No, because "illustrator" is a dictionary word. For Adobe to name their product "illustrator" was just plain stupid, if they wanted to have trademark protection.
Not only is this a dictionary word it is also a description of the program in question.
Oh wait, the U.S. legal system protects them anyway, compensating for Adobe's stupidity by trampling the rights of the general public.
Though the US legal system has in the passed voided "weak trademarks".
Yeah, but intellectual property is VERY different from physical property.
The concept of physical property is one which has been used since pre-history. The concept of intellectual property is one was invented a few hundred years ago.
Theoretically, you could acheive a complete comprehension of your Maxima by disassembling it and studying all the pieces. Can you now go into business competing against Nissan? Not hardly.
Another company already in the car making business could use information from reverse engineering Nissan cars to improve their own products
But with open source software, as soon as a company releases the source they are potentially in the position of defending against millions of competitors. Each one capable of matching them in distribution capacity and quality of product.
Except those millions of competitors would still have to make a profit somehow. Remember that no business has a devine right to make a profit, either from a specific business model or even at all.
In the open source world if you want to make money you must do it through services. Period.
There are plenty of tertiary businesses. Including those involved in provision of infrastructure. To many people wanting software it's a business infrastructure as much as the buildings they use are.
The argument contends that if potential attackers had access to the source code of a product, they would be able to find possible security flaws and exploit them.
One problem with this reasoning is that it's perfectly easy for potential attackers to get hold of the binary and work out ways to attack that. There are several groups of people who take binary only programs, remove code for dongles, registration codes, copy protection, etc. Sometimes including adding their own splash screens or credits.
The problem with the Lone Gunment was that they focused more on their dorky, fish-out-of-water antics than on their hacking and general cool activities.
There is also the little problem of the first episode being overtaken by real world events.
In the past we have seen the rich sell everything they have to move to strange new lands. It then often took those families generations of squaller to build it back up.
Especially if the transportation is expensive, both for people and cargo.
Even tribes in south america that had never previously seen outsiders were more than willing to trade goods for knives made of steel.
A knife made of stainless steel is very obviously a better knife than one made of other materials. It is sharp, stays sharp for a long time and can be easily resharpened.
I imagine if they had seen or heard of a gun, they might have tried to bargain for one so they could use it instead of a spear to hunt with.
Guns require different hunting techniques compared with spears, they also require a supply of ammunition and make a loud noise when fired. (The latter a big drawback if you need more than one dead prey animal to feed everyone in a tribe.)
How did these "primitives" get off of earth in the first place, if they don't have advanced technology?
Just because someone understands advanced technology dosn't mean that they can replicate an advanced technological infrastructure from scratch. Also consider the difference between buying a plane ticket, buying a 747 and building a 747 from scratch.
Is it too much to assume that in 500 years from now a pocket battery can be more powerful than 1000 horses?
Do you really want to put something like that in your pocket? Anyway in order to be useful you need machines to charge and use this 1,000 Hp battery. How much would these cost, maybe more than a thousand horses.
Now I know why all farmers in USA switched to horses, away from their tractors and harvesters:-) The *real* fact of the matter is that horses get sick, injured, want to eat, and they can drag only one plow blade; a tractor can manage tens of blades, can be repaired (or replaced), and can be refueled in a moment.
It wasn't that long ago that farmers in the US used horses. A tractor being easy to fix and fuel requires a huge infrastructure to make that the case. There are plenty of examples of agricultural machinary sent to countries without that infrastructure proving to be worst than useless, since waiting for fuel and spare parts can take longer than using horses, oxen or even humans to do the job.
The fact of the matter is that horses are cheaper to raise and maintain than a tractor is. And a horse generates fertilizer. A tractor just spits out fumes.
Horses also self repair and produce new horses. There is also a lot more meat on a horse than on a tractor.
First, Star Trek in its latest three incarnations either didn't do well in the ratings(DS9)
Yet oddly quite a few fans very much like DS9
or were reviled by most of the ST fans (Voyager and Enterprise).
