only distributor can stop with no notice at all.
If they use Busybox or the kernel unmodified, it might be enough if they point you to the default repository.
The source they provide has to be the source they used. It's perfectly possible that they would be supplying after their supplier was no longer obligated to supply them.
They also have no obligations, to make available applications they build on top of those packages or the configuration parameters.
If what they put "on top" qualifies as a "derived work" they certainly do....
IANAL, but every time I've talked to one "distribution" depends on who it's being distributed to. If I'm at both ends of the transaction, it is not distribution in the sense the GPL uses
Actually it's the sense copyright law uses...
if I copy the code from my desktop box to the server box sitting next to it and plugged into the same Ethernet switch just above them. Physical distance doesn't matter, it's ownership/control of the ends and if I own or have sole control over both ends then it's just me and there's no distribution involved in the legal sense.
It also dosn't matter if the "you" in question is an individual or a large corporation (or other entity with the status of "legal person").
However, as soon as a company provides anything to an external entity, it fears loss of competitive advantage and gain of responsibility. What if someone puts that source code into and escalator control box, and the escalator malfunctions and kills someone? Legal does not want to be associated with unknown, although impossible, risks like that.
How would that be any different from using proprietary software from some third party (including a contractor). Or if the malfunction is caused by something else. Though the only escalator malfunction which springs to mind as having killed people was over 20 years ago. Maybe a company which installs or maintains escalators should consider public liability insurance.
What if the end-user, the guy with the box, doesn't own it? Suppose the IPTV company maintains ownership of the box? Than the end-user wouldn't need to be provided with the code?
What matters is distribution oft software. e.g. it might well make a difference if the IPTV required the customer/user to perform firmware updates, etc. Ditto for allowing SSH access.
Sure, but the other side of the coin may be there as well..."are you willing to let this murder/rapist/thief go to commit more crimes, create more victims" if you're wrong the other way...
In many cases it is the same coin. In that you are imprisoning an innocent person whilst letting a guilty person go free. The only exception would be where no crime actually happened. Which appears most likely with rape...
Perhaps a better question would be: are you willing to take the risk that the person you're locking up may later be proven innocent, knowing that if that happens you'll have to pay restitution for all the pain and suffering you've caused them (not to mention lost wages, etc.)?
With such restitution possibly not fully making up for their loss. Especially in the UK where they are likely to have "board and lodging" deducted.
The "correct" balance between false positive vs. false negatives is far too abstract to have any objective answer. This is a situation that calls for a feedback loop, punishment in proportion to the effects of an incorrect judgment.
Very often there is no such feedback, which really should happen when people are found innocent at a trial or a case is dropped/dimissed, as well as when innocent people wind up being sentenced. Even though someone might (eventually) be released and somewhat financially compensated. Nothing is likely to happen to those responsible. Be they police who didn't follow the rules or civilians who made malicious accusations...
Now, let's take the harm of imprisoning an innocent man, which we will call I. Also positive, since putting an otherwise useful member of society in jail for no reason is something I think we'll agree is harmful.
If there was a real crime commited then jailing an innocent person means that someone who is guilty has gone free. The harm starts as soon as an innocent person is charged and any police investigation either stops completely or becomes entirely focused on finding evidence against that person. Even if they are aquitted (and the police accept the court's verdict) any subsequent investigation is likely to be a lot harder. As well as being harmful to the innocent person.
In general, it would be pretty hard to trace an arbitrary cartridge back to a particular seller or buyer without other evidence. About all that you can determine from a shell casing found at the scene of a crime would be the manufacturer, caliber, possibly the original year of manufacture (and that shell casing might have been reloaded numerous times after that), fingerprints of one or more persons who have handled it,
Plenty og scope for fingerprints to get on a cartridge. Especially if you were to have someone reloading cartridges someone else didn't want.
and it may be possible to determine that it was fired in a particular firearm if (and only if) that firearm is recovered, and has not been modified, repaired, serviced, upgraded, or even fired a large number of times since that shell casing was fired in it.
Recovered soon after a crime. Problem is that it would be difficult to match cartridges which have been used several times, quite possibly in different guns.
