It's what everyone with a patent says. Having worked for/with companies that do genuine R&D, investing lots of time and money in smart people who come up with genuinely new ideas, it's frequently justified, too.
The way patents are implemented may be (OK, let's be fair: blatantly is) seriously flawed in some places, particularly the US, but the underlying principle isn't a bad one. My objections to things like software patents in Europe are because I don't believe the system will function as allegedly intended, after seeing what's happened in the US before, not because I think patents are in themselves a bad idea.
If Intel would agree to lay aside their patents and other government-granted monopolies, perhaps it would be more level,
Sure... except for all the time and money Intel invested to develop the technology behind those patents in the first place!
I'm no great Intel fan -- all my home systems run AMD and have for years, and I'm amazed this lawsuit didn't happen much sooner -- but really, that argument is some combination of off-topic, trolling and just plain silly.
What software has ever marketed itself as piratester?
According to the Supreme Court, the software in question here did, for reasons they clearly describe in the judgement. That's pretty much the point, isn't it?
OK, I normally start ignoring people when they swear at me and accuse me of being stupid/naive rather than trying to make a convincing argument, but I'll make an exception here because I understand that you believe in what you're saying and you want to argue for it.
As I said before, what you describe would be great. I believe in education for education's sake, and that society should provide as much education as possible to any individual who wants it. Of course, there's nothing stopping someone putting most of the books ever written onto the sort of device you describe; copyright provides restrictions only for a limited time. (This is being increasingly abused by big-business-funded legal changes, which I imagine you support about the same "not at all" as I do.)
However, I also live in the real world, and furthermore, I make my living by writing genuinely original and useful software. This is a benefit to society, and copyright exists to promote this benefit. As I tried to explain previously, the motivation that has enabled my employers to pay me to write this software comes in large part from the protections they enjoy through owning the copyright to the works I make for them. In a very real sense, removing copyright without a fundamental restructuring of the way those who produce works are supported would kill a large part of the industry. This is not hypothetical; as I wrote before, I have seen real world figures for directly comparable situations involving products, ongoing support, and custom work/consultancy. I am not arguing on principle; my argument is based on facts about what actually happens.
Now, in the much longer term, given sufficient other changes to make copyright an unnecessary limitation, I have no moral objections to removing it. But that's not what I see when people object to copyright here. Those people almost invariably want to have, for free, the works currently produced under copyright, giving no consideration to the likelihood of those works existing at all without that protection. If you want blinkers, there you go.
Ultimately, if you want to move to a system that doesn't fundamentally rely on ideas like copyright, you need to change the compensation structure as well. Writing good books or good software or whatever is a full-time job, requiring skilled and dedicated workers, and someone has to put the roof over their head and pay for the food on their children's plates. So far, I've never seen anyone on Slashdot suggest any alternative way of providing this. Until I do, I will maintain my position that removing copyright without balancing changes would be immensely damaging to the industries that produce works of many kinds, and thus would be damaging to that same society you so want to improve.
Would that "1 B5 episode" be the entire first season?
Only if you're working in modulo 4 arithmetic.;-)
To answer the grandparent's question, maybe I can give a little perspective. I bought the DVD set a couple of months back, partly due to seeing it listed repeatedly as people's favourite sci-fi show here in Slashdot in preference to B5, and partly on the recommendation of a close friend whose taste in sci-fi is close to my own.
I think the thing about Firefly is that its style is different to anything else I've seen. Yes, it's set in a futuristic universe, with space ships and aliens and all that, but that's not the point of the show. The point is characters that have depth and plausible relationships played by good actors. (A prostitute being probably the most educated and respectable member of the crew? They'll be inventing lesbian, vampire-hunting witches next...) The storylines are entertaining and slightly edgy: there are lots of moral ambiguities, even if it's clear where our sympathies are supposed to lie. And of course, there are elements of everything from crime drama to western thrown into the mix as well.
I'm not sure it's my favourite sci-fi show. Actually, I'm sure it's not; B5 has many of the same advantages, but on a much grander scale, for example. But we seem to be seeing a new generation of high quality sci-fi shows just lately: the new Battlestar Galactica, the new series of Doctor Who, etc. I, for one, am happy to count Firefly among them. It's a welcome change to sometimes watchable but horribly formulaic Star Trek: The Next, Next, Prequal Generation episodes, or Yet Another SFX-laden But Plotless Sci-Fi Movie With Bad Acting.
The OOo developers stopped working on Mac integration because it wasn't a priority for them, the NO/J developers were doing a better job of it, and NO/J's license precludes merging code from NO/J into OOo.
That raises at least two questions for me:
Is the fact that OpenOffice.org is basically run by Sun likely to be a significant factor here?
How can NO/J's licence preclude merging code back into OOo, if it was based on OOo in the first place? If the NO/J devs just picked up the OOo source under the GPL, surely the GPL forbids that? Did they do something weird under Sun's SISSL instead?
I admire your enthusiasm and your desire to see the world improved, I really do. But IME, what you're describing simply isn't economically practical. Rather than repeating doctrine, let me give you just one personal example that motivates this position for me.
For much of the past few years, I worked at a small, privately owned software company that makes software products, provides support contracts (which cover not only bug fixing but also certain types of feature enhancement request), and does consulting work. We made enough money overall to provide a pretty good but not exceptional wage to the 50-or-so staff, around 80% of whom were the developers who wrote the software, designed the algorithms, implemented the new features or provided those consulting services to customers, with the remainder of the staff providing sales & marketing, product support and office administration roles. We didn't make a lot more money than that, and the staff were all part of a profit-sharing scheme.
I have seen the figures for how much we made from each of the areas of income each year. It is true that the consulting and support we offered were reasonably profitable, but without the income from licensing and royalties we brought in through our products, it's simply not likely that we could have survived. At the very least, the amount of money the individual developers received to pay their rent and put food on their families' tables would have been directly and dramatically affected.
I've heard all these arguments about relying on providing related services rather than software products before, but I have seen nothing yet to convince me that they aren't just RMS-inspired idealism. A huge brand like IBM might be in a position to give away software as a commodity and rely on providing support services, but most businesses aren't huge brands. The economy is driven by small companies, like the one I've been working for, and in those cases commoditising software would result in the business failing all too quickly.
The only thing in the way of that is the principle of copyright, which is probably why that principle is still recognised in every country in the western world. Given that the model apparently works quite successfully to promote benefits for the developers as was intended (see my example above), and doesn't actually inhibit any of the alternative approaches you mentioned if a company thinks it will do better that way, I don't see any strong argument for changing it as things stand today.
The term "copyright infringement" is used not just because it's fluffy, but because it's the legal term for what's going on.
That's true, but let's not pretend sounding like something harmless that kiddies do in the school playground isn't part of it, OK? ("But think of the children! What harm could it possibly do?")
The fact is, the statutory penalties for copyright infringement are shockingly high, but the fine for petty theft usually isn't.
And the fact is, the potential damage done by copyright infringement is also much greater than that of petty theft. Large groups like the RIAA, big name artists and super-huge software companies like Microsoft might be able to write off damage done by illegal copying as "acceptable losses" or "the cost of doing business", but of course most artists and distributors and software companies aren't that size, and don't have those resources.
A small software company run by a few individuals needs copyright protection to survive and make a fair profit a lot more than the big players do, and these are the guys who often get screwed. More than one good games company has died because of this, for example, so let's drop the "victimless crime", "doesn't cost anybody anything", "it wasn't real revenue anyway" charade as well.
Sorry, but I believe you're mistaken. AFAIK, assault and battery are both common law offences, the former defined to be "any act which puts a person in fear of immediate and unlawful violence", while the latter is defined as "the application of unlawful violence". ABH is the next level up, and the lowest formally arrestable offence, while things like GBH and wounding refer to attacks with more serious consequences.
I can't stand that abbreviation, i18n. I mean who thought that would be a good abbreviation?
I thought this was common knowledge, but no-one seems to have posted it yet while many people seem to be asking, so: it's a pun.
The word is written either "internationalisation" or "internationalization", depending on which English-speaking country you're in at the time, but both versions have 18 letters between the 'i' and the 'n'. As well as being shorter, "i18n" therefore works without adjustment in all English-speaking locales.
This is one of the best truisms I ever heard: if you never piss anyone off, you're probably not doing anything worthwhile.
I'm a nice guy. My natural inclination is to be everybody's friend. If you never have to deal with people whose views may disagree with yours, then that's great.
But sometimes, you have money involved. Sometimes, your relationship with someone puts one of you in a senior position within some organisation. Sometimes, you simply have a strong difference of opinion with someone, or your ethics mean you disapprove of their behaviour. In these cases, it's impossible to be everyone's friend all the time.
I've come to the conclusion that when this happens, the only two things that count are having principles you believe in, and sticking to them. To me, and amongst other things, that means you back people up when they deserve your help, you deal with people with honesty and integrity, you negotiate firmly but fairly, and if someone is doing something wrong, the consequences are their responsibility, and theirs alone.
Re:Is 100% compatibility really what we want?
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KOffice 1.4 Released
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But these features should be switched off when you open a Word document, and not switched on again unless the user specifically asks for them.
So every word processor on the planet has to not only implement, but also adaptively default to and provide an interface to select between, the line-breaking algorithms used by every other word processing product whose data can be imported? Even if there is a far superior native algorithm? And this is purely to replicate the poor typography of the original software's rendering of the document? I'm not sure that's even viable in a market with more than two or three players, and I'm certainly not convinced it's desirable just to avoid a very occasional layout change...
I would find the *legal* definition of "piracy" more relevant to the discussion than what OED says.
I would find the dictionary definition far more relevant than the legal one. We aren't (in most cases, at least) lawyers, and this is not a court. What matters is the subject at hand, and the meanings of the terms "copyright infringement", "IP theft" and "music/software piracy" are clear to everyone in this context.
I find it rather hypocritical that those on the anti-copyright side of the debate so frequently attack the other side for using the terms "theft" and "piracy" in an emotive way, while at the same time insisting everyone should reject common language that's been in use for centuries and use the fluffy-bunny-friendly-sounding "copyright infringement" instead.
I look at it this way: if we're debating the ethics of beating someone up, the discussion is likely to use terms like assault. Technically, in a legal sense, we probably mean battery, or ABH, or GBH, or wounding, or attempted murder, or manslaughter, or murder. The one thing we almost certainly don't mean is assult, since this doesn't (in most jurisdictions) require physical abuse. However, what matters is the ethics, the common language is "assault", and accepting and using that term is a far more effective way to debate those ethics.
To put it another way, everyone on every side of every debate uses language that tends to support their position. Language is not neutral, and probably never can be. However, if the best argument you've got is an attack on language, then you've got no attack on substance. And in debating terms, that's the same as having nothing at all.
The candle maker would propably get pissed, but so would the people if they couldn't share the candles would such a wondrous sharing magic exist.
I don't think the candle maker should be allowed to persecute people who used this magic?
OK, but if you adopt that position, you have to accept that making candles may no longer be a viable occupation for some people. When the first magic candle runs out, there may be no-one left to make the second.
You can hope all you want that people will innovate; the reality is most web site owners are only in it for the money.
I'm not sure that's true at all. I have never run a commercial web site, though I have been in charge of several others, from a home page with a few articles to help people with similar interests to me, up to a few sites providing information about clubs I belong to for members and those interested in joining/visiting.
In fact, I could quite happily live without most money-making web sites in existence. Of the remainder, all are either something where I pay money anyway (electronic shops of some description) or something I'd be prepared to pay a reasonable to continue using if they couldn't support themselves through ads (e-zines that have genuinely interesting articles, forums I enjoy such as Slashdot, etc.).
Besides which, if we're being realistic, usability studies have consistently shown that untargeted banner ads are blanked by most users without even noticing them these days, and click-through rates are generally terrible. The model is already ineffective, regardless of whether the ads are knocked off the screen visibly or not. Alternatives, from Google's clever use of relevant advertising that people do read up to micro-payment systems so everyone can contribute to content they value without the hassle, are going to dominate more and more over the next few years, without a doubt.
You can call it short-sighted, you can call it whatever you want, but the fact is the owners of most web sites are not innovators and never claimed to be. All they want to do is put out a product and make money doing it.
Well, if they're providing a product for money, they don't need banner ads, do they? And if they're not providing a product and they're not providing any other sort of innovative service, why would I visit their web site and view any ads they host anyway...?
It doesn't cost extra money, if you have coders that at least half knowledgable on the subject. [...] Writing something from scratch, it shouldn't take any more time to work across browsers.
Yes, it really does, and yes, it really will.
For a start, there are numerous standards bugs in all browsers, IE more than many. You have to include numerous hacks in things like CSS to get consistent rendering across the range of browser software in use.
Then there are issues with tools. IE lets you use ActiveX controls, for example, which Firefox clearly doesn't. Regardless of the merits of ActiveX, if you have a tool that will do the job quickly and easily in IE, and you don't have it in other browsers, it takes time and money to produce an equivalent.
Next up, there's testing effort. If you're going to support users of different browsers, you need to check all your styles, scripts, etc. work everywhere. That means configuring machines with all supported browser software (or at least a representative sample if you're cutting corners), and investing the time to check everything out, with various combinations of supported browser options for text size, cookies, scriptings, etc. etc. This can require a vast amount of time to do properly on large site.
