> For instance in the Zenon Panoussis [wikipedia.org] case, where the > US government officially lobbied Sweden to amend their constitution > just to protect some copyrighted Scientology documents.
I'm sorry, but if you claim you are a religion (and, coincidentally, get to thus avoid both laws about fraud, and of paying taxes) then you shouldn't get to copyright your holy works.
IP laws will first get worse to the point where there will be a social layer of somewhat wealthy, but held-down upstarts who will be opressed by perpetuated "IP gentry" (aided by "lawyer clergy")
At least until the patents start expiring, and the big companies get the government to start passing draconian regulations that only large companies can afford to follow, or defend against, as was done with (or more accurately, for) car companies.
Oh, wait! I forgot! All that elephantine regulation is Good Stuff for The Betterment Of The People And Safety Of The People And The Environment.
Yes, I fergit that's what it's really all about. Yeah! Protect The People, stick it to The Man who owns the Car Companies.
Yes. In the end, I"P" law is incompatible with freedom. I hope to see and work towards the complete destruction of I"P" law in my lifetime
Totally, dude. And the same goes for physical property laws.
Good luck relying on government agencies to direct, or hobbyiests to develop, eight hundred million transistor next-gen 3D cards and microprocessors and RAM chips. Because, you know, with ever growing, bloated safety nets, government officials have nothing better to spend their money on than multi-billion dollar clean room plants, so too, hobbyiests.
Yes, a person whose entire livelihood revolves around creating attractive, unique designs is being a control freak by trying to prevent the designs from being spread all over Hell's Half Acre and back, of a type of product where the design can be duplicated physically in a few hours by a semi-skilled worker.:rollseyes
Auto companies put covers over the grill, and sometimes the entire car, of vehicles they are developing lest some other car company rush out a near-copy of it. Chrysler lost a lawsuit a few years back over a unique Jeep grill, if I recall correctly. This stuff does matter, and the developer of the design can lose a lot of effort to people who would copy them.
Now imagine a product that can be copied into production not in the course of eight to twelve excruciatingly fast months, but in a matter of a few days, as with clothing.
If all they were doing was reading the first page, or even the first few pages, I doubt that would have been a problem. Heck, the publishers would probably jumped for joy at the free advertising, the radio station trying to get people hooked on the story, with no money spent by them at all.
Somehow I doubt that was what was going on, though. Heck, if I were them, I'd set a policy that any radio or TV station was free to read the first chapter and the first half of the second. Or maybe the first five chapters, depending on how long the book was.
> They do business with a country the US doesn't like, so they are prevented > from entering the US. How is that right?
The US has its foreign policy agenda, whether you like it or not. Among other things, it allows Cubans in the US, who have had their property, ummmm, "taken for the betterment of The People" to sue companies that do business in the US and in Cuba for financial loss.
I have no problem with that. If you're a big business, and the business in Cuba is as important as the business in the US, you'd better be prepared to treat that as a cost of doing business. This doesn't apply to US businesses since they're flat-out banned from Cuba.
> The claim is that a law granting copyright protection to fashion designs would be an > unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. That's not saying that all copyright > protections are unconstitutional, only this one. It's essentially saying that copyright > protections in the US have already been extended to their Constitutional limit, and argument > I'd pretty much agree with.
What if it was Constitutional? What if Congress could allow dress design copyrights (or patents or trademarks or servicemarks or whatever, "look" of packaging is something-rightable, I believe) but simply chose not to (or never considered it)? Then what?
I'd argue that this cannot be allowed to stand because Congress, and the Constitution, cannot reasonably expect American citizens to be aware of every law all over the world that might fall under this umbrella. Cities are supposed to post local Bizarro-world parking laws on every street that enters the city so people can't claim they never knew about it as it's unreasonable to expect people to know every strange driving law in every community they drive through. This is that, multiplied by every government at every level around the world, and applies while "driving in your own city, so to speak.
Microsoft has "been in trouble" in the past. Symantec used to do compilers on both Mac and PC, and had developed "Bedrock", a technology that would allow a developer to develop one app, then compile it for both environments seamlessly, including all windowing.
Microsoft still here?
Netscape was building the virtual computer -- very few applications need serious, native-compile number crunching. And you'd just run this virtual computer in your Netscape web browser. Presto! No OS needed whatsoever, at least beyond a bare bones needed to support a Netscape. Microsoft would die a quick death (as would Apple) when people realized all they needed was this little virtual computer.
Masturbation used to be commonly illegal, and may very well still be, buried in ancient lawbooks somewhere. Bzzzt! Sorry, thanks for playing the Slam Slashdot game!