I recall the same thing happened with Anarchy online. They released the game for sale but then told reviewers to hold off on their reviews because the game wasn't actually 'final'.
In other words they expected random members of the public to pay (presumably full price) for something which wasn't finished.
Sure enough, reviewers didn't do their job and waited around till the Anarchy folks actually felt their game was 'ready'.
A reviewer who does what the publisher says can hardly be called "independent" or "unbiased". Also things like a game being sold before it is finished might be more relevent than anything else about the game.
They allege that 4P just wanted "first review!" (ignoring that print magazines had even earlier reviews).
How did these "print magazines" manage an earlier review without pirating? If they had been sent a "review" copy by Atari then those copies may well have been gifts, which the magazines were free to dispose of in any way they saw fit. Including passing them to the likes of 4P.
When will these gaming companies (and others) learn that this isn't the 80's anymore.
It's unlikely to happen before major airlines employ porcine pilots, IMHO, though. Maybe they should form the Computer Games Association of America. So that they will be included with ??AA.
On another note, if you get a bad review, you should take it. Crying like a baby only emphasizes the ratings.
The same applies in many other situations. Yet you still see people shooting their mouth (or worst their lawyers) off.
You may get sales from a small fraction of people who play it to verify that it sucks, but sooner or later all the review sites will say the game sucks and it will only make the situation worse. The whole "bad publicity is good publicity" paradigm is long dead in this age of gamers.
This sort of action provides plenty of "good publicity". Thing is that it tends to be publicity for the the reviewer. Which is clearly the case here, since several people only appear to have heard of the reviewer because of the story being of Slashdot.
A really stupid move by the legal department at Atari IMHO. If they wanted to get the review changed they should have wined them and dined them and bought a bunch of ads.
Then hoped they didn't get a review along the lines of "Nice meal, shame about the game" or "Atari bribed us to write a good review of this"...
If the reviews are based on a pirated copy of the game, and the released versions game play is different then Atari has every right in the world to not only sue these guys, but put them out of business.
Presumably if "these guys" did nothing wrong they should be able to put Atari out of business:)
Slashdot Mirror
I completely trashed any plans I had for ever visiting the US when I heard from my friends that not only were they fingerprinted when they flew into the US, they also had their retinas photographed. One wasn't even staying in the US, he just had to change planes so he could continue onto Mexico.
:)
It gets even dafter when you consider that the same thing happens to passengers (and presumably crews) when they are not even changing planes. I wonder what it would take for an Air New Zealand captain to decide that the "technical stop" on the Auckland to London route should be in Vancover
If you RTFA you'll see that the sale includes introductions to his friends, and a trial in his job, which is supported by his employer.
Presumably subject to being able to get the appropriate visa should the winning bidder not have one or be an Australian citizen.
1. For a sufficiently competent programmer, the documentation supplied is enough to achieve 100% feature parity with the proprietary drivers.
In practice they may not want to do this. Instead they may want a feature set which works well with X.org. Which could easily wind up doing some things the proprietary driver dosn't and not do some things it does.
There are three reasons why nVidia claims they can't open source their drivers:
This isn't what they are being asked for. They are being asked for specifications, there are people perfectly prepared to write drivers.
1) They incorporate third party proprietary code. This is almost certainly the case. I'm betting that some or maybe even all of it isn't secret, but it is still licensed none the less. That means they'd have to either change the driver to leave those features out and/or rewrite the code themselves which could involve some expensive clean room/dirty room techniques. Remember that they can't play the Xvid game of "Well we don't distribute it compiled so don't need to pay a license." Ya that won't won't work for a company who is providing the code for the clear purpose of making their cards work. They'd get sued (and they'd lose).
None of it's secret since they make all sorts of binaries available. Indeed having multiple binaries for the same piece of hardware may make reverse engineering easier.
I don't understand nVidia and other companies. One of the arguments is that the driver makes the difference between higher- or lowerpriced cards, thus open-sourcing this stuff will make the differences go away.
If that were the case you'd expect to see hacks for getting a higherprice driver to work with a lowerpriced card. Removing any hardcoded restrictions in such a driver is probably trivial compared with removing DRM from the typical game.
