The whole purpose of copyright was originally to protect those people who invested in the typesetting of printed works against unscrupulous printers who would then set up their printers only for the proven best-sellers of the other printers who took risks.
Rewarding successful risk-taking is the key. Some forms of art seem to primarily be the result of companies taking risks, and making gambles. A lot of these efforts fail. If the odds are poor, then the payoff had better be a windfall in proportion to the risk, or else smart people would not invest in the risk. If copycat publishers can cherry pick only the successful ventures without spending anything on the failures, then they end up lessening the profits of the artists who take the actual risks.
The purpose of IP is to encourage risky art and other ventures by providing occasional jackpots. Without IP protection, legal or otherwise, less people will invest the time and money in these art forms, and the world of commercial art will change, probably for the worst, since riskless art is usually the most boring.
Start your own shell corporation. License all your inventions prior to date X to this shell corporation. Sign an NDA with the shell corporation saying that you will not disclose these ideas to another client. Write on any new contract that your prior ideas and inventions are already owned and under NDA by a prior client, so cannot be disclosed, just as your current contractor would not want their trade-secrets invented by you exposed to your future clients.
At the heart of Freedom's 1996 patent is the idea of using a computer to match a cellphone number with a database showing how many paid-up minutes the cellphone owner has, then deciding whether to complete a call.
The way around this particular statement of the patent is obvious. Always complete the call. Just make that useless AND a revenue generator. During "completed" calls after the minutes have run out, play targeted paid advertisements at full volume while simultaneously garbling the voices of the callers at a nearly inaudible level.
But IANAL, so the above is completely worthless nonsense...
Don't forget that the first personal computers (Altair, Imsai, et.al.) used 8" floppies, paper tape, and audio cassette tape. Byte magazine (and others) printed code in some sort of bar code format. That's not even starting with the formats used by old, pre-PC, computers. Now where's my box of punch cards?
One would hope that all the banks would have a massive farm of distributed PCs which would automatically do this (stuff the phishers web site(s) with bogus and "hot" credit card numbers) as soon as a phishing attempt was detected by one of their honeypots.
The cable and DSL companies could even loan the banks gigantic blocks of temporarily unused IP addresses, so that the phishers would have to throw out all of their real customers data along with the random noise.
...including, according to Apple, all information about the source(s) of the published rumors. Publishing only part of the covered "source" doesn't count according to the GPL.
Jef Raskin had practically nothing to do with the Macintosh.
Burrell Smith started as an electronic technician at Apple, not as a design engineer. Though brilliant in his own way, it's an open historical question whether his design talent would have been noticed by Apple's then management without Jef's initial championing. Jef also introduced one of his previous grad students, Bill Atkinson, to a job opportunity at Apple, Atkinson being a key engineer (one of the ones who went on that first technical visit to Xerox PARC) without whom probably neither the Lisa or the Mac would have come into existance.
Since a patent is a legislative grant, the government doesn't need to aquire them by eminent domain. The legislature can let the drug companies keep the patents, but just change the law underneath them. Say cap the amount of the awards for infringements of the listed patents at $1 per year per corporation and disallow specific performance remedies, making the patents violatable at a tiny cost.
The legislature can do the same for copyrights, making it easy to gut the GPL if it interferes with government use of any critical software.
Most of the time when people say "commercial [gnu.org]" in this context, they don't mean that. That word was just a poor choice which may stem from not fully understanding what software freedom entails. What they really meant to say was "proprietary [gnu.org]", which is something different.
No, they mean commercial. A sustainable business plan requires that what you profitably sell can't be trivally undercut in price by competition. If what you are selling is priced higher than the customers time to type "download;configure;make;install", then you are actually in the business of selling something other than GPL software. Support, documentation, or name branding maybe...
Why is this an issue for Google, a US corporation with its servers outside of French jurisdiction? If French law is incompatible with Google's business model, their courts should just make it illegal for French citizens and residents to attempt to connect to Google's servers from within French jurisdiction.
I've got a wonderful business model, but it's violating a federal law in the US. What should I do ? In your opinion ?
Move yourself to some democratic country where it's completely legal, move your business model and all its assets there as well, then don't return to the US. Isn't that what some online casino operators do?
I work at a school for the deaf and blind, and captcha's make it impossible for the blind or many of the vision impaired to
Optional audio captcha's.
Picking a voice with a heavy accent out of a low-fidelity recording of a crowded cocktail party with a band playing in the background seems to be way beyond what Dragon or ViaVoice can currently come close to transcribing accurately. Of course, I can barely do that myself, but they say that vision-impaired folks learn to compensate by better development of the auditory portions of their brain.
The federal government is considering outlawing this abusive practise.
Nonsense. Maybe they can dictate that on government web sites but your independent web developer or company can do this all they want.
