"Please note that installing this software is ILLEGAL and is in violation of the Kazaa Media Desktop Terms of Use. If you do, however, install the software contained in this package, you agree to take ALL responsibility for your actions."
If this came up in a box with an "I agree" button, than it is a typical click-through EULA agreement, and almost everybody agrees that these are unenforcable. Nobody reads them, everybody just clicks "I agree" immediately.
If their client was GPL, the RIAA could modify the source code all they want to make whatever evil program they wanted, and they would not be violating the GPL or copyright. It has been shown many times that the GPL allows you to modify code for your own use. This is because the GPL only grants some additional rights that copyright does not allow, and copyright already allows you to do this. Thus the GPL cannot stop it.
Only if they "distributed" the resulting program would they be violating the GPL. And certainly they would not be distributing it, since that would allow the enemies of the RIAA to get it and try to figure out how to outwit it's purpose.
So IMHO this is in no way a copyright violation, and KAZAA is completely wrong to even attempt this.
One in the middle of Massachusetts I once was a member of: Nashua Valley Railroad Association. The web site is retro (to be charitable), but the layout is quite nice.
No, at the Xlib level drag & drop (the xDnD proposal) and cut & paste use the same mechanism (XSetSelectionOwner and negotiation of data types) and are approximately equal in complexity.
The main addition in DnD is that there is feedback from the dropee that the source program is supposed to use to change the cursor. However this is just historical, you could easily imagine a design where the cursor is supposed to feedback all the time an indication of whether the middle-mouse-click will work and this would be identical.
These problems are caused by bad design, in particular the seperated Window manager and programs.
Windows also has Expose events, thought they call them WM_PAINT, and they work the same way. However even the earliest version of Windows would freeze all update to any windows while you dragged a window around and would preserve the area hidden by the moving window, so once the area the window was sitting on was repainted (you can certainly see this, it looks just like X because they did the same brain-dead "erase" action and it turns white), you could drag the window quite quickly. Modern Windows has backing store for all the windows so WM_PAINT is not needed except for resize and when the program requests it.
Both of these can be added to X without much trouble, though it looks like only Backing Store is going in.
No amount of speed is going to fix the resize problems. They are caused by two different processes drawing the window border and the window contents. I have looked at ways of synchronizing this and things do not look good, even if I assumme new calls are added to the X server. We need to make the window borders be drawn by the application. The "Window manager", if it exists at all, is strictly for managing icons or taskbars, it would send a "you are being opened/iconized" message to applications, and they would respond by unmapping/mapping windows.
And yes, I know this means the window borders can look different between programs, and that dreaded boogyman of "inconsistency" will be raised yet again. But really, lots of media players already use override-redirect and make fake window borders, and I have NOT seen people "confused by inconsistency". This argument is really a scam by people who want to write the toolkits, rather than work on hard stuff like fast and powerful rendering models.
Remote display of some X programs is really bad due to the fact that they draw everything with images because it is too hard to get the graphics they want with the (quite awful) X drawing primitives. Basically they are acting like VNC in a window, except X has no image compression, so of course this is worse. This can only be addressed with new and powerful rendering models so that you can draw transparent images. IMHO "sending widgets" is a mistake and will cause more communication: check out how many methods you need to create and control a Qt widget, and compare that to how many graphics calls you have to do to draw it.
Before you put your foot in your mouth again, you might want to check the Windows API. Check what W_DESTROYCLIPBOARD, WM_RENDERFORMAT, and WM_RENDERALLFORMATS do. In fact SetClipboardData() is implemented locally, a fact that can easily be proven by interfering with the above events. Internally Windows works exactly the same as X.
Window's advantage over X can be in a few things:
1. They added meaningful and useful wrapper functions such as SetClipboardData, rather than just expose the underlying data. And they rely on static variables so you don't have to pass some pointer (and remember if it is a Display, Visual, GC, or Window, or what...) to all the functions.
