>His options for avoiding this are to either find another copy of the code which is listed under a license, contact the author and ask for a license, or to rewrite the code.
I've actually left out a lot of caveats here, and IANAL, but most of the caveats are things that only get settled after litigation, which is something you want to avoid. People have replied to me talking about things like 'works created for public use' or talking about how anything in comp.* on usenet is essentially meant to be used. Neither of these are actually strong legal arguments, nor would a judge accept 'well no one has sued anyone over use of code from this source before' as a valid defense. This kind of thinking is hopelessly naive. In point of fact, companies which have used source code under the GPL and failed to follow the terms of that license have run into hot water numerous times before and the GPL is a much less restrictive license than 'no license at all'. My point is that if the OP wants to be in the clear (i.e. no gray areas that might involve litigation down the road, even litigation his employer is likely to win) then he basically has the above listed options.
Being 'found to be uncopyrightable' is something that only happens after you've spent a mountain on legal fees. If the code in question turns out to originate with a competing company with deep pockets, its probably worth the time and effort for them to litigate it even if they know they will lose in the end.
I don't know if you're trying to be funny or trying to point out a perceived flaw in the 'automatically copyrighted' concept being discussed here, but since that code is demonstrably not original, you can't copyright it, and in fact you're violating copyright by reproducing it (yes, even though its publicly available elsewhere).
>Absolutely right. This is programming. If programmers are constantly reinventing the wheel, they are idiots. What about standard libraries, etc?
Standard libraries can leave a lot to be desired. The original poster didn't even specify the language, so if you're dealing with something like C or C++ on Win32, then the standard libraries are woefully lacking. Programmers don't reinvent the wheel because they are idiots, at least not always. They do it because there isn't a publicly available implementation of the code in question for their platform and language or because the time it would take to implement the functionality is less than the time it would take to find such a library.
>Code is meant to be reused. Thats why people put it out there.
No, thats one reason people put it out there. But again, posting something in a public place doesn't make it public domain.
>Man, if the original poster worked for me, he wouldn't for long. Thats the exact type of programmer that you DONT want, someone wasting precious time and resources rewriting code thats been written a million times before.
Its the kind of programmer who exercises due diligence and ensures that you're not going to end up with a huge public relations disaster and or lawsuit if the copying ever came to light. I work for a major software developer and if one of our products ever went out and someone discovered it was using illegally copied code, it would have a major impact on the bottom line of both the company and myself (stock options), and if it was my copying, it would certainly cost me my job. This precious time and resources you call 'wasted' is what wiser men have referred to as 'an ounce of prevention'.
>> Is it legitimate to use source code that's publicly available but doesn't fall under any particular license?
>Of course it is. This kind of thing happens all the time.
This may be completely commonplace, but it is certainly not legal. Simply posting something in a public place does NOT put it in the public domain, and contrary to what many people in this forum are saying, failing to attach a copyright notification to something does NOT place it in the public domain either. Assuming the author posted the information after 1976 and is covered by american law, then the copyright act of 1976 provides for automatic copyright protections, unless there is some notification which explicitly puts it under a license which permits it use.
The original poster will probably never be called out if he leaves the situation as it stands he is still breaking the law. His options for avoiding this are to either find another copy of the code which is listed under a license, contact the author and ask for a license, or to rewrite the code.
Granted you can't use the account X to play the game in location Y, but then again you paid for the right to play it in location X. There's nothing stopping you from creating another account Y and entering the new location Y serial number there. Steam accounts don't cost anything to create. What you're complaining about is not being coddled because you put yourself in a situation by trying to rip off Valve.
So Comcast causing Bittorrent problems is OK for Net Neutrality. But if Comcast suddenly lets Blizzard's WoW updates unimpeded while causing problems for say, Linux ISO torrents, then that conflicts with Net Neutrality.
