I knew a guy like that too, but he wasn't after money or corporate leadership. Same kind of shtick though. He was a regional manager at $LARGE_US_RETAIL_CHAIN, with responsibility for Ohio, Pennsylvania, and all of Canada. Pallbearer at funeral of $FAMOUS_RETAIL_EXECUTIVE. But didn't have his own business cards ("Sam doesn't believe in them!") and just didn't look the part ("But everyone at $RETAIL_CHAIN is customer service!").
It is really amazing how far guys like that can push and push before people catch on. There are millions of little signs but nothing quite big enough to set off your bullcarp detector. And then you're horrified at how stupid you were.
I never even lent this guy a nickel. I think he just liked the thrill of hacking people. But he was very, very good at it.
I mute commercials, and generally try to avoid advertising at all costs. But it is simply
impossible to not get those goddamn jingles stuck in your head...the thought pollution is immense.
Right you are.
If advertising weren't so effective, mega-corporations wouldn't be paying so much for it. Obviously they believe that enough money and clever delivery can make a message extremely persuasive.
It's not your fault. Advertising really is that pervasive and persuasive.
It's called the right to feely associate, and it's the same right that allows an all-women college to keep me out because I'm a guy, or for the NAACP to not allow me on their board of directors, because I am not the right "race".
The NAACP probably has a legal right to exclude whites, but it doesn't do so.
From their website:
The NAACP was formed in 1909 in New York City by a group of black and white citizens committed to social justice.... The struggle continues and we invite all Americans to stand with us - Native-American, black, white, and Hispanic, young and old, Jew and Gentile, male and female. Wherever Americans of good will and decency reside - they are welcome to join our ranks until freedom for all is won.
I couldn't find specific information to the effect that the NAACP's policies on board membership are that inclusive, but ISTR they do not restrict any offices to or from persons of any particular ethnic group.
I know it isn't really on point, but I felt a need to correct a misperception that the NAACP is an exclusive organization.
You seem to have multiple legal questions here, and I am not a lawyer in any jurisdiction although I am 3-1 pro se.
"Is HTML copyrightable?" Sure it is. You don't lose the ability to copyright code or text just because it has tags in it, do you?
You hint that there's a question of who owns the copyright to the partially-completed work of the first company. All I can say is, "That's a good question and it depends on a lot of things."
There is also the question of whether you've violated a copyright by modifying their HTML, assuming that the first company even owns it.
And then you have to consider damages. It's possible to violate a copyright but prove that the copyright holder didn't lose money as a result...
Oy, my head hurts. From what you've provided, it's a complicated situation. "Is HTML coyprightable?" is just one question among many.
Instead, software vendors should be made accountable for process. Software Engineering is a mature body of research on the processes required to produce solidly engineered code. If Brand X software crashes my computer, I'll just have to live with it unless I find out that Brand X rushed their development cycle, slashed their budget, hired script kiddies to implement last minute hacks, and spent a whopping 10 minutes testing the final product.... We could even taken it one step further and imagine a codified set of symbols that software vendors could place on their packages to indicate the level of rigor used during production.
You just described the "Capability Maturity Model" in a nutshell.
Third-party certification agencies could back these claims, and people who sue would only win when the company failed to live up to their published level of rigor.
The average child in the United States sees 200,000 killings, stabbings and beatings on television by the age of 18, according to the
American Academy of Pediatrics.
But how is that even possible?
200,000 killings/stabbings/beatings by age 18 would be over 10,000 per year, or around 30 per day, every day.
Are they seriously saying that everyone under 18, on average, including preschoolers, is seeing someone being beaten or killed 30 times a day on TV?
...there was a disclaimer at the bottom proclaiming that "this spam is not spam according to US code X.Y.Z so long as we provide a way for you to avoid receiving any more mailings." Aside from questioning the existence of such a law in the first place (can anyone confirm that?), if the law does exist it's intolerable.
Spammers lie.
No, there is no such law. Spammers quote S. 1618, which died in committee something like two years ago without becoming law.
There needs to be an open review period before any patent is granted. The combined knowledge of everyone in the field is far greater than what's written down.
Or, put another way: "With enough eyes, all prior art is shallow."
Don't open-source patents. Open-source the Patent Office!
20 years from now any patent they hold will have been rendered obselete. [reply:] Don't be too sure. The RSA patent is due to expire this September, and the technologies it covers are still in common use.
Sure, but the patent holders have been compensated pretty well for this innovation. RSA isn't obsolete yet, but I doubt you could argue that a shorter patent term would have taken away the incentive to create it.