Voyager was critiques as being ST-PC and Enterprise for rewriting ST history
Second, what think are the target markets are questionable. Goths for Buffy? Buffy's target audience, if anything, is women 18-30 (whether they are goths or not, which incidently is too small a demographic.) And, while Xena had a cult lesbian following, its main audience was 14+ boys/men (hey how can you resist the cleavage?)
Buffy also attracted a cult lesbian following too, possibly even exactly the same people as Xena. Since in both cases they wanted the show rewritten to suit their worldview.
We want interesting, believable stories with a scientificlly plausable background at least (not some faster than light boat that uses a gear powered engine).
What exactly is wrong with a FTL drive with components which spin. Not that is unique to "Firefly". Landing using swiveling engines looks a lot better than having some invisible AG drive too.
I simply can't understand the popularity of Buffy. After all the raving on slashdot, I decided to give it a shot. Pure cheese; it's what I'd call a teen drama.
"teen drama" where the title character is 21 and the possibly most popular character is nearing 130, shouldn't "teen drama" have mostly teenage characters?
idealized college campus life (clearly sanitized for the target audience),
What you mean that real US universities have more sacrifices and students getting killed by giant spiders:)
My big gripe is that the dialogue was horrible, and the plots, despite the fact that the show made a painfully obvious effort to not be Star Trek, were so obviously lifted from Star Trek.
It's not as if Star Trek used original plots in the first place.
It makes you think to follow the plotlines, there are no 'magic' answers to every problem, the characters have real-life type problems, and the dialog was halfway intelligent.
Having plotlines which need to be followed can cause problems where episodes are shown out of order (even with recaps tacked on the beginning). Unfortunatly out of order showing appears to be the norm with US broadcasters. Maybe Joss should move to Europe or Australia...
What TiVo really needs is a "likes good writing" profile. Genre profiling only works if you
have an unhealthy obsession with one genre or another.
It also tends to help if the people compiling the catagories have some clue about the genres in question. Otherwise you can find some very strange groupings.
I watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" every Tuesday, but have no interest in "Clueless",
"Charmed" or "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", as I am neither a teenaged girl, nor am I
obsessed with them.
Which is an odd conclusion to draw considering that Buffy has only one regular character aged under 20, as opposed to two aged over 120.
A properly configured TiVo would see that I like "Buffy" & "The Sopranos" and realize that
thoughtful writing is what captures my attention, making reccomendations like "The
Industry" when its on PBS (That's the US title for "Made In Canada", the funniest and
smartest damn sitcom I've ever seen.)
It's only a machine, humans make up the catagories it uses...
Well, for one thing, we're going to end up leaving a truly massive written record.
Plenty of modern paper isn't especially durable.
hey
won't think football fields are for worship, because almost every newspaper they find will
mention the game,
Newspaper isn't even intended to be long lasting.
allong with millions of books, films, cds, dvds, and who knows what
else.
CDs, DVDs, magnetic tape, etc may well be in a format unknown to future archaeologists, even if they can recover data from them.
If you look at the dates, these were probably built around the time that the Roman
empire was being built. Why don't we think that the circus maximus was built for religious
reasons? Because of all the written material that mentions it's actual use.
The vast bulk of Roman written material has vanished.
at the Smithonian they have a set of ancient potware,
cutlery, china, etc. And it's marked "ritual cookware". Again, an attempt to mark as
religious or mystical, something that could just has easily been mundane. Such as 'the
nice china for when the relatives visit'.
"ritual" is a word archaeologists tend to use when they can't think of a good explanation for why something should have been used.
So really, if two bored farmers can create crop circles for years just for a lark, the idea of a
civilization saying "Let's make some water pointers and, gosh darn it, let's make them
artistic and fun as weel" isn't too weird.
It didn't take Doug and Dave (or their copiers) long to create large crop features. They were working in darkness, covertly and with a tight timescale.
I'm a flight instructor, with a preference for single-engine. Twin pilots like to say how much safer they are with an "extra" engine; the usual retort is all that does is double your chances of an engine failure.
