This must be widespread. A while ago, my mother told me a similar story about Wells Fargo. She said when we were living in California (so it was at least 20 years ago), they kept getting our account and this other guy's account mixed up--he had the same last name. I wonder if their system just looks at last names instead of account numbers? Either way, their system sucks!
This article was written by Fox News, a part of News Corporation. News Corp is one of the companies who "encouraged" Master Hollings to write his SSSCA / CBDTPA bills.
I think the biggest solution to your problem would be to have no political parties at all. Think about it. You would be able to vote on each candidate based on their individual merits instead of what is often cookie cutter party platform. The way things are run now, a politician is more answerable to his / her party than the voters.
I have a few pictures I took with my digital camera which would make very good textures, only problem is I don't have a good way to make the images tileable. GIMP's "Make Seamless" plugin sort of works, but has obvious visual problems. The Resynthesizer may work, but I haven't tried it for a while (when I did, it took lots of CPU time.
There also need to be good texture editors. Some photo editing program where you can view the image in a tiled setting and edit it. I don't know of any. Maybe using the tile function in GIMP, editing it, and recropping the image will work?
BTW, there used to be some public domain textures listed in gimp.org (called something like farm textures--they were taken from real photos), but I can't find them now...
For security reasons, the company I'm at won't let me run a Mac there because they can't PROVE there's no backdoors in OSX. They're paranoid (rightly so, being a large banking interest) and they won't run ANYTHING that their code monkeys haven't scanned every line of code or they haven't written themselves.... If Apple would do something like Microsoft's "shared source"...
This makes no sense. The DRM "features" in Windows Media Player are a backdoor. The product activation system in XP is a backdoor. As soon as MS's Palladium project is completed, the entire,/b> system will be a huge backdoor where MS can do anything they want with your computer. Not to mention if you don't compile MS's "shared source" into an OS yourself, how do you know they gave you the real source?
I don't think the guy was trying to make a political statement. I think he just didn't want money stolen from him by a law breaking monopolist. If you're going to run Linux and not MS software, you shouldn't be forced to pay money to Microsoft.
Yeah, that's the problem right there. Their real motive seems to be "crush any potential competition and screw the public for as much money as possible."
I agree with you on the points where you say employees shouldn't be allowed to do illegal things on company time, waste time at work, or use up company resorces for non-work purposes. But are you seriously saying listening to music wastes company time?
I'm listening to music now. Do you think I took longer to write this post just because I'm listening to music???
/me wishing I could remember where those studies are which said music boosted productivity.
They have dedicated keys for Undo/Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Front (X users will understand this), Open, Help, and a few other keys.
Well, technically, the function keys on other computers are supposed to be used that way, they just aren't most of the time. If you are old enough, you may remember the function key templates which came with Wordperfect.
Oh, and they keep control where it should be.
I think that is part of the Bill Gates conspiracy to force everyone to use the mouse. "These dern ctrl and alt keys are so small! eyes reckon eyes musa use der moose!" Serously, if they do put "windows" and "menu" keys on the keyboard, I think they should put them somewhere out of the way. Perhaps on the other side of tab and caps lock. It would not only allow one to use them with little hand movment (if you really need it), but it would add more balance to the keyboard. I keep my keyboad on my lap, and being centered on home row, the number pad and cursor keys hang way off. More keys on the left side would keep my keyboard from sliding off as it sometimes does.:-)
For the Windows users it even has a Ctrl+Alt+Delete button:)
It has ctrl alt delete as one key? I wouldn't want that keyboard!
Cat walks across keyboard
%^@&^!!! My computer just reset again!;-)
A good keyboard would also eliminate the CAPS LOCK key to block all the AOL posters.
My memory is a little fuzzy on it, but I think it was used to temporarily stop scrolling--kind of like the Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q keys do in Unix. In a terminal (aka command line) program, sometimes the information would scroll off the screen too fast to read it. Being able to halt the scrolling allows one to read in such situations.
I think FreeBSD uses that key to enable paging up and down a terminal session.
Yeah, but if some people take nekkid pictures of themselves and post them on a P2P network, they imply permission to copy it. Any dumbfuck with a digital camera or camcorder can make porn and upload it to the internet.
