It is definitely true that it costs quite a bit more to develop a new model of a car than a new piece of software, but you're missing an important point. All cars are general purpose machines that everybody needs. One server-base software package may have only 1% of the development costs of a car, but we're talking about a potential customer base of what, 1000 people, or let's go crazy and say even 100,000 people want this server app you've developed.
That's nothing compared to the number of people that want to purchase an automobile, and better yet, any automobile will due and the choice is purely to personal preference versus price. Your server package will only do one specific thing that only a few people will need to meet their needs. You just can't sell niche market software for cheap and expect to stay in business.
The current implementation of DRM can supply you with the right to backup your licenses, but only if the license server you connected to tells you that's an okay thing to do.
The amount of rights the user actually has, such as being able to play the file in a non-microsoft player or some SDMI device, is up to the content owner.
Which of course means that most content owners will be encouraged by their respective artist's association to turn off these features...:)
Excellent point, but don't underestimate the number of simulatenous atoms that are randomly colliding. Although it make take 10^one billion years for life to be randomly generated at one point in space, these reactions occur everywhere in the universe. If there's 10^1,000,000,000 places in the universe where atoms are turning into molecules, the amount estimated time for life to spontaneously appear would only be one year.
This seems like a good forum to get responses to a theory I've had in my head for about a year now.
Given a mass of matter, floating in space, its atoms interacting with one another making random combinations. Eventually, over billions or even trillions of years, every possible combination of molecular structures will be created from these random interactions.
What if one of these random structures coming out of this process naturally attempts to create copies of itself, using the resources around it? What if this structure doesn't make perfect copies, but creates copies that are the closest it can come to an exact copy with the resources around it? Exactly at what point does this molecular compound become life?
I'm not looking for flames, just good arguments why this can't happen. It's the most reasonable explaination of the source of life that I have come up with.
Although this isn't the case with this particular issue, would creating a plug-in DLL that uses GPL'd code and is released under GPL for a non-GPL'd application be allowed under the license, in the case that the GPL'd plugin isn't required for the app to function.
Example:
I was working on a networked-based emulator (until someone beat me to it) that used plugins to emulate each of the consoles, one being the Stella 2600 engine (GPL'd). I was considering not releasing the networking code, but the code to the plugins.
I've changed my mind on not releasing the code since then, but I was curious if anyone else thought this would be a valid use of GPL code since the program could run any plugin, GPL'd or not. BTW, if anyone's actually interested in the code, email me and I'll post it somewhere, since I'm not using it anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
It is definitely true that it costs quite a bit more to develop a new model of a car than a new piece of software, but you're missing an important point. All cars are general purpose machines that everybody needs. One server-base software package may have only 1% of the development costs of a car, but we're talking about a potential customer base of what, 1000 people, or let's go crazy and say even 100,000 people want this server app you've developed.
That's nothing compared to the number of people that want to purchase an automobile, and better yet, any automobile will due and the choice is purely to personal preference versus price. Your server package will only do one specific thing that only a few people will need to meet their needs. You just can't sell niche market software for cheap and expect to stay in business.
The current implementation of DRM can supply you with the right to backup your licenses, but only if the license server you connected to tells you that's an okay thing to do.
:)
The amount of rights the user actually has, such as being able to play the file in a non-microsoft player or some SDMI device, is up to the content owner.
Which of course means that most content owners will be encouraged by their respective artist's association to turn off these features...
Excellent point, but don't underestimate the number of simulatenous atoms that are randomly colliding. Although it make take 10^one billion years for life to be randomly generated at one point in space, these reactions occur everywhere in the universe. If there's 10^1,000,000,000 places in the universe where atoms are turning into molecules, the amount estimated time for life to spontaneously appear would only be one year.
This seems like a good forum to get responses to a theory I've had in my head for about a year now.
Given a mass of matter, floating in space, its atoms interacting with one another making random combinations. Eventually, over billions or even trillions of years, every possible combination of molecular structures will be created from these random interactions.
What if one of these random structures coming out of this process naturally attempts to create copies of itself, using the resources around it? What if this structure doesn't make perfect copies, but creates copies that are the closest it can come to an exact copy with the resources around it? Exactly at what point does this molecular compound become life?
I'm not looking for flames, just good arguments why this can't happen. It's the most reasonable explaination of the source of life that I have come up with.
Although this isn't the case with this particular issue, would creating a plug-in DLL that uses GPL'd code and is released under GPL for a non-GPL'd application be allowed under the license, in the case that the GPL'd plugin isn't required for the app to function.
Example: I was working on a networked-based emulator (until someone beat me to it) that used plugins to emulate each of the consoles, one being the Stella 2600 engine (GPL'd). I was considering not releasing the networking code, but the code to the plugins.
I've changed my mind on not releasing the code since then, but I was curious if anyone else thought this would be a valid use of GPL code since the program could run any plugin, GPL'd or not. BTW, if anyone's actually interested in the code, email me and I'll post it somewhere, since I'm not using it anymore.