The Russians built a rocket with something like 30 engines, none of the launch attempts made orbit, some barely made it off the pad.
a twin with an engine out IS very dangerous because of the risk of losing control authority to the working engine, or of shutting down the good engine in a panic.
The group's lawyer, Morten Lindegaard, is quoted as saying "The money will be for the victims - the artists. They're not to be spent on administration."
Would these be the same artists who cannot recieve money except through their publisher without it being a breach of their contract? This cropped up a couple of days ago when someone said "why not simply donate, rather more than the typical royalty, directly to the artist?"
He "lost" just "potential to sell" it to you or anyone you distributed it to, not the original item.
Possibly they have lost the potential to sell. It's just as possible that they may gain a sale if someone has seen or heard something from a P2P system. Or if someone can play DVDs on their Linux box. Should negative reviews be banned, because they might lose someone the "potential to sell". This kind of claim is not unlike someone claiming they have the "right" to sales or to make a profit...
The ??AA's want you to think it's theft. They want you to think it's their real property.
The thing is that "content" is not real property. It used to be the case that content was tied tighly to a media. A media is a piece of real property, what has been happening over the last century is that the link between content and media has become weaker and weaker.
They want these terms for two things; to scare people away from illegally copying of copyrighted materials and (which is far worse) to indoctrinate the public and new generations into believing that IP is real property on equal footing with physical property. Because if people think it's real physical property then it's much easier to garner support against any proposals to reduce the length of copyright.
Thing is that most people arn't stupid. They can easily see the difference between "intellecutal property" and real property.
A large scale attack by whom? I thought the 9/11 was done by Al Qaeda not Iraq.
Since there is not much in the way of actual evidence as to who was behind the attack it's a case of pick the conspiracy theory of your choice. The US government initially endorsed "OBL did it", but then tried to change to "SH did it".
Slashdot Mirror
No, because "illustrator" is a dictionary word. For Adobe to name their product "illustrator" was just plain stupid, if they wanted to have trademark protection.
Not only is this a dictionary word it is also a description of the program in question.
Oh wait, the U.S. legal system protects them anyway, compensating for Adobe's stupidity by trampling the rights of the general public.
Though the US legal system has in the passed voided "weak trademarks".
Yeah, but intellectual property is VERY different from physical property.
The concept of physical property is one which has been used since pre-history. The concept of intellectual property is one was invented a few hundred years ago.
Theoretically, you could acheive a complete comprehension of your Maxima by disassembling it and studying all the pieces. Can you now go into business competing against Nissan? Not hardly.
Another company already in the car making business could use information from reverse engineering Nissan cars to improve their own products
But with open source software, as soon as a company releases the source they are potentially in the position of defending against millions of competitors. Each one capable of matching them in distribution capacity and quality of product.
Except those millions of competitors would still have to make a profit somehow. Remember that no business has a devine right to make a profit, either from a specific business model or even at all.
In the open source world if you want to make money you must do it through services. Period.
There are plenty of tertiary businesses. Including those involved in provision of infrastructure. To many people wanting software it's a business infrastructure as much as the buildings they use are.
The argument contends that if potential attackers had access to the source code of a product, they would be able to find possible security flaws and exploit them.
One problem with this reasoning is that it's perfectly easy for potential attackers to get hold of the binary and work out ways to attack that. There are several groups of people who take binary only programs, remove code for dongles, registration codes, copy protection, etc. Sometimes including adding their own splash screens or credits.
The problem with the Lone Gunment was that they focused more on their dorky, fish-out-of-water antics than on their hacking and general cool activities.
There is also the little problem of the first episode being overtaken by real world events.
In the past we have seen the rich sell everything they have to move to strange new lands. It then often took those families generations of squaller to build it back up.
Especially if the transportation is expensive, both for people and cargo.
Even tribes in south america that had never previously seen outsiders were more than willing to trade goods for knives made of steel.
A knife made of stainless steel is very obviously a better knife than one made of other materials. It is sharp, stays sharp for a long time and can be easily resharpened.