Shooting a 20 min video of a guy and his girlfriend: 20 minutes
Encoding the video using a computer with a tv card: 20 minutes--could be the same 20 minutes as above if the computer is in the same room.
Assuming they encoded the file at a rate of 50kbytes/sec. Time to upload with a slow dialup line: 4h 10min. Time to upload with a "broadband" connection (DSL or cable--256 kbit/sec): about 31 minutes.
Cost of equipment: computer $1000, camcorder: $300, tv card: $60, encoder: varies, but some are free and some come with the tv card / computer's OS. All one time. You could make a thousand videos with this equipment and last I checked, "broadband" internet is only $50 per month (assuming it's available in your area).
I was favoring higher quality and a long video with those figures. One could probably encode the file at 10 kB/s and still have reasonably decent video with some codecs. One could put together a workable computer for $500 if need be.
Your assumption that all the pr0n on the internet is made by some pay site who doesn't want it redistributed is shit. It doesn't take that much effort to produce it. The problem is many of the people who upload the material don't know anything about copyright law, so they don't indicate anywhere that you have permission to copy it. Yes, some of the files traded are used without the author's consent, but to automatically assume they all are is bogus shit.
With your mentality, you are violating copyright law, because for all you know, all the information on Slashdot is copyrighted by others and you don't have permission to download it. How can you be sure Slashdot, CNN, IMDB, Yahoo, and all the other sites really have permission to publish or own the material? Hmmm? How do you know a book, CD, DVD, or program you buy at the store were really published with the permisson of the copyright owner?:-P~~
You are a stupid troll. I didn't say they said "music sharing" was legal, I said they basicly said it was okay for the "fans" to do it. I can't find the specific article, but this one talks around it. In the article, their lawyer says: "But I don't think Metallica is going to sue fans, period, unless there's been wholesale infringement."
In the article I was looking for, someone from the RIAA said they didn't want to prosecute any "fans", but go after universities (for merely providing internet access!) and Napster. It's apparently much older, because it was before Metallica even sent names to Napster. (and just getting people banned from one service doesn't do much to stop the illegal activity.)
If they really wanted the blatant copyright infringement to stop, they could've sent letters threatening to sue. It worked for Verison when they did it to webmasters of Star Trek fan web sites. The RIAA's inaction against the people actually doing the crime has led to such myths that it is "fair use" to copy entire CDs and movies over the internet without permission as long as one doesn't profit. Plus many of the people know it's illegal don't care because they think no one will try to punish them.
The backhanded methods of DMCA complains, suing service providers, distribuing trojaned CDs, flooding the networks with crap, &etc have just made the problems worse. Many people don't respect them or their copyrights anymore. If they would have acted resonably and appropriately, some people would have probably even helped by reporting infringers. Even if they started suing and prosecuting those who are actually doing the infringing, they won't do much good, and they'll have an uphill battle.
Most of those service providers they sued or tried to sue didn't even do anything wrong. Just think if this mess happened ten or twenty years ago. We wouldn't have HTTP, FTP, email, or any other networking protocols, (or probably even hard drives / CD burners) because they may potentially be used to infringe copyrights.
I suppose the arrest of those cadets at the US Naval Academy for sharing music was a sign of music publishers "approval" of file sharing.
They were arrested? Where was that story? The one I read said they were kicked out of school, and it was very recent. See above why it isn't effective at this point. Most people who read it probably didn't care--even if they were hardcore Napster users hosting Metallica songs.
Unless you are completely delusional, there is no way that you can assert and signifigant percentage of Kazaa traffic is used to distribute material other than pirated music, porn, and software.
For a while the same could be said about HTTP. You are using that protocol to download the pages off this site. Do you think we should make the web illegal too?
What's wrong with porn? Maybe in Taliban infested areas they'll arrest you or kill you for possessing it, but I see nothing wrong with it, and in areas the Taliban is weak, it is perfectly legal.
Re:Why not just use Web proxies
on
Blocking Kazaa 2.0?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Opensource and freeware can be easily obtained from web pages.
Yeah, web pages often paid by the author. Web pages where the auther has to pay bandwidth fees. Web pages whose bandwidth may be saturated to the max. Sure, there are organizations which are willing to host software for free (like SourceForge), but for various reasons some authors may not want (or be able) to host their site at such places. Not to mention, I'm sure VA pays a lot of money for bandwith and administration of SourceForge--as do other sites.
P2P systems allow the users to help share the costs of bandwidth, and if the scumbags hadn't sued every maker of communications software called "P2P" or "file sharing", we'd probably have a P2P CVS type system too, among other things. And the reason "nobody is using Kazaa for legitimate purposes" is because the RIAA basicly said it was okay for "the fans" to "trade" music--they just demonized the people who made any sort of file sharing software. Though I doubt every user of Kazaa is using it for illegitimate purposes. I'm sure you'd say the same thing about Napster, but I know the band Betty's Trash was using it to publish their music. Unless you think it should be illegal for an independent band to publish their music.
Also, I would be concerned that a P2P app like Kazaa would "hijack" important ports.
I assume you mean it would use up all the bandwith and use ports in such a way as to not allow blocking it. Yeah, that's a problem. People shouldn't use up bandwith they're not entitled to.
I do think a GUI is a good thing, but GNOME and KDE are not.
How do you expect to browse the web in Mozilla, edit a picture in Gimp, type and format a letter in OpenOffice or play a game with a CLI alone?
None of those things require KDE or GNOME--well I don't know about Open Office for sure because I never tried it, but I didn't find any references to either on their site. I run Phoenix, Mozilla, Lyx, GIMP, Unreal Tournament, xfig, and many other programs just fine without KDE or GNOME installed. Slackware compiled some GNOME dependancies into the GIMP, but I just went to gimp.org and found some nice non-GNOME binaries there.;-)
I'm sorry if you see both GNOME and KDE as a waste of time.
They are not only a waste of time, but they are the bane of the community. They are hideous bloated clones of the horrid UI and "OS" called Win98. I hate Win98 with a passion. Do you even know why M$ created Win98? To try and circumvent any ruling by the DoJ where they would have to distribute IE separately from Windows and to argue those systems were tightly integrated. That is why they merged IE into the desktop. It wasn't to make the product better or "easier to use". On the contrast--it makes the thing much worse and more contrived.
I recently decided to give KDE another shot. What a mistake! KDE and their programs require the stupid "DCOP" server which needs thirty seconds just to even load the smallest program. The non-KDE non-GNOME gv loads almost instantly, kghostview takes it's own sweet time to load. So does khexedit! A friggin hex editor! The display even lags behind the scrollbar just like in Winders! I don't want to run the KDE window manager or the crappy KDE desktop. I like fvwm2. And kword sucks just as bad as MS Word.
I don't get why people praise KDE / GNOME so much. We don't need such monolithic systems to use a GUI. Most of the problems with X would be solved with individual systems (mostly just libraries) where a standard API is established, and they don't need to be bound to a specific framework like KDE or GNOME. Libpng works fine by itself. GTK works fine by itself. FLTK works fine by itself. Most window managers work fine by themselves. They are all separate components that don't require a whole bunch of excess baggage.
Aiptek is a thousand times worse. In their shrink wrap license, they go way beyond making you agree to new terms only with a software update. In their "hardware product license" (meaning this applies to their cameras, not just the software), they say "Aiptek reserves the right to amend, change, and update this EULA at any time, and without notice. The user agrees to abide by such amendments, changes, and updates should any be made." A straight-up blank contract. They can just "amend" it to say you owe them a million dollars or your first born daughter.
They also put some other interesting clauses in this "agreement" you don't see until you open the box and bother to read the manual. "Only you and those in your immediate household may use the HARDWARE PRODUCT and its accompanying software." So you can't even ask a friend to take your picture. The license also says you may give the product as a gift, but only if you don't open the package. How are you supposed to know the license says this if you don't open the package?!?
I'm not sure how they plan on compensating artists with this plan, since there doesn't seem to be a *payment* mechanism.