No, what you're describing is best termed 'bittorrent neutrality'. Net Neutrality means treating VOIP, HTTP, Torrent, FTP, SMTP, etc.. all the same. Quality of Service is not general taken to mean throttling, but rather an additional service that you pay for that guarantees a certain level of MINIMUM quality for YOUR packets, like being on a chartered plane instead of taking a regular airline flight.
Right.... cause you can ONLY use urea nitrate for bomb making. Its not as if the Oklahoma City bombing was perpetrated using ordinary commercial fertilizer.
This power, to selectively enforce the law, is used more often than you might think.
Yes, often to do things like disenfranchise voters and enable racism. Like enforcing certain laws only against poor/black people and not against right/white people. I think the grand parent's assertion that laws should be enforced uniformly if they're on the books is so that there will be backlash against unjust and unfair laws and they'll be taken off the books, or struck down as unconstitutional.
Alabama's sodomy law is in fact invalidated by Lawrence vs. Texas. There are probably many other similar laws that wouldn't pass constitutional muster, but until they are tested, they stay on the books and can be held over the head of anyone, or more likely held over the head of people you don't like selectively.
That's as may be, but a default OS installation should have no reason to talk to any of the root servers. Only a machine RUNNING a DNS server should have any reason to communicate with root servers.
While you can argue the DRM issue with someone else, the UAC stuff is definitely better than XP. Its also a well designed UI for it given the problem being solved. On *nix boxes I find that I tend to use sudo to elevate my level for one task and then forget to change it back, leaving me open to accidentally fscking my system. On the other hand, in Windows priv elevation is per task based and virtually impossible to spoof.
Where Vista falls down is third party apps, but this can hardly be laid completely at Microsoft's feet. More than 6 months since release and Cisco still doesn't have a reliable VPN client. Is MS's new network stack so fiendishly complex that Cisco can't cope, or is Cisco dropping the ball. I think the latter.
There is so much power streaming out of the sun. really, every single power source on the planet (save perhaps nuclear) derives from a solar process.
Not quite. There are basically 3 power sources available on earth. There is solar energy, nuclear energy and geothermal energy. Nuclear energy is really just another form of solar energy from other suns since the radioactive elements are created in supernovas. Geothermal energy taps heat generated from both nuclear decay within the earth (back to nuclear energy) and heat from the gravitational collapse of the primordial dust cloud into the planet Earth. Not sure what the ratio is there.
I don't know for certain about HP or Toshiba or the others, but Dell EXCPLICITLY states on their web site that DVD's for the upgrade will go out 4-8 weeks after Vista is available. Read the god damned fine print.
History is full of permitted protests. That's not the point. History is also full of non-permitted protests which were just as important. This is about protecting the ability to non-violently resist injustice on the part of the government.
I recommend protesting anyway, publically, non-violently, a la Ghandi. The problem is, that this weapon, had it been available, likely would have been used against Ghandi. So now Ghandi and all his fellow protesters have to be non-violent AND immune to searing pain.
Anyone doing business with a chronically heavily-phished bank should be looking for a new bank
Thus setting up a market force for banks to not only lay the burden of fraud on consumers, but to keep it quiet as well, perhaps by suing customers who try to make public how they were fleeced.
Not all financial institutions get targeted, and not all of those who have been heavily targeted in the past remain so.
No. The institutions that get targeted are not the stupid ones, or the small ones. They are the very largest ones, because those are the largest pool of potential victims.
It's good to read more than the headline... The point of the article, mentioned in the/. summary, is that a bank almost made phishees pay for their own mistakes. That's somewhat novel.
I wasn't replying to the articl, I was replying to this
If you could make the bank managers and directors and shareholders pay out of their personal pockets, maybe that would have an incentive effect to make phishing harder, but that's not the way corporate capitalism works.
Maybe not, but the solution is not to shaft the consumer. If your argument is that the corporation doesn't have the incentive to reduce fraud, my point is and has been that the consumer may have the incentive (maybe) but he certainly doesn't have the means. Guess which is easier to tweak?
Individual customers can't, particularly if they don't speak up but large numbers of customers being vocal and moving on send a message banks will listen to.