Here's how it should be played:
And, given that masturbation is frequently illegal, Slashdotters shouldn't get all high and mighty lest they find themselves on a sex offender registry for torquing off to the latest pics of Lindsay or Eva, alongsides the 19 year old who had sex with his 17 year old girlfriend, and the guy who just raped the 10 year old girl and killed her and was gonna eat her.
I don't believe that, since the death penalty was reinstated in the US, that there were any confirmed cases of the wrong person being executed.
There was that famous case a few months ago where, golly, DNA evidence showed the guy executed was actually guilty of it.
One of the interesting things about DNA was that, according to "common knowledge", since so vastly many are wrongly convicted, the coming of DNA would start springing people left and right. As it turned out, very few people on death row requested the DNA tests when they finally became available.
I'll leave it as the question on this week's critical thinking quiz as to why...
"Allegedly" is a weasel-word used in our litigious society by reporters to protect themselves from a lawsuit. Prior to the conviction, only the prosecutor (and witnesses) do not use the word allegedly, since, yes indeed, they do plan to prove it in court, thank you very much.
Once conviction occurs, one need no longer use the weasel word, but organizations frequently do, [i]forgetting the original reason they were using it in the first place.[/i] Many abandon it in favor of a marginally less weasel phrase, "convicted of". As in, "So-and-so, convicted of loving animals too much, was in court again today..."
Ok, I officially declare you can't get a patent on the following:
1. Doing something wirelessly that is now done with wires.
Why? The point of a wireless network is to make it transparent to the higher application layer as to whether it's wireless or wired.
Now, that doesn't mean a particular implementation can't be patented -- there's plenty of room for clever solutions to do things wirelessly to overcome the lag and chatty interaction problems.
2. Simulation of any real-world, or real-worldish thing on a computer.
Why? It's brutally obvious that someone may want to simulate something that already exists.
Now, that doesn't mean a particular implementation can't be patented. There's plenty of room for efficient implementations of simulations, or for clever algorithms to actually do the simulation. But the concept of a simulation of XYZ itself should not be patented.
Which, of course, is why Julian Simon, bless his soul, has destroyed climate scientists decade after decade as they made their grotesquely wild predictions.
It's government intervention that causes economic hurt and mass starvation on all but the shortest of time scales. And on the shortest of time scales, a throbbing economy is best fit to respond to emergencies.
> 3. The game will be released, it will sit on 5 CDs instead of one > DVD to keep "costs down" and pirated versions will appear with all > the speech replaced with mexican festival music
Cool! Where can I download this patch?
> 6. Some dude in Korea will die after playing the game for 79 hours straight.
When Quake came out, soon after I got the 3.5 CTF super-patch. I recall seeing a guy run by with the glowing, waving flag, and this holy light shone down on me. This, multiplayer, team-based online gaming, was what all human game history was leading up to. I played for over 36 hours, from 11:00 AM to 11:30 PM of the next day I only stopped because I was literally falling asleep at the keyboard (woke up standing in the water where that guy grabs the grenade launcher in QDQR so he can "take a shortcut" on a later level.
> 7. A full week after the release of the game a dozen patches > will come out to fix various holes in the game [re: pirates] > and each one will take a full 200MB to replace 39KB of code in the binary.
People will find out their saved games are useless after the patch, will complain about it online, and get called "asses" by developers for not reading paragraph 472 of the release notes carefully enough.
> Sure, you get "support" [with Alienware] but what self respecting gaming geek is not going to > be able to support his own machine?
And what support you get evaporates as soon as your warranty expires, as I quickly found out when my 3D card went bad. Thank goodness Radeon supported a return and replacement, against their policy of supporting OEM-installed product directly.
The serious gamer doesn't have much rent since they're living in a single-wide trailer park, saving every penny they have so they can retire at age 40 to play games the rest of their life.
Way back when, when your choices were hideously expensive IBM PCs, or an almost hideously expensive Compaq, Gateway came along and took over as the premier 3rd party seller of PCs.
We bought one, and tried to install Doom on it (to paraphrase Scotty, "No I, II, III, or Magnificent Gold Super Duper Everything Pack".) It wouldn't run. We called Gateway and they said......wait for it......"We don't consider 'Doom' to be an application we need to support to not be considered defective."
So back it went. I'm sure shortly after they changed their tune. Heave that comment into the bin alongside the 640K ram limit apocryphal comment and the "The planet will support a need for maybe 5 computers."
> But there's a whole segment of gamers with too much money and no taste who do buy PCs from Alienware
Guilty!
I made sure I got the Alien Blue with the green glowing eyes for "alien ice" cooling system. Don't get the cable management system thing, though. It's just a plastic grating that forces all cables through a 4x5" opening, where they all spread out again.
I wonder what the point of the cooling system was given the Radeon went on the fritz 1.5 years later...
Actually, I ran the numbers, and I'd have saved maybe $300 rolling my own. That wasn't worth the several extra days of effort I'd have had to spend if I had difficulties getting drivers to download and so on.
I never got what was so great about Halo, anyway. So you can run around and shoot stuff, and ride in a vehicle too and shoot stuff. Aside from the vehicle, it isn't any different from Quake or Doom or any other online shooter. And even the vehicles were done before by Tribes, where you also got to basically be a small mech in the heavy armor.
I forgot what their big gun was the heavy carried, but you could rocket-jump with it to get your heavy with resupply station and launch yourself way up top somewhere. Plant shooting turrets, control turrets, etc. etc. etc.
Too bad Tribes II was such a screwup that it killed the franchise. My machine exceeded minimum requirements, but would barely run with every display setting set to minimum -- such a minimum I couldn't see very far and everything running around was little different from a blob.
Two and a half years ago I bought an Alienware Area 51 at Thanksgiving. It had what was the then top-of-the-line Radeon 9800XT (I think that's the model number, anyway.) A year and a half later it started going haywire showing giant triangles, green garbagey rectangles, and pink lines everywhere. Reinstalling everything didn't work.
Going to the Alienware live chat room, the tech asked me for my customer order number. They looked it up and said, "We're sorry, your machine is only warranted for one year. Thank you and goodbye, Smithers release the hounds..."
Radeon warranties that product for 3 years. The Radeon guys let me send it in for repair/replacement even though OEM-installed products are supposed to be covered by the OEM.
Slashdot Mirror
> For instance in the Zenon Panoussis [wikipedia.org] case, where the
> US government officially lobbied Sweden to amend their constitution
> just to protect some copyrighted Scientology documents.
I'm sorry, but if you claim you are a religion (and, coincidentally, get to thus avoid both laws about fraud, and of paying taxes) then you shouldn't get to copyright your holy works.
At least until the patents start expiring, and the big companies get the government to start passing draconian regulations that only large companies can afford to follow, or defend against, as was done with (or more accurately, for) car companies.
Oh, wait! I forgot! All that elephantine regulation is Good Stuff for The Betterment Of The People And Safety Of The People And The Environment.
Yes, I fergit that's what it's really all about. Yeah! Protect The People, stick it to The Man who owns the Car Companies.
Good luck relying on government agencies to direct, or hobbyiests to develop, eight hundred million transistor next-gen 3D cards and microprocessors and RAM chips. Because, you know, with ever growing, bloated safety nets, government officials have nothing better to spend their money on than multi-billion dollar clean room plants, so too, hobbyiests.
Think about it in Hollywood.
Oh, they're developing a volcano movie? We've got to develop a volcano movie!
Oh, they're developing an asteroid-hitting-the-earth movie? We've got to develop an asteroid-hitting-the-earth-movie.
Oh, they're developing a Christopher Columbus movie? We've got to develop a Christopher Columbus movie.
Et al. Ad nauseum.
> This designer is just being a control freak.
:rollseyes
Yes, a person whose entire livelihood revolves around creating attractive, unique designs is being a control freak by trying to prevent the designs from being spread all over Hell's Half Acre and back, of a type of product where the design can be duplicated physically in a few hours by a semi-skilled worker.
Auto companies put covers over the grill, and sometimes the entire car, of vehicles they are developing lest some other car company rush out a near-copy of it. Chrysler lost a lawsuit a few years back over a unique Jeep grill, if I recall correctly. This stuff does matter, and the developer of the design can lose a lot of effort to people who would copy them.
Now imagine a product that can be copied into production not in the course of eight to twelve excruciatingly fast months, but in a matter of a few days, as with clothing.
If all they were doing was reading the first page, or even the first few pages, I doubt that would have been a problem. Heck, the publishers would probably jumped for joy at the free advertising, the radio station trying to get people hooked on the story, with no money spent by them at all.
Somehow I doubt that was what was going on, though. Heck, if I were them, I'd set a policy that any radio or TV station was free to read the first chapter and the first half of the second. Or maybe the first five chapters, depending on how long the book was.
> They do business with a country the US doesn't like, so they are prevented
> from entering the US. How is that right?
The US has its foreign policy agenda, whether you like it or not. Among other things, it allows Cubans in the US, who have had their property, ummmm, "taken for the betterment of The People" to sue companies that do business in the US and in Cuba for financial loss.
I have no problem with that. If you're a big business, and the business in Cuba is as important as the business in the US, you'd better be prepared to treat that as a cost of doing business. This doesn't apply to US businesses since they're flat-out banned from Cuba.
> The claim is that a law granting copyright protection to fashion designs would be an
> unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. That's not saying that all copyright
> protections are unconstitutional, only this one. It's essentially saying that copyright
> protections in the US have already been extended to their Constitutional limit, and argument
> I'd pretty much agree with.
What if it was Constitutional? What if Congress could allow dress design copyrights (or patents or trademarks or servicemarks or whatever, "look" of packaging is something-rightable, I believe) but simply chose not to (or never considered it)? Then what?
I'd argue that this cannot be allowed to stand because Congress, and the Constitution, cannot reasonably expect American citizens to be aware of every law all over the world that might fall under this umbrella. Cities are supposed to post local Bizarro-world parking laws on every street that enters the city so people can't claim they never knew about it as it's unreasonable to expect people to know every strange driving law in every community they drive through. This is that, multiplied by every government at every level around the world, and applies while "driving in your own city, so to speak.
Microsoft has "been in trouble" in the past. Symantec used to do compilers on both Mac and PC, and had developed "Bedrock", a technology that would allow a developer to develop one app, then compile it for both environments seamlessly, including all windowing.
Microsoft still here?
Netscape was building the virtual computer -- very few applications need serious, native-compile number crunching. And you'd just run this virtual computer in your Netscape web browser. Presto! No OS needed whatsoever, at least beyond a bare bones needed to support a Netscape. Microsoft would die a quick death (as would Apple) when people realized all they needed was this little virtual computer.
Microsoft still here?
Masturbation used to be commonly illegal, and may very well still be, buried in ancient lawbooks somewhere. Bzzzt! Sorry, thanks for playing the Slam Slashdot game!
Here's how it should be played:
And, given that masturbation is frequently illegal, Slashdotters shouldn't get all high and mighty lest they find themselves on a sex offender registry for torquing off to the latest pics of Lindsay or Eva, alongsides the 19 year old who had sex with his 17 year old girlfriend, and the guy who just raped the 10 year old girl and killed her and was gonna eat her.
I don't believe that, since the death penalty was reinstated in the US, that there were any confirmed cases of the wrong person being executed.
There was that famous case a few months ago where, golly, DNA evidence showed the guy executed was actually guilty of it.
One of the interesting things about DNA was that, according to "common knowledge", since so vastly many are wrongly convicted, the coming of DNA would start springing people left and right. As it turned out, very few people on death row requested the DNA tests when they finally became available.
I'll leave it as the question on this week's critical thinking quiz as to why...
"Allegedly" is a weasel-word used in our litigious society by reporters to protect themselves from a lawsuit. Prior to the conviction, only the prosecutor (and witnesses) do not use the word allegedly, since, yes indeed, they do plan to prove it in court, thank you very much.
Once conviction occurs, one need no longer use the weasel word, but organizations frequently do, [i]forgetting the original reason they were using it in the first place.[/i] Many abandon it in favor of a marginally less weasel phrase, "convicted of". As in, "So-and-so, convicted of loving animals too much, was in court again today..."
> For a guy who has some great moral opposition to patents,
I heartily encourage him to work hard for little reward and for my improved quality of life.
Ok, I officially declare you can't get a patent on the following:
1. Doing something wirelessly that is now done with wires.
Why? The point of a wireless network is to make it transparent to the higher application layer as to whether it's wireless or wired.
Now, that doesn't mean a particular implementation can't be patented -- there's plenty of room for clever solutions to do things wirelessly to overcome the lag and chatty interaction problems.
2. Simulation of any real-world, or real-worldish thing on a computer.
Why? It's brutally obvious that someone may want to simulate something that already exists.
Now, that doesn't mean a particular implementation can't be patented. There's plenty of room for efficient implementations of simulations, or for clever algorithms to actually do the simulation. But the concept of a simulation of XYZ itself should not be patented.
A billion will starve? Bzzzt! Sorry, that's not how that works. This is an economics question, not a climate one.
Which, of course, is why Julian Simon, bless his soul, has destroyed climate scientists decade after decade as they made their grotesquely wild predictions.
It's government intervention that causes economic hurt and mass starvation on all but the shortest of time scales. And on the shortest of time scales, a throbbing economy is best fit to respond to emergencies.