Yes, there is a lot of streaming content in Real Networks format out there. However, the company has hardly behaved particularly well: they never released specifications for their format as they had originally promised, and their closed source player has transmitted private information back to their servers.
Not to mention that they are among the top two or three corporate spammers. Not only do they harvest addresses, but according to reliable regular posters on news.admin.net-abuse.email, Real Networks has been caught performing "dictionary" attacks against mailservers. That's basically picking a domain and attempting to send spam to every combination of characters that looks like it might possibly be a deliverable address in that domain: alice@example.com, bob@example.com, charlie@example.com, and so on. The load on other people's mail servers is tremendous, and of course by definition it's unsolicited. (If you'd wanted their advertising, they wouldn't have to guess your address, would they?)
MAPS, a service known for being rather conservative about who gets listed as a spam source, has had Real Networks on their RBL (sort of a voluntary spam filter service) for months. I don't know of any other "legitimate" company that's been RBLed for more than a couple of weeks.
Long story short, besides all their other faults, Real Networks is an unrepentant corporate spamhaus. It's too bad Red Hat has gotten into bed with them.
In the MS world where things get released every 2 years or so, it's not incredibly bad. In the Linux world where updates come every few weeks, it can get a bit amazing that I can keep up at all.
While the rest of your post was illuminating, I had to take exception to this.
True, a new Linux kernel comes out every few weeks, and one or another distribution is selling a new update practially as often. But they're not changing fundamental programming concepts nearly as often.
Microsoft, on the other hand... one year it's DDE, two years later it's OLE, but then OLE becomes ActiveX which is not quite the same thing, and then suddenly they decide "everything" (yeah, right) on Win98 is going to be "web-enabled," and by the way there's a new WidgetAPI that you have to use to get the Windows 2000 logo, but the certification tests are all different this year...
Oy. The Microsoft developer-maintenance system is designed to lock you in. They want you to feel so far behind their latest "technology" that you can't do much more than keep up with the newsletters. It's gratuitous churning. Change for the sake of change.
There are very few true paradigm shifts in our field. In retrospect, it's probably fair to say that object-oriented programming was one of them, but that's been around for more than a decade. The world of Windows dreams up new names for old techniques and different ways of packaging the same ideas as a competitive tactic.
On the contrary, Linux is still pretty much just a very nice, Open Sourced Unix. It works mostly the way you expect Unix to work. Beowulf comes around, and you say, "Oh, clustering. I know what that is." Multiprocessing support gets added, and you say, "Oh, multiprocessing. I know what that does even if I don't feel a need to use it right now." Someone ports a commercial database and you say, "Fantastic, it's about time I'm allowed to run Oracle on this thing."
What Linux is, and what it does, is pretty much consistent from one big release to the next. It just does it better or in a more feature-rich way each time around.
Even though I know it's a side issue here, I really felt like saying this. Life as a Microsoft developer is a life of keeping up with gratuitous surface changes. I find it much, much easier to "keep up" with Linux.
Someone suggested looking at Harbour, which is all Open Source, but maybe not quite ready to use in production yet. It has some nice extensions over CA-Clipper though. It wasn't particularly designed as a successor to FoxPro.
FlagShip is quite good, very stable, been in production for years. Available right now. But it's commercial. ISTR they have a very affordable Linux version.
Can't remember what the name of the product was, but CA had some marketoid-type ad in a computer magazene for some product that asked something to the effect of "Imagine if you could fly around the office to fix computer problems". What's wrong with telnet, or some windows equiv? What if the ethernet is unplugged? This looked like a lot of fluff and no substance.
The product was CA-Unicenter: TNG. It has a pretty slick three-dimensional virtual reality interface. You can "fly" around the world with your mouse and click down into a particular building/subnet/host/component/yaddayaddayadda. Neat demoware.
I still haven't heard of anyone actually using this instead of the console alerts though. "NIC FAILED ON WORKSTATION xyzzy SUBNET baz AT FACILITY foo" is a lot more useful, but it doesn't look as cool on a video.
Capitalism boils down to "This resource (bit of and, mineral vein, idea) is MINE, and government guns will back up that claim". It's very good for those whose claims the state decides to back but, depending on what's being claimed, can tend to suck for everyone else.
No, that's allodialism. Land is not Capital; Capital is not Land.
"This thing that I made is mine!" is Capitalism. So is, "this thing that I paid someone to make for me," and "this thing that my machine made for me."
Allodialism is claiming resources that are simply "out there" and not created by anyone. It's a perversion of Capitalism in which Land (which belongs to nobody) is conflated with Capital (which belongs to whoever paid for it). In your example, the mineral vein is a kind of Land; but the "idea" is a form of Labor, of which Capital is merely the accumulation.