I've often typed too quickly and ended up with .co . I don't know how many squatters are sitting on Colombia's TLD. I would suspect .con would see some value for typosquatters as well.
.con should be reserved for elected politicans...
Or maybe
The problem with your ".isgay" TLD is that it can go both ways, just like Captain Jack. (Yes, pun intended - it was way too easy.)
:)
Hopefully this won't take three thousand years to be sorted out though
# apt-get source foo Downloads the source of "foo" from the Debian server
Even if it's not using a Debian server (or an official mirror) it still tends to be the case that it comes from one of the places apt could get the binary from. There are non Debian sites providing software for Debian distributions, e.g. VLC.
IANAL. But I think you are wrong. If they (re)used somebody's else work verbatim, then they are users - they are not obliged to host somebody's else work.
/etc/apt/sources.list shows that sources typically come from exactly the same repositories as binaries.
According to the GPL they are.
There is no case of derivative work.
The derived work is the binary object code, which they have created by compiling the source code. It is that source code which is the original work.
Or to put it otherwise. They provide both BusyBox and Linux source code readily - you can also (immediately) access it: just go to BusyBox.net and Linux.org.
The version of the software used need not be the most recent version, there's no reason to assume that these websites will have any old versions...
BTW, it works the same in Linux distributions in general and in Debian in particualr: they do not provide you with sources of the packages - they just (1) link to original URL of tarball package and (2, if applicable) give you a patch with changes. If there were no changes, then it can be said that Debian also violates GPL: it doesn't ship the sources - it just links to them. (Debian Archives)
Debian (and debian derivatives) can obtain source code using the same software as binaries. A quick look in
I thought you weren't allowed to simply point to the original source unless you had made an agreement with the repository,since the source code can change,be dropped from the repository,etc leaving your customers without access to the actual source you used.
This is especially the case if the original repository only distributes source. The "at least 3 years" condition applies only to people distributing binaries. A source only distributor can stop with no notice at all.
If they use Busybox or the kernel unmodified, it might be enough if they point you to the default repository.
The source they provide has to be the source they used. It's perfectly possible that they would be supplying after their supplier was no longer obligated to supply them.
They also have no obligations, to make available applications they build on top of those packages or the configuration parameters.
If what they put "on top" qualifies as a "derived work" they certainly do....
IANAL, but every time I've talked to one "distribution" depends on who it's being distributed to. If I'm at both ends of the transaction, it is not distribution in the sense the GPL uses
Actually it's the sense copyright law uses...
if I copy the code from my desktop box to the server box sitting next to it and plugged into the same Ethernet switch just above them. Physical distance doesn't matter, it's ownership/control of the ends and if I own or have sole control over both ends then it's just me and there's no distribution involved in the legal sense.
It also dosn't matter if the "you" in question is an individual or a large corporation (or other entity with the status of "legal person").
However, as soon as a company provides anything to an external entity, it fears loss of competitive advantage and gain of responsibility. What if someone puts that source code into and escalator control box, and the escalator malfunctions and kills someone? Legal does not want to be associated with unknown, although impossible, risks like that.
How would that be any different from using proprietary software from some third party (including a contractor). Or if the malfunction is caused by something else. Though the only escalator malfunction which springs to mind as having killed people was over 20 years ago. Maybe a company which installs or maintains escalators should consider public liability insurance.
What if the end-user, the guy with the box, doesn't own it? Suppose the IPTV company maintains ownership of the box? Than the end-user wouldn't need to be provided with the code?
What matters is distribution oft software. e.g. it might well make a difference if the IPTV required the customer/user to perform firmware updates, etc. Ditto for allowing SSH access.
Sure, but the other side of the coin may be there as well..."are you willing to let this murder/rapist/thief go to commit more crimes, create more victims" if you're wrong the other way...
In many cases it is the same coin. In that you are imprisoning an innocent person whilst letting a guilty person go free. The only exception would be where no crime actually happened. Which appears most likely with rape...
Perhaps a better question would be: are you willing to take the risk that the person you're locking up may later be proven innocent, knowing that if that happens you'll have to pay restitution for all the pain and suffering you've caused them (not to mention lost wages, etc.)?
With such restitution possibly not fully making up for their loss. Especially in the UK where they are likely to have "board and lodging" deducted.
The "correct" balance between false positive vs. false negatives is far too abstract to have any objective answer. This is a situation that calls for a feedback loop, punishment in proportion to the effects of an incorrect judgment.
Very often there is no such feedback, which really should happen when people are found innocent at a trial or a case is dropped/dimissed, as well as when innocent people wind up being sentenced.
Even though someone might (eventually) be released and somewhat financially compensated. Nothing is likely to happen to those responsible. Be they police who didn't follow the rules or civilians who made malicious accusations...
Now, let's take the harm of imprisoning an innocent man, which we will call I. Also positive, since putting an otherwise useful member of society in jail for no reason is something I think we'll agree is harmful.
If there was a real crime commited then jailing an innocent person means that someone who is guilty has gone free. The harm starts as soon as an innocent person is charged and any police investigation either stops completely or becomes entirely focused on finding evidence against that person. Even if they are aquitted (and the police accept the court's verdict) any subsequent investigation is likely to be a lot harder. As well as being harmful to the innocent person.
In general, it would be pretty hard to trace an arbitrary cartridge back to a particular seller or buyer without other evidence. About all that you can determine from a shell casing found at the scene of a crime would be the manufacturer, caliber, possibly the original year of manufacture (and that shell casing might have been reloaded numerous times after that), fingerprints of one or more persons who have handled it,
Plenty og scope for fingerprints to get on a cartridge. Especially if you were to have someone reloading cartridges someone else didn't want.
and it may be possible to determine that it was fired in a particular firearm if (and only if) that firearm is recovered, and has not been modified, repaired, serviced, upgraded, or even fired a large number of times since that shell casing was fired in it.
Recovered soon after a crime. Problem is that it would be difficult to match cartridges which have been used several times, quite possibly in different guns.
1. The law is useless to solve the problem it's marketed as the solution to.
Not as bad as it could be then. Some laws are actually part of the problem they are marketed as being solutions to...
I recall the same thing happened with Anarchy online. They released the game for sale but then told reviewers to hold off on their reviews because the game wasn't actually 'final'.
In other words they expected random members of the public to pay (presumably full price) for something which wasn't finished.
Sure enough, reviewers didn't do their job and waited around till the Anarchy folks actually felt their game was 'ready'.
A reviewer who does what the publisher says can hardly be called "independent" or "unbiased". Also things like a game being sold before it is finished might be more relevent than anything else about the game.
They allege that 4P just wanted "first review!" (ignoring that print magazines had even earlier reviews).
How did these "print magazines" manage an earlier review without pirating? If they had been sent a "review" copy by Atari then those copies may well have been gifts, which the magazines were free to dispose of in any way they saw fit. Including passing them to the likes of 4P.
When will these gaming companies (and others) learn that this isn't the 80's anymore.
It's unlikely to happen before major airlines employ porcine pilots, IMHO, though.
Maybe they should form the Computer Games Association of America. So that they will be included with ??AA.
On another note, if you get a bad review, you should take it. Crying like a baby only emphasizes the ratings.
The same applies in many other situations. Yet you still see people shooting their mouth (or worst their lawyers) off.
You may get sales from a small fraction of people who play it to verify that it sucks, but sooner or later all the review sites will say the game sucks and it will only make the situation worse. The whole "bad publicity is good publicity" paradigm is long dead in this age of gamers.
This sort of action provides plenty of "good publicity". Thing is that it tends to be publicity for the the reviewer. Which is clearly the case here, since several people only appear to have heard of the reviewer because of the story being of Slashdot.
A really stupid move by the legal department at Atari IMHO. If they wanted to get the review changed they should have wined them and dined them and bought a bunch of ads.
Then hoped they didn't get a review along the lines of "Nice meal, shame about the game" or "Atari bribed us to write a good review of this"...
If the reviews are based on a pirated copy of the game, and the released versions game play is different then Atari has every right in the world to not only sue these guys, but put them out of business.
:)
Presumably if "these guys" did nothing wrong they should be able to put Atari out of business