You should speak to coders who are fully knowledgeable about their subject; half-knowledgeable ones tend to think this stuff comes for free.;-)
It's a commercial decision. Making your site work completely with IE gets you around 90% of the market. Making your site work completely with W3C standards gets you around 10% of the market. Making your site work completely with both costs you more money. If the extra money is more than the 10% of the market is worth, you're going to go with the 90%-only option.
It sucks, but businesses don't run to make Firefox users happy, they run to make a profit. When the cost of losing the smaller market share (and the resulting negative PR etc.) outweighs the cost of making a site that works completely with both types of browser, businesses will support both types of browser.
Having OpenOffice render opened word documents differently from Word, is a problem
The problem is that as long as this attitude prevails, OpenOffice Writer will never overtake Word, because it can't do anything Word can't.
I don't know why importing data from one application into another is expected to be a lossless process. That's just unrealistic if the two aren't clones in their feature sets, and is that really desirable? I'd say what matters is that you can get the data across in a form that resembles the original enough to be useful.
For example, Word has pretty poor support for fine typography. Are we really saying that an OSS word processor can't (for example) support proper ligatures and "expert" characters from OpenType fonts, typographical enhancements like hanging punctuation, or more advanced page layout like a decent line-breaking algorithm for fully justified paragraphs and stretchable whitespace? Serious DTP and typesetting packages like InDesign or TeX do these things all the time, and get much nicer-looking output as a result.
But of course, if you used TeX's line-breaking algorithm for your justified paragraphs, while Word used the crude algorithm it has at present, then importing a Word document into your alternative software wouldn't exactly duplicate the page layout. It's somewhere between chicken-and-egg and catch-22...
The nice thing is this 2% will be easy to convert once we genuinely have a superior OSS office suite they are similiar to the windows users who switched over to Mozilla/firefox in the last 2 years.
I'm not sure that's really comparable. The only real disadvantage I've found in using Firefox rather than IE is the compatibility issue. In many other respects, it's (for me) a much nicer browser: I actively prefer things like tabbed browsing, the way bookmarks are handled, and the little touches like the find bar rather than a dialog obscuring your view.
OOo has none of these things going for it. As someone who's a fan and been using it at home for a long time, I've still yet to find anything it actually does better than MS Office, other than having a native PDF export (and obviously professionals will just get other software for that). OOo is great as a free alternative for the simple things, but it's a long way from competing with MS Office in the way Firefox competes with IE, and you still have the compatibility problems.
Sorry, I don't have the link either. FWIW, I do remember seeing this information in a previous Slashdot discussion, though, along with a post by one of those four people explaining a bit about how it really worked.
[The AC cites sources that say at 11' or more, 50% of victims will die.]
But in those studies, they're talking about industrial accidents where people have fallen off a ladder or some such. I imagine that the number of people who land particularly awkwardly or with heavy things falling around them is rather higher in those cases that most. As I noted in my comment above (why was it Redundant, BTW?!) the nature of your landing makes a huge difference to what your body can take.
Actually you can brace yourself that you can survive a fall. I don't know how high but it is theoretically possible to do that. It aparently also helps if a canopy is there. A lady survived a fall from what usually is a fatal height after falling on top of a canopy. All she suffered was a broken arm.
If you're talking about surviving falls, the good news is that an adult human being can survive a fall even at terminal velocity, as long as they land on something reasonably soft. There are documented cases of pilots bailing out of their planes during the Second World War without parachutes, and surviving with only relatively minor injuries after something like a tree broke their fall.
The bad news, of course, is that they were the lucky ones. If you've ever been parachuting, you'll know that even with all that drag to slow you down, you still hit the ground pretty hard. People do suffer injuries from not getting it right, even after training in how to land correctly.
If you land more-or-less on your feet, you have a much better chance, too. If you look at the training martial artists do in how to break a fall when thrown on their back/side/front, they can take a fair impact as well, but nowhere near as much as a parachutist's roll. As for coming straight down in just about any position when your feet are much above your head -- well, sorry, but you're pretty much toast if you've got any speed behind you. Trust me, best give that one a miss...
Imagine handing a bunch of kids a carton of eggs. Will they cook the eggs or toss 'm at the first best target?
That probably depends on (a) whether they've been brought up to be civilised human beings, and (b) whether their parent/teacher/local police officer is standing behind them. Kids aren't responsible enough to drive cars, which is why we don't let them. Kids aren't responsible enough to own guns, which is why we don't let them. Kids are quite capable of executing cookbook scripting attacks for kicks, these attacks can be quite damaging to someone caught off-guard, and yet we see no harm in letting kids use the Internet completely unsupervised.
Now imagine the effect of handing every kid a free virtual carton of eggs when they double click on their browser icon. Welcome to the Internet.
And people are surprised when I say I don't think Internet access should be completely anonymous. This is the "free speech" they cherish so dearly in action.
(Before the trolls arrive, I have always acknowledged that there are legitimate potential uses for anonymity on the Internet. My position is simply that in practice, the vast majority of uses are not legitimate, the most important legitimate uses are rarely practical for other reasons, and consequently the lack of anonymity will bring more good than harm.)
Apparently Michael Newman thinks that all half a million daily Slashdot readers are malicious, although I personally would guess more like a 60:40 split myself *grin*.
And you're proud of that? I'm not sure it's as funny for everyone who might have benefitted from the service that's been taken down.
The machine you linked to appears to come with an entry-level 32-bit processor, only 256MB of RAM, only a 15" screen and naff integrated graphics, WinXP Home, almost no warranty, and those are the good bits. Are you really claiming that's better than a $1,299 iMac? You must have been reading a different page to me, then! Apple's figures show that particular iMac annihilating a much better spec'd Dell box in their Halo FPS benchmarks; that Dell box normally starts at $1,148 BTW.
Slashdot Mirror
It's what everyone with a patent says. Having worked for/with companies that do genuine R&D, investing lots of time and money in smart people who come up with genuinely new ideas, it's frequently justified, too.
The way patents are implemented may be (OK, let's be fair: blatantly is) seriously flawed in some places, particularly the US, but the underlying principle isn't a bad one. My objections to things like software patents in Europe are because I don't believe the system will function as allegedly intended, after seeing what's happened in the US before, not because I think patents are in themselves a bad idea.
Sure... except for all the time and money Intel invested to develop the technology behind those patents in the first place!
I'm no great Intel fan -- all my home systems run AMD and have for years, and I'm amazed this lawsuit didn't happen much sooner -- but really, that argument is some combination of off-topic, trolling and just plain silly.
According to the Supreme Court, the software in question here did, for reasons they clearly describe in the judgement. That's pretty much the point, isn't it?
OK, I normally start ignoring people when they swear at me and accuse me of being stupid/naive rather than trying to make a convincing argument, but I'll make an exception here because I understand that you believe in what you're saying and you want to argue for it.
As I said before, what you describe would be great. I believe in education for education's sake, and that society should provide as much education as possible to any individual who wants it. Of course, there's nothing stopping someone putting most of the books ever written onto the sort of device you describe; copyright provides restrictions only for a limited time. (This is being increasingly abused by big-business-funded legal changes, which I imagine you support about the same "not at all" as I do.)
However, I also live in the real world, and furthermore, I make my living by writing genuinely original and useful software. This is a benefit to society, and copyright exists to promote this benefit. As I tried to explain previously, the motivation that has enabled my employers to pay me to write this software comes in large part from the protections they enjoy through owning the copyright to the works I make for them. In a very real sense, removing copyright without a fundamental restructuring of the way those who produce works are supported would kill a large part of the industry. This is not hypothetical; as I wrote before, I have seen real world figures for directly comparable situations involving products, ongoing support, and custom work/consultancy. I am not arguing on principle; my argument is based on facts about what actually happens.
Now, in the much longer term, given sufficient other changes to make copyright an unnecessary limitation, I have no moral objections to removing it. But that's not what I see when people object to copyright here. Those people almost invariably want to have, for free, the works currently produced under copyright, giving no consideration to the likelihood of those works existing at all without that protection. If you want blinkers, there you go.
Ultimately, if you want to move to a system that doesn't fundamentally rely on ideas like copyright, you need to change the compensation structure as well. Writing good books or good software or whatever is a full-time job, requiring skilled and dedicated workers, and someone has to put the roof over their head and pay for the food on their children's plates. So far, I've never seen anyone on Slashdot suggest any alternative way of providing this. Until I do, I will maintain my position that removing copyright without balancing changes would be immensely damaging to the industries that produce works of many kinds, and thus would be damaging to that same society you so want to improve.
Only if you're working in modulo 4 arithmetic. ;-)
To answer the grandparent's question, maybe I can give a little perspective. I bought the DVD set a couple of months back, partly due to seeing it listed repeatedly as people's favourite sci-fi show here in Slashdot in preference to B5, and partly on the recommendation of a close friend whose taste in sci-fi is close to my own.
I think the thing about Firefly is that its style is different to anything else I've seen. Yes, it's set in a futuristic universe, with space ships and aliens and all that, but that's not the point of the show. The point is characters that have depth and plausible relationships played by good actors. (A prostitute being probably the most educated and respectable member of the crew? They'll be inventing lesbian, vampire-hunting witches next...) The storylines are entertaining and slightly edgy: there are lots of moral ambiguities, even if it's clear where our sympathies are supposed to lie. And of course, there are elements of everything from crime drama to western thrown into the mix as well.
I'm not sure it's my favourite sci-fi show. Actually, I'm sure it's not; B5 has many of the same advantages, but on a much grander scale, for example. But we seem to be seeing a new generation of high quality sci-fi shows just lately: the new Battlestar Galactica, the new series of Doctor Who, etc. I, for one, am happy to count Firefly among them. It's a welcome change to sometimes watchable but horribly formulaic Star Trek: The Next, Next, Prequal Generation episodes, or Yet Another SFX-laden But Plotless Sci-Fi Movie With Bad Acting.
That raises at least two questions for me:
I admire your enthusiasm and your desire to see the world improved, I really do. But IME, what you're describing simply isn't economically practical. Rather than repeating doctrine, let me give you just one personal example that motivates this position for me.
For much of the past few years, I worked at a small, privately owned software company that makes software products, provides support contracts (which cover not only bug fixing but also certain types of feature enhancement request), and does consulting work. We made enough money overall to provide a pretty good but not exceptional wage to the 50-or-so staff, around 80% of whom were the developers who wrote the software, designed the algorithms, implemented the new features or provided those consulting services to customers, with the remainder of the staff providing sales & marketing, product support and office administration roles. We didn't make a lot more money than that, and the staff were all part of a profit-sharing scheme.
I have seen the figures for how much we made from each of the areas of income each year. It is true that the consulting and support we offered were reasonably profitable, but without the income from licensing and royalties we brought in through our products, it's simply not likely that we could have survived. At the very least, the amount of money the individual developers received to pay their rent and put food on their families' tables would have been directly and dramatically affected.
I've heard all these arguments about relying on providing related services rather than software products before, but I have seen nothing yet to convince me that they aren't just RMS-inspired idealism. A huge brand like IBM might be in a position to give away software as a commodity and rely on providing support services, but most businesses aren't huge brands. The economy is driven by small companies, like the one I've been working for, and in those cases commoditising software would result in the business failing all too quickly.
The only thing in the way of that is the principle of copyright, which is probably why that principle is still recognised in every country in the western world. Given that the model apparently works quite successfully to promote benefits for the developers as was intended (see my example above), and doesn't actually inhibit any of the alternative approaches you mentioned if a company thinks it will do better that way, I don't see any strong argument for changing it as things stand today.
That's true, but let's not pretend sounding like something harmless that kiddies do in the school playground isn't part of it, OK? ("But think of the children! What harm could it possibly do?")
And the fact is, the potential damage done by copyright infringement is also much greater than that of petty theft. Large groups like the RIAA, big name artists and super-huge software companies like Microsoft might be able to write off damage done by illegal copying as "acceptable losses" or "the cost of doing business", but of course most artists and distributors and software companies aren't that size, and don't have those resources.
A small software company run by a few individuals needs copyright protection to survive and make a fair profit a lot more than the big players do, and these are the guys who often get screwed. More than one good games company has died because of this, for example, so let's drop the "victimless crime", "doesn't cost anybody anything", "it wasn't real revenue anyway" charade as well.
Sorry, but I believe you're mistaken. AFAIK, assault and battery are both common law offences, the former defined to be "any act which puts a person in fear of immediate and unlawful violence", while the latter is defined as "the application of unlawful violence". ABH is the next level up, and the lowest formally arrestable offence, while things like GBH and wounding refer to attacks with more serious consequences.
I thought this was common knowledge, but no-one seems to have posted it yet while many people seem to be asking, so: it's a pun.
The word is written either "internationalisation" or "internationalization", depending on which English-speaking country you're in at the time, but both versions have 18 letters between the 'i' and the 'n'. As well as being shorter, "i18n" therefore works without adjustment in all English-speaking locales.
This is one of the best truisms I ever heard: if you never piss anyone off, you're probably not doing anything worthwhile.
I'm a nice guy. My natural inclination is to be everybody's friend. If you never have to deal with people whose views may disagree with yours, then that's great.
But sometimes, you have money involved. Sometimes, your relationship with someone puts one of you in a senior position within some organisation. Sometimes, you simply have a strong difference of opinion with someone, or your ethics mean you disapprove of their behaviour. In these cases, it's impossible to be everyone's friend all the time.
I've come to the conclusion that when this happens, the only two things that count are having principles you believe in, and sticking to them. To me, and amongst other things, that means you back people up when they deserve your help, you deal with people with honesty and integrity, you negotiate firmly but fairly, and if someone is doing something wrong, the consequences are their responsibility, and theirs alone.
So every word processor on the planet has to not only implement, but also adaptively default to and provide an interface to select between, the line-breaking algorithms used by every other word processing product whose data can be imported? Even if there is a far superior native algorithm? And this is purely to replicate the poor typography of the original software's rendering of the document? I'm not sure that's even viable in a market with more than two or three players, and I'm certainly not convinced it's desirable just to avoid a very occasional layout change...
I would find the dictionary definition far more relevant than the legal one. We aren't (in most cases, at least) lawyers, and this is not a court. What matters is the subject at hand, and the meanings of the terms "copyright infringement", "IP theft" and "music/software piracy" are clear to everyone in this context.
I find it rather hypocritical that those on the anti-copyright side of the debate so frequently attack the other side for using the terms "theft" and "piracy" in an emotive way, while at the same time insisting everyone should reject common language that's been in use for centuries and use the fluffy-bunny-friendly-sounding "copyright infringement" instead.
I look at it this way: if we're debating the ethics of beating someone up, the discussion is likely to use terms like assault. Technically, in a legal sense, we probably mean battery, or ABH, or GBH, or wounding, or attempted murder, or manslaughter, or murder. The one thing we almost certainly don't mean is assult, since this doesn't (in most jurisdictions) require physical abuse. However, what matters is the ethics, the common language is "assault", and accepting and using that term is a far more effective way to debate those ethics.
To put it another way, everyone on every side of every debate uses language that tends to support their position. Language is not neutral, and probably never can be. However, if the best argument you've got is an attack on language, then you've got no attack on substance. And in debating terms, that's the same as having nothing at all.
OK, but if you adopt that position, you have to accept that making candles may no longer be a viable occupation for some people. When the first magic candle runs out, there may be no-one left to make the second.
I'm not sure that's true at all. I have never run a commercial web site, though I have been in charge of several others, from a home page with a few articles to help people with similar interests to me, up to a few sites providing information about clubs I belong to for members and those interested in joining/visiting.
In fact, I could quite happily live without most money-making web sites in existence. Of the remainder, all are either something where I pay money anyway (electronic shops of some description) or something I'd be prepared to pay a reasonable to continue using if they couldn't support themselves through ads (e-zines that have genuinely interesting articles, forums I enjoy such as Slashdot, etc.).
Besides which, if we're being realistic, usability studies have consistently shown that untargeted banner ads are blanked by most users without even noticing them these days, and click-through rates are generally terrible. The model is already ineffective, regardless of whether the ads are knocked off the screen visibly or not. Alternatives, from Google's clever use of relevant advertising that people do read up to micro-payment systems so everyone can contribute to content they value without the hassle, are going to dominate more and more over the next few years, without a doubt.
Well, if they're providing a product for money, they don't need banner ads, do they? And if they're not providing a product and they're not providing any other sort of innovative service, why would I visit their web site and view any ads they host anyway...?
Yes, it really does, and yes, it really will.
For a start, there are numerous standards bugs in all browsers, IE more than many. You have to include numerous hacks in things like CSS to get consistent rendering across the range of browser software in use.
Then there are issues with tools. IE lets you use ActiveX controls, for example, which Firefox clearly doesn't. Regardless of the merits of ActiveX, if you have a tool that will do the job quickly and easily in IE, and you don't have it in other browsers, it takes time and money to produce an equivalent.
Next up, there's testing effort. If you're going to support users of different browsers, you need to check all your styles, scripts, etc. work everywhere. That means configuring machines with all supported browser software (or at least a representative sample if you're cutting corners), and investing the time to check everything out, with various combinations of supported browser options for text size, cookies, scriptings, etc. etc. This can require a vast amount of time to do properly on large site.
You should speak to coders who are fully knowledgeable about their subject; half-knowledgeable ones tend to think this stuff comes for free. ;-)
It's a commercial decision. Making your site work completely with IE gets you around 90% of the market. Making your site work completely with W3C standards gets you around 10% of the market. Making your site work completely with both costs you more money. If the extra money is more than the 10% of the market is worth, you're going to go with the 90%-only option.
It sucks, but businesses don't run to make Firefox users happy, they run to make a profit. When the cost of losing the smaller market share (and the resulting negative PR etc.) outweighs the cost of making a site that works completely with both types of browser, businesses will support both types of browser.
The problem is that as long as this attitude prevails, OpenOffice Writer will never overtake Word, because it can't do anything Word can't.
I don't know why importing data from one application into another is expected to be a lossless process. That's just unrealistic if the two aren't clones in their feature sets, and is that really desirable? I'd say what matters is that you can get the data across in a form that resembles the original enough to be useful.
For example, Word has pretty poor support for fine typography. Are we really saying that an OSS word processor can't (for example) support proper ligatures and "expert" characters from OpenType fonts, typographical enhancements like hanging punctuation, or more advanced page layout like a decent line-breaking algorithm for fully justified paragraphs and stretchable whitespace? Serious DTP and typesetting packages like InDesign or TeX do these things all the time, and get much nicer-looking output as a result.
But of course, if you used TeX's line-breaking algorithm for your justified paragraphs, while Word used the crude algorithm it has at present, then importing a Word document into your alternative software wouldn't exactly duplicate the page layout. It's somewhere between chicken-and-egg and catch-22...
I'm not sure that's really comparable. The only real disadvantage I've found in using Firefox rather than IE is the compatibility issue. In many other respects, it's (for me) a much nicer browser: I actively prefer things like tabbed browsing, the way bookmarks are handled, and the little touches like the find bar rather than a dialog obscuring your view.
OOo has none of these things going for it. As someone who's a fan and been using it at home for a long time, I've still yet to find anything it actually does better than MS Office, other than having a native PDF export (and obviously professionals will just get other software for that). OOo is great as a free alternative for the simple things, but it's a long way from competing with MS Office in the way Firefox competes with IE, and you still have the compatibility problems.
Sorry, I don't have the link either. FWIW, I do remember seeing this information in a previous Slashdot discussion, though, along with a post by one of those four people explaining a bit about how it really worked.
[The AC cites sources that say at 11' or more, 50% of victims will die.]
But in those studies, they're talking about industrial accidents where people have fallen off a ladder or some such. I imagine that the number of people who land particularly awkwardly or with heavy things falling around them is rather higher in those cases that most. As I noted in my comment above (why was it Redundant, BTW?!) the nature of your landing makes a huge difference to what your body can take.
If you're talking about surviving falls, the good news is that an adult human being can survive a fall even at terminal velocity, as long as they land on something reasonably soft. There are documented cases of pilots bailing out of their planes during the Second World War without parachutes, and surviving with only relatively minor injuries after something like a tree broke their fall.
The bad news, of course, is that they were the lucky ones. If you've ever been parachuting, you'll know that even with all that drag to slow you down, you still hit the ground pretty hard. People do suffer injuries from not getting it right, even after training in how to land correctly.
If you land more-or-less on your feet, you have a much better chance, too. If you look at the training martial artists do in how to break a fall when thrown on their back/side/front, they can take a fair impact as well, but nowhere near as much as a parachutist's roll. As for coming straight down in just about any position when your feet are much above your head -- well, sorry, but you're pretty much toast if you've got any speed behind you. Trust me, best give that one a miss...
That probably depends on (a) whether they've been brought up to be civilised human beings, and (b) whether their parent/teacher/local police officer is standing behind them. Kids aren't responsible enough to drive cars, which is why we don't let them. Kids aren't responsible enough to own guns, which is why we don't let them. Kids are quite capable of executing cookbook scripting attacks for kicks, these attacks can be quite damaging to someone caught off-guard, and yet we see no harm in letting kids use the Internet completely unsupervised.
And people are surprised when I say I don't think Internet access should be completely anonymous. This is the "free speech" they cherish so dearly in action.
(Before the trolls arrive, I have always acknowledged that there are legitimate potential uses for anonymity on the Internet. My position is simply that in practice, the vast majority of uses are not legitimate, the most important legitimate uses are rarely practical for other reasons, and consequently the lack of anonymity will bring more good than harm.)
And you're proud of that? I'm not sure it's as funny for everyone who might have benefitted from the service that's been taken down.
The machine you linked to appears to come with an entry-level 32-bit processor, only 256MB of RAM, only a 15" screen and naff integrated graphics, WinXP Home, almost no warranty, and those are the good bits. Are you really claiming that's better than a $1,299 iMac? You must have been reading a different page to me, then! Apple's figures show that particular iMac annihilating a much better spec'd Dell box in their Halo FPS benchmarks; that Dell box normally starts at $1,148 BTW.