It doesn't mean that the cow are fed cow meat at all. The prion that cause BSE can be created naturally through mutation, and then reproduce. This kind of mutation happens very occasionally, but it does happen often enough that we have seen it happen several times. This is believed to be such a case; to quote the Associated Press coverage:
Clifford said the California cow is what scientists call an atypical case of BSE, meaning that it didn't get the disease from eating infected cattle feed, which is important.
That means it's "just a random mutation that can happen every once in a great while in an animal," said Bruce Akey, director of the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Cornell University.
Norway has relatively strict gun control. We still had the Breivik situation.
I'm in favor of of gun control, but not for this reason - to decrease the overall amounts of guns going around, and the attitude towards guns. However, it won't solve the lone gunman problem.
As far as I understand, by Title 17, Section 602 of the American copyright law:
602. Infringing importation of copies or phonorecords (a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106 [17 USC 106], actionable under section 501 [17 USC 501].
If he had bought a "license only for region X", then he would have contracted for a license, there would be no sale of goods for the doctrine of first sale to apply. But he didn't, he bought a good, it's his, and the doctrine of first sale should apply. Only this particular circumstance for that doctrine, which includes copyright treaties in addition to US copyright law, has never been tested by the Supreme Court, so they are willing to take it up to settle the issue. Hopefully, they'll rule in the judicial conservative manner and uphold the doctrine of first sale, rather than the political "Conservative" way and side with big money. (IANAL, I don't know the details of the Berne Convention or other treaties, YMMV, etc.)
IANAL too.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a piece of US law that change this for copyrighted works, to wit:
Title 17, Section 602 of the American copyright law: 602. Infringing importation of copies or phonorecords (a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106 [17 USC 106], actionable under section 501 [17 USC 501].
There's supposedly an exception for single copies intended for personal use, also if these are incidentally resold.
I have the impression that the same kind of effect as the above statute could be created without the statute, e.g. by specifically *not* licensing the subsidiary to reproduce the book, but just have a non-enforcement agreement; that way, the merchandise would technically be counterfeit. It's also problematic to have it work the other way around; mandatory licensing in other countries could be used to basically gut copyright in the US, the way it was done by e.g. allofmp3.com
I'm on the fence about whether first sale should apply in this case; I think it probably should, but both directions have a lot of problems. Ideally, we'd have all the world at roughly purchasing power parity (and payment/hour for the same skilled labor) - alas, we're not anywhere near that.
Again: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I agree with you in normal, sanity-based views.
However, the law here seems to be clearly against us:
Title 17, Section 602 of the American copyright law: 602. Infringing importation of copies or phonorecords (a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106 [17 USC 106], actionable under section 501 [17 USC 501].
And even if it didn't, there would be tricks to get around it. E.g, the US company could refuse to license the work to its subsidiary, and just have an agreement not to prosecute in the other country, but would prosecute copies that showed up in the US. They would all technically be "counterfeit" but it would be a non-problem except in the US (and all other counterfeits would be a problem.)
Let's start with me saying that I think you are right in thinking the publishers are price-gouging - but your argument isn't sufficient to show that.
A publisher has a cost of C for creating the content of a book, and an incremental cost of I for producing a copy, it sells at price P, and it sells X copies. It will have an incremental income of P-I for each copy sold, and a total profit on the project of (copies sold)*(price - incremental cost) - content costs (X*(P-I) - C).
If it has two different segmented markets, like in the above example, it will still have C for the overall content costs, and then P1 and I1 (say, US sales with $90 price and $15 production cost), and P2 and I2 (say, Indian sales at $9 price and $5 production cost.) The overall profit will be X1*(P1-I1) + X2*(P2-I2) - C - in this example, (us sales)*$75 + (indian sales)*$4 - (content costs).
Transitioning US sales to $4 per book can easily make the project have a loss if the content costs are high, even if there *is* an incremental income per copy. In this case, the Indian income is just a bonus - it's all the market can bear, so the publisher will accept it, but it's the US (and probably European) sales that actually carry the cost of the production of the content, and not providing it to the Indian market would just make it more expensive to the US/European consumers; as would selling it at a higher price there, as the market just couldn't purchase at the higher price.
Of course, lots of academic textbooks are sold with hardly anything paid to the author, so I think the publishing industry is probably engaging in price gouging (as the cost of content should be close to zero). But that's where the argument is; that they can do physical production and resale at a lower price don't mean that there is an option of having a lower price in the market that bear the brunt of the cost. It could be that the entire project goes in zero profit and these prices are the best possible; we need other evidence than the price differential to show it is different.
I'm not the OP, and I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I would argue that first sale should cover things that are "licensed only for region X" to also be used in region Y; that a sale of an information good to the general public include a license that can be re-sold, and that region restrictions cannot apply.
As it is, I believe that isn't generally applied; copyright licenses are granted by area, and importing into a different area for re-sale is not necessarily legal. I'm not sure if importing into a region for personal use is always considered OK - I hope it in general is, because I brought my collection of DVDs and CDs with me when I relocated to the US, and would hate to have them deemed contraband.