2. Besides making a scheme by which various types of data can be passed and identified by number (exactly the same as X), they assigned some numbers. For instance they assigned a number that means Windows BMP file. This is the reason RTF and images can cut & paste (note that newer data tends not to cut & paste except between instances of the same program, since they did not assign numbers for these). Meanwhile the X guys said that was a higher-level function and did not even assign a number to mean text. If the stupid X designers had just said "this number means an XWD image" or something they could easily have done in 1985, images would be cutting and pasting today. Instead I have to check for six different strings to mean text, and the only other data type I handle is URLs and I do that by looking for a colon near the start.
X (or really the desktop environments and applications) supports both
I challenge you to find a modern X program (ie a KDE or Gnome program) that does not support ctrl+x and ctrl+v for cut and paste. And don't you dare say "Emacs" or any other program that runs on Windows and does not support ctrl+x and ctrl+v there either. I can complaint that cut & paste don't work in Lotus 123 or in the DOS cmd.exe or hundreds of other Windows programs.
The middle mouse thing is really drag & drop, with the advantage that you can rearrange the windows and open/iconize them between when you "drag" and when you "drop", and also the advantage that it is trivial to "abort a drag". Unfortunatley the original X programs thought drag & drop was sufficient and did not do clipboard, which is the source of complaints. But you are basically saying the same as "Windows should get rid of drag & drop, it is confusing and everybody uses cut & paste".
I have a 1985 CD player with drawer loading. Unlike current ones, the drawer has a very large hole, really just a 1/2" rim around the outside of a normal-sized disk. You cannot play a 3" disk in it because it falls through the drawer. I also have a ring that adapts the 3" disk, it snaps around the outside to make it full-size, with this ring the small disks play.
Based on these observations, it would seem that 3" disks are newer than the original CD specification, since otherwise I would think my CD player would have been made to take them.
PS: the CD player works great, after I replaced one rubber drive band that made the drawer open/close.
This means that if you find a piece of paper lying on the ground and read it, the information ends up in your brain, even if it was illegal for that to happen. It's like water flowing downhill, it is a natural phenomenon.
Now somebody writing source code might "want it to be free". They might also "want it to be secret". In fact somebody could work on their clever idea that they plan to GPL, but they want to keep it secret right now, because it is so clever and they don't want to see another rip-off GPL program appear before theirs is done and steal all the credit. So they might very well "want it to be secret" and then change to "want it to be free". Microsoft probably wants their code to be secret, but they certainly also release lots of code as examples that they don't mind people copying. Plenty of people publish books and source code with normal copyright where they want people to see the code but don't want them to copy it.
All of these have nothing to do with the natural effect if you see some source code printed on a piece of paper, and you pick it up and read it to see what it is. That is why "information wants to be free". The copyright holder's desires have nothing to do with the information being free or not.
I don't know what you are reading, but I saw dozens of posts of what I consider the most persuasive argument:
class Rectangle rectangle;
If this is not allowed, you either have to put ugly hungarian-type notation on either the class names or the instance names (like RectangleClass or rectangleI or both), or you have to make a harder-to-read language where the parsing rules allow the compiler to unambiguously know if a type or id is expected everywhere.
Conversely *everybody* arguing against case-sensitivity seems to say "it is easier to type, and my Visual Basic fixes the case for me". Dude, if your IDE "fixes the case" then you don't need case insensitivity!!!. Think hard and don't hurt your brain: if the case is "fixed" then it is already correct for a case-sensitive compiler! The fact that VB programmers don't seem to grasp the obvious is proof that that thing must rot their brain...
Languages on systems that had no lower-case letters do not count (ie anything on punchcards). Languages implemented in ways that compressed labels to 6 or fewer bits per character do not count for the same reason.
The only early language I can think of that worked on terminals that had multiple cases is Lisp. It absolutely was case-sensitive.
Using different cases to mean different things has a history in mathmatics back to the early 19th century when modern algebraic notation was standardized. A matrix was often called "A" in the same calculation where a scaler was called "a".
If you name two classes with different case only, I think that can be considered bad enough practice that it is ok that you can't store both of them.
However case dependece is vital so you can name a variable and a Class with different case. It would be incredibly annoying if I wanted one instance of the Class "Rectangle" and I was unable to call it "rectangle". The only alternative to case dependence is to change the syntax of the language so that at any point in parsing it can know if a type or id is expected, that would greatly restrict the expressiveness of the language and add annoying extra required keywords.
Storing anything other than UTF-8 in filenames is an incredible mistake, and whoever at Microsoft did that should burn in hell. All Unix systems such as Linux fortunately use UTF-8.
Thanks for that link on Gamma correction. It does seem that some people are finally getting it, I have been trying to get this idea across for years.
Numbers in the file should represent *specific* colors. Not some color in a "colorspace" that the file also gives. This is just like tagging text files with the "character set", it should be obvious now that making a single specification like UTF-8 is far more reliable and "just works".
I very much recommend using the sRGB standard to represent color levels in any file format storing an integer. Programs should *ALWAYS* copy these numbers unchanged to the screen framebuffer. Any attempt at any other solution means that colors will not match between programs.
That means all those colorimiters and printer matching profiles and other garbage you have been scammed into buying is useless. Too bad. You were taken. Even the authors of png were taken. And people who keep saying Gimp is no good because it lacks printer profiles are wrong (there are probably other problems with Gimp, but printer matching is a scam). I have worked in computer processed imagery (for special effects) for over 10 years and I damn well know what I am talking about, so don't go calling this a troll.
Wrong, the authors, despite having violated your copyright, still have copyright over their modifications. Without some sort of negotiation nobody can legally distribute the merged work.
Re:Intellectual Property theft is still theft...
on
RIAA Files 532 Lawsuits
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· Score: 2, Informative
No. Legally copyright violation is not theft. It is against the law, but it is under a different catagory than theft.
The usual explanation is that in fact the original owner did not really lose anything.
However I think perhaps legally the difference is more that copyright violation can happen and the original owner can be unaware that it happened, while the original owner is obviously aware when theft happens because something of theirs is now missing. This makes the methods of detecting and prosecuting copyright violations different than theft.
I agree with you, and I think you will find a majority of people here agree.
Violating copyright (please don't call it "IP") is wrong. The RIAA has every right to locate people who are violating their copyright and punish them. Not just GPL code, but every single visible piece of data that is released for profit or that the author wants to control, relies on copyright, this includes instruction manuals, sample interface code, patches to closed source,... Without copyright there would be no useful source code published, everything would be closed and secret and nobody would be allowed to program anything without signing NDA's.
Conversely, violating people's ability to do what they want with hardware they have purchased, and with data they have purchased or otherwise have the rights to, is wrong. They should be able to do anything that does not violate the law (such as copyright law). This is what pisses people off about the RIAA.
And using "piracy" for copyright infringement is a long-established term, though it originally meant for-profit. "scalping tickets" also has nothing to do with cutting skin off a head, and "computer crashes" do not involve the actual impact of the computer against something.
The original company is going to have to contact any of the authors and get their permission to use the code. It is possible that all the code was submitted with a GPL type license in which case the company could just open source or otherwise obey this license, however I find that doubtful.
Since they have to get permission from everybody, this can't harm anybody.
I have to agree with others here that "X crashing" is not a problem. I have not seen X or a window manager crash in years.
Window managers crashing typically cause you to log out, or cause all the window borders and possibly other pieces of the interface to disappear.
In my experience, X crashing usually means the screen locks up. NVidea drivers about 3 years ago did this quite a bit, but I have not seen it since then. Contrary to popular belief here, an X crash really can lock your machine. First of all the portion in the kernel can die with a lock and you are really crashed (in this case the crash was portable to Windows (!), so it was certainly in Nvidea's shared code). Most X crashes, though you can still ping and ssh into the machine, almost always lock up the keyboard so Ctrl+Alt+Backspace and Ctrl+Alt+F1 do not work, which for the average user means the machine is dead. I did try to ssh in and try to kill the correct programs a few times, but that takes far longer than rebooting the machine.
So first of all, X crashes seem to be a thing of the past. Second, all the Linux defenders saying an X crash is not a flaw with Linux are wrong.
It was over 21 a few months ago. And several people have pointed out that all possible ways to short the stock have already been purchased by investors.
I'm certainly not a security expert, but it seems that on the server end almost all attacks are against IIS. Not against the Linux or BSD or Windows kernel on the servers. And it seems the IIS attacks mostly cause them to deliver different pages, they are not the catastrophic "infect all the neighbor machines" types of things that you see on the desktop.
So based on this I would say server design is actually not bad at all.
Now on the desktop there are obviously huge amounts of holes, because of a wide disparity of software that is trying to present information in a user-friendly way to a clueless user. This means the software is complex, it also means it must do lots of things without authorization from the user, so it is likely to be full of holes. I don't belive Linux desktops are going to be any better than Microsoft ones, by the time Linux desktops are popular I'm sure Microsoft will have switched their systems so that normal users are not "administrator" by default and they will have eliminated all ways that a desktop app can execute a program or function dictated by an outside source without asking the user, this would eliminate the only known advantages of Linux. On both systems a program bug or methods of fooling clueless users can still trash the user's personal files, and still spew email to other systems and thus propagate.
But the servers are not desktops. If they were, some server-attacking Windows virus (or a Linux virus) would have brought it all down long ago.
The idea as quoted is stupid. Steganography can accomplish exactly the same result and is probably a lot more reliable. This seems to be a proposal to technically-clueless legislators, something that sounds to them like it would work.
Also, blocking content is stupid. If you do this, you have provided the person trying to violate your copyright with an easy test to see if they have modified the data enough to evade the test. Instead, the test should not be in any software on any users computer. You instead monitor the p2p with software which will identify copyrighted content, and use any tricks you can to identify the sender and receiver, and after collecting enough information on proven copyright violations, you hit them with a lawsuit.
I am also amazed at how many clueless people here who think they mean some MD5 sum and "flip one bit to outwit it". They mean a fingerprint of a large area of the image at low frequency, extensively filtered just like compression algorithims do. It will sort of work for identical images. But inserting offset frames, concatenating two pictures, or adding black sections (or ads!) into the middle of movies would probably defeat it. It definately will if they are so stupid as to try to enforce filtering at the client end.
Re:The Militarization Of Space
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
China has been able to launch electronics into orbit for a long time. The manned flights have a different purpose that to get spy sattelites up there.
Although you can excuse the Mac for not having a hard drive, there was certainly no reason for there to not be a hard drive in the NeXT. That made it almost unusable (all work I have done on NeXT was on one with a hard drive).
The copyright holder is the only person who has any rights here. Not the receiver of the code. This should be obvious in cases where the receiver voluntarily downloaded the code with no actions or agreements by the producer. Otherwise you would be liable for data that anybody downloaded from your site!
Actually the receiver has even less rights than that. Technically they are a contributory infringer on the original copyright. They are not allowed to use the code at all, or they are violating the original author's copyright.
I suppose if there was a signed contract between the GPL violator and the receiver of the code, the receiver could sue because they cannot use the product they received until the original author stops violating the GPL and delivers a new version that does not violate the GPL. This could be stronger than what the copyright holder can do, since it would force the violator to deliver something (either source or a non-GPL version), while the violator can satisfy the copyright holder by just ceasing delivery of anything. However I think this is unlikely, it would be like a reader of the New York Times being able to sue the Times for copyright violation of an unrelated third party.