IANAL, but this sounds like something to aid compulsory licensing. Title 17 Chapter 1 Section 115 c: "To be entitled to receive royalties under a compulsory license, the copyright owner must be identified in the registration or other public records of the Copyright Office." Compulsary licensing just means the broadcaster pays the money to a central organization, and the organization pays the appropriate copyright owner.
The problem is this money is sent to the RIAA (at least that is how I understand it--I can't find the reference, but I'm sure the law said the predecessor to them--the AMA?), and they are supposed to "fairly" redistribute the money to the labels and "artists." Yeah right. The Copyright Office should be the ones to handle this.
This system can also be used for sales outside of the scope of compulsory licensing too.
It strikes me as a first step towards 'Music Audits' in which a hard drive is scanned for the works of particular artists.
No, Palladium is supposed to do that (in addtion to allowing them+M$ to censor anything they want and enforce their monopolistic positions in the market).
The goal of the project is to establish procedure and criteria for broadcasting to the cable or satellite TV network from remote locations, using a laptop, camera and any type of available broadband Internet connection - preferably WiFi.
The motivation for such an exercise is the attempt to break away from classical TV production requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialized infrastructure and enable immediate and on-the-fly transmission from remote locations to the TV network, ultimately leading toward creative production of programming from within a P2P network.
Funny, this doesn't seem to indicate they are trying to create a "pirate" ring. Sounds more like they are trying to make it easier for anyone to create and distribute original content.
Maybe you are just a lying slanderer who wants to steal the rights of everyone else and give yourself a monopoly on the entertainment market so you can steal everyone's money through your fraud and deceit. Maybe you should be in jail, thief.
Won't they have to pay royalties to Acacia for the bogus "transmit compressed video over (insert any form of transmission here)" patent? The claim doesn't even seem to describe any actual invention!
Perhaps it is unethical for people to pay sales tax for out of state orders. IANAL, but after studying the matter for a while, I am beginning to think states charging "use" tax is illegal. Out of state mail / internet orders are interstate commerce after all. That is out of their jurisdiction. I think the states are calling it a "use" tax to try and get around the law. A national interstate commerce sales tax would be legal, but how I understand it, a state charging the same tax (on interstate commerce) is not legal.
In fact, I've paid my "use" taxes every year, and every year on the stub with my tax return check, my state's tax commission says I made a "mistake" (I didn't--I know filled out the form correctly) and removes the use tax from my total. The only reason I can think they do this is they know it isn't legal.
The memo was talking about how much memory the program takes when it is running. You are on the right track, the original poster was wrong. I haven't tested it myself, but the numbers in the memo seem about right with my experience. The reason a "hello world" program takes up 9M is not because the program is inefficient, it is because Java requires a JIT compiler and other crap be loaded and running with the program. The actual "hello world" code and data were probably only a few kilobytes (if even that). The compiler, gc, &etc took up the remaining 8.9M--not to mention a bunch of processing time.
Java is only free if your memory and cpu aren't worth anything.;-)
Ummm...so "no porn" isn't a blanket policy? Could've fooled me. Sounds like the people in your HR department are just a bunch of stupid incompetent bureaucrats. What happens if some idiot brings in a book full of sex and naked people then shows it to everyone? Will they ban all books or say it isn't porn?
Slashdot Mirror
This must be widespread. A while ago, my mother told me a similar story about Wells Fargo. She said when we were living in California (so it was at least 20 years ago), they kept getting our account and this other guy's account mixed up--he had the same last name. I wonder if their system just looks at last names instead of account numbers? Either way, their system sucks!
I think it should read:
;-)
This article was written by Fox News, a part of News Corporation. News Corp is one of the companies who "encouraged" Master Hollings to write his SSSCA / CBDTPA bills.
I think the biggest solution to your problem would be to have no political parties at all. Think about it. You would be able to vote on each candidate based on their individual merits instead of what is often cookie cutter party platform. The way things are run now, a politician is more answerable to his / her party than the voters.
I have a few pictures I took with my digital camera which would make very good textures, only problem is I don't have a good way to make the images tileable. GIMP's "Make Seamless" plugin sort of works, but has obvious visual problems. The Resynthesizer may work, but I haven't tried it for a while (when I did, it took lots of CPU time.
There also need to be good texture editors. Some photo editing program where you can view the image in a tiled setting and edit it. I don't know of any. Maybe using the tile function in GIMP, editing it, and recropping the image will work?
BTW, there used to be some public domain textures listed in gimp.org (called something like farm textures--they were taken from real photos), but I can't find them now...
This makes no sense. The DRM "features" in Windows Media Player are a backdoor. The product activation system in XP is a backdoor. As soon as MS's Palladium project is completed, the entire,/b> system will be a huge backdoor where MS can do anything they want with your computer. Not to mention if you don't compile MS's "shared source" into an OS yourself, how do you know they gave you the real source?
I don't think the guy was trying to make a political statement. I think he just didn't want money stolen from him by a law breaking monopolist. If you're going to run Linux and not MS software, you shouldn't be forced to pay money to Microsoft.
Yeah, that's the problem right there. Their real motive seems to be "crush any potential competition and screw the public for as much money as possible."
There is a difference. If I download music where the author / license permits it, then it is legal. Very easy. ;-)
I agree with you on the points where you say employees shouldn't be allowed to do illegal things on company time, waste time at work, or use up company resorces for non-work purposes. But are you seriously saying listening to music wastes company time?
I'm listening to music now. Do you think I took longer to write this post just because I'm listening to music???
/me wishing I could remember where those studies are which said music boosted productivity.
Well, technically, the function keys on other computers are supposed to be used that way, they just aren't most of the time. If you are old enough, you may remember the function key templates which came with Wordperfect.
I think that is part of the Bill Gates conspiracy to force everyone to use the mouse. "These dern ctrl and alt keys are so small! eyes reckon eyes musa use der moose!" Serously, if they do put "windows" and "menu" keys on the keyboard, I think they should put them somewhere out of the way. Perhaps on the other side of tab and caps lock. It would not only allow one to use them with little hand movment (if you really need it), but it would add more balance to the keyboard. I keep my keyboad on my lap, and being centered on home row, the number pad and cursor keys hang way off. More keys on the left side would keep my keyboard from sliding off as it sometimes does. :-)
It has ctrl alt delete as one key? I wouldn't want that keyboard!
Cat walks across keyboard
%^@&^!!! My computer just reset again! ;-)
No, they'd just hold down the shift key. ;-)
My memory is a little fuzzy on it, but I think it was used to temporarily stop scrolling--kind of like the Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q keys do in Unix. In a terminal (aka command line) program, sometimes the information would scroll off the screen too fast to read it. Being able to halt the scrolling allows one to read in such situations.
I think FreeBSD uses that key to enable paging up and down a terminal session.
Yeah, but if some people take nekkid pictures of themselves and post them on a P2P network, they imply permission to copy it. Any dumbfuck with a digital camera or camcorder can make porn and upload it to the internet.
I was favoring higher quality and a long video with those figures. One could probably encode the file at 10 kB/s and still have reasonably decent video with some codecs. One could put together a workable computer for $500 if need be.
Your assumption that all the pr0n on the internet is made by some pay site who doesn't want it redistributed is shit. It doesn't take that much effort to produce it. The problem is many of the people who upload the material don't know anything about copyright law, so they don't indicate anywhere that you have permission to copy it. Yes, some of the files traded are used without the author's consent, but to automatically assume they all are is bogus shit.
With your mentality, you are violating copyright law, because for all you know, all the information on Slashdot is copyrighted by others and you don't have permission to download it. How can you be sure Slashdot, CNN, IMDB, Yahoo, and all the other sites really have permission to publish or own the material? Hmmm? How do you know a book, CD, DVD, or program you buy at the store were really published with the permisson of the copyright owner? :-P~~
You are a stupid troll. I didn't say they said "music sharing" was legal, I said they basicly said it was okay for the "fans" to do it. I can't find the specific article, but this one talks around it. In the article, their lawyer says: "But I don't think Metallica is going to sue fans, period, unless there's been wholesale infringement."
In the article I was looking for, someone from the RIAA said they didn't want to prosecute any "fans", but go after universities (for merely providing internet access!) and Napster. It's apparently much older, because it was before Metallica even sent names to Napster. (and just getting people banned from one service doesn't do much to stop the illegal activity.)
If they really wanted the blatant copyright infringement to stop, they could've sent letters threatening to sue. It worked for Verison when they did it to webmasters of Star Trek fan web sites. The RIAA's inaction against the people actually doing the crime has led to such myths that it is "fair use" to copy entire CDs and movies over the internet without permission as long as one doesn't profit. Plus many of the people know it's illegal don't care because they think no one will try to punish them.
The backhanded methods of DMCA complains, suing service providers, distribuing trojaned CDs, flooding the networks with crap, &etc have just made the problems worse. Many people don't respect them or their copyrights anymore. If they would have acted resonably and appropriately, some people would have probably even helped by reporting infringers. Even if they started suing and prosecuting those who are actually doing the infringing, they won't do much good, and they'll have an uphill battle.
Most of those service providers they sued or tried to sue didn't even do anything wrong. Just think if this mess happened ten or twenty years ago. We wouldn't have HTTP, FTP, email, or any other networking protocols, (or probably even hard drives / CD burners) because they may potentially be used to infringe copyrights.
They were arrested? Where was that story? The one I read said they were kicked out of school, and it was very recent. See above why it isn't effective at this point. Most people who read it probably didn't care--even if they were hardcore Napster users hosting Metallica songs.
For a while the same could be said about HTTP. You are using that protocol to download the pages off this site. Do you think we should make the web illegal too?
What's wrong with porn? Maybe in Taliban infested areas they'll arrest you or kill you for possessing it, but I see nothing wrong with it, and in areas the Taliban is weak, it is perfectly legal.
Yeah, web pages often paid by the author. Web pages where the auther has to pay bandwidth fees. Web pages whose bandwidth may be saturated to the max. Sure, there are organizations which are willing to host software for free (like SourceForge), but for various reasons some authors may not want (or be able) to host their site at such places. Not to mention, I'm sure VA pays a lot of money for bandwith and administration of SourceForge--as do other sites.
P2P systems allow the users to help share the costs of bandwidth, and if the scumbags hadn't sued every maker of communications software called "P2P" or "file sharing", we'd probably have a P2P CVS type system too, among other things. And the reason "nobody is using Kazaa for legitimate purposes" is because the RIAA basicly said it was okay for "the fans" to "trade" music--they just demonized the people who made any sort of file sharing software. Though I doubt every user of Kazaa is using it for illegitimate purposes. I'm sure you'd say the same thing about Napster, but I know the band Betty's Trash was using it to publish their music. Unless you think it should be illegal for an independent band to publish their music.
I assume you mean it would use up all the bandwith and use ports in such a way as to not allow blocking it. Yeah, that's a problem. People shouldn't use up bandwith they're not entitled to.
I do think a GUI is a good thing, but GNOME and KDE are not.
None of those things require KDE or GNOME--well I don't know about Open Office for sure because I never tried it, but I didn't find any references to either on their site. I run Phoenix, Mozilla, Lyx, GIMP, Unreal Tournament, xfig, and many other programs just fine without KDE or GNOME installed. Slackware compiled some GNOME dependancies into the GIMP, but I just went to gimp.org and found some nice non-GNOME binaries there. ;-)
They are not only a waste of time, but they are the bane of the community. They are hideous bloated clones of the horrid UI and "OS" called Win98. I hate Win98 with a passion. Do you even know why M$ created Win98? To try and circumvent any ruling by the DoJ where they would have to distribute IE separately from Windows and to argue those systems were tightly integrated. That is why they merged IE into the desktop. It wasn't to make the product better or "easier to use". On the contrast--it makes the thing much worse and more contrived.
I recently decided to give KDE another shot. What a mistake! KDE and their programs require the stupid "DCOP" server which needs thirty seconds just to even load the smallest program. The non-KDE non-GNOME gv loads almost instantly, kghostview takes it's own sweet time to load. So does khexedit! A friggin hex editor! The display even lags behind the scrollbar just like in Winders! I don't want to run the KDE window manager or the crappy KDE desktop. I like fvwm2. And kword sucks just as bad as MS Word.
I don't get why people praise KDE / GNOME so much. We don't need such monolithic systems to use a GUI. Most of the problems with X would be solved with individual systems (mostly just libraries) where a standard API is established, and they don't need to be bound to a specific framework like KDE or GNOME. Libpng works fine by itself. GTK works fine by itself. FLTK works fine by itself. Most window managers work fine by themselves. They are all separate components that don't require a whole bunch of excess baggage.
Aiptek is a thousand times worse. In their shrink wrap license, they go way beyond making you agree to new terms only with a software update. In their "hardware product license" (meaning this applies to their cameras, not just the software), they say "Aiptek reserves the right to amend, change, and update this EULA at any time, and without notice. The user agrees to abide by such amendments, changes, and updates should any be made." A straight-up blank contract. They can just "amend" it to say you owe them a million dollars or your first born daughter.
They also put some other interesting clauses in this "agreement" you don't see until you open the box and bother to read the manual. "Only you and those in your immediate household may use the HARDWARE PRODUCT and its accompanying software." So you can't even ask a friend to take your picture. The license also says you may give the product as a gift, but only if you don't open the package. How are you supposed to know the license says this if you don't open the package?!?
IANAL, but this sounds like something to aid compulsory licensing. Title 17 Chapter 1 Section 115 c: "To be entitled to receive royalties under a compulsory license, the copyright owner must be identified in the registration or other public records of the Copyright Office." Compulsary licensing just means the broadcaster pays the money to a central organization, and the organization pays the appropriate copyright owner.
The problem is this money is sent to the RIAA (at least that is how I understand it--I can't find the reference, but I'm sure the law said the predecessor to them--the AMA?), and they are supposed to "fairly" redistribute the money to the labels and "artists." Yeah right. The Copyright Office should be the ones to handle this.
This system can also be used for sales outside of the scope of compulsory licensing too.
No, Palladium is supposed to do that (in addtion to allowing them+M$ to censor anything they want and enforce their monopolistic positions in the market).
From the article:
Funny, this doesn't seem to indicate they are trying to create a "pirate" ring. Sounds more like they are trying to make it easier for anyone to create and distribute original content.
Maybe you are just a lying slanderer who wants to steal the rights of everyone else and give yourself a monopoly on the entertainment market so you can steal everyone's money through your fraud and deceit. Maybe you should be in jail, thief.
Won't they have to pay royalties to Acacia for the bogus "transmit compressed video over (insert any form of transmission here)" patent? The claim doesn't even seem to describe any actual invention!
Perhaps it is unethical for people to pay sales tax for out of state orders. IANAL, but after studying the matter for a while, I am beginning to think states charging "use" tax is illegal. Out of state mail / internet orders are interstate commerce after all. That is out of their jurisdiction. I think the states are calling it a "use" tax to try and get around the law. A national interstate commerce sales tax would be legal, but how I understand it, a state charging the same tax (on interstate commerce) is not legal.
In fact, I've paid my "use" taxes every year, and every year on the stub with my tax return check, my state's tax commission says I made a "mistake" (I didn't--I know filled out the form correctly) and removes the use tax from my total. The only reason I can think they do this is they know it isn't legal.
Obviously you don't know much about California. ;-)
The memo was talking about how much memory the program takes when it is running. You are on the right track, the original poster was wrong. I haven't tested it myself, but the numbers in the memo seem about right with my experience. The reason a "hello world" program takes up 9M is not because the program is inefficient, it is because Java requires a JIT compiler and other crap be loaded and running with the program. The actual "hello world" code and data were probably only a few kilobytes (if even that). The compiler, gc, &etc took up the remaining 8.9M--not to mention a bunch of processing time.
Java is only free if your memory and cpu aren't worth anything. ;-)
We already have a one party system. It's called the biparty. Ever hear the term bipartisan? ;-)
Ummm...so "no porn" isn't a blanket policy? Could've fooled me. Sounds like the people in your HR department are just a bunch of stupid incompetent bureaucrats. What happens if some idiot brings in a book full of sex and naked people then shows it to everyone? Will they ban all books or say it isn't porn?