These "moons" are only 30 and 100 miles across. Mars' Phobos and Deimos, widely thought to be captured asteroids, are thousands of kilometers across.
You are way out of the ballpark, I'm afraid. These two new moon are larger than Phobos (diameter approx. 22Km) and Deimos (diameter approx. 12Km). The Earth (and its moon) Mars, Venus, Mercury, the Galilean Moons and Titan are thousands of kilometers across, but everything else is much smaller. Ceres (the largest asteriod) is only 914Km across.
A bunch of small white dots is very good, actually. The fact that both Pluto and Charon come out as extended objects in the short exposure picture is quite impressive in its own right. I wonder if the long exposure has better resolution or is smeared due to an imprefect correction for the relative motion of the telescope and Pluto. Any astronomers reading this?
Einstien [sic] didn't work with scientific labs and big telescopes. He was really a theortical physicist. He proposed a theory that didn't have evidence for it until 8 years later. They are only finding direct evidence of some his work now. Yet his work was taken seriously, scientifically reviewed and is taught in science classes even though some of it has no direct evidence.
Actually, Einstein had evidence for this theory from the get-go. At the mid-19th century a discrepancy in the percession of the perhelion of Mercury was found. Astronomical data and the Newtonian prediction disagree to the tune of 43 arc-seconds per century. This was one of the phenomena analyzed in Einstein's initial paper in 1916. As I try to explain below, there is overwhelming evidence that general relativity is highly accurate theory. It is certainly not the final theory (as stated, it doesn't jive well with quantum field theory), but it's one of the best scientific theories of all time: it's amazinginly simple and yet is accurage to within our measurement ability for a wide range of phenomena.
In fact, Eddington's observation of the bending of light from distance stars, originally hailed as a confirmation of GR, later turned out to have such large measurement errors to be completely useless. In this respect it is imperative to note that if light has mass (as predicted by special relativity [E=mc^2]) then light would also bend due to Newtonian gravity. The difference between Newton and Einstein here is a factor of two in the predicted bending, which is very small in any case.
Many more predictions of GR have been verified since. For example, the fact that the rate of passage of time depends on the gravitational field. I apologize for the bad pharsing (it would be technical to give details), but the actual experiment is easy to describe: you take two atomic clocks and synchronize them. You then put one at the top of a tower. Put the other one at the bottom of a well. Wait a few months then bring them together to the same point. You will say that less time elapsed from the point of view of the clock that felt the weaker graviational effect (i.e. the one from the tower).
As to "or the vast majority of my life, Newtonian physics will be good enough" -- I hope you will never have to rely on a GPS then. A GPS unit calculates its own position by comparing timing signals sent to it by several satellites.
The effect described above (that time flows differently for the sattelite compared to the unit on earth) has to be accounted for or the system will not work. The fact that the GPS system can measure locations and distances to an accuracy of 1 metre can be considered a very accurate test of general relativity (among other things -- there's also a special relativistic time-dilation effect here, coming from the velocity of the satellite in orbit).
Finally, tests of general relativity in the so-called ``non-linear'' regime (i.e. for strong gravitational fields) were recently done. The slowing-down of one double pulsar system
and then another due to gravitational radiation were
measured to agree with GR models to good accuracy. For more info read what the Alfred Nobel Foundation have to say.
I should also point out that GR is rarely taught at science classes, or even to undergraduate physics majors. It is simple, but it requires considerable mathematical sophistication to even understand what it says (let alone compute with it).
Reading IMDb's history, it is interesting to note that
the site is owned by Jeff Bezos. I wonder if the advertizing revenue pays for the bills, or whether he supports this great service on a continuing basis.
IANAL, but the point is that the Federal Governmnet is excluded by default.
States (as well as the Federal Government and foreign countries) are soverign entities. As such, they are not legal persons in the ordinary sense of the word (unlike corporations, for example), and are not by default subject to most laws. Thus the ordinary reading of the word "whoever" will include all private entities, but exclude the States, as well as the Federal Government.
The main point is that you can't usually sue a state in Federal Court without its consent (this is known as "sovereign immunity" and codified in the 11th Amendment). Congress can abrogate this immunity in specific cases with exlicit language in the laws, and in this case they chose to do so: by redefining "whoever" to include the States. For an even more explicit version of this see what they did for Copyrights, at 17 USC 511.
In the US political philosophy, patents are not a right given by the government. Rather, they are a legal scheme created by the people (via the Constitution). In essence we have decided to give up our ability to apply certain ideas we hear about, in order to encourage people to tell us the ideas they have.
However, trusted with implementing this scheme is the Federal Government. In particular, our representatives there got to decide that patent law does not apply to the Federal Government. Note they have decided to make the several States subject to patent law.
Actually, the US Federal Government is immune to claims of patent infringement. As specified in 35 USC Ch. 28 Sec. 271:
(h) As used in this section, the term "whoever" includes any
State, any instrumentality of a State, and any officer or employee
of a State or instrumentality of a State acting in his official
capacity. Any State, and any such instrumentality, officer, or
employee, shall be subject to the provisions of this title in the
same manner and to the same extent as any nongovernmental entity.
It's not so simple. The DVD specification (especially the CSS part of it) is not open. To build a device that will play movies you need to pay the DVD Forum to license the "book" containing the specifications. There may also be a per-device fee. The license probabably doesn't force you to manufacture region-coded devices, but may (someone else might know this) require you to pay more. In any case hardware companies enjoy this distinction: it seems their profits are maximized by charging $80 for a regular DVD player, $300 for an region-free one.
This is a case where it's very important to at least read the press release, since the posting is somewhat misleading. This ruling and the jurisprudence it represents are fundamentally different from US court's views.
To start with, it's important to note that the guy was mainly selling illegally copied games, and was selling the modchips together with them so that these games would play. Thus the appeal was about whether the sale of the modchips was legal, even though they were sold to allow pirated games to play on the system.
Next, the brunt of the ruling is that while the act of copying the games was illegal, the modchips have no effect on that. The modchips only affect the loading of games to the console memory. And now comes the important bit:
"... computer programs are not reproduced in a material form in RAM and copies of cinematograph films are not made in RAM when games are played."
Note that in the US, running a program is thought to include an act of copying it from storage to RAM, and hence fall under the purview of copyright law.
Now, companies are allowed to use technology to restrict the loading of programs (this is about price discrimination), but you are allowed to modify a device you own, so modchips are legal even though they allow you to play copied games, indirectly helping you violate copyrights.
In fact, region coding is not protected. That's what the court said, but also clearly understood by Sony. While Sony's main motivation to oppose modchips may be their desire to enfore a price discrimination system, their legal argument was that the locked-down state of the PS2 is needed to prevent copyright infringement, and therefore the modchip should be thought of as a device to circumventa copy-protection system. Thankfully, the court didn't buy their argument.
Region Coding has to do with price discrimination, i.e. the desire of the media companies to charge different prices in different countries depending on what people will pay by preventing you from buying a DVD in Africa, and reselling it in the US. It is a techonology that they apply for economic reasons, and has nothing to do with the consumer. It is perfectly legal to buy a DVD that will ignore the coding (though they are much more expensive than regular ones). Computer programs that play DVDs ignore this coding too.
Making personal copies (warning: link discusses the copyright regime of the USA) has to do with copyright law. It's not about giving your copy to someone else, but about creating more copies. Just because you're allowed to modify your PS2 (for example, to play games bought in other regions) doesn't mean you are allowed to freely copy the games without paying for them.
I don't think you understand what digitally signed certificates are or how they work. The point of this idea (mostly encountered under the 'public key cryptography' umbrella) is that I can prove to you that I am who I claim to be without allowing you to impersonate me. In brief, the idea is as follows:
There exists two functions, "encrypt" and "decrypt" which are inverses to one another. The "encryption" function is publicly known, but only specific people (the TV in our example) knows how to "decrypt". Now the DVD player generates a random message, "encrypts" it, and gives the result to the TV. The TV "decrypts" it and returns the result, and the DVD can compare that to the original. Note that capturing the data in transit will do you no good -- the data was random! The "certificate" consisted in the ability to do something.
This depends, of course, on the encryption function being "one-way", in that it is very hard to compute the decryption functions from it. All modern cryptography depends on such functions. Finally, in case you were thinking of learning the secret ("decryption function") directly from the TV hardware, there exist tampre-proof chips that break when you try to do that.
Let me just point out that the fax client was added to Windows 3.11, and that a compressed file-system support was added to DOS 6.0 in response to several commercial offerings.
I admit my CAD reference was bad choice since I have no idea of that market. It still seems that all the alternatives you mention are commercial offerings -- in other words you are making my point for me.
"As with all DRM, if I can watch it once, I can record it without the DRM. I wish they'd understand that."
Actually, this is only approximately the case. Indeed, you can record any analog output they produce. However, high-quality output is going to be via digial channels, and they have total control over these (imagine a DVD player that doesn't output a picture unless the TV produced a digitally signed certificate).
Now, as long as no-one forced you to by DRM'ed media (i.e. it's private industry doing whatever they want with their product), it's difficult to argue against -- exactly because it has nothing to do with copyright law. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the ??AA will try to get Congress to pass a "DRM is mandatory" law (e.g. in response to the recent ruling on the Broadcast Flag).
Till then, expect to pay more for a Trusted-Computing free PC (think of it as your "??AA cartel tax").
I mean, there exist many fast IMAP clients. Certainly Pine is fast, some (e.g. myself) find it very convenient, and it should be easy to recompile for OS X. It is not free software though.
More seriously, today's software market is such that selling a small app for money is not likely to be profitable. Too many people will write email clients, editors, OS kernels... and give them away at no cost ("free as in beer"). Most of that software is actually Free Software (TM), but that's beside the point here. This is not dissimilar from the period in the 80s and early 90s when anytime someone would start selling a nice utility Microsoft would bundle similar functionality into DOS or Windows (anyone remember SideKick?). Today that means taht if your piece of software does something not too complicated, and many people would like to have this functionality, then someone will develop a free alternative. When it comes to web-browsing or e-mail reading, you have to content with massive efforts like the , which is even worse.
This is not to say there's room for commercial software today -- but it's in a different market. Since the cost of distributing software is now about zero, and the cost of writing it is effectively small (in the sense that many projects find many people are willing to donate their effots), to charge for software it must embody something more -- some kind of expensive research or expertise that is difficult to duplicate in a community project.
For example, GCC is a great cross-platform compiler, but if you need a good optimizing compiler you will pay for the real thing: 's ICC, or Sun's compilers. In a different field, there is little competition for AutoCAD.
Consumer Linux is more difficult
"... as you don't have a system admin or professional technician at home"
Is this to say that MS-Windows requires no system administration? I think the real difference is that Microsoft (and Dell) both offer customer support services for people who don't have WinXP administration skills, while Mandriva (and Dell) will not offer customer support for Linux.
Indeed, at-home Linux will be an "enthusiast-only" market until some form of commercial customer support becomes available. This can be from the OEM or from the makers of the distribution (perhaps the costs included in the price of the machine), or from the local computer store, but it has to exist. [clearly there is a chicken-and-egg problem here]
... Novell my have the right to dismiss SCO's suits agaist IBM and others, since they actually own the rights to the System V code.
Originally, SCO claimed to own copyrights to SVR4, and sued IBM for infringing their copyrights. Novell them claimed that they are the ones who own the copyright, and waived, on SCO's behalf, any claim of infringement. The current litigation (SCO v. Novell) is exactly about who owns these copyrights. It depends on the interpretation of a contract between AT&T (which owned Unix at the time) and the Santa Cruz Operation (a.k.a. "old SCO"). Later, AT&T transferred all rights to Novell, and old SCO sold its unix business (as well as the name "SCO" to the Canopy group.
Since then, SCO has changed their tune. They have amended the complaint and are now suing IBM for breach of contract instead, related to "project Monterey", a joint venture of SCO and IBM to develop an Intel-based unix port.
There are times when keystroke logging could be appropriate, like if you are in data entry- and they need to see how many wpms you are at.
Keystroke logging means recording your keystrokes, not simply counting them. I would say that if company policy was "your computer use may be monitored", they should be able to do so -- if you won't like this clause, you don't have to work there. Persumably this will lead to a compromise, especially if workers negotiate their contracts jointly.
As a brother post says, this is more-or-less the situation in the US, but not in Canada. There, privacy is a constitutional right which even private businesses have to respect. However, note that the ruling doesn't say that all logging is wrong -- just that in this case, there were less intrusive ways to evaluate the performance of that employee. Government regulation is another way to balance the competing concerns of the company and the individual.
It is exactly this kind of illegal downloading that would go away if they offered reasonably priced legitimate copies. It's true that they will have to offer some recording capability (probably with reduced resolution) -- people feel pretty strongly about their ability to record what they see on their TV.
However, for all the grandstanding of the media companies in the US, the real "piracy" (actually, a very bad term) problem they face is in the far east. The problem is not people downloading low-resolution copies of movies (which doesn't cost them much business), but entire factories which churn out illegally copied DVDs, and people who buy the cheap fakes rather than the expensive originals.
Having competing standards and companies in the field will make for better services for the users. Open standards are great, since they improve interoperability and reliability. For example, people can writing their own clients, etc.
However, the project is not open-source. At least, their about us page doesn't mention it. They only say:
At the core of Gizmo Project is a commitment to open standards
Methinks someone at the Register got confused. Those other clients written may be open-source or even free software, but the client they offer surely isn't. Their server software is not even offered for download (nor should it necessarily be -- that's what they want to make the money off, of course).
Note, thought, that the list you give represents a tiny fraction of all movies made in the 60's and 70's. Nearly all movies from that period have made by now nearly all the profit they would make anyway (say, 95% of it).
Next, note that all these movies made a lot of money at the time -- they were hugely successful. So much so, that the studios would have made them even if they would only get the profits from the first 30 years. In other words, for both kinds of movies 30 years is a long enough protection to motivate the studios to make them.
Now, remember why copyright law is there in the first place -- it's you and me realizing that without it, Steven Spielberg would not have made "Jaws". As long as a 28-year term would have sufficed to allow him to do it we're happy. In fact, a 28-year term would mean that you and me could remake the movie today if we wanted -- even better for us!
Finally, I doubt that even if free copies of "Casablanca" were available, people wouldn't buy "The Ring 2". People go to see good films for a different reason than when they look for mind-numbing entertainment. And recent flic you haven't seen usually has better entertainment value than an oldie.
Indeed, I made a very bad choice of wording. Ideas are certainly not copyrightable. What I meant is that copyright tries to strike the same balance with intangible creations that patent law does with physical inventions. The way it is done is by offering a monopoly on the way an idea is expressed,
Actually, special effects (especially CGI) are cheaper to buy than acting talent. Movie success is becoming increasingly dependent on star power, allowing the cast to command incredible salaries.
I think this has little bearing on the copyright debate though. Today, many people want to see Tom Cruise, and are willing to pay for it. A studio is thus justified in paying him US$20M to act in their movie. This is an investment they make -- they hope his name will attract move people to see the movie, thus increasing their profits. Now, the time frame for the studio to profit from this is actually quite short -- let's be conservative and say that it is no more than 30 years. After that, most people will only watch the movie for historical reasons, since there will be many newer releases with more current stars (e.g. Sean Connery).
What is my point? That, assuming 30 years is enough to make a profit (or not) from a movie, the motivation of the studio to make it (independently of how astronomical is the cost of productions) only depends on the returns during that period. Therefore, there is no need to give the studio a 95-year monopoly on reproduction of the movie. A copyright term of 14 years, renewable once [if the movie turned out to be good enough to make it worth their while] would be sufficient and will not reduce their innovation.
You wouldn't like it if someone broke into your workshop and took your day's work.
This is a false analogy -- here's a better one: say you make a horseshoe in your workshop. I then buy it from you. Is it now wrong for me to make my own horseshoes? These horseshoes I will make will not be taken from you -- they will be entirely my creation.
Now, society benefits from a supply of horseshoes, and you might not invent the horseshoe if, once you sold me one, I would never buy another from you. Therefore, society took an unusual step: by legal fiat, we will voluntarily give you a monopoly on your invention for a limited time, even though you can't force us to do it. Since it us doing it, we'll optimize the "limited time" to maximize the benefit to us -- long enough for you to make enough of a profit to justify spending time on creating new things, short enough so that we too can make a profit by making horseshoes. In fact, we realize that if we gave you a permanent monopoly you'll simply grow fat making horseshoes. On the other hand, but limiting the time of your current monopoly we hope you might decide to go back to the shop and invent something new (the crowbar?), so you can get a new monopoly.
Copyright law is based on the same principle, except now it's about ideas rather than physical invensions. Again, we need to strike a balance between allowing the authors to get a return on their investment of time and work, and between our desire to profit from their ideas by selling them as their are (reproduction) or reworking them in new ways (making derivative works).
Slashdot Mirror
You are way out of the ballpark, I'm afraid. These two new moon are larger than Phobos (diameter approx. 22Km) and Deimos (diameter approx. 12Km). The Earth (and its moon) Mars, Venus, Mercury, the Galilean Moons and Titan are thousands of kilometers across, but everything else is much smaller. Ceres (the largest asteriod) is only 914Km across.
A bunch of small white dots is very good, actually. The fact that both Pluto and Charon come out as extended objects in the short exposure picture is quite impressive in its own right. I wonder if the long exposure has better resolution or is smeared due to an imprefect correction for the relative motion of the telescope and Pluto. Any astronomers reading this?
Actually, Einstein had evidence for this theory from the get-go. At the mid-19th century a discrepancy in the percession of the perhelion of Mercury was found. Astronomical data and the Newtonian prediction disagree to the tune of 43 arc-seconds per century. This was one of the phenomena analyzed in Einstein's initial paper in 1916. As I try to explain below, there is overwhelming evidence that general relativity is highly accurate theory. It is certainly not the final theory (as stated, it doesn't jive well with quantum field theory), but it's one of the best scientific theories of all time: it's amazinginly simple and yet is accurage to within our measurement ability for a wide range of phenomena.
In fact, Eddington's observation of the bending of light from distance stars, originally hailed as a confirmation of GR, later turned out to have such large measurement errors to be completely useless. In this respect it is imperative to note that if light has mass (as predicted by special relativity [E=mc^2]) then light would also bend due to Newtonian gravity. The difference between Newton and Einstein here is a factor of two in the predicted bending, which is very small in any case.
Many more predictions of GR have been verified since. For example, the fact that the rate of passage of time depends on the gravitational field. I apologize for the bad pharsing (it would be technical to give details), but the actual experiment is easy to describe: you take two atomic clocks and synchronize them. You then put one at the top of a tower. Put the other one at the bottom of a well. Wait a few months then bring them together to the same point. You will say that less time elapsed from the point of view of the clock that felt the weaker graviational effect (i.e. the one from the tower).
As to "or the vast majority of my life, Newtonian physics will be good enough" -- I hope you will never have to rely on a GPS then. A GPS unit calculates its own position by comparing timing signals sent to it by several satellites. The effect described above (that time flows differently for the sattelite compared to the unit on earth) has to be accounted for or the system will not work. The fact that the GPS system can measure locations and distances to an accuracy of 1 metre can be considered a very accurate test of general relativity (among other things -- there's also a special relativistic time-dilation effect here, coming from the velocity of the satellite in orbit).
Finally, tests of general relativity in the so-called ``non-linear'' regime (i.e. for strong gravitational fields) were recently done. The slowing-down of one double pulsar system and then another due to gravitational radiation were measured to agree with GR models to good accuracy. For more info read what the Alfred Nobel Foundation have to say.
I should also point out that GR is rarely taught at science classes, or even to undergraduate physics majors. It is simple, but it requires considerable mathematical sophistication to even understand what it says (let alone compute with it).
Reading IMDb's history, it is interesting to note that the site is owned by Jeff Bezos. I wonder if the advertizing revenue pays for the bills, or whether he supports this great service on a continuing basis.
IANAL, but the point is that the Federal Governmnet is excluded by default.
States (as well as the Federal Government and foreign countries) are soverign entities. As such, they are not legal persons in the ordinary sense of the word (unlike corporations, for example), and are not by default subject to most laws. Thus the ordinary reading of the word "whoever" will include all private entities, but exclude the States, as well as the Federal Government.
The main point is that you can't usually sue a state in Federal Court without its consent (this is known as "sovereign immunity" and codified in the 11th Amendment). Congress can abrogate this immunity in specific cases with exlicit language in the laws, and in this case they chose to do so: by redefining "whoever" to include the States. For an even more explicit version of this see what they did for Copyrights, at 17 USC 511.
In the US political philosophy, patents are not a right given by the government. Rather, they are a legal scheme created by the people (via the Constitution). In essence we have decided to give up our ability to apply certain ideas we hear about, in order to encourage people to tell us the ideas they have.
However, trusted with implementing this scheme is the Federal Government. In particular, our representatives there got to decide that patent law does not apply to the Federal Government. Note they have decided to make the several States subject to patent law.
It says that the States, including state-government organizations etc., can infringe copyrights. The Federal Government is not a State.
Actually, the US Federal Government is immune to claims of patent infringement. As specified in 35 USC Ch. 28 Sec. 271:
It's not so simple. The DVD specification (especially the CSS part of it) is not open. To build a device that will play movies you need to pay the DVD Forum to license the "book" containing the specifications. There may also be a per-device fee. The license probabably doesn't force you to manufacture region-coded devices, but may (someone else might know this) require you to pay more. In any case hardware companies enjoy this distinction: it seems their profits are maximized by charging $80 for a regular DVD player, $300 for an region-free one.
This is a case where it's very important to at least read the press release, since the posting is somewhat misleading. This ruling and the jurisprudence it represents are fundamentally different from US court's views.
To start with, it's important to note that the guy was mainly selling illegally copied games, and was selling the modchips together with them so that these games would play. Thus the appeal was about whether the sale of the modchips was legal, even though they were sold to allow pirated games to play on the system.
Next, the brunt of the ruling is that while the act of copying the games was illegal, the modchips have no effect on that. The modchips only affect the loading of games to the console memory. And now comes the important bit:
Note that in the US, running a program is thought to include an act of copying it from storage to RAM, and hence fall under the purview of copyright law.Now, companies are allowed to use technology to restrict the loading of programs (this is about price discrimination), but you are allowed to modify a device you own, so modchips are legal even though they allow you to play copied games, indirectly helping you violate copyrights.
In fact, region coding is not protected. That's what the court said, but also clearly understood by Sony. While Sony's main motivation to oppose modchips may be their desire to enfore a price discrimination system, their legal argument was that the locked-down state of the PS2 is needed to prevent copyright infringement, and therefore the modchip should be thought of as a device to circumventa copy-protection system. Thankfully, the court didn't buy their argument.
Two separate issues:
Region Coding has to do with price discrimination, i.e. the desire of the media companies to charge different prices in different countries depending on what people will pay by preventing you from buying a DVD in Africa, and reselling it in the US. It is a techonology that they apply for economic reasons, and has nothing to do with the consumer. It is perfectly legal to buy a DVD that will ignore the coding (though they are much more expensive than regular ones). Computer programs that play DVDs ignore this coding too.
Making personal copies (warning: link discusses the copyright regime of the USA) has to do with copyright law. It's not about giving your copy to someone else, but about creating more copies. Just because you're allowed to modify your PS2 (for example, to play games bought in other regions) doesn't mean you are allowed to freely copy the games without paying for them.
I don't think you understand what digitally signed certificates are or how they work. The point of this idea (mostly encountered under the 'public key cryptography' umbrella) is that I can prove to you that I am who I claim to be without allowing you to impersonate me. In brief, the idea is as follows:
There exists two functions, "encrypt" and "decrypt" which are inverses to one another. The "encryption" function is publicly known, but only specific people (the TV in our example) knows how to "decrypt". Now the DVD player generates a random message, "encrypts" it, and gives the result to the TV. The TV "decrypts" it and returns the result, and the DVD can compare that to the original. Note that capturing the data in transit will do you no good -- the data was random! The "certificate" consisted in the ability to do something.
This depends, of course, on the encryption function being "one-way", in that it is very hard to compute the decryption functions from it. All modern cryptography depends on such functions. Finally, in case you were thinking of learning the secret ("decryption function") directly from the TV hardware, there exist tampre-proof chips that break when you try to do that.
Let me just point out that the fax client was added to Windows 3.11, and that a compressed file-system support was added to DOS 6.0 in response to several commercial offerings.
I admit my CAD reference was bad choice since I have no idea of that market. It still seems that all the alternatives you mention are commercial offerings -- in other words you are making my point for me.
Actually, this is only approximately the case. Indeed, you can record any analog output they produce. However, high-quality output is going to be via digial channels, and they have total control over these (imagine a DVD player that doesn't output a picture unless the TV produced a digitally signed certificate).
Now, as long as no-one forced you to by DRM'ed media (i.e. it's private industry doing whatever they want with their product), it's difficult to argue against -- exactly because it has nothing to do with copyright law. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the ??AA will try to get Congress to pass a "DRM is mandatory" law (e.g. in response to the recent ruling on the Broadcast Flag).
Till then, expect to pay more for a Trusted-Computing free PC (think of it as your "??AA cartel tax").
I mean, there exist many fast IMAP clients. Certainly Pine is fast, some (e.g. myself) find it very convenient, and it should be easy to recompile for OS X. It is not free software though.
More seriously, today's software market is such that selling a small app for money is not likely to be profitable. Too many people will write email clients, editors, OS kernels ... and give them away at no cost ("free as in beer"). Most of that software is actually Free Software (TM), but that's beside the point here. This is not dissimilar from the period in the 80s and early 90s when anytime someone would start selling a nice utility Microsoft would bundle similar functionality into DOS or Windows (anyone remember SideKick?). Today that means taht if your piece of software does something not too complicated, and many people would like to have this functionality, then someone will develop a free alternative. When it comes to web-browsing or e-mail reading, you have to content with massive efforts like the , which is even worse.
This is not to say there's room for commercial software today -- but it's in a different market. Since the cost of distributing software is now about zero, and the cost of writing it is effectively small (in the sense that many projects find many people are willing to donate their effots), to charge for software it must embody something more -- some kind of expensive research or expertise that is difficult to duplicate in a community project.
For example, GCC is a great cross-platform compiler, but if you need a good optimizing compiler you will pay for the real thing: 's ICC, or Sun's compilers. In a different field, there is little competition for AutoCAD.
Originally, SCO claimed to own copyrights to SVR4, and sued IBM for infringing their copyrights. Novell them claimed that they are the ones who own the copyright, and waived, on SCO's behalf, any claim of infringement. The current litigation (SCO v. Novell) is exactly about who owns these copyrights. It depends on the interpretation of a contract between AT&T (which owned Unix at the time) and the Santa Cruz Operation (a.k.a. "old SCO"). Later, AT&T transferred all rights to Novell, and old SCO sold its unix business (as well as the name "SCO" to the Canopy group.
Since then, SCO has changed their tune. They have amended the complaint and are now suing IBM for breach of contract instead, related to "project Monterey", a joint venture of SCO and IBM to develop an Intel-based unix port.
Keystroke logging means recording your keystrokes, not simply counting them. I would say that if company policy was "your computer use may be monitored", they should be able to do so -- if you won't like this clause, you don't have to work there. Persumably this will lead to a compromise, especially if workers negotiate their contracts jointly.
As a brother post says, this is more-or-less the situation in the US, but not in Canada. There, privacy is a constitutional right which even private businesses have to respect. However, note that the ruling doesn't say that all logging is wrong -- just that in this case, there were less intrusive ways to evaluate the performance of that employee. Government regulation is another way to balance the competing concerns of the company and the individual.
It is exactly this kind of illegal downloading that would go away if they offered reasonably priced legitimate copies. It's true that they will have to offer some recording capability (probably with reduced resolution) -- people feel pretty strongly about their ability to record what they see on their TV.
However, for all the grandstanding of the media companies in the US, the real "piracy" (actually, a very bad term) problem they face is in the far east. The problem is not people downloading low-resolution copies of movies (which doesn't cost them much business), but entire factories which churn out illegally copied DVDs, and people who buy the cheap fakes rather than the expensive originals.
Having competing standards and companies in the field will make for better services for the users. Open standards are great, since they improve interoperability and reliability. For example, people can writing their own clients, etc.
However, the project is not open-source. At least, their about us page doesn't mention it. They only say:
Methinks someone at the Register got confused. Those other clients written may be open-source or even free software, but the client they offer surely isn't. Their server software is not even offered for download (nor should it necessarily be -- that's what they want to make the money off, of course).Note, thought, that the list you give represents a tiny fraction of all movies made in the 60's and 70's. Nearly all movies from that period have made by now nearly all the profit they would make anyway (say, 95% of it).
Next, note that all these movies made a lot of money at the time -- they were hugely successful. So much so, that the studios would have made them even if they would only get the profits from the first 30 years. In other words, for both kinds of movies 30 years is a long enough protection to motivate the studios to make them.
Now, remember why copyright law is there in the first place -- it's you and me realizing that without it, Steven Spielberg would not have made "Jaws". As long as a 28-year term would have sufficed to allow him to do it we're happy. In fact, a 28-year term would mean that you and me could remake the movie today if we wanted -- even better for us!
Finally, I doubt that even if free copies of "Casablanca" were available, people wouldn't buy "The Ring 2". People go to see good films for a different reason than when they look for mind-numbing entertainment. And recent flic you haven't seen usually has better entertainment value than an oldie.
Indeed, I made a very bad choice of wording. Ideas are certainly not copyrightable. What I meant is that copyright tries to strike the same balance with intangible creations that patent law does with physical inventions. The way it is done is by offering a monopoly on the way an idea is expressed,
Actually, special effects (especially CGI) are cheaper to buy than acting talent. Movie success is becoming increasingly dependent on star power, allowing the cast to command incredible salaries.
I think this has little bearing on the copyright debate though. Today, many people want to see Tom Cruise, and are willing to pay for it. A studio is thus justified in paying him US$20M to act in their movie. This is an investment they make -- they hope his name will attract move people to see the movie, thus increasing their profits. Now, the time frame for the studio to profit from this is actually quite short -- let's be conservative and say that it is no more than 30 years. After that, most people will only watch the movie for historical reasons, since there will be many newer releases with more current stars (e.g. Sean Connery).
What is my point? That, assuming 30 years is enough to make a profit (or not) from a movie, the motivation of the studio to make it (independently of how astronomical is the cost of productions) only depends on the returns during that period. Therefore, there is no need to give the studio a 95-year monopoly on reproduction of the movie. A copyright term of 14 years, renewable once [if the movie turned out to be good enough to make it worth their while] would be sufficient and will not reduce their innovation.
This is a false analogy -- here's a better one: say you make a horseshoe in your workshop. I then buy it from you. Is it now wrong for me to make my own horseshoes? These horseshoes I will make will not be taken from you -- they will be entirely my creation.
Now, society benefits from a supply of horseshoes, and you might not invent the horseshoe if, once you sold me one, I would never buy another from you. Therefore, society took an unusual step: by legal fiat, we will voluntarily give you a monopoly on your invention for a limited time, even though you can't force us to do it. Since it us doing it, we'll optimize the "limited time" to maximize the benefit to us -- long enough for you to make enough of a profit to justify spending time on creating new things, short enough so that we too can make a profit by making horseshoes. In fact, we realize that if we gave you a permanent monopoly you'll simply grow fat making horseshoes. On the other hand, but limiting the time of your current monopoly we hope you might decide to go back to the shop and invent something new (the crowbar?), so you can get a new monopoly.
Copyright law is based on the same principle, except now it's about ideas rather than physical invensions. Again, we need to strike a balance between allowing the authors to get a return on their investment of time and work, and between our desire to profit from their ideas by selling them as their are (reproduction) or reworking them in new ways (making derivative works).