Slashdot Mirror
If this came up in a box with an "I agree" button, than it is a typical click-through EULA agreement, and almost everybody agrees that these are unenforcable. Nobody reads them, everybody just clicks "I agree" immediately.
If their client was GPL, the RIAA could modify the source code all they want to make whatever evil program they wanted, and they would not be violating the GPL or copyright. It has been shown many times that the GPL allows you to modify code for your own use. This is because the GPL only grants some additional rights that copyright does not allow, and copyright already allows you to do this. Thus the GPL cannot stop it.
Only if they "distributed" the resulting program would they be violating the GPL. And certainly they would not be distributing it, since that would allow the enemies of the RIAA to get it and try to figure out how to outwit it's purpose.
So IMHO this is in no way a copyright violation, and KAZAA is completely wrong to even attempt this.
One in the middle of Massachusetts I once was a member of: Nashua Valley Railroad Association. The web site is retro (to be charitable), but the layout is quite nice.
No, at the Xlib level drag & drop (the xDnD proposal) and cut & paste use the same mechanism (XSetSelectionOwner and negotiation of data types) and are approximately equal in complexity.
The main addition in DnD is that there is feedback from the dropee that the source program is supposed to use to change the cursor. However this is just historical, you could easily imagine a design where the cursor is supposed to feedback all the time an indication of whether the middle-mouse-click will work and this would be identical.
These problems are caused by bad design, in particular the seperated Window manager and programs.
Windows also has Expose events, thought they call them WM_PAINT, and they work the same way. However even the earliest version of Windows would freeze all update to any windows while you dragged a window around and would preserve the area hidden by the moving window, so once the area the window was sitting on was repainted (you can certainly see this, it looks just like X because they did the same brain-dead "erase" action and it turns white), you could drag the window quite quickly. Modern Windows has backing store for all the windows so WM_PAINT is not needed except for resize and when the program requests it.
Both of these can be added to X without much trouble, though it looks like only Backing Store is going in.
No amount of speed is going to fix the resize problems. They are caused by two different processes drawing the window border and the window contents. I have looked at ways of synchronizing this and things do not look good, even if I assumme new calls are added to the X server. We need to make the window borders be drawn by the application. The "Window manager", if it exists at all, is strictly for managing icons or taskbars, it would send a "you are being opened/iconized" message to applications, and they would respond by unmapping/mapping windows.
And yes, I know this means the window borders can look different between programs, and that dreaded boogyman of "inconsistency" will be raised yet again. But really, lots of media players already use override-redirect and make fake window borders, and I have NOT seen people "confused by inconsistency". This argument is really a scam by people who want to write the toolkits, rather than work on hard stuff like fast and powerful rendering models.
Remote display of some X programs is really bad due to the fact that they draw everything with images because it is too hard to get the graphics they want with the (quite awful) X drawing primitives. Basically they are acting like VNC in a window, except X has no image compression, so of course this is worse. This can only be addressed with new and powerful rendering models so that you can draw transparent images. IMHO "sending widgets" is a mistake and will cause more communication: check out how many methods you need to create and control a Qt widget, and compare that to how many graphics calls you have to do to draw it.
Before you put your foot in your mouth again, you might want to check the Windows API. Check what W_DESTROYCLIPBOARD, WM_RENDERFORMAT, and WM_RENDERALLFORMATS do. In fact SetClipboardData() is implemented locally, a fact that can easily be proven by interfering with the above events. Internally Windows works exactly the same as X.
Window's advantage over X can be in a few things:
1. They added meaningful and useful wrapper functions such as SetClipboardData, rather than just expose the underlying data. And they rely on static variables so you don't have to pass some pointer (and remember if it is a Display, Visual, GC, or Window, or what...) to all the functions.