It wouldn't have been DNA; DNA is too complicated and has problems replicating without a bunch of machinery. RNA is one possibility, though I personally have the feel that it is too complicated as well. One example of a hypothesed simpler pathway is Cairn-Smith's Clay hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Clay_hypothesis) though experiments indicate that clay crystals likely aren't stable enough to work for this purpose. However, there only needs to be some kind of material with the right properties, and then evolution rapidly creates variation and more advanced structures. (For more on abiogenesis, you may want to see the nice talk.origins FAQ at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html)
I did not put it together, but did take it out of the box. And it wasn't for not looking right - it was for not actually being the thing I thought I bought *and* being broken. Normally, I'd accept a repair/fix for something that's broken, but as it was the wrong thing, I explained the situation and IKEA accepted a return.
In detail: I had, I thought, bought four bases and four tops for cabinets. I opened and started putting together one of the tops, noticed that it was missing a screw, and opened and got the screw out of a second top and finished the one I'd started building. I then tried putting it on top of the base - and then found the top didn't fit, and was intended for wall mount. I then went back to IKEA and returned the top I'd opened for the screw (and the two unopened ones), and bought the four tops that actually went with the bases. (I was also left with an unusable wall mountable cabinet, which I later threw out.)
BTW, returns in a bookshop - I would have thought that was fine as long as the book was in perfect shape (ie, unread, etc)? Returns of unread books is standard practice for especially holiday gifts in Norway, where I'm from. Is the problem that people lack a decent library (or decency) and treat the bookshop as a library?
As someone who doesn't abuse that, I welcome the move so we honest people get things cheaper
Are you someone who might honestly need to return two items at two different times in the course of three months?
So far not at Best Buy, but I've regularly done this at IKEA - I'll pick up things I'm not 100% sure we'll need, and then return the things we don't need (or where I was just wrong). I've spent close to $10,000 at IKEA the last year and returned maybe $300 worth of things - with all the return value immediately spent at IKEA again. They have a lot of advertisements saying that it's OK to change your mind, so I assume they're fine with it - and I know I've bought more there than I would have if I had to carefully consider each thing and consult with my wife before getting it instead of after.
I've also found returns to usually be possible the other countries I've lived in (Norway, Ireland). I would suspect that this does not drive up prices, because it presumably leads to higher income for the store than not offering it, or the stores wouldn't. I know I've seen recommendations to offer this for new businesses - it makes it much easier to get customers, because the customers take less of a risk, and the amount of customers that use it is small enough that it isn't a problem. Basically, it's treated as a marketing expense, and is a fairly minor one.
I know it affect me personally; I do buy some things I'm uncertain about because I can return them, and usually end up keeping them. I'll also say I don't abuse the system - with the single exception of small piece of furniture from IKEA that for complicated reasons were opened by mistake, I've only returned things in their original, shrink wrapped form, and done exchange on things that were broken when I got them.)
A better analogy: We've found car keys on a road once, so when looking for more car keys, we choose to focus on roads, rather than elsewhere, like hillsides and ocean.
Of course, the ideal place to look for lost car keys is in bars, but we don't know that - we've only found the one set.
And who cares about that?, we are stillt talking about Open Source. if this helps make development faster by reusing more code It's certainly welcome. If *BSD users want this functionality, they can write a compatibility layer, the same way they did with ALSA, then they have the source code for Wayland available.
Otherwise, they are giving Wayand devs the burden of mantaining all the ports and even their own video drivers (like in X11)
"Do not tightly depend on Linux-specific features" and "maintain your own ports" are different. There's significant differences between writing reasonably portable code (which I think it is fine to ask for) and to fully deal with creating all kinds of infrastructure (which I don't think it is reasonable to ask for.) systemd is a seemingly OK solution to a problem that's been solved a number of different ways, with intentional direct Linux dependency, created by somebody (Lennart Poettering) that works for a Linux company (Red Hat) and would have advantages to blocking off other ways of dealing with things. This has also been stopped systemd from being used by some other Linux distributions, but the author is pushing for direct dependency on systemd. I interpret that as partially ego-driven (he'd like his software used), and partially personally philosophically based (he's a consistent GPL-user) with even more than normal Linux blinders on.
I'm saying "Embrace, extend, extinguish" because there are developers that very specifically tries to tie things to Linux. Wayland specifically damages it: It creates a new path which is likely to be used by significant amounts of applications, and which means those applications won't work except with Wayland.
And no, it will not be feasible to keep using old versions of things if the world moves along. It is e.g. not feasible to use an old web browser, both due to the web itself evolving and the now known security issues. You're effectively forced to upgrade a lot of things; staying with the old does not mean keeping the old features, it means losing features.
Due to selection bias, such numbers say very little. If a case would be obviously won - in either direction - then it will most likely be settled instead of going to court.
"Would be obviously won" applies to very few pre-litigation patent disputes. One look at the reversal rates at the Federal Circuit would be enough to tell you that, to say nothing of the uncertainty created by Supreme Court decisions, Federal Circuit en banc cases, and the America Invents Act.
These numbers can't be drawn conclusions from either; they have similar types of bias.
Anyway, are you suggesting that NPEs have caused a significant increase in out-of-court patent disputes all involving either obviously strong or obviously weak patents? If the patents are that obviously weak, then what's the problem? And if the patents are so obviously strong that the defendants don't bother going to court, then it sounds like there's not a problem with NPEs abusing weak patents.
And if there had been such an enormous swell in the number of out-of-court patent disputes one would expect significant spillover into the courts because of close cases. Remember that an alleged infringer can easily drag the patentee into court via a declaratory judgment action. In fact, it is almost impossible to discuss a license agreement without triggering declaratory judgment jurisdiction. