Just because some law says corporations are people doesn't mean it's true. A corporation is not a real person, it is a legal entity. If governments were sane, their officials would strike down any claim a corporation should have the same rights as a person. Too bad most governments are based on bribes, so anyone with lots of money (like corporations) can steer things in selfish directions to the detriment of the general populace.
Corporations were created to limit investor liability and to form a more efficient system for business. Now they're being used to shield criminals from prosecution and all sorts of nastyness. Many corporations have become entities who screw over both customers and investors while giving con artist CEOs golden parachutes. It has got to stop.
Okay, answer me this: If a corporation is really a "person" with all of a real person's rights, should they be allowed to vote in the next election??? I've never heard of a corporation voting in an election. That's just absurd.
What are you rambling about? Why are you trying to equate Linux with warez toting script kiddies? Warez toting script kiddies are more likely to use their warezed Photoshop with their warezed copy of Windows XP, not Linux.
But where did he say he was running a server on his home system? Maybe he was uploading to USenet. Maybe he runs a web site (hosted somewhere else), and he was uploading files to it. Maybe he was sending a huge email or the mail server was slow. There are plenty of reasons for a 35 minute upload without running a server.
The Blair Witch Project was made for about $30,000 IIRC. Terminator 3 was probably 10,000 times that. They wouldn't need to sell anywhere near as many BWP tickets/DVDs to turn a profit.
I see you are trying to combine open source developers and warez toting script kiddies into one group. Warez toting script kiddes will say "1nformationz zhould ve fr33! C0peer1z R dez suxxors!" Open source developers say copyright is a legitimate thing, but it is being abused at an absurd level.
Of course, your username says it all: WINDOWS TROLL.
If you have a sheet of paper half filled with text and you want to add to it, where are you going to start writing? If we took a poll, I bet over 90% of literate English speakers (some languages go from the bottom to the top, but not English) will say the bottom.
Text editors are an exception because they are editors. When one starts up one of these programs, very rarely are they adding to a converstaion. Often they are either starting a new document, using the proggie to read it or editing (changing) an existing one.
Many times people use a text editor to continue a document they didn't finish. They don't add material to the top, they scroll down to the bottom. How many people write their documents starting at the end and work their way to the beginning? In my experience, not many.
If you try to edit a post on Usenet or edit an email, the poster will become quite pissed off. Why do you think people hate grammar Nazis so much?
Switching window focus without letting the user know that it is going to happen can confuse accessibility programs and users.
It's even worse than that. Some sites have Flash or Java, which pops up a plugin warning dialog in Mozilla (I don't want either installed), and the page will change focus back to the main window. I have to find the dialog again (either with alt-tab or moving the window, because the browser window will be on top), and click the stupid If I leave too many of these dialogs open, Mozilla will crash. Yeah, this is caused by bugs in Mozilla, but when you have so many "features" (mostly unwanted by users) on your site, you are bound to start triggering bugs. Especially considering the two most popular browsers (I consider N$ and Mozilla as one) are bug filled bloatware.
I would be using Lynx, but these days too many sites are unfriendly to text based browsers. I wonder if Opera is ready for FreeBSD yet...
You have to be kidding me. You save a document in some obscure format (RTF) instead of the program's native format (like any decent person would), and you expect to read it without any problems? So a program which runs on Linux couldn't read the crappy RTF format. They probably only wrote the writing filter to allow transferring to the M$ world. I'm sure I could find plenty of word processing programs written for M$ Windows which suck worse.
Okay M$ fanboy, does M$ Office support all the standard formats one would see with Linux, *BSD, or Unix? Do they support LaTeX? Do they support DVI? Do they support Troff? Let me guess, the answer is no.
Why do you expect Linux programs to support M$ files (especially when M$ does everything they can to hide their format), and yet your favorite software company doesn't support common formats to which the specifications are open and available to anyone???