No, they won't because of the assymetric nature of the problem. From the point of view of the banks or the customers as a whole its not a big enough problem to put a lot of effort into. The small fraction of people who are impacted can be devastated, but they aren't a big enough voice to encourage banks to take actions that would minimize fraud. For that matter, customers as a whole probably aren't the best people to decide how to minimize fraud. The banks or the experts they hire would be the ones with the expertise, so let them do it. You just need to give them an incentive, and paying for fraud is it.
Brad
The customer is incapable of forcing the bank to make even the most basic and obvious gestures to security. Placing the financial burden of fraud on the banks gives the banks an incentive to do everything in their power to make it rare. Putting the financial burden of fraud on the consumer give the banks every incentive to ignore the problem. And don't point to market forces because no one bank is going to be able to single-handedly shoulder the burden of handling fraud and pushing the other banks to do so, especially when they don't have to.
The bottom line is that corporations don't protect consumers unless they're forced to by financial incentives or legal disincentives against wrongdoing.
Please stop spreading this BS. Nuclear fission and nuclear decay are two entirely different nuclear reactions.
No, in fact fission is one type of nuclear decay
Decay happens spontaneously fission requires the nucleus to react with a neutron.
Again, no. Fission can occur without an intervening neutron, though neutrons can also help it. Given the heavy nuclei occuring in radioactive waste, there are probably going to be quite a lot of decays emmiting neutrons and a lot of spontaneous fission as well.
In order to 'reduce the half life' you'd either have to have a mechanism to alter the fundamental properties of the nucleus on a large scale to prevent radioactive decay (which would be an amazing physics breakthrough with applications well beyond handling nuclear waste) or you'd have to find a way to increase the rate of the radioactive decay by many orders of magnitude. Doing the latter is possible. Its called a nuclear bomb. If they did manage to cause the material to give up all its energy and become inert they'd still have to do something with all that energy.
My point was not to necessarily compare Iraq and Japan other than the high-level similarity that both were occupations and nation-building excercises by the US.
If you're point is simply to say that nation building is hard work, I'm certainly willing to agree. I would suggest that many people that bleat about the difficulties in Iraq are not simply complaining about nation building, but perhaps complaining, if only implicitly, about doing so in a nation that a) never attacked us, b) had no capability to attack us, and c) was in no way a state supporter of islamic fundamentalist terrorism and was in fact a largely secular government, and as such was viewed with almost as much suspicioun and distrust by the fundamentalists as the U.S.
So I'll concede your original point, nation building is hard. That's why it should only be employed against countries that pose a clear and immediate threat, demonstrated by things like bombing Pearl Harbor, or destroying the World Trade Center (which again, Iraq had nothing to do with).
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually left out a lot of caveats here, and IANAL, but most of the caveats are things that only get settled after litigation, which is something you want to avoid. People have replied to me talking about things like 'works created for public use' or talking about how anything in comp.* on usenet is essentially meant to be used. Neither of these are actually strong legal arguments, nor would a judge accept 'well no one has sued anyone over use of code from this source before' as a valid defense. This kind of thinking is hopelessly naive. In point of fact, companies which have used source code under the GPL and failed to follow the terms of that license have run into hot water numerous times before and the GPL is a much less restrictive license than 'no license at all'. My point is that if the OP wants to be in the clear (i.e. no gray areas that might involve litigation down the road, even litigation his employer is likely to win) then he basically has the above listed options.
Being 'found to be uncopyrightable' is something that only happens after you've spent a mountain on legal fees. If the code in question turns out to originate with a competing company with deep pockets, its probably worth the time and effort for them to litigate it even if they know they will lose in the end.
I don't know if you're trying to be funny or trying to point out a perceived flaw in the 'automatically copyrighted' concept being discussed here, but since that code is demonstrably not original, you can't copyright it, and in fact you're violating copyright by reproducing it (yes, even though its publicly available elsewhere).
