I guess it depends on what lawyer you're talking with.
I mean, looking at the brief facts from the summary it seems that it would amount to some sort of infringement, and a good lawyer *should* tell you whether he thinks it's likely to fall under fair use or not. Of course we never know until it's decided in court but a lawyer worth his/her salt should be better than that.
What a lawyer can't do is to tell you that it isn't an infringement when in fact it is. You got a point here. From the question I see that the OP is asking the community to agree with his views so he can sleep better at night.
4) Another big secret: It's perfectly possible to write clear, self-documenting code in Perl. It's only the fact that Perl programmers seem to refuse to do this that allows Python to exist;).
I'm also tired of hearing that MS's bundling of IE killed Netscape exclusively. At the time when IE5 was released it was actually a relatively good product for its time, considering that most of the world was still using that abomination called Win98 which crashed randomly every half hour.
I tried switching to Linux in 2001, and when I switched the most damning problem I had was not drivers, not a lack of office suite, but a lack of a decent browser. At that time there was no readily available Linux version of Netscape (which was crap and I wouldn't want to use it anyway), and Mozilla 0.6 was just released, with disclaimers saying it's not release quality blah blah blah. I actually considered switching to Konqueror when KDE2 was released. The alternatives to IE was that bad.
IE didn't win the browser wars because it was bundled with windows. It helped accelerate its win, but the main reason why it won was because while it wasn't perfect, the alternatives were really steaming POS software.
Exercise: try to survive a week by using a browser available in 2001, and see which one you'd be using.
It's just hilarious when those filthy rich people come out and say they've lost a few billion due to the recent crash. What they mean is that the numbers in some of their accounts have dropped, and they can still afford to live filthy rich -- but oh noes their ranks in the billionaire list has dropped! That's depressing.
Copyright is not intended to "protect" works that are deemed "personal". Copyright is not intended to combat privacy.
Of course, if somebody distributed private photos of me you can bet that I'd be going after them with copyright suits but it isn't how it's supposed to work.
As for a larger picture of how society would benefit with artists losing their rights, the issue is not the cost to the artist, but the relative cost to the society. If copyrights were shortened, would most artists continue producing works? I'd say most would. After all, the value of a work after like 100 years is not something people would think about compared with the profits that they would/might receive in the first few years/decades.
There are benefits to society too. Limits on copyright on literary works, for example, would greatly benefit society. Ever heard of Project Gutenberg? I've grabbed a few texts there. I wonder how many authors would rather have their ideas be heard by a larger population than to rake in that last penny 50 years after his/her death.
Don't be such a control freak. That's the trait of many artists I've seen, but it's not how society grows and develops.
Yeah except that the smug responses from "why not call asctime" to "how you should write the isleapyear() function" to "OMG GOTOs!!!" just tells me that nobody actually learned anything from this ordeal.
I'm willing to bet anything that what those people write will be absolute crap compared with the code we're looking at.
You really can't learn Chinese (written) in just a year or two.
Unless you're really a genius.
It's my first language, and I remember vividly the horrors of spending primary school cramping the characters into my memory. Worse, there are still plenty of characters that I can't reliably recall how to write (reading is much easier).
I've heard that spoken Chinese is much easier to learn for foreigners since there's few grammatical constructs.
As mentioned by another poster, but I'll repeat: wrong.
"One country, two systems" does not apply to Taiwan. Even if Taiwan (re)unifies with Mainland China, the system will probably be a different beast altogether. Actually "One country, two systems" is more of a marketing ploy (for "propaganda" purposes) than a constitutional tool. The ingenuity is in the *idea* of allowing a (self proclaimed) socialist state to take within its borders a basically capitalist, western society. The implementation has been a bit rough at the edges in the past few years with a few controversial constitutional cases, and much of the "mundane details" haven't been figured out yet (and everybody now knows better than to poke the issues)
As to what the official China-Taiwan status is... as far as I understand it, officially, there is one China, the disagreement is to who's the boss. In reality it's just an abysmally weird and delicate political situation where basically PRC doesn't have effective control over Taiwan, but the Taiwanese are not ready (for various reasons) to declare themselves independent (yet).