Even so, how will becoming a lawyer turn out any different? If there are only lawyers, politicians and "towel boys" (whatever they do;-), then none of the essential services will be done. I don't see contracting out our legal services to other countries as a viable option--they'll have their own lawyers (and probably decent laws so they don't need many). Politicans can't be contracted out at all...well unless they are being paid to betray their country. Towel boys? Let's see them compete with a $0.05/hr Asian towel boy!
Perhaps if conquering soldiers are put into the mix, you can have such an economy. Maybe this is Dubya's plan, but I don't really think we want to go there.;-)
Maybe your suggestion was just a joke? Someone moderated it as funny. At any rate, I don't see your suggestion as any sort of solution.
Exactly, I didn't even need a consumer group to figure out Amazon was discriminating against me. I'd be logged out and looking at their site, see something I liked, log in to put it in my cart, and next thing I know it's twice the price and more expensive than any retail store (not including shipping). I thought their server was messed up, so I just stopped shopping there. Though I had to see the big story a few months later before I fully understood what they were doing.
This is the Soviet version of capitalism--exploitation and greed. All this does is ruin the markets. Too bad the schools in the US are teaching Soviet values.
In successful capitalist contries and the old US, capitalism is/was based upon trust and efficiency.
A bank could loan money and have a resonable expectation the person would do everything they could to pay it back. In today's US, half the people don't even care. Like my roommate. When he was working, he just took out countless loans and never payed them back. It was like free money to him.
Many of the problems with overreaching copyrights, patents, and trademarks are caused by this attitude. They think they have the right to take money from people for "thinking of" a basic common idea. Just about anyone would be able to think up most of these ideas with very little effort, yet their right to do so is taken away.
Maybe it's time for a SEC investigation into the patent office to check for bribery and other criminal actions.
You think you'll get the government to watch over itself? Good luck. Sometimes it happens, but not often. I may be good to try, but I wouldn't bank on it.
It would be better for companies to defend their products as innovative, not the functions within them that make things work. Disney has done very well with copyright laws...
Yeah, but look at Disney's use of trademarks. Look up trademarks for "Winnie the Pooh" at the uspto.gov site. Disney owns several. Just try to use Winnie the Pooh for almost anything without getting sued by Disney. All this, and as far as I can tell, Disney had nothing to do with the creation of those characters. Also note the dates. The books were published between 1926-1928, by my math the copyright on the last book expired in 1956 (copyrights lasted a max of 28 years then, correct?). Disney started using Pooh in their cartoons at about 1966, no doubt without paying royalties.
Everywhere I've seen, Disney doesn't innovate much at all, they just rehash--while doing everything they can to avoid paying royalties, yet they do everything they can to expand copyright law and DRM to defend their unorigional work. So no one is able to reap the same benefits from their works that they did from others.
I don't think it is bad to rehash old works, nor do I think it's bad to use works from the public domain, but what Disney does is hypocritical and fascist.
What is the point? No matter what you do, you will be subject to bogus patents and absurd agency regulations. It is getting to the point where it is impossible to follow all the rules and avoid (or pay royalties for) patents. Even if you represent yourself, you will lose a major portion of your life in the court defending against the "a means of trasportation by putting one leg in front of the other" patents.
A better solution would just do business on the black market. Yeah, sure, you might be killed or put in prison, but is it any worse than spending the majority of your life in court? At least you'll have some resemblance of freedom.
This has to be why the Russian mafia is so strong. When honest people are pushed down by a bureaucratic mess. When law abiding citizens may be jailed because they didn't let thieves steal from them. They have little choice but to turn to crime.
Since when has the word property ever meant copyrights??? The term "intellectual property" was coined by con artists who are trying to say they own basic ideas. I doubt the Founding Fathers would have used the term "intellectual property." In fact, I bet they would have shot anyone who did. "I own the idea for resting a large box on two cylinders, the two cylinders connected to large circular objects. Wherefore this entire contraption is propelled by a horse..." **BLAM***
Why would the Constitution say authors should have the exclusive right to their work for limited times if their work was considered property? If a copyrighted work is property, then they have the right to own it forever, don't they? You quoted the Bill of Rights, precisely where it says the government can't give away property to the public without compensation. I've never heard of copyright holders getting paid by the government when their work goes into the public domain. Have you? Yet if a copyrighted work is property, obviously it would be required by law.
On another subject: Where does Reuters go off mentioning the three year slump in music sales and the fact the RIAA blames this on P2P. Yet they don't mention the economy has been in a slump for the past three or so years too! Oh yeah, they're really objective.
Why do people think there is a difference? A game console is just a specialized personal computer. If Microsoft did a port, they could sell a version of Office or Internet Explorer for the Xbox. It's only called a "game console" because developers usually only write games for the device. It's not as if the CPU uses special "game only" opcodes.
I'm more concerned about the effect DRM will have on *public* rights, including fair use and archiving.
Don't forget free speech. If you need a certified DRM key to publish anything, then you have to ask company X for one. If they don't like what you say, they'll send a rejection certificate. Free speech goes out the window. Some insist DRM won't work this way, but with DRM mentality, it'll have to be done because otherwise "them durn pyrates will steal everything."
Same for writing your own programs. Palladium (aka NGSCB or whatever) will have this from the beginning (for "secure" content anyway). If anyone can create a program which reads a DRM file, anyone can copy that data without "rights management."
Re:WRONG! POSIX does some really dumb things!!
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
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· Score: 1
gets() should still be thrown away. It's like saying "please make my program crash and have security problems."
From the Linux Programmer's Manual man page:
Never use gets(). Because it is impossible to tell without knowing the data in advance how many characters gets() will read, and because gets() will continue to store characters past the end of the buffer, it is extremely dangerous to use. It has been used to break computer security. Use fgets() instead.
Does it print any messages? Mplayer usually prints tonnes of messages, so if you don't see any, then it's really screwed up. If it prints messages, try reading them.;-)
Have you tried the -vo (video output) option? I think the default is mga--Direct access to a Matrox video card. Don't ask me why. If you have X set up properly, you probably want xv for the best performance. Otherwise x11 should work, but it's slow.
My beef with Java is the fact most implementations (which are mostly Sun's) use JIT compilers instead of compiling it at install time. JIT is good for small programs which are only run once, but for everyday programs, it is a PITA. Not only does the thing take forever to start up, but it will often load a class while I am running the program. Select menu item....wait thirty seconds....get dialog box, make choices.....wait thirty seconds....returns to program. It sucks bigtime.
I don't know why Sun is so obsessed with JIT compiling, it would work a thousand times better if they would at least cache the compiles or something. Then again, they're a hardware manufacturer. I suppose they have to create incentives for buying the latest and greatest. Customer frustration be damned.
I doubt a port to another processor would be just a recompile. I'm sure they wrote much of it in C, but many games use assembly for the critical sections. If the developers know the target processor, a port may not be a huge amount of work, but it will take time and resources the company may not be willing to spend. However, if they are working on a Mac port (I think they are), they'll have to translate the assembly anyway, so whatever processor current Macs run (PPC?) will probably get support in Linux...
The kind of portablilty you are talking about only works with compiled languages such as C.
Yeah, it's sad when the only way to prevent getting completely screwed over is to stop participating in the internet. These sort of problems are the reason why the internet is slowly turning into a one way medium. There is no reason a person should be afraid to speak their mind and distribute their own creative works, yet the legal system has become corrupt, so we all suffer.
Does that RIAA Radar site even work? I typed in "stripped" to see if any of my stripped executables may be targeted by the terrorists. The first entry was Christina Aguilera's "Stripped" album, marked as safe, yet the listed label "RCA" is a member of the RIAA.
BTW, I doubt you are safe from false complaints. If any word in your filename matches any word in the name of a RIAA song or band, odds are they will send a DMCA complaint against you. They have to be stopped.
I'm pissed at the RIAA because they are abusing the legal process. This is all obviously FUD so they can shut down any competition and steal money from everyone (through media/internet/computer "royalties"--really taxes)--including those who don't want anything to do with their "products."