I imagine if they had seen or heard of a gun, they might have tried to bargain for one so they could use it instead of a spear to hunt with.
Guns require different hunting techniques compared with spears, they also require a supply of ammunition and make a loud noise when fired. (The latter a big drawback if you need more than one dead prey animal to feed everyone in a tribe.)
How did these "primitives" get off of earth in the first place, if they don't have advanced technology?
Just because someone understands advanced technology dosn't mean that they can replicate an advanced technological infrastructure from scratch. Also consider the difference between buying a plane ticket, buying a 747 and building a 747 from scratch.
Is it too much to assume that in 500 years from now a pocket battery can be more powerful than 1000 horses?
:-) The *real* fact of the matter is that horses get sick, injured, want to eat, and they can drag only one plow blade; a tractor can manage tens of blades, can be repaired (or replaced), and can be refueled in a moment.
Do you really want to put something like that in your pocket? Anyway in order to be useful you need machines to charge and use this 1,000 Hp battery. How much would these cost, maybe more than a thousand horses.
Now I know why all farmers in USA switched to horses, away from their tractors and harvesters
It wasn't that long ago that farmers in the US used horses. A tractor being easy to fix and fuel requires a huge infrastructure to make that the case. There are plenty of examples of agricultural machinary sent to countries without that infrastructure proving to be worst than useless, since waiting for fuel and spare parts can take longer than using horses, oxen or even humans to do the job.
The fact of the matter is that horses are cheaper to raise and maintain than a tractor is. And a horse generates fertilizer. A tractor just spits out fumes.
Horses also self repair and produce new horses. There is also a lot more meat on a horse than on a tractor.
First, Star Trek in its latest three incarnations either didn't do well in the ratings(DS9)
Yet oddly quite a few fans very much like DS9
or were reviled by most of the ST fans (Voyager and Enterprise).
Voyager was critiques as being ST-PC and Enterprise for rewriting ST history
Second, what think are the target markets are questionable. Goths for Buffy? Buffy's target audience, if anything, is women 18-30 (whether they are goths or not, which incidently is too small a demographic.) And, while Xena had a cult lesbian following, its main audience was 14+ boys/men (hey how can you resist the cleavage?)
Buffy also attracted a cult lesbian following too, possibly even exactly the same people as Xena. Since in both cases they wanted the show rewritten to suit their worldview.
We want interesting, believable stories with a scientificlly plausable background at least (not some faster than light boat that uses a gear powered engine).
What exactly is wrong with a FTL drive with components which spin. Not that is unique to "Firefly". Landing using swiveling engines looks a lot better than having some invisible AG drive too.
I simply can't understand the popularity of Buffy. After all the raving on slashdot, I decided to give it a shot. Pure cheese; it's what I'd call a teen drama.
:)
"teen drama" where the title character is 21 and the possibly most popular character is nearing 130, shouldn't "teen drama" have mostly teenage characters?
idealized college campus life (clearly sanitized for the target audience),
What you mean that real US universities have more sacrifices and students getting killed by giant spiders
My big gripe is that the dialogue was horrible, and the plots, despite the fact that the show made a painfully obvious effort to not be Star Trek, were so obviously lifted from Star Trek.
It's not as if Star Trek used original plots in the first place.
It makes you think to follow the plotlines, there are no 'magic' answers to every problem, the characters have real-life type problems, and the dialog was halfway intelligent.
Having plotlines which need to be followed can cause problems where episodes are shown out of order (even with recaps tacked on the beginning). Unfortunatly out of order showing appears to be the norm with US broadcasters. Maybe Joss should move to Europe or Australia...
Ah, college.
We received quite a bit of junk mail for Poopsy Banananose.
Another way to give junk mailers some fun is to give them the address of a derelict (or even demolished) building.
What TiVo really needs is a "likes good writing" profile. Genre profiling only works if you have an unhealthy obsession with one genre or another.
It also tends to help if the people compiling the catagories have some clue about the genres in question. Otherwise you can find some very strange groupings.
I watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" every Tuesday, but have no interest in "Clueless", "Charmed" or "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", as I am neither a teenaged girl, nor am I obsessed with them.
