I once got one of these because I ran an ad for computers I was selling. I included "free deivery and setup". I was 'warned' that the delivery and setup was not free, but actually calculated in the price of the computers. So I was misleading customers about it being free. Had to pay about $1000 for that mistake. I know that system sucks.
Did you charge less if they didn't want delivery and setup? If not, then the delivery and setup were free.
The net effect of this entire situation is that it casts Germany in a very bad light. People are calling for boycott's of Adobe. Since this seems to be more a problem with German law, why don't we just boycott Germany instead.
You know, there's a real simple way to deal with this kind of thing. On the day that Aimster gets shut down, everybody who's ever used Napster, Gnutella, Aimster, etc. should STOP BUYING CD'S FOR A MONTH! Just start making a list of the CD's you WOULD have bought, and get them a month later.
Or, even better, if you want to buy a cd, go to a used CD store and buy it there. You'll get your CD, the RIAA won't get any of your money, and you'll help support your local businesses.
Actually, I don't think Redhat is actually profitable yet. They're getting there. I would propose, instead, that Cygnus is an example of a company that had a successful business model based on the GPL and that they did it long before the GPL became fashionable.
But I thought that TGS (template graphics systems) "owned" Inventor now...maybe they just licensed it and the contract just expired, I don't know, but TGS has been the company maintaining it for the last couple of years. I'm really quite excited about this!
TGS has never owned Inventor, they just licensed it from SGI. As far as I know that license expires sometime soon (not exactly sure when).
TGS's version of Inventor, however, has several things in it that the Open Source version doesn't have (yet). These include the capability to load VRML 2.0 files and thread safe code.
Peta's press release says: PETA won the precedent-setting case on three grounds. First, trademark infringement-the PETA trademark belongs to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Doughney had no right to use it. Second, Doughney diluted the value of the trademark by his use of it. Third, Doughney was found in violation of the "Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act," because he appropriated the distinctive and famous "PETA" mark for his own commercial benefit.
The first amendment always allows parody, even if someone has a trademark.
Diluted the value of the trademark?!? He just gave a ton of press to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He should be charging them for advertising.
Commercial benefit?!? How was this commercial at all? He put up a parody site.
As a vegetarian, I must say that I view PETA in an extremely bad light. All you have to do is take a look at some of the hate mail this guy has received from PETA advocates to realize what scumbags they really are.
Besides that, I really think this sets a dangerous precedent. Trademarks are limited to specific things whereas domain names inevitably cross all boundaries. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office PETA's trademark is for "educational services; namely, providing programs and seminars on the subject of animal rights and welfare" and "educational services; namely, providing programs and seminars on the subject of animal rights and welfare." (See also here and here or here for all trademarks with PETA in them.) This trademark classification has nothing to do with computers, so what right do they have to the domain name. If this is allowed to stand it will make taking away someone's domain name much easier.
As far as I know (not being a lawyer:-) you can cross out anything you want in a contract when you sign it. If they then accept the contract then it is valid. (It's possible that they may have to initial those sections, but I don't think so.) If they try to hold you to something you crossed out you can just point to the contract you signed and say that you didn't agree to that (at which point they'll probably fire you, but life's not perfect, right.:-)
Qt is available for free even on non-Open Source OSes, but you have to buy Qt Professional Edition if you're going to make commercial (non-Open Source) software that uses Qt, regardless of whether it runs on an Open Source OS or not.
Qt is not free on MS-Windows, even for Open Source programs. I would very much like to use KDE programs under whatever operating system a computer has on it but I can't because in order to do so I would have to buy QT/Windows at $1,550! That's why I think Gnome will utilmately prevail -- because you can use it on whatever OS has a port of it (and if there isn't a port you can port it to that platform).
Some guys at the University of Virginia did that a LONG time ago too...
The person that did it actually confessed a couple of years ago. (I don't have the reference, but it was in the Washington Post.) One of the things that came out was that he actually used one of his family's cows because UVA has an honor code that would have prevented him from just taking any cow he wanted. Until he confessed, though, they had no clue who had done it (and about 20 years had past).
This is what I have the most problem with. If you take a look at the transcript from the hearing that is posted over at 2600 the judge states:
"First of all, defendants have submitted no evidence whatsoever that the primary purpose of DeCSS was to enable people in lawful possession of copyrighted DVDs to play them on Linux machines and not to copy them. Secondly, even if there were proof to that effect, there is no doubt that DeCSS was primarily designed or produced for the purpose prohibited in 1201(a)(2)(A) because the definition of "circumvent a technological measure" in 1201(a)(3) makes clear that decrypting or descrambling a copyrighted work without the authority of the copyright owner is the very definition of circumventing a technological measure. Therefore, even if the primary purpose here were to enable lawful possessors of copyrighted DVDs simply to play those DVDs on Linux machines, the primary purpose would have been within the statute.