They might be able to regulate this on any *commercial* site based in the US. Regulating interstate commerce is specifically allowed in the constitution, and if your server or its routing is based in the US, the courts can always authorize sending feds with wire-cutters to fix the situation.
A scientific theory is by definition well-supported.
Only because you are attempting to equate the term "scientific theory" with truth. Lot's of 18th and 19th century scientific theories considered partially supported by the evidence in their day are now considered bunk.
My point is that Christianity (specifically, Creationistic Christianity) is going outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour by trying to intrude on other disciplines.
The issues is not with intruding on other disciplines. The issue is with publicly funded and state enforced teaching about those disciplines. How can kids go on exercising their constitutional freedom to believe in the Great Pumpkin if the chemistry curriculum requires that the fact that it's impossible for Pumkins to rise that way on Halloween night be stuffed down every kids throat.
But chemists should be free believe rational things on their own time and dollar.
By that logic, you are declaring Evolution a religion...
Not quite... but the theory of evolution is usually accepted as true based on the belief that truth can only be the result of applying Occam's razor to objectively testable and falsifiable hypothesis. The latter is itself a form of religion. Just try and test it without assuming it's true.
Since putting the sticker violated rules (2) and (3), it was deemed to be unconstitutional.
Removing the sticker also violates rule (2) and (3). How are you supposed to believe that the Great Pumpkin poofed the world into being atop the Giant Turtle with all the public schools forcing these scientific theories down your throat as absolute fact.
Only by stating the evolution (or creationism) is merely a strongly (weakly) supported scientific theory, are we Great Pumkin worshippers not inhibited in holding our silly beliefs, and thus entangling the schools into endorsing atheism or agnosticism.
Note that expenses related to profit/loss and stock dilution are seperate lines items in a companies shareholders reports.
The exercise of a stock option is not a cash expense, but actually cash income, as the employee still needs to pay the company the strike price when exercising the options. Now the company does forego potential income by not selling its option stock at the market price; but reporting this loss of potential income as both an expense and as a stock dilution is double reporting the cost to the shareholders, since just the dilution fully accounts for even giving stock away with no option price (to a chartiy, for instance).
In order to avoid this double accounting, stock options should only be reported as stock dilutions or potential stock dilutions, and income (from payment of the strike price), and not also as an expense.
The first few dozen posts, (some even modded +3, insightful) seem to be confusing "free" with "free as in beer"
They are not confusing anything. Free, as in beer, is the normal use of the word. "Free software" should mean the same thing as Freeware, and does so for most of the non-programming public speakers of the English (or American) language.
On one system, I stick a post-it note with my password right on the monitor (plus maybe a copy in an encrypted file sent to gmail). It's a random number which gets changed quite often. Won't do anybody any good though, since it needs to be (pre|post|reverse) appended to a passphrase which I've memorized. The sysadmin can't bust me, because if he/she tries it, it's not the full password.
This is psuedo 2-factor authentication: something I know, plus the number on the post-it which I probably won't memorize before I change have to change it.
Slashdot Mirror
Rewarding successful risk-taking is the key. Some forms of art seem to primarily be the result of companies taking risks, and making gambles. A lot of these efforts fail. If the odds are poor, then the payoff had better be a windfall in proportion to the risk, or else smart people would not invest in the risk. If copycat publishers can cherry pick only the successful ventures without spending anything on the failures, then they end up lessening the profits of the artists who take the actual risks.
The purpose of IP is to encourage risky art and other ventures by providing occasional jackpots. Without IP protection, legal or otherwise, less people will invest the time and money in these art forms, and the world of commercial art will change, probably for the worst, since riskless art is usually the most boring.
But IANAL. Would this work?
Mod down. BeOS was formerly purchased by PalmSource (not Palm) which was recently purchased by Access of Japan.
The way around this particular statement of the patent is obvious. Always complete the call. Just make that useless AND a revenue generator. During "completed" calls after the minutes have run out, play targeted paid advertisements at full volume while simultaneously garbling the voices of the callers at a nearly inaudible level.
But IANAL, so the above is completely worthless nonsense...
Don't forget that the first personal computers (Altair, Imsai, et.al.) used 8" floppies, paper tape, and audio cassette tape. Byte magazine (and others) printed code in some sort of bar code format. That's not even starting with the formats used by old, pre-PC, computers. Now where's my box of punch cards?
One would hope that all the banks would have a massive farm of distributed PCs which would automatically do this (stuff the phishers web site(s) with bogus and "hot" credit card numbers) as soon as a phishing attempt was detected by one of their honeypots.
The cable and DSL companies could even loan the banks gigantic blocks of temporarily unused IP addresses, so that the phishers would have to throw out all of their real customers data along with the random noise.
...including, according to Apple, all information about the source(s) of the published rumors. Publishing only part of the covered "source" doesn't count according to the GPL.
The same can be true even if you have a good job.