Which is an odd conclusion to draw considering that Buffy has only one regular character aged under 20, as opposed to two aged over 120.
A properly configured TiVo would see that I like "Buffy" & "The Sopranos" and realize that thoughtful writing is what captures my attention, making reccomendations like "The Industry" when its on PBS (That's the US title for "Made In Canada", the funniest and smartest damn sitcom I've ever seen.)
It's only a machine, humans make up the catagories it uses...
Well, for one thing, we're going to end up leaving a truly massive written record.
Plenty of modern paper isn't especially durable.
hey won't think football fields are for worship, because almost every newspaper they find will mention the game,
Newspaper isn't even intended to be long lasting.
allong with millions of books, films, cds, dvds, and who knows what else.
CDs, DVDs, magnetic tape, etc may well be in a format unknown to future archaeologists, even if they can recover data from them.
If you look at the dates, these were probably built around the time that the Roman empire was being built. Why don't we think that the circus maximus was built for religious reasons? Because of all the written material that mentions it's actual use.
The vast bulk of Roman written material has vanished.
at the Smithonian they have a set of ancient potware, cutlery, china, etc. And it's marked "ritual cookware". Again, an attempt to mark as religious or mystical, something that could just has easily been mundane. Such as 'the nice china for when the relatives visit'.
"ritual" is a word archaeologists tend to use when they can't think of a good explanation for why something should have been used.
So really, if two bored farmers can create crop circles for years just for a lark, the idea of a civilization saying "Let's make some water pointers and, gosh darn it, let's make them artistic and fun as weel" isn't too weird.
It didn't take Doug and Dave (or their copiers) long to create large crop features. They were working in darkness, covertly and with a tight timescale.
I'm a flight instructor, with a preference for single-engine. Twin pilots like to say how much safer they are with an "extra" engine; the usual retort is all that does is double your chances of an engine failure.
The Russians built a rocket with something like 30 engines, none of the launch attempts made orbit, some barely made it off the pad.
a twin with an engine out IS very dangerous because of the risk of losing control authority to the working engine, or of shutting down the good engine in a panic.
Not just a theoretical risk either
The group's lawyer, Morten Lindegaard, is quoted as saying "The money will be for the victims - the artists. They're not to be spent on administration."
Would these be the same artists who cannot recieve money except through their publisher without it being a breach of their contract?
This cropped up a couple of days ago when someone said "why not simply donate, rather more than the typical royalty, directly to the artist?"
He "lost" just "potential to sell" it to you or anyone you distributed it to, not the original item.
Possibly they have lost the potential to sell. It's just as possible that they may gain a sale if someone has seen or heard something from a P2P system. Or if someone can play DVDs on their Linux box.
Should negative reviews be banned, because they might lose someone the "potential to sell". This kind of claim is not unlike someone claiming they have the "right" to sales or to make a profit...
The ??AA's want you to think it's theft. They want you to think it's their real property.
The thing is that "content" is not real property. It used to be the case that content was tied tighly to a media. A media is a piece of real property, what has been happening over the last century is that the link between content and media has become weaker and weaker.
They want these terms for two things; to scare people away from illegally copying of copyrighted materials and (which is far worse) to indoctrinate the public and new generations into believing that IP is real property on equal footing with physical property. Because if people think it's real physical property then it's much easier to garner support against any proposals to reduce the length of copyright.
Thing is that most people arn't stupid. They can easily see the difference between "intellecutal property" and real property.
nicht spraeken Deutsch.
It is Dutch which though a Germanic language is not the same as modern German.
I mean, he's 26. He now owes the university and several companies 40-50 Million Euros (dollars). Its just arson so thats what 3-5 years.
Depends if he's considered sane or not.
A large scale attack by whom? I thought the 9/11 was done by Al Qaeda not Iraq.
Since there is not much in the way of actual evidence as to who was behind the attack it's a case of pick the conspiracy theory of your choice. The US government initially endorsed "OBL did it", but then tried to change to "SH did it".