Why does the legal system allow such things to be done in the first place? Why are there no repercussions to "immoral" lawyers filing thousands of frivolous suits against innocent people?
Have you actually TRIED whether indenting the continued lines as you wanted work? Because unless I'm mistaken, you CAN actually indent the continued lines pretty much like how you wanted.
The subject that deals with these basic concepts here was called "computer literacy" or something like that. Computer science? No. Any (real) computer scientist would laugh at your statement:
There are two types of memory, primary memory and secondary memory.
There are in fact, numerous types of memory, although for lay people they usually deal only with these "two types". The general rule is that the faster memory is, the more expensive (and hence less are available on a typical system). You have L1 cache, L2 cache, "main memory", and the numerous different kinds of storage devices. Of course you can label them as "primary memory", "secondary memory", but it's far from standard terminology (outside your "CS101" class), and basically a useless distinction in most situations.
Besides, everything you wrote is basically at best the state of art in 1990s. Welcome to the new millenia. Where concepts of non-volatile RAM and diskless OSes running entirely on RAM are experimented with, and where the fact that you'd need 4GB of memory cached onto harddisk means you'll be trashing for hours means having a paging file of gigabytes simply isn't practicable.
At any rate, your post could be written by an average high school kid who did some research on the topic. Not exactly with the quality to label somebody as a n00b.
With Digg at least you know they're pulling stuff out of their asses. With slashdot a non-trivial number of comments seem rather well-informed until you realize it's not exactly what you asked for.
I mean, the comments aren't too bad, but I really wouldn't base an important decision on a bunch of slashdot comments.
The most obvious answer is to get a lawyer. Of course, as pointed out by many other slashdotters, you're probably not in a financial situation to get a fully qualified lawyer charging you hundreds (or thousands) an hour. Well, depending on your situation there might be alternatives:
- Find a free legal advice service in your jurisdiction. Since you might be in Canada this may help: http://www.lslap.bc.ca/main/ You should be able to find similar stuff with a simple search - I found that one with a trivial google search. - See if you can find a law student (not necessarily on campus, could be friends family, whatever) and talk to him/her personally. Might not help you solve the whole problem, but it's more reliable than asking slashdot for pointers. - If your university has a law department (that teaches law, not the one which handles legal stuff), go and ask some professors about it. You're probably looking for those who teach contract and IP law.
At any rate, don't listen to whatever you see on slashdot. People here like to think they're experts in law, where in reality they really know sht. And unless you're prepared to spends lots of time (weeks, months if not years) learning the basics about law, the legal system, etc, it's generally a bad idea to learn the stuff by yourself, since minor details you may not have noticed can change everything, and often there would not be any black and white answers to a difficult problem, so the problem could be best solved with a bit of social/political tact than reference to legal rights/actions.
If in doubt, use your common sense (but not your geeky-common-sense). Good luck!
As for credentials, IANAL, and I'm studying law in HK and generally failing my courses:)
PS: The ask slashdot question looks spookishly like those exam questions I might have had in my law courses...
Slashdot Mirror
From experience a law dictionary is utterly useless.
Might as well look up on wikipedia as it's more informative than trying to explain legal concepts in a single sentence.
And every part of the world really.
I guess it depends on what lawyer you're talking with.
I mean, looking at the brief facts from the summary it seems that it would amount to some sort of infringement, and a good lawyer *should* tell you whether he thinks it's likely to fall under fair use or not. Of course we never know until it's decided in court but a lawyer worth his/her salt should be better than that.
What a lawyer can't do is to tell you that it isn't an infringement when in fact it is. You got a point here. From the question I see that the OP is asking the community to agree with his views so he can sleep better at night.
It could make for some pretty funny conversation in a few decades when the bat is forgotten.
[spoken in Chinese] Hey Captain - look what I see! A bat! Seriously! right next to us! Look!
There's gotta be some all your bases belonging to us joke somewhere....
Black hats don't read slashdot to fish for new exploits.
YOU SUCK. ... just kidding :)
4) Another big secret: It's perfectly possible to write clear, self-documenting code in Perl. It's only the fact that Perl programmers seem to refuse to do this that allows Python to exist ;).
Yes, yes. Tell me how bless() works again?
My mod points expired today. :(
I'm also tired of hearing that MS's bundling of IE killed Netscape exclusively. At the time when IE5 was released it was actually a relatively good product for its time, considering that most of the world was still using that abomination called Win98 which crashed randomly every half hour.
I tried switching to Linux in 2001, and when I switched the most damning problem I had was not drivers, not a lack of office suite, but a lack of a decent browser. At that time there was no readily available Linux version of Netscape (which was crap and I wouldn't want to use it anyway), and Mozilla 0.6 was just released, with disclaimers saying it's not release quality blah blah blah. I actually considered switching to Konqueror when KDE2 was released. The alternatives to IE was that bad.
IE didn't win the browser wars because it was bundled with windows. It helped accelerate its win, but the main reason why it won was because while it wasn't perfect, the alternatives were really steaming POS software.
Exercise: try to survive a week by using a browser available in 2001, and see which one you'd be using.
Javascript is actually a nice and clean language.
The reason why it has a bad reputation is because of "web developers" writing generally horrible hacks with it. Nothing to do with the language.
Shouldn't the conclusion be, the quality of the voting population sucks pretty much everywhere?
Please don't use the R word.
I don't think you know what it means.
Where are my mod points?
It's just hilarious when those filthy rich people come out and say they've lost a few billion due to the recent crash. What they mean is that the numbers in some of their accounts have dropped, and they can still afford to live filthy rich -- but oh noes their ranks in the billionaire list has dropped! That's depressing.
Copyright is not intended to "protect" works that are deemed "personal".
Copyright is not intended to combat privacy.
Of course, if somebody distributed private photos of me you can bet that I'd be going after them with copyright suits but it isn't how it's supposed to work.
As for a larger picture of how society would benefit with artists losing their rights, the issue is not the cost to the artist, but the relative cost to the society. If copyrights were shortened, would most artists continue producing works? I'd say most would. After all, the value of a work after like 100 years is not something people would think about compared with the profits that they would/might receive in the first few years/decades.
There are benefits to society too. Limits on copyright on literary works, for example, would greatly benefit society. Ever heard of Project Gutenberg? I've grabbed a few texts there. I wonder how many authors would rather have their ideas be heard by a larger population than to rake in that last penny 50 years after his/her death.
Don't be such a control freak. That's the trait of many artists I've seen, but it's not how society grows and develops.
Yeah except that the smug responses from "why not call asctime" to "how you should write the isleapyear() function" to "OMG GOTOs!!!" just tells me that nobody actually learned anything from this ordeal.
I'm willing to bet anything that what those people write will be absolute crap compared with the code we're looking at.
I don't see them frowning on me for not knowing something I asked them.
Of course. They make money because of their alleged expertise in gambling with your money.
You really can't learn Chinese (written) in just a year or two.
Unless you're really a genius.
It's my first language, and I remember vividly the horrors of spending primary school cramping the characters into my memory. Worse, there are still plenty of characters that I can't reliably recall how to write (reading is much easier).
I've heard that spoken Chinese is much easier to learn for foreigners since there's few grammatical constructs.
Happened to me some years ago.
No idea what triggered it.
Bleh.
What?
I still hear from those student leaders in the Tienanmen Square incidents who fled to the USA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei_Jingsheng
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Dan_(dissident)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_Ling
Well your point is registered, but it's not really zero.
As mentioned by another poster, but I'll repeat: wrong.
"One country, two systems" does not apply to Taiwan. Even if Taiwan (re)unifies with Mainland China, the system will probably be a different beast altogether. Actually "One country, two systems" is more of a marketing ploy (for "propaganda" purposes) than a constitutional tool. The ingenuity is in the *idea* of allowing a (self proclaimed) socialist state to take within its borders a basically capitalist, western society. The implementation has been a bit rough at the edges in the past few years with a few controversial constitutional cases, and much of the "mundane details" haven't been figured out yet (and everybody now knows better than to poke the issues)
As to what the official China-Taiwan status is... as far as I understand it, officially, there is one China, the disagreement is to who's the boss. In reality it's just an abysmally weird and delicate political situation where basically PRC doesn't have effective control over Taiwan, but the Taiwanese are not ready (for various reasons) to declare themselves independent (yet).
I'll be waiting for the announcement that China hosts Weapons of Mass Cyber Destruction.
Also now Obama bin Ladin has escaped to China after Iraq became inhospitable.
Also China is the culprit of the credit crisis because it bought the US debts.
Yay. Let's bomb Beijing back to the stone age.
It's still a legal question.
Why does the legal system allow such things to be done in the first place? Why are there no repercussions to "immoral" lawyers filing thousands of frivolous suits against innocent people?
Have you actually TRIED whether indenting the continued lines as you wanted work? Because unless I'm mistaken, you CAN actually indent the continued lines pretty much like how you wanted.
How, on earth, did you get that +1 karma bonus?
God.
welcome to computer science.
The subject that deals with these basic concepts here was called "computer literacy" or something like that. Computer science? No. Any (real) computer scientist would laugh at your statement:
There are two types of memory, primary memory and secondary memory.
There are in fact, numerous types of memory, although for lay people they usually deal only with these "two types". The general rule is that the faster memory is, the more expensive (and hence less are available on a typical system). You have L1 cache, L2 cache, "main memory", and the numerous different kinds of storage devices. Of course you can label them as "primary memory", "secondary memory", but it's far from standard terminology (outside your "CS101" class), and basically a useless distinction in most situations.
Besides, everything you wrote is basically at best the state of art in 1990s. Welcome to the new millenia. Where concepts of non-volatile RAM and diskless OSes running entirely on RAM are experimented with, and where the fact that you'd need 4GB of memory cached onto harddisk means you'll be trashing for hours means having a paging file of gigabytes simply isn't practicable.
At any rate, your post could be written by an average high school kid who did some research on the topic. Not exactly with the quality to label somebody as a n00b.
With Digg at least you know they're pulling stuff out of their asses. With slashdot a non-trivial number of comments seem rather well-informed until you realize it's not exactly what you asked for.
I mean, the comments aren't too bad, but I really wouldn't base an important decision on a bunch of slashdot comments.
The most obvious answer is to get a lawyer. Of course, as pointed out by many other slashdotters, you're probably not in a financial situation to get a fully qualified lawyer charging you hundreds (or thousands) an hour. Well, depending on your situation there might be alternatives:
- Find a free legal advice service in your jurisdiction. Since you might be in Canada this may help: http://www.lslap.bc.ca/main/ You should be able to find similar stuff with a simple search - I found that one with a trivial google search.
- See if you can find a law student (not necessarily on campus, could be friends family, whatever) and talk to him/her personally. Might not help you solve the whole problem, but it's more reliable than asking slashdot for pointers.
- If your university has a law department (that teaches law, not the one which handles legal stuff), go and ask some professors about it. You're probably looking for those who teach contract and IP law.
At any rate, don't listen to whatever you see on slashdot. People here like to think they're experts in law, where in reality they really know sht. And unless you're prepared to spends lots of time (weeks, months if not years) learning the basics about law, the legal system, etc, it's generally a bad idea to learn the stuff by yourself, since minor details you may not have noticed can change everything, and often there would not be any black and white answers to a difficult problem, so the problem could be best solved with a bit of social/political tact than reference to legal rights/actions.
If in doubt, use your common sense (but not your geeky-common-sense). Good luck!
As for credentials, IANAL, and I'm studying law in HK and generally failing my courses :)
PS: The ask slashdot question looks spookishly like those exam questions I might have had in my law courses...