The question I have is whether or not, by the simple act of selling us a DVD, the copyright owner has implicitly given us permission to view a DVD. Since the only way to watch the movie is to decrypt it, and the only use for a DVD is to watch it, doesn't that imply that we've been given permission to decrypt this DVD for the purpose of watching it? The judge doesn't seem to think so.
Since, IANAL, I would appreciate some help here from someone who is.
[...] even if DeCSS were intended and usable solely to permit the playing, and not the copying, of DVDs on Linux machines, the playing without a licensed CSS "player key" would "circumvent a technological measure" that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work and violate the statute in any case.
IANAL, but it seems to me that in one fell swoop this judge has just said that there is no such thing as fair use. Are there any lawyers out there who can say for certain if I am correct in this assumption?
"Brook also managed the development of the IBM 360 Operating System."
Note that while manager of the 360 project it was Dr. Brooks who specified that a byte would consist of 8 bits. Whether or not you agree with his decision, it's hard to argue that this has not had a huge impact on the computer field.
Did you notice the links to their other pages. One of them was Dumb Criminals. Under the "Convenience" section, there is one story about the Red Hat Bandit. I wonder what some people who are worried about all the money/power Red Hat has achieved lately would say about this...:-)
Actually, the UNC Walkthrough group hasn't used that for several years. Right now we have what is probably the only "wide area tracker" in existence. It uses cameras to reference know spots on the ceiling (in our case, infra-red LEDs) and is accurate to 0.2mm with less than 1ms of latency. You can find more information about it here. Or, you can read about an interesting experiment we did with it last year where we studied what works better: flying (as with a joystick), walking in place (to simulate walking), or real walking.
There's an interesting story about a similar case with MIT here, sounds as if someone in the administration got a clue and acted rationally before it got totally out of hand.
Did they? You may want to check out whois mit.com:
Registrant: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT7-DOM) Room E40-311, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 US
I've been using a Belkin Omniview SE 2 port KVM Switch (here or here) for the past few months with no problems at all. I run it at 1600x1200 resolution on a 21 inch monitor and have noticed no video degradation at all. However, it will do you no good if your KVM switch supports very high resolution if you hook up cheap cables between it and your monitor and computer. Get triple-shielded VGA cables and you shouldn't have any worrys. Yes, they cost a bit more, but you don't have to worry about moire patters all over your screen.
One other nice thing about the Belkin switches is that they have something called "integrated mouse conversion technology." What that means, simply, is that one of my computers hooked to the KVM switch uses a PS/2 mouse and one uses a serial mouse, but both are controlled by one PS/2 mouse connected to the switch. The only thing it doesn't convert is the Microsoft Mouse Wheel. Also, if you want to expand in the future, you can daisy chain it with other KVM Switches and switch more computers.
It's interesting to see that Microsoft seems to think it can dominate whatever field they want to and refuses to admit any wrongdoing when things fall down around them. This seems very similar to when Microsoft made vendors pay for Windows whenever they sold a computer (Microsoft thinking they could dominate a field) and then refusing to admit wrongdoing when the DOJ called them on the fact that what they were doing was an illegal business practice. Is Microsoft doomed to repeat history over and over again and how can their general cluelessness help the Open Source community?
Actually, we don't use armlib anymore (for those of you who are wondering what armlib was, it was a library to talk to haptic devices. It started out as the library to talk to the Argonne Remote Manipulator, or ARM, and hence the name.) We now use something called VRPN (Virtual Reality Peripheral Network) written by Russ Taylor, the guy who wrote the nanoManipulator. It's code is freely available here. This is a library that allows you to easily connect and talk to a bunch of 3D tracker/haptic devices.
You are indeed correct. We still have the ARM in house, and it (at least as of last semester) still works. I used it, in fact, in my final project for my "Virtual Worlds" class (taught by the aforementioned Warren Robinett, who is indeed the author of Adventure for the Atari) to simulate a renaissance rapier. The goal was to make the ARM fool you into thinking you were actually holding a real rapier. It worked, sort of...
Actually, one of the things we've considered is the following: someone, using lego mindstorms, built an atomic force microscope simulator (that is, a device that images the same way as an AFM, by taking height samples along a regular grid). We thought it would be cool to build one of these, hook the nanoManipulator up to it, and use it to explain how an AFM works.
Actually, one of our guys is doing his dissertation on how to run the nanomanipulator over the commodity Internet. I think, from what I've heard, it has something to do with sending over reference frames of images and doing image warping between them. See Tom Hudson's web page, however, for more info.
Slashdot Mirror
The net effect of this entire situation is that it casts Germany in a very bad light. People are calling for boycott's of Adobe. Since this seems to be more a problem with German law, why don't we just boycott Germany instead.
You know, there's a real simple way to deal with this kind of thing. On the day that Aimster gets shut down, everybody who's ever used Napster, Gnutella, Aimster, etc. should STOP BUYING CD'S FOR A MONTH! Just start making a list of the CD's you WOULD have bought, and get them a month later.
Or, even better, if you want to buy a cd, go to a used CD store and buy it there. You'll get your CD, the RIAA won't get any of your money, and you'll help support your local businesses.
Actually, I don't think Redhat is actually profitable yet. They're getting there. I would propose, instead, that Cygnus is an example of a company that had a successful business model based on the GPL and that they did it long before the GPL became fashionable.
Copy one person, it's plagiarism. Copy many, it's research.
The issue really isn't copying. You can copy to your heart's content, as long as you don't claim you wrote it yourself.
How do you feel about the current election problems? If you were to write a song about it, what would it be?
NBC and then CNN have just said that Bush will win FL and be the next president. I'm not sure I'm going to believe it until I see all the votes in...
TGS's version of Inventor, however, has several things in it that the Open Source version doesn't have (yet). These include the capability to load VRML 2.0 files and thread safe code.
Unfortunately, that's no longer an option, since Peta seems to have registered that also.
- The first amendment always allows parody, even if someone has a trademark.
- Diluted the value of the trademark?!? He just gave a ton of press to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He should be charging them for advertising.
- Commercial benefit?!? How was this commercial at all? He put up a parody site.
As a vegetarian, I must say that I view PETA in an extremely bad light. All you have to do is take a look at some of the hate mail this guy has received from PETA advocates to realize what scumbags they really are.Besides that, I really think this sets a dangerous precedent. Trademarks are limited to specific things whereas domain names inevitably cross all boundaries. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office PETA's trademark is for "educational services; namely, providing programs and seminars on the subject of animal rights and welfare" and "educational services; namely, providing programs and seminars on the subject of animal rights and welfare." (See also here and here or here for all trademarks with PETA in them.) This trademark classification has nothing to do with computers, so what right do they have to the domain name. If this is allowed to stand it will make taking away someone's domain name much easier.
As far as I know (not being a lawyer :-) you can cross out anything you want in a contract when you sign it. If they then accept the contract then it is valid. (It's possible that they may have to initial those sections, but I don't think so.) If they try to hold you to something you crossed out you can just point to the contract you signed and say that you didn't agree to that (at which point they'll probably fire you, but life's not perfect, right. :-)
Qt is available for free even on non-Open Source OSes, but you have to buy Qt Professional Edition if you're going to make commercial (non-Open Source) software that uses Qt, regardless of whether it runs on an Open Source OS or not.
Qt is not free on MS-Windows, even for Open Source programs. I would very much like to use KDE programs under whatever operating system a computer has on it but I can't because in order to do so I would have to buy QT/Windows at $1,550! That's why I think Gnome will utilmately prevail -- because you can use it on whatever OS has a port of it (and if there isn't a port you can port it to that platform).
Some guys at the University of Virginia did that a LONG time ago too...
The person that did it actually confessed a couple of years ago. (I don't have the reference, but it was in the Washington Post.) One of the things that came out was that he actually used one of his family's cows because UVA has an honor code that would have prevented him from just taking any cow he wanted. Until he confessed, though, they had no clue who had done it (and about 20 years had past).
The question I have is whether or not, by the simple act of selling us a DVD, the copyright owner has implicitly given us permission to view a DVD. Since the only way to watch the movie is to decrypt it, and the only use for a DVD is to watch it, doesn't that imply that we've been given permission to decrypt this DVD for the purpose of watching it? The judge doesn't seem to think so.
Since, IANAL, I would appreciate some help here from someone who is.
IANAL, but it seems to me that in one fell swoop this judge has just said that there is no such thing as fair use. Are there any lawyers out there who can say for certain if I am correct in this assumption?
Here's another. This one also contains some other files to help form the basis of a Linux DVD Player.
"Brook also managed the development of the IBM 360 Operating System."
Note that while manager of the 360 project it was Dr. Brooks who specified that a byte would consist of 8 bits. Whether or not you agree with his decision, it's hard to argue that this has not had a huge impact on the computer field.
Tanner Lovelace
UNC Chapel Hill
Did you notice the links to their other pages. One of them was Dumb Criminals. Under the "Convenience" section, there is one story about the Red Hat Bandit. I wonder what some people who are worried about all the money/power Red Hat has achieved lately would say about this... :-)
Actually, the UNC Walkthrough group hasn't used that for several years. Right now we have what is probably the only "wide area tracker" in existence. It uses cameras to reference know spots on the ceiling (in our case, infra-red LEDs) and is accurate to 0.2mm with less than 1ms of latency. You can find more information about it here. Or, you can read about an interesting experiment we did with it last year where we studied what works better: flying (as with a joystick), walking in place (to simulate walking), or real walking.
There's an interesting story about a similar case with MIT here, sounds as if someone in the administration got a clue and acted rationally before it got totally out of hand.
Did they? You may want to check out whois mit.com:
Registrant:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT7-DOM)
Room E40-311, 77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
US
Domain Name: MIT.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Schiller, Jeffrey I (JIS) jis@MIT.EDU
+1 617 253-8400 (FAX) +1 617 258-8736
Billing Contact:
Schiller, Jeffrey I (JIS) jis@MIT.EDU
+1 617 253-8400 (FAX) +1 617 258-8736
Record last updated on 29-Aug-1997.
Record created on 29-Aug-1997.
Database last updated on 14-Nov-1999 12:33:59 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
STRAWB.MIT.EDU 18.71.0.151
BITSY.MIT.EDU 18.72.0.3
I've been using a Belkin Omniview SE 2 port KVM Switch (here or here) for the past few months with no problems at all. I run it at 1600x1200 resolution on a 21 inch monitor and have noticed no video degradation at all. However, it will do you no good if your KVM switch supports very high resolution if you hook up cheap cables between it and your monitor and computer. Get triple-shielded VGA cables and you shouldn't have any worrys. Yes, they cost a bit more, but you don't have to worry about moire patters all over your screen.
One other nice thing about the Belkin switches is that they have something called "integrated mouse conversion technology." What that means, simply, is that one of my computers hooked to the KVM switch uses a PS/2 mouse and one uses a serial mouse, but both are controlled by one PS/2 mouse connected to the switch. The only thing it doesn't convert is the Microsoft Mouse Wheel. Also, if you want to expand in the future, you can daisy chain it with other KVM Switches and switch more computers.
It's interesting to see that Microsoft seems to think it can dominate whatever field they want to and refuses to admit any wrongdoing when things fall down around them. This seems very similar to when Microsoft made vendors pay for Windows whenever they sold a computer (Microsoft thinking they could dominate a field) and then refusing to admit wrongdoing when the DOJ called them on the fact that what they were doing was an illegal business practice. Is Microsoft doomed to repeat history over and over again and how can their general cluelessness help the Open Source community?
Actually, we don't use armlib anymore (for those of you who are wondering what armlib was, it was a library to talk to haptic devices. It started out as the library to talk to the Argonne Remote Manipulator, or ARM, and hence the name.) We now use something called VRPN (Virtual Reality Peripheral Network) written by Russ Taylor, the guy who wrote the nanoManipulator. It's code is freely available here. This is a library that allows you to easily connect and talk to a bunch of 3D tracker/haptic devices.
Tanner Lovelace
You are indeed correct. We still have the ARM in house, and it (at least as of last semester) still works. I used it, in fact, in my final project for my "Virtual Worlds" class (taught by the aforementioned Warren Robinett, who is indeed the author of Adventure for the Atari) to simulate a renaissance rapier. The goal was to make the ARM fool you into thinking you were actually holding a real rapier. It worked, sort of...
Tanner Lovelace
Actually, one of the things we've considered is the following: someone, using lego mindstorms, built an atomic force microscope simulator (that is, a device that images the same way as an AFM, by taking height samples along a regular grid). We thought it would be cool to build one of these, hook the nanoManipulator up to it, and use it to explain how an AFM works.
Tanner Lovelace
Actually, one of our guys is doing his dissertation on how to run the nanomanipulator over the commodity Internet. I think, from what I've heard, it has something to do with sending over reference frames of images and doing image warping between them. See Tom Hudson's web page, however, for more info.
Tanner Lovelace
lovelace@NoSpAm.cs.unc.edu