Burrell Smith started as an electronic technician at Apple, not as a design engineer. Though brilliant in his own way, it's an open historical question whether his design talent would have been noticed by Apple's then management without Jef's initial championing. Jef also introduced one of his previous grad students, Bill Atkinson, to a job opportunity at Apple, Atkinson being a key engineer (one of the ones who went on that first technical visit to Xerox PARC) without whom probably neither the Lisa or the Mac would have come into existance.
Since a patent is a legislative grant, the government doesn't need to aquire them by eminent domain. The legislature can let the drug companies keep the patents, but just change the law underneath them. Say cap the amount of the awards for infringements of the listed patents at $1 per year per corporation and disallow specific performance remedies, making the patents violatable at a tiny cost.
The legislature can do the same for copyrights, making it easy to gut the GPL if it interferes with government use of any critical software.
No, they mean commercial. A sustainable business plan requires that what you profitably sell can't be trivally undercut in price by competition. If what you are selling is priced higher than the customers time to type "download;configure;make;install", then you are actually in the business of selling something other than GPL software. Support, documentation, or name branding maybe...
Why is this an issue for Google, a US corporation with its servers outside of French jurisdiction? If French law is incompatible with Google's business model, their courts should just make it illegal for French citizens and residents to attempt to connect to Google's servers from within French jurisdiction.
Move yourself to some democratic country where it's completely legal, move your business model and all its assets there as well, then don't return to the US. Isn't that what some online casino operators do?
It does connect, at the Millbrae station right across the freeway from SFO airport.
But BART really needs to go around the Bay and connect with the other end of the CalTrain line near San Jose.
Optional audio captcha's.
Picking a voice with a heavy accent out of a low-fidelity recording of a crowded cocktail party with a band playing in the background seems to be way beyond what Dragon or ViaVoice can currently come close to transcribing accurately. Of course, I can barely do that myself, but they say that vision-impaired folks learn to compensate by better development of the auditory portions of their brain.
The idea doesn't have to work. It only has to be better than the current alternatives for enough people.
Some people prefer email that doesn't even go through without a big hassle over the current style and quantity of spam.
Nonsense. Maybe they can dictate that on government web sites but your independent web developer or company can do this all they want.
They might be able to regulate this on any *commercial* site based in the US. Regulating interstate commerce is specifically allowed in the constitution, and if your server or its routing is based in the US, the courts can always authorize sending feds with wire-cutters to fix the situation.
Some textbook statements have greater impact than others on the constitutional right to the free exercise of religion.
Only because you are attempting to equate the term "scientific theory" with truth. Lot's of 18th and 19th century scientific theories considered partially supported by the evidence in their day are now considered bunk.
The issues is not with intruding on other disciplines. The issue is with publicly funded and state enforced teaching about those disciplines. How can kids go on exercising their constitutional freedom to believe in the Great Pumpkin if the chemistry curriculum requires that the fact that it's impossible for Pumkins to rise that way on Halloween night be stuffed down every kids throat.
But chemists should be free believe rational things on their own time and dollar.
Not quite... but the theory of evolution is usually accepted as true based on the belief that truth can only be the result of applying Occam's razor to objectively testable and falsifiable hypothesis. The latter is itself a form of religion. Just try and test it without assuming it's true.
Removing the sticker also violates rule (2) and (3). How are you supposed to believe that the Great Pumpkin poofed the world into being atop the Giant Turtle with all the public schools forcing these scientific theories down your throat as absolute fact.
Only by stating the evolution (or creationism) is merely a strongly (weakly) supported scientific theory, are we Great Pumkin worshippers not inhibited in holding our silly beliefs, and thus entangling the schools into endorsing atheism or agnosticism.
Note that expenses related to profit/loss and stock dilution are seperate lines items in a companies shareholders reports.
The exercise of a stock option is not a cash expense, but actually cash income, as the employee still needs to pay the company the strike price when exercising the options. Now the company does forego potential income by not selling its option stock at the market price; but reporting this loss of potential income as both an expense and as a stock dilution is double reporting the cost to the shareholders, since just the dilution fully accounts for even giving stock away with no option price (to a chartiy, for instance).
In order to avoid this double accounting, stock options should only be reported as stock dilutions or potential stock dilutions, and income (from payment of the strike price), and not also as an expense.
They are not confusing anything. Free, as in beer, is the normal use of the word. "Free software" should mean the same thing as Freeware, and does so for most of the non-programming public speakers of the English (or American) language.
On one system, I stick a post-it note with my password right on the monitor (plus maybe a copy in an encrypted file sent to gmail). It's a random number which gets changed quite often. Won't do anybody any good though, since it needs to be (pre|post|reverse) appended to a passphrase which I've memorized. The sysadmin can't bust me, because if he/she tries it, it's not the full password.
This is psuedo 2-factor authentication: something I know, plus the number on the post-it which I probably won't memorize before I change have to change it.