he entered into a contract with the copyright holders where they allowed him to use the INTELECTUAL PROPERTY (not the "hardware" or plastic) for his own personal use
"Intellectual property" is an obfuscation, please use the specific and correct term "copyright".
There is no contract involved in the purchase of copyrighted materials. The use of the material is specified by copyright law, not by a contract.
You have "taken" nothing but have commited an illegal act.
Of course you have taken something, you've derpived the owner of the use of the car during that time. You've also taken useful miles off the life of the car, as well as exposed it to the possibility of damage or destruction.
If you could somehow take my car and at the same time leave it here for me...if you could somehow, I don't know, "copy" my car and drive off in the copy, well then, no harm no foul.
Your example has fsck-all to do with the unauthorized copying of information.
Do you insist on making distinctions between the different types of intellectual property theft (notice how easily that term slips off the tongue)? Do you insist on making distinctions between the different kinds of theft involving stolen physical property? I don't see how you can justify one but not the other.
You're begging the question by assuming the category "intellectual property" has meaning. It doesn't. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are distinct creations, artificial restrictions made up by the government in pursuit of different ends.
The word "theft" simply does not apply to violation of these restrictions, and your communictions and your thoughts will be clearer if you stop using it to refer to copyright, trademark, or patent violations.
I personally see no problem in restricting the sale of "adult" material to minors.
Great. You should be personally free to restrict the sale of "adult" material to minors in your personal store then. What you should not be able to do under the law of the U.S. is have the state point guns at someone because they gave or sold a kid a book, game, recording, or whatever, that you don't like.
Neither does the Supreme court.
The opinions of the Supreme court are often in conflict with the Constitution, morality, and reality. The First Amendment contains no exceptions for speech to minors; censorship is immoral; and it doesn't work anyway (how many people here never saw porn before turning 18?)
It only seems unreasonable if you think of derivitive works as containing another application completely, or being based on an existing application.
That's exactly what a derivative work means: a work that includes or is based on another. The GPL (or any other licence) or RMS and the FSF (or any other licence-philosopher) doesn't get to determine what constitutes a derivative work, the courts do.
What if you just wanted to use a single function in your program that does something completely different? Is that still a derivative work?
The question of whether a work is derivative of another is decided on a case-by-case basis. If trivial enough, such copying might fall under fair use.
And if they Supremes aren't an august, impartial, non-partisan body, free from undue political influence, then what possible service do they perform?
About the same sort of possible service as know-nothing war-happy presidents and corrupt legistators, I'd say. It's all part of the grand tapestry that is U.S. history.
The Constitution can be changed, you know. The methods of electing the President and Senators have been changed by amending the constitution, it's possible the method of selecting the Supreme Court will also be changed. (It's gotta happen - how else is Bart Simpson going to end up Chief Justice in the future?)
And finally, why is this better than some WML or similar application designed for a phone that can leverage graphics and text on the screen?
Because WML sucks rocks, not all phones have screens, and because many more people (at least here in the mobile-backwards US) are comfortable talking into a phone than puzzling their way through tiny screens.
It's not at all clear from the article what sort of application Yahoo! has in mind, but I know that Nuance has been working with speech reco in telephony applications for many years.
I integrated the Nuance reco engine into an IBM voice browser project for Sprint about three years ago, though I don't know how far the project ultimately got. It was ultimately supposed to re-implement Sprint's "Voice Command" feature as a VXML application. You did have to provide a grammar for possible utterances (and writing the code that generated the propriety format grammar that Nuance wanted from the JSGF that was the first VXML standard was some interesting hacking), but it was usable under non-ideal conditions.
Libertarianism holds that you own yourself and your labor. Socialism holds that you and your labor belong to the state.
No. Socialism advocates an economic system in which labor is primary. It comes in libertarian and authoritarian forms. Its opposite is capitalism, an economic system based on private control of capital; i.e,, a system in which economic resources are controled by a state-backed privileged minority.
The word "libertarian" originally refered to libertarian socialism and was highjacked by the the right (capitalists) in the 1950s.
More realistically the shareholders decide that there is a purpose for the company. Many companies have statutes in the foundation documents stating their primary purpose is to produce a best-of-breed product or to be the world leader in a particular niche.
Those documents have as much meaning as the "mission statements" you sometimes see on the walls of francise restaurants. The stockholders of a large corporations (I'm not talking about Mom And Pop Inc down the street with five shareholders here) are interested in "best-of-breed products" or whatever only because they see it as a path to profit. If there are two ways to produce that best-of-breed widget, and one involves pollution, resource depletion, screwing workers, and political corruption but results in higher profits for the corporation, that's the path the corporation will take.
Value includes non-tangibles such as customer confidence, employee satisfaction, and the long-term sustainability of the company. If the managers of those companies "screwed anyone in the name of profit" like you say they should, then they could be sued by investors for destroying the company's value.
Obviously these things you name are factors in the profitability of the shareholder's investment. But as the race to the bottom we are experiencing shows, they are very very tiny factors. Stockholders want their stock to go up, and the street rewards short-term growth rather than long-term sustainability. Employee satisfaction? Screw 'em, there's cheaper labor overseas. Customer confidence? If anyone complains, SLAPP their ass. And always externalize, externalize, externalize costs.
It's not really a "for-profit" motivation. "for-growth" (with the promise of profit) is what motivates public corportations.
It's for-profit in the sense of profit for the stockholders. Since dividends are pretty much passe, that means higher price for the stock, and yes, in the bizarre cancer-like economics of Wall Street that means continual growth in corporate profits.
They're groups of people. They get together and decide what to do. Usually the controlling body of shareholders says "do wtf you want as long as I make oodles of money".
They're not just groups of people, they are legal entities created by the state in a way that makes them unable to do anything but seek profit.
A business corporation that fails to screw over anyone it can in the name of profit can be sued by investors. Since for large corporations, those investors are often other profit-seeking-monster corporations, such suits would be a given if the corporation didn't plunder to within an inch of what the law allows - and even beyond what the law allows, if the penalty is less than the profit.
The modern large for-profit corporation is a Frankenstein's monster constructed of law rather than of corpses; and it's only by changing the law that we can tame these beasts.
What is the ethical problem with executing all the people in jail for life terms? They are otherwise going to die in jail anyways.
Non sequitor. The zygote or morula is going to be destroyed at time T, whether the method of destruction is research or the incinerator, whereas you are considering killing now a person who would not otherwise die until some unknown time in the future.
A closer example would be, what is the ethical problem with using the bodies of condemned criminals for research after they are dead? (Punting the ethical issues surrounding state homicide for the moment.) Provided that the victim of execution agrees (since we generally recognize an ethical right of people to have their corpse disposed of in a matter that they approve of), I don't think there are any, and thanks to one such person we have the Visible Man project.
We might consider that the parents have a proprietary interest in the cells in question, and that disposal should be according to their wishes; but assuming that is addressed, if the cells are about to be destroyed anyway, research seems ethically superior to the trash can.
Nuclear weapons are 60-year-old tech. Any nation with enough technology to put together a TV set has a high enough technology to make nukes, and invading every nation that starts an enrichment program is going to be really impractical (and only motivates small nations to develop nuclear and other WMDs as a defense.)
(I'm using the 89 year old grandma as an illustration of someone who is always, 100% innocent. In [Slashdot] reality I know this is potentially impractical, but the chance that she is a terrorst or other criminal is far far lower than the norm)
Says who?
As I recall, during the Vietnam war, the Viet Cong would use children or old ladies to carry bombs. You think Al Qaeda wouldn't use the same tactic?
Or other nutjob groups. We've got plenty of domestic terrorists too. Or have we all forgotten Oklahoma City? The chance that a clean cut Caucasian native-born American Army veteran like Timothy McVeigh is a criminal has got be really low, right?
Campaign donations are the ultimate form of free speech.
Campaign donations are often little more than bribery in a pretty wrapper.
Our Constitution is very clear in restricting our Congress from limiting speech.
Money is not speech. If I take out an ad in the paper saying "Police are great!", that's speech. If I tell the cop who pulls me over, "Here's $50 to fund your `Police are great!' ad campain, nudge nudge, wink wink", that's bribery.
My phone is sitting right next to my keyboard now...so let me just say hi to my fans in domestic surveillance who might be listening to me typing this...
The government is simply "protecting" kids from stopping them buying booze...
Everyone who never had booze before they reached legal age, raise your hands. Ah, I see.001 percent of/.'s hands in the air. Great job of protecting the kids, there.
On the other hand, by providing examples of responsbile alcohol use, and guiding a young person's initial experiences with it (wine at a holiday dinner, a beer with Dad), parents can do a pretty good job of "protecting" kids from developing abusive drinking patterns. Making a criminal out of a parent who gives a teen a glass of wine, or out of a college freshman who has a beer, is foolish and only encourages unhealthy drinking patterns, including intoxicated driving.
Substituing "booze" for "violent video games" makes an even stronger argument.
My fucking point in my original post was that the first dumb idea (i.e. "security idea that sucks") -- "Default Permit" -- isn't even a fucking security idea
The reason he brings it up is because people still do it - they build "security systems" with default permit. You recognize that that's a oxymoron, great. But the reason the meme that "Default Permit isn't even a security idea" is in your head is in part due to the work of Marcus Ranum. He was one of the principal guys behind the development proxy-based firewalls, and the TIS Firewall Toolkit (which evolved into Gauntlet, one of the first commerical firewalls) was his work.
I worked at TIS the same time he did, on a different project. In a company full of security experts, he stood out. (I wasn't and am not one, but it was an education)
(His work on firewalls is probably 90% of the reason why my TIS stock options became valuable when the company went public, and later got bought by Network Associates.)
Oddly enough, I don't recall seeing an "obscenity" exception in the text of the First Amendment. Yes, the government has decided that it has such power, but such decision to exclude "obscene" material is in no way supported by the First Amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
"Intellectual property" is an obfuscation, please use the specific and correct term "copyright".
There is no contract involved in the purchase of copyrighted materials. The use of the material is specified by copyright law, not by a contract.
Of course you have taken something, you've derpived the owner of the use of the car during that time. You've also taken useful miles off the life of the car, as well as exposed it to the possibility of damage or destruction.
If you could somehow take my car and at the same time leave it here for me...if you could somehow, I don't know, "copy" my car and drive off in the copy, well then, no harm no foul.
Your example has fsck-all to do with the unauthorized copying of information.
You're begging the question by assuming the category "intellectual property" has meaning. It doesn't. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are distinct creations, artificial restrictions made up by the government in pursuit of different ends.
The word "theft" simply does not apply to violation of these restrictions, and your communictions and your thoughts will be clearer if you stop using it to refer to copyright, trademark, or patent violations.
Great. You should be personally free to restrict the sale of "adult" material to minors in your personal store then. What you should not be able to do under the law of the U.S. is have the state point guns at someone because they gave or sold a kid a book, game, recording, or whatever, that you don't like.
The opinions of the Supreme court are often in conflict with the Constitution, morality, and reality. The First Amendment contains no exceptions for speech to minors; censorship is immoral; and it doesn't work anyway (how many people here never saw porn before turning 18?)
Yes, we have been here before. Crippled DVDs have been tried and failed.
That's exactly what a derivative work means: a work that includes or is based on another. The GPL (or any other licence) or RMS and the FSF (or any other licence-philosopher) doesn't get to determine what constitutes a derivative work, the courts do.
The question of whether a work is derivative of another is decided on a case-by-case basis. If trivial enough, such copying might fall under fair use.
About the same sort of possible service as know-nothing war-happy presidents and corrupt legistators, I'd say. It's all part of the grand tapestry that is U.S. history.
The Constitution can be changed, you know. The methods of electing the President and Senators have been changed by amending the constitution, it's possible the method of selecting the Supreme Court will also be changed. (It's gotta happen - how else is Bart Simpson going to end up Chief Justice in the future?)
Because WML sucks rocks, not all phones have screens, and because many more people (at least here in the mobile-backwards US) are comfortable talking into a phone than puzzling their way through tiny screens.
It's not at all clear from the article what sort of application Yahoo! has in mind, but I know that Nuance has been working with speech reco in telephony applications for many years.
I integrated the Nuance reco engine into an IBM voice browser project for Sprint about three years ago, though I don't know how far the project ultimately got. It was ultimately supposed to re-implement Sprint's "Voice Command" feature as a VXML application. You did have to provide a grammar for possible utterances (and writing the code that generated the propriety format grammar that Nuance wanted from the JSGF that was the first VXML standard was some interesting hacking), but it was usable under non-ideal conditions.
Actually I would presume that Yahoo! is building some sort of VoiceXML application.
No. Socialism advocates an economic system in which labor is primary. It comes in libertarian and authoritarian forms. Its opposite is capitalism, an economic system based on private control of capital; i.e,, a system in which economic resources are controled by a state-backed privileged minority.
The word "libertarian" originally refered to libertarian socialism and was highjacked by the the right (capitalists) in the 1950s.
Those documents have as much meaning as the "mission statements" you sometimes see on the walls of francise restaurants. The stockholders of a large corporations (I'm not talking about Mom And Pop Inc down the street with five shareholders here) are interested in "best-of-breed products" or whatever only because they see it as a path to profit. If there are two ways to produce that best-of-breed widget, and one involves pollution, resource depletion, screwing workers, and political corruption but results in higher profits for the corporation, that's the path the corporation will take.
Uh, I'm not saying they should. In a sensible system, they shouldn't. I'm saying they do, because we have a non-sensible system.
Obviously these things you name are factors in the profitability of the shareholder's investment. But as the race to the bottom we are experiencing shows, they are very very tiny factors. Stockholders want their stock to go up, and the street rewards short-term growth rather than long-term sustainability. Employee satisfaction? Screw 'em, there's cheaper labor overseas. Customer confidence? If anyone complains, SLAPP their ass. And always externalize, externalize, externalize costs.
It's for-profit in the sense of profit for the stockholders. Since dividends are pretty much passe, that means higher price for the stock, and yes, in the bizarre cancer-like economics of Wall Street that means continual growth in corporate profits.
They're not just groups of people, they are legal entities created by the state in a way that makes them unable to do anything but seek profit.
A business corporation that fails to screw over anyone it can in the name of profit can be sued by investors. Since for large corporations, those investors are often other profit-seeking-monster corporations, such suits would be a given if the corporation didn't plunder to within an inch of what the law allows - and even beyond what the law allows, if the penalty is less than the profit.
The modern large for-profit corporation is a Frankenstein's monster constructed of law rather than of corpses; and it's only by changing the law that we can tame these beasts.
Non sequitor. The zygote or morula is going to be destroyed at time T, whether the method of destruction is research or the incinerator, whereas you are considering killing now a person who would not otherwise die until some unknown time in the future.
A closer example would be, what is the ethical problem with using the bodies of condemned criminals for research after they are dead? (Punting the ethical issues surrounding state homicide for the moment.) Provided that the victim of execution agrees (since we generally recognize an ethical right of people to have their corpse disposed of in a matter that they approve of), I don't think there are any, and thanks to one such person we have the Visible Man project.
We might consider that the parents have a proprietary interest in the cells in question, and that disposal should be according to their wishes; but assuming that is addressed, if the cells are about to be destroyed anyway, research seems ethically superior to the trash can.
Uh, almost all plutonium on the planet is man-made, by exposing U-238 to neutron radiation. It is not that difficult to make.
Nuclear weapons are 60-year-old tech. Any nation with enough technology to put together a TV set has a high enough technology to make nukes, and invading every nation that starts an enrichment program is going to be really impractical (and only motivates small nations to develop nuclear and other WMDs as a defense.)
For most of the American right, that rule only applies if they American babies. Iraqi babies? Bombs away!
BTW, I agree that killing babies is bad. A blastula, embryo, or fetus is however not a baby.
(-1 flamebait, but what the heck.)
"I was only following orders." Yeah, that's a great defense.
Says who?
As I recall, during the Vietnam war, the Viet Cong would use children or old ladies to carry bombs. You think Al Qaeda wouldn't use the same tactic?
Or other nutjob groups. We've got plenty of domestic terrorists too. Or have we all forgotten Oklahoma City? The chance that a clean cut Caucasian native-born American Army veteran like Timothy McVeigh is a criminal has got be really low, right?
Campaign donations are often little more than bribery in a pretty wrapper.
Money is not speech. If I take out an ad in the paper saying "Police are great!", that's speech. If I tell the cop who pulls me over, "Here's $50 to fund your `Police are great!' ad campain, nudge nudge, wink wink", that's bribery.
It's a open secret that most large campain donations resemble the latter more than the former. (Recommended reading: the recent piece in Rolling Stone, Four Amendments and a Funeral: A month inside the house of horrors that is Congress.)
"Sounds let eavesdroppers determine what you're typing" plus "cellphone companies can remotely install software to activate the microphone when the user is not making a call" equals "a creepy feeling up and down my spine".
My phone is sitting right next to my keyboard now...so let me just say hi to my fans in domestic surveillance who might be listening to me typing this...
Dude, this is Singapore. They torture people for vandalism. Taking a pack of gum over there is punishable by a year in jail.
Everyone who never had booze before they reached legal age, raise your hands. Ah, I see .001 percent of /.'s hands in the air. Great job of protecting the kids, there.
On the other hand, by providing examples of responsbile alcohol use, and guiding a young person's initial experiences with it (wine at a holiday dinner, a beer with Dad), parents can do a pretty good job of "protecting" kids from developing abusive drinking patterns. Making a criminal out of a parent who gives a teen a glass of wine, or out of a college freshman who has a beer, is foolish and only encourages unhealthy drinking patterns, including intoxicated driving.
Substituing "booze" for "violent video games" makes an even stronger argument.
The reason he brings it up is because people still do it - they build "security systems" with default permit. You recognize that that's a oxymoron, great. But the reason the meme that "Default Permit isn't even a security idea" is in your head is in part due to the work of Marcus Ranum. He was one of the principal guys behind the development proxy-based firewalls, and the TIS Firewall Toolkit (which evolved into Gauntlet, one of the first commerical firewalls) was his work.
I worked at TIS the same time he did, on a different project. In a company full of security experts, he stood out. (I wasn't and am not one, but it was an education)
(His work on firewalls is probably 90% of the reason why my TIS stock options became valuable when the company went public, and later got bought by Network Associates.)
Oddly enough, I don't recall seeing an "obscenity" exception in the text of the First Amendment. Yes, the government has decided that it has such power, but such decision to exclude "obscene" material is in no way supported by the First Amendment.