> 3. The game will be released, it will sit on 5 CDs instead of one
> DVD to keep "costs down" and pirated versions will appear with all
> the speech replaced with mexican festival music
Cool! Where can I download this patch?
> 6. Some dude in Korea will die after playing the game for 79 hours straight.
When Quake came out, soon after I got the 3.5 CTF super-patch. I recall seeing a guy run by with the glowing, waving flag, and this holy light shone down on me. This, multiplayer, team-based online gaming, was what all human game history was leading up to. I played for over 36 hours, from 11:00 AM to 11:30 PM of the next day I only stopped because I was literally falling asleep at the keyboard (woke up standing in the water where that guy grabs the grenade launcher in QDQR so he can "take a shortcut" on a later level.
> 7. A full week after the release of the game a dozen patches
> will come out to fix various holes in the game [re: pirates]
> and each one will take a full 200MB to replace 39KB of code in the binary.
People will find out their saved games are useless after the patch, will complain about it online, and get called "asses" by developers for not reading paragraph 472 of the release notes carefully enough.
[b]A Random Gamer:[/b] Hurry up now and finish Duke!
[b]3D Realms:[/b] Why? We running out of time?
[b]Gamer:[/b] Technically, yes. The universe is collapsing and the time dimension is starting to rotate into a physical dimension.
A lawyer who got worse grades at a worse school than the much-disdained W.
Climate scientist from MIT is right
> Sure, you get "support" [with Alienware] but what self respecting gaming geek is not going to
> be able to support his own machine?
And what support you get evaporates as soon as your warranty expires, as I quickly found out when my 3D card went bad. Thank goodness Radeon supported a return and replacement, against their policy of supporting OEM-installed product directly.
The serious gamer doesn't have much rent since they're living in a single-wide trailer park, saving every penny they have so they can retire at age 40 to play games the rest of their life.
Way back when, when your choices were hideously expensive IBM PCs, or an almost hideously expensive Compaq, Gateway came along and took over as the premier 3rd party seller of PCs.
...wait for it... ..."We don't consider 'Doom' to be an application we need to support to not be considered defective."
We bought one, and tried to install Doom on it (to paraphrase Scotty, "No I, II, III, or Magnificent Gold Super Duper Everything Pack".) It wouldn't run. We called Gateway and they said...
So back it went. I'm sure shortly after they changed their tune. Heave that comment into the bin alongside the 640K ram limit apocryphal comment and the "The planet will support a need for maybe 5 computers."
> But there's a whole segment of gamers with too much money and no taste who do buy PCs from Alienware
Guilty!
I made sure I got the Alien Blue with the green glowing eyes for "alien ice" cooling system. Don't get the cable management system thing, though. It's just a plastic grating that forces all cables through a 4x5" opening, where they all spread out again.
I wonder what the point of the cooling system was given the Radeon went on the fritz 1.5 years later...
Actually, I ran the numbers, and I'd have saved maybe $300 rolling my own. That wasn't worth the several extra days of effort I'd have had to spend if I had difficulties getting drivers to download and so on.
I never got what was so great about Halo, anyway. So you can run around and shoot stuff, and ride in a vehicle too and shoot stuff. Aside from the vehicle, it isn't any different from Quake or Doom or any other online shooter. And even the vehicles were done before by Tribes, where you also got to basically be a small mech in the heavy armor.
I forgot what their big gun was the heavy carried, but you could rocket-jump with it to get your heavy with resupply station and launch yourself way up top somewhere. Plant shooting turrets, control turrets, etc. etc. etc.
Too bad Tribes II was such a screwup that it killed the franchise. My machine exceeded minimum requirements, but would barely run with every display setting set to minimum -- such a minimum I couldn't see very far and everything running around was little different from a blob.
Alienware has their problems, too.
Two and a half years ago I bought an Alienware Area 51 at Thanksgiving. It had what was the then top-of-the-line Radeon 9800XT (I think that's the model number, anyway.) A year and a half later it started going haywire showing giant triangles, green garbagey rectangles, and pink lines everywhere. Reinstalling everything didn't work.
Going to the Alienware live chat room, the tech asked me for my customer order number. They looked it up and said, "We're sorry, your machine is only warranted for one year. Thank you and goodbye, Smithers release the hounds..."
Radeon warranties that product for 3 years. The Radeon guys let me send it in for repair/replacement even though OEM-installed products are supposed to be covered by the OEM.
Yay, Radeon.
Boo, Alienware.