P2P Subscriptions: Not everyone uses P2P systems to download the RIAA's crap music, so why should they be forced to pay?
Bandwidth Levies: Why should I pay the RIAA so I can have internet access??? I don't download their shit.
Media Tariffs: The US already does this, and I am pissed. I've never used my CD burner to infringe copyrights, yet every time I burn a disk or buy a drive, I have to pay the terrorists money?
Slashdot Mirror
You almost had it. How about: In Soviet Russia, a beowulf cluster of hot gritted Penguins 69 on Natalie Portman's nasty McBride screws you!
Just because some law says corporations are people doesn't mean it's true. A corporation is not a real person, it is a legal entity. If governments were sane, their officials would strike down any claim a corporation should have the same rights as a person. Too bad most governments are based on bribes, so anyone with lots of money (like corporations) can steer things in selfish directions to the detriment of the general populace.
Corporations were created to limit investor liability and to form a more efficient system for business. Now they're being used to shield criminals from prosecution and all sorts of nastyness. Many corporations have become entities who screw over both customers and investors while giving con artist CEOs golden parachutes. It has got to stop.
Okay, answer me this: If a corporation is really a "person" with all of a real person's rights, should they be allowed to vote in the next election??? I've never heard of a corporation voting in an election. That's just absurd.
What are you rambling about? Why are you trying to equate Linux with warez toting script kiddies? Warez toting script kiddies are more likely to use their warezed Photoshop with their warezed copy of Windows XP, not Linux.
But where did he say he was running a server on his home system? Maybe he was uploading to USenet. Maybe he runs a web site (hosted somewhere else), and he was uploading files to it. Maybe he was sending a huge email or the mail server was slow. There are plenty of reasons for a 35 minute upload without running a server.
The Blair Witch Project was made for about $30,000 IIRC. Terminator 3 was probably 10,000 times that. They wouldn't need to sell anywhere near as many BWP tickets/DVDs to turn a profit.
I see you are trying to combine open source developers and warez toting script kiddies into one group. Warez toting script kiddes will say "1nformationz zhould ve fr33! C0peer1z R dez suxxors!" Open source developers say copyright is a legitimate thing, but it is being abused at an absurd level.
Of course, your username says it all: WINDOWS TROLL.
If you have a sheet of paper half filled with text and you want to add to it, where are you going to start writing? If we took a poll, I bet over 90% of literate English speakers (some languages go from the bottom to the top, but not English) will say the bottom.
Text editors are an exception because they are editors. When one starts up one of these programs, very rarely are they adding to a converstaion. Often they are either starting a new document, using the proggie to read it or editing (changing) an existing one.
Many times people use a text editor to continue a document they didn't finish. They don't add material to the top, they scroll down to the bottom. How many people write their documents starting at the end and work their way to the beginning? In my experience, not many.
If you try to edit a post on Usenet or edit an email, the poster will become quite pissed off. Why do you think people hate grammar Nazis so much?
It's even worse than that. Some sites have Flash or Java, which pops up a plugin warning dialog in Mozilla (I don't want either installed), and the page will change focus back to the main window. I have to find the dialog again (either with alt-tab or moving the window, because the browser window will be on top), and click the stupid If I leave too many of these dialogs open, Mozilla will crash. Yeah, this is caused by bugs in Mozilla, but when you have so many "features" (mostly unwanted by users) on your site, you are bound to start triggering bugs. Especially considering the two most popular browsers (I consider N$ and Mozilla as one) are bug filled bloatware.
I would be using Lynx, but these days too many sites are unfriendly to text based browsers. I wonder if Opera is ready for FreeBSD yet...
You have to be kidding me. You save a document in some obscure format (RTF) instead of the program's native format (like any decent person would), and you expect to read it without any problems? So a program which runs on Linux couldn't read the crappy RTF format. They probably only wrote the writing filter to allow transferring to the M$ world. I'm sure I could find plenty of word processing programs written for M$ Windows which suck worse.
Okay M$ fanboy, does M$ Office support all the standard formats one would see with Linux, *BSD, or Unix? Do they support LaTeX? Do they support DVI? Do they support Troff? Let me guess, the answer is no.
Why do you expect Linux programs to support M$ files (especially when M$ does everything they can to hide their format), and yet your favorite software company doesn't support common formats to which the specifications are open and available to anyone???
Even so, how will becoming a lawyer turn out any different? If there are only lawyers, politicians and "towel boys" (whatever they do ;-), then none of the essential services will be done. I don't see contracting out our legal services to other countries as a viable option--they'll have their own lawyers (and probably decent laws so they don't need many). Politicans can't be contracted out at all...well unless they are being paid to betray their country. Towel boys? Let's see them compete with a $0.05/hr Asian towel boy!
Perhaps if conquering soldiers are put into the mix, you can have such an economy. Maybe this is Dubya's plan, but I don't really think we want to go there. ;-)
Maybe your suggestion was just a joke? Someone moderated it as funny. At any rate, I don't see your suggestion as any sort of solution.
Exactly, I didn't even need a consumer group to figure out Amazon was discriminating against me. I'd be logged out and looking at their site, see something I liked, log in to put it in my cart, and next thing I know it's twice the price and more expensive than any retail store (not including shipping). I thought their server was messed up, so I just stopped shopping there. Though I had to see the big story a few months later before I fully understood what they were doing.
This is the Soviet version of capitalism--exploitation and greed. All this does is ruin the markets. Too bad the schools in the US are teaching Soviet values.
In successful capitalist contries and the old US, capitalism is/was based upon trust and efficiency.
A bank could loan money and have a resonable expectation the person would do everything they could to pay it back. In today's US, half the people don't even care. Like my roommate. When he was working, he just took out countless loans and never payed them back. It was like free money to him.
Many of the problems with overreaching copyrights, patents, and trademarks are caused by this attitude. They think they have the right to take money from people for "thinking of" a basic common idea. Just about anyone would be able to think up most of these ideas with very little effort, yet their right to do so is taken away.
You think you'll get the government to watch over itself? Good luck. Sometimes it happens, but not often. I may be good to try, but I wouldn't bank on it.
Yeah, but look at Disney's use of trademarks. Look up trademarks for "Winnie the Pooh" at the uspto.gov site. Disney owns several. Just try to use Winnie the Pooh for almost anything without getting sued by Disney. All this, and as far as I can tell, Disney had nothing to do with the creation of those characters. Also note the dates. The books were published between 1926-1928, by my math the copyright on the last book expired in 1956 (copyrights lasted a max of 28 years then, correct?). Disney started using Pooh in their cartoons at about 1966, no doubt without paying royalties.
Everywhere I've seen, Disney doesn't innovate much at all, they just rehash--while doing everything they can to avoid paying royalties, yet they do everything they can to expand copyright law and DRM to defend their unorigional work. So no one is able to reap the same benefits from their works that they did from others.
I don't think it is bad to rehash old works, nor do I think it's bad to use works from the public domain, but what Disney does is hypocritical and fascist.
What is the point? No matter what you do, you will be subject to bogus patents and absurd agency regulations. It is getting to the point where it is impossible to follow all the rules and avoid (or pay royalties for) patents. Even if you represent yourself, you will lose a major portion of your life in the court defending against the "a means of trasportation by putting one leg in front of the other" patents.
A better solution would just do business on the black market. Yeah, sure, you might be killed or put in prison, but is it any worse than spending the majority of your life in court? At least you'll have some resemblance of freedom.
This has to be why the Russian mafia is so strong. When honest people are pushed down by a bureaucratic mess. When law abiding citizens may be jailed because they didn't let thieves steal from them. They have little choice but to turn to crime.