Here are a couple of links to documents that describe the difference between allodialism and capitalism:
Before you start to panic, please take a moment to read about the Fair Use Doctrine which allows for free appropriation of content in certain cases of parody, commentary and academic research.
"Fair use" has nothing to do with trademarks. It is part of copyright law. Even the word "copyright" is embedded in the URL you gave.
Trademark law is not copyright law. Copyright law is not trademark law.
So, I guess I need some further explanation of the loophole. The only way I can see it is if a limited partnership (not sole-proprietor) company (not incorporated) did this. Then, there would be no "individual" since it would cover a group that could not be legally assumed to be either humanly or legally individual.
Right, and even in that case a partnership does not have a separate legal existence. The only "persons" that exist in law are natural humans and corporations. Partnerships are just combinations of "persons"... they don't have any rights in law.
IANAL, but I'm 3-1 in pro se cases.
Bottom line, I'm with you. I don't see what the original poster's point is. Corporations have exactly the same rights under GPL as individuals do. So what?
Slashdot Mirror
Who are "they"? That's been known by mainstream science for decades.
Hey Bruce, if the GPL is a license-hence-contract under UCITA, doesn't that contract apply only to copying and changing the program?
ISTM that the GPL is not a license to use the software, and therefore UCITA doesn't apply to use of GPLd software.
I'm interested in your thoughts on this.
I knew a guy like that too, but he wasn't after money or corporate leadership. Same kind of shtick though. He was a regional manager at $LARGE_US_RETAIL_CHAIN, with responsibility for Ohio, Pennsylvania, and all of Canada. Pallbearer at funeral of $FAMOUS_RETAIL_EXECUTIVE. But didn't have his own business cards ("Sam doesn't believe in them!") and just didn't look the part ("But everyone at $RETAIL_CHAIN is customer service!").
It is really amazing how far guys like that can push and push before people catch on. There are millions of little signs but nothing quite big enough to set off your bullcarp detector. And then you're horrified at how stupid you were.
I never even lent this guy a nickel. I think he just liked the thrill of hacking people. But he was very, very good at it.
Right you are.
If advertising weren't so effective, mega-corporations wouldn't be paying so much for it. Obviously they believe that enough money and clever delivery can make a message extremely persuasive.
It's not your fault. Advertising really is that pervasive and persuasive.
The NAACP probably has a legal right to exclude whites, but it doesn't do so.
From their website:
I couldn't find specific information to the effect that the NAACP's policies on board membership are that inclusive, but ISTR they do not restrict any offices to or from persons of any particular ethnic group.
I know it isn't really on point, but I felt a need to correct a misperception that the NAACP is an exclusive organization.
I'll pile on with another "me too" about Cleveland. It's cheap to live here and the perks are pretty good.
I wrote an article about it a few weeks ago.
You seem to have multiple legal questions here, and I am not a lawyer in any jurisdiction although I am 3-1 pro se.
"Is HTML copyrightable?" Sure it is. You don't lose the ability to copyright code or text just because it has tags in it, do you?
You hint that there's a question of who owns the copyright to the partially-completed work of the first company. All I can say is, "That's a good question and it depends on a lot of things."
There is also the question of whether you've violated a copyright by modifying their HTML, assuming that the first company even owns it.
And then you have to consider damages. It's possible to violate a copyright but prove that the copyright holder didn't lose money as a result...
Oy, my head hurts. From what you've provided, it's a complicated situation. "Is HTML coyprightable?" is just one question among many.
Exodus has pretty much taken over from UUNet the distinction of being the most notorious spamhaus ISP. Unless you count Telstra and Sprint.
You just described the "Capability Maturity Model" in a nutshell.
And that is the idea of ISO9000.
But how is that even possible?
200,000 killings/stabbings/beatings by age 18 would be over 10,000 per year, or around 30 per day, every day.
Are they seriously saying that everyone under 18, on average, including preschoolers, is seeing someone being beaten or killed 30 times a day on TV?
Chris Johnson says he's afraid to send single, personalized emails to specific people in the music industry to help promote his work.
A single message to a specific person isn't spam. It may be unsolicited, but it's not bulk, and bulk is what makes spam intolerable.
Without the "bulk" part of "unsolicted bulk email," nobody would give spam a second thought.
Chris, if you use email like a personal phone call, I don't think anyone could rightly accuse you of network abuse.
Spammers lie.
No, there is no such law. Spammers quote S. 1618, which died in committee something like two years ago without becoming law.
Or, put another way: "With enough eyes, all prior art is shallow."
Don't open-source patents. Open-source the Patent Office!
Fatbrain spams.
From the signup confirmation email:
And they call this a standards organization?