2. Besides making a scheme by which various types of data can be passed and identified by number (exactly the same as X), they assigned some numbers. For instance they assigned a number that means Windows BMP file. This is the reason RTF and images can cut & paste (note that newer data tends not to cut & paste except between instances of the same program, since they did not assign numbers for these). Meanwhile the X guys said that was a higher-level function and did not even assign a number to mean text. If the stupid X designers had just said "this number means an XWD image" or something they could easily have done in 1985, images would be cutting and pasting today. Instead I have to check for six different strings to mean text, and the only other data type I handle is URLs and I do that by looking for a colon near the start.
X (or really the desktop environments and applications) supports both
I challenge you to find a modern X program (ie a KDE or Gnome program) that does not support ctrl+x and ctrl+v for cut and paste. And don't you dare say "Emacs" or any other program that runs on Windows and does not support ctrl+x and ctrl+v there either. I can complaint that cut & paste don't work in Lotus 123 or in the DOS cmd.exe or hundreds of other Windows programs.
The middle mouse thing is really drag & drop, with the advantage that you can rearrange the windows and open/iconize them between when you "drag" and when you "drop", and also the advantage that it is trivial to "abort a drag". Unfortunatley the original X programs thought drag & drop was sufficient and did not do clipboard, which is the source of complaints. But you are basically saying the same as "Windows should get rid of drag & drop, it is confusing and everybody uses cut & paste".
I have a 1985 CD player with drawer loading. Unlike current ones, the drawer has a very large hole, really just a 1/2" rim around the outside of a normal-sized disk. You cannot play a 3" disk in it because it falls through the drawer. I also have a ring that adapts the 3" disk, it snaps around the outside to make it full-size, with this ring the small disks play.
Based on these observations, it would seem that 3" disks are newer than the original CD specification, since otherwise I would think my CD player would have been made to take them.
PS: the CD player works great, after I replaced one rubber drive band that made the drawer open/close.
The term in "information wants to be free"
This means that if you find a piece of paper lying on the ground and read it, the information ends up in your brain, even if it was illegal for that to happen. It's like water flowing downhill, it is a natural phenomenon.
Now somebody writing source code might "want it to be free". They might also "want it to be secret". In fact somebody could work on their clever idea that they plan to GPL, but they want to keep it secret right now, because it is so clever and they don't want to see another rip-off GPL program appear before theirs is done and steal all the credit. So they might very well "want it to be secret" and then change to "want it to be free". Microsoft probably wants their code to be secret, but they certainly also release lots of code as examples that they don't mind people copying. Plenty of people publish books and source code with normal copyright where they want people to see the code but don't want them to copy it.
All of these have nothing to do with the natural effect if you see some source code printed on a piece of paper, and you pick it up and read it to see what it is. That is why "information wants to be free". The copyright holder's desires have nothing to do with the information being free or not.
I don't know what you are reading, but I saw dozens of posts of what I consider the most persuasive argument:
class Rectangle rectangle;
If this is not allowed, you either have to put ugly hungarian-type notation on either the class names or the instance names (like RectangleClass or rectangleI or both), or you have to make a harder-to-read language where the parsing rules allow the compiler to unambiguously know if a type or id is expected everywhere.
Conversely *everybody* arguing against case-sensitivity seems to say "it is easier to type, and my Visual Basic fixes the case for me". Dude, if your IDE "fixes the case" then you don't need case insensitivity!!!. Think hard and don't hurt your brain: if the case is "fixed" then it is already correct for a case-sensitive compiler! The fact that VB programmers don't seem to grasp the obvious is proof that that thing must rot their brain...
Languages on systems that had no lower-case letters do not count (ie anything on punchcards). Languages implemented in ways that compressed labels to 6 or fewer bits per character do not count for the same reason.
The only early language I can think of that worked on terminals that had multiple cases is Lisp. It absolutely was case-sensitive.
Using different cases to mean different things has a history in mathmatics back to the early 19th century when modern algebraic notation was standardized. A matrix was often called "A" in the same calculation where a scaler was called "a".
If you name two classes with different case only, I think that can be considered bad enough practice that it is ok that you can't store both of them.
However case dependece is vital so you can name a variable and a Class with different case. It would be incredibly annoying if I wanted one instance of the Class "Rectangle" and I was unable to call it "rectangle". The only alternative to case dependence is to change the syntax of the language so that at any point in parsing it can know if a type or id is expected, that would greatly restrict the expressiveness of the language and add annoying extra required keywords.
Storing anything other than UTF-8 in filenames is an incredible mistake, and whoever at Microsoft did that should burn in hell. All Unix systems such as Linux fortunately use UTF-8.
Thanks for that link on Gamma correction. It does seem that some people are finally getting it, I have been trying to get this idea across for years.
Numbers in the file should represent *specific* colors. Not some color in a "colorspace" that the file also gives. This is just like tagging text files with the "character set", it should be obvious now that making a single specification like UTF-8 is far more reliable and "just works".
I very much recommend using the sRGB standard to represent color levels in any file format storing an integer. Programs should *ALWAYS* copy these numbers unchanged to the screen framebuffer. Any attempt at any other solution means that colors will not match between programs.
That means all those colorimiters and printer matching profiles and other garbage you have been scammed into buying is useless. Too bad. You were taken. Even the authors of png were taken. And people who keep saying Gimp is no good because it lacks printer profiles are wrong (there are probably other problems with Gimp, but printer matching is a scam). I have worked in computer processed imagery (for special effects) for over 10 years and I damn well know what I am talking about, so don't go calling this a troll.
Wrong, the authors, despite having violated your copyright, still have copyright over their modifications. Without some sort of negotiation nobody can legally distribute the merged work.
No. Legally copyright violation is not theft. It is against the law, but it is under a different catagory than theft.
The usual explanation is that in fact the original owner did not really lose anything.
However I think perhaps legally the difference is more that copyright violation can happen and the original owner can be unaware that it happened, while the original owner is obviously aware when theft happens because something of theirs is now missing. This makes the methods of detecting and prosecuting copyright violations different than theft.
I agree with you, and I think you will find a majority of people here agree.
... Without copyright there would be no useful source code published, everything would be closed and secret and nobody would be allowed to program anything without signing NDA's.
Violating copyright (please don't call it "IP") is wrong. The RIAA has every right to locate people who are violating their copyright and punish them. Not just GPL code, but every single visible piece of data that is released for profit or that the author wants to control, relies on copyright, this includes instruction manuals, sample interface code, patches to closed source,
Conversely, violating people's ability to do what they want with hardware they have purchased, and with data they have purchased or otherwise have the rights to, is wrong. They should be able to do anything that does not violate the law (such as copyright law). This is what pisses people off about the RIAA.
And using "piracy" for copyright infringement is a long-established term, though it originally meant for-profit. "scalping tickets" also has nothing to do with cutting skin off a head, and "computer crashes" do not involve the actual impact of the computer against something.
The original company is going to have to contact any of the authors and get their permission to use the code. It is possible that all the code was submitted with a GPL type license in which case the company could just open source or otherwise obey this license, however I find that doubtful.
Since they have to get permission from everybody, this can't harm anybody.
I have to agree with others here that "X crashing" is not a problem. I have not seen X or a window manager crash in years.
Window managers crashing typically cause you to log out, or cause all the window borders and possibly other pieces of the interface to disappear.
In my experience, X crashing usually means the screen locks up. NVidea drivers about 3 years ago did this quite a bit, but I have not seen it since then. Contrary to popular belief here, an X crash really can lock your machine. First of all the portion in the kernel can die with a lock and you are really crashed (in this case the crash was portable to Windows (!), so it was certainly in Nvidea's shared code). Most X crashes, though you can still ping and ssh into the machine, almost always lock up the keyboard so Ctrl+Alt+Backspace and Ctrl+Alt+F1 do not work, which for the average user means the machine is dead. I did try to ssh in and try to kill the correct programs a few times, but that takes far longer than rebooting the machine.
So first of all, X crashes seem to be a thing of the past. Second, all the Linux defenders saying an X crash is not a flaw with Linux are wrong.
It was over 21 a few months ago. And several people have pointed out that all possible ways to short the stock have already been purchased by investors.
Unfortunatly that advantage of Linux is lost if it becomes popular.
If you assumme Linux has already captured the "clued" user population, the only way it can become more popular is to get "clueless" users.
I'm certainly not a security expert, but it seems that on the server end almost all attacks are against IIS. Not against the Linux or BSD or Windows kernel on the servers. And it seems the IIS attacks mostly cause them to deliver different pages, they are not the catastrophic "infect all the neighbor machines" types of things that you see on the desktop.
So based on this I would say server design is actually not bad at all.
Now on the desktop there are obviously huge amounts of holes, because of a wide disparity of software that is trying to present information in a user-friendly way to a clueless user. This means the software is complex, it also means it must do lots of things without authorization from the user, so it is likely to be full of holes. I don't belive Linux desktops are going to be any better than Microsoft ones, by the time Linux desktops are popular I'm sure Microsoft will have switched their systems so that normal users are not "administrator" by default and they will have eliminated all ways that a desktop app can execute a program or function dictated by an outside source without asking the user, this would eliminate the only known advantages of Linux. On both systems a program bug or methods of fooling clueless users can still trash the user's personal files, and still spew email to other systems and thus propagate.
But the servers are not desktops. If they were, some server-attacking Windows virus (or a Linux virus) would have brought it all down long ago.
This seems to be the first intelligent post here.
The idea as quoted is stupid. Steganography can accomplish exactly the same result and is probably a lot more reliable. This seems to be a proposal to technically-clueless legislators, something that sounds to them like it would work.
Also, blocking content is stupid. If you do this, you have provided the person trying to violate your copyright with an easy test to see if they have modified the data enough to evade the test. Instead, the test should not be in any software on any users computer. You instead monitor the p2p with software which will identify copyrighted content, and use any tricks you can to identify the sender and receiver, and after collecting enough information on proven copyright violations, you hit them with a lawsuit.
I am also amazed at how many clueless people here who think they mean some MD5 sum and "flip one bit to outwit it". They mean a fingerprint of a large area of the image at low frequency, extensively filtered just like compression algorithims do. It will sort of work for identical images. But inserting offset frames, concatenating two pictures, or adding black sections (or ads!) into the middle of movies would probably defeat it. It definately will if they are so stupid as to try to enforce filtering at the client end.
China has been able to launch electronics into orbit for a long time. The manned flights have a different purpose that to get spy sattelites up there.
Although you can excuse the Mac for not having a hard drive, there was certainly no reason for there to not be a hard drive in the NeXT. That made it almost unusable (all work I have done on NeXT was on one with a hard drive).
The copyright holder is the only person who has any rights here. Not the receiver of the code. This should be obvious in cases where the receiver voluntarily downloaded the code with no actions or agreements by the producer. Otherwise you would be liable for data that anybody downloaded from your site!
Actually the receiver has even less rights than that. Technically they are a contributory infringer on the original copyright. They are not allowed to use the code at all, or they are violating the original author's copyright.
I suppose if there was a signed contract between the GPL violator and the receiver of the code, the receiver could sue because they cannot use the product they received until the original author stops violating the GPL and delivers a new version that does not violate the GPL. This could be stronger than what the copyright holder can do, since it would force the violator to deliver something (either source or a non-GPL version), while the violator can satisfy the copyright holder by just ceasing delivery of anything. However I think this is unlikely, it would be like a reader of the New York Times being able to sue the Times for copyright violation of an unrelated third party.