Standard libraries can leave a lot to be desired. The original poster didn't even specify the language, so if you're dealing with something like C or C++ on Win32, then the standard libraries are woefully lacking. Programmers don't reinvent the wheel because they are idiots, at least not always. They do it because there isn't a publicly available implementation of the code in question for their platform and language or because the time it would take to implement the functionality is less than the time it would take to find such a library.
>Code is meant to be reused. Thats why people put it out there.
No, thats one reason people put it out there. But again, posting something in a public place doesn't make it public domain.
>Man, if the original poster worked for me, he wouldn't for long. Thats the exact type of programmer that you DONT want, someone wasting precious time and resources rewriting code thats been written a million times before.
Its the kind of programmer who exercises due diligence and ensures that you're not going to end up with a huge public relations disaster and or lawsuit if the copying ever came to light. I work for a major software developer and if one of our products ever went out and someone discovered it was using illegally copied code, it would have a major impact on the bottom line of both the company and myself (stock options), and if it was my copying, it would certainly cost me my job. This precious time and resources you call 'wasted' is what wiser men have referred to as 'an ounce of prevention'.
>Of course it is. This kind of thing happens all the time.
This may be completely commonplace, but it is certainly not legal. Simply posting something in a public place does NOT put it in the public domain, and contrary to what many people in this forum are saying, failing to attach a copyright notification to something does NOT place it in the public domain either. Assuming the author posted the information after 1976 and is covered by american law, then the copyright act of 1976 provides for automatic copyright protections, unless there is some notification which explicitly puts it under a license which permits it use.
The original poster will probably never be called out if he leaves the situation as it stands he is still breaking the law. His options for avoiding this are to either find another copy of the code which is listed under a license, contact the author and ask for a license, or to rewrite the code.
Avada Kedavra!
Granted you can't use the account X to play the game in location Y, but then again you paid for the right to play it in location X. There's nothing stopping you from creating another account Y and entering the new location Y serial number there. Steam accounts don't cost anything to create. What you're complaining about is not being coddled because you put yourself in a situation by trying to rip off Valve.
Right.... cause you can ONLY use urea nitrate for bomb making. Its not as if the Oklahoma City bombing was perpetrated using ordinary commercial fertilizer.
Bomb makers or maybe farmers who handle fertilizer? I don't envy being a false positive in Iraq.
Alabama's sodomy law is in fact invalidated by Lawrence vs. Texas. There are probably many other similar laws that wouldn't pass constitutional muster, but until they are tested, they stay on the books and can be held over the head of anyone, or more likely held over the head of people you don't like selectively.
That's as may be, but a default OS installation should have no reason to talk to any of the root servers. Only a machine RUNNING a DNS server should have any reason to communicate with root servers.
Where Vista falls down is third party apps, but this can hardly be laid completely at Microsoft's feet. More than 6 months since release and Cisco still doesn't have a reliable VPN client. Is MS's new network stack so fiendishly complex that Cisco can't cope, or is Cisco dropping the ball. I think the latter.
I don't know for certain about HP or Toshiba or the others, but Dell EXCPLICITLY states on their web site that DVD's for the upgrade will go out 4-8 weeks after Vista is available. Read the god damned fine print.
You mean these?
The bottom line is that corporations don't protect consumers unless they're forced to by financial incentives or legal disincentives against wrongdoing.
In order to 'reduce the half life' you'd either have to have a mechanism to alter the fundamental properties of the nucleus on a large scale to prevent radioactive decay (which would be an amazing physics breakthrough with applications well beyond handling nuclear waste) or you'd have to find a way to increase the rate of the radioactive decay by many orders of magnitude. Doing the latter is possible. Its called a nuclear bomb. If they did manage to cause the material to give up all its energy and become inert they'd still have to do something with all that energy.
So I'll concede your original point, nation building is hard. That's why it should only be employed against countries that pose a clear and immediate threat, demonstrated by things like bombing Pearl Harbor, or destroying the World Trade Center (which again, Iraq had nothing to do with).