Not to mention that they are among the top two or three corporate spammers. Not only do they harvest addresses, but according to reliable regular posters on news.admin.net-abuse.email, Real Networks has been caught performing "dictionary" attacks against mailservers. That's basically picking a domain and attempting to send spam to every combination of characters that looks like it might possibly be a deliverable address in that domain: alice@example.com, bob@example.com, charlie@example.com, and so on. The load on other people's mail servers is tremendous, and of course by definition it's unsolicited. (If you'd wanted their advertising, they wouldn't have to guess your address, would they?)
MAPS, a service known for being rather conservative about who gets listed as a spam source, has had Real Networks on their RBL (sort of a voluntary spam filter service) for months. I don't know of any other "legitimate" company that's been RBLed for more than a couple of weeks.
Long story short, besides all their other faults, Real Networks is an unrepentant corporate spamhaus. It's too bad Red Hat has gotten into bed with them.
While the rest of your post was illuminating, I had to take exception to this.
True, a new Linux kernel comes out every few weeks, and one or another distribution is selling a new update practially as often. But they're not changing fundamental programming concepts nearly as often.
Microsoft, on the other hand... one year it's DDE, two years later it's OLE, but then OLE becomes ActiveX which is not quite the same thing, and then suddenly they decide "everything" (yeah, right) on Win98 is going to be "web-enabled," and by the way there's a new WidgetAPI that you have to use to get the Windows 2000 logo, but the certification tests are all different this year...
Oy. The Microsoft developer-maintenance system is designed to lock you in. They want you to feel so far behind their latest "technology" that you can't do much more than keep up with the newsletters. It's gratuitous churning. Change for the sake of change.
There are very few true paradigm shifts in our field. In retrospect, it's probably fair to say that object-oriented programming was one of them, but that's been around for more than a decade. The world of Windows dreams up new names for old techniques and different ways of packaging the same ideas as a competitive tactic.
On the contrary, Linux is still pretty much just a very nice, Open Sourced Unix. It works mostly the way you expect Unix to work. Beowulf comes around, and you say, "Oh, clustering. I know what that is." Multiprocessing support gets added, and you say, "Oh, multiprocessing. I know what that does even if I don't feel a need to use it right now." Someone ports a commercial database and you say, "Fantastic, it's about time I'm allowed to run Oracle on this thing."
What Linux is, and what it does, is pretty much consistent from one big release to the next. It just does it better or in a more feature-rich way each time around.
Even though I know it's a side issue here, I really felt like saying this. Life as a Microsoft developer is a life of keeping up with gratuitous surface changes. I find it much, much easier to "keep up" with Linux.
Someone suggested looking at Harbour, which is all Open Source, but maybe not quite ready to use in production yet. It has some nice extensions over CA-Clipper though. It wasn't particularly designed as a successor to FoxPro.
FlagShip is quite good, very stable, been in production for years. Available right now. But it's commercial. ISTR they have a very affordable Linux version.
The product was CA-Unicenter: TNG. It has a pretty slick three-dimensional virtual reality interface. You can "fly" around the world with your mouse and click down into a particular building/subnet/host/component/yaddayaddayadda. Neat demoware.
I still haven't heard of anyone actually using this instead of the console alerts though. "NIC FAILED ON WORKSTATION xyzzy SUBNET baz AT FACILITY foo" is a lot more useful, but it doesn't look as cool on a video.
No, that's allodialism. Land is not Capital; Capital is not Land.
"This thing that I made is mine!" is Capitalism. So is, "this thing that I paid someone to make for me," and "this thing that my machine made for me."
Allodialism is claiming resources that are simply "out there" and not created by anyone. It's a perversion of Capitalism in which Land (which belongs to nobody) is conflated with Capital (which belongs to whoever paid for it). In your example, the mineral vein is a kind of Land; but the "idea" is a form of Labor, of which Capital is merely the accumulation.
Here are a couple of links to documents that describe the difference between allodialism and capitalism:
Current "pirate" stations seem to do well on much less than that.
You're a lawyer. You went to Harvard. You know what you're talking about.
I bow to superior knowledge.
"Fair use" has nothing to do with trademarks. It is part of copyright law. Even the word "copyright" is embedded in the URL you gave.
Trademark law is not copyright law. Copyright law is not trademark law.
Right, and even in that case a partnership does not have a separate legal existence. The only "persons" that exist in law are natural humans and corporations. Partnerships are just combinations of "persons"... they don't have any rights in law.
IANAL, but I'm 3-1 in pro se cases.
Bottom line, I'm with you. I don't see what the original poster's point is. Corporations have exactly the same rights under GPL as individuals do. So what?