Since when has the word property ever meant copyrights??? The term "intellectual property" was coined by con artists who are trying to say they own basic ideas. I doubt the Founding Fathers would have used the term "intellectual property." In fact, I bet they would have shot anyone who did. "I own the idea for resting a large box on two cylinders, the two cylinders connected to large circular objects. Wherefore this entire contraption is propelled by a horse..." **BLAM***
Why would the Constitution say authors should have the exclusive right to their work for limited times if their work was considered property? If a copyrighted work is property, then they have the right to own it forever, don't they? You quoted the Bill of Rights, precisely where it says the government can't give away property to the public without compensation. I've never heard of copyright holders getting paid by the government when their work goes into the public domain. Have you? Yet if a copyrighted work is property, obviously it would be required by law.
On another subject: Where does Reuters go off mentioning the three year slump in music sales and the fact the RIAA blames this on P2P. Yet they don't mention the economy has been in a slump for the past three or so years too! Oh yeah, they're really objective.
Why do people think there is a difference? A game console is just a specialized personal computer. If Microsoft did a port, they could sell a version of Office or Internet Explorer for the Xbox. It's only called a "game console" because developers usually only write games for the device. It's not as if the CPU uses special "game only" opcodes.
Don't forget free speech. If you need a certified DRM key to publish anything, then you have to ask company X for one. If they don't like what you say, they'll send a rejection certificate. Free speech goes out the window. Some insist DRM won't work this way, but with DRM mentality, it'll have to be done because otherwise "them durn pyrates will steal everything."
Same for writing your own programs. Palladium (aka NGSCB or whatever) will have this from the beginning (for "secure" content anyway). If anyone can create a program which reads a DRM file, anyone can copy that data without "rights management."
gets() should still be thrown away. It's like saying "please make my program crash and have security problems."
From the Linux Programmer's Manual man page:
Pro-Linux site? I thought this was the anti-M$ one. Oh wait, this is just the fake bait site for trolls and M$ shills.... Nevermind. ;-)
Does it print any messages? Mplayer usually prints tonnes of messages, so if you don't see any, then it's really screwed up. If it prints messages, try reading them. ;-)
Have you tried the -vo (video output) option? I think the default is mga--Direct access to a Matrox video card. Don't ask me why. If you have X set up properly, you probably want xv for the best performance. Otherwise x11 should work, but it's slow.
My beef with Java is the fact most implementations (which are mostly Sun's) use JIT compilers instead of compiling it at install time. JIT is good for small programs which are only run once, but for everyday programs, it is a PITA. Not only does the thing take forever to start up, but it will often load a class while I am running the program. Select menu item....wait thirty seconds....get dialog box, make choices.....wait thirty seconds....returns to program. It sucks bigtime.
I don't know why Sun is so obsessed with JIT compiling, it would work a thousand times better if they would at least cache the compiles or something. Then again, they're a hardware manufacturer. I suppose they have to create incentives for buying the latest and greatest. Customer frustration be damned.
I doubt a port to another processor would be just a recompile. I'm sure they wrote much of it in C, but many games use assembly for the critical sections. If the developers know the target processor, a port may not be a huge amount of work, but it will take time and resources the company may not be willing to spend. However, if they are working on a Mac port (I think they are), they'll have to translate the assembly anyway, so whatever processor current Macs run (PPC?) will probably get support in Linux...
The kind of portablilty you are talking about only works with compiled languages such as C.
Yeah, it's sad when the only way to prevent getting completely screwed over is to stop participating in the internet. These sort of problems are the reason why the internet is slowly turning into a one way medium. There is no reason a person should be afraid to speak their mind and distribute their own creative works, yet the legal system has become corrupt, so we all suffer.
Does that RIAA Radar site even work? I typed in "stripped" to see if any of my stripped executables may be targeted by the terrorists. The first entry was Christina Aguilera's "Stripped" album, marked as safe, yet the listed label "RCA" is a member of the RIAA.
BTW, I doubt you are safe from false complaints. If any word in your filename matches any word in the name of a RIAA song or band, odds are they will send a DMCA complaint against you. They have to be stopped.
I'm pissed at the RIAA because they are abusing the legal process. This is all obviously FUD so they can shut down any competition and steal money from everyone (through media/internet/computer "royalties"--really taxes)--including those who don't want anything to do with their "products."
It's sad to see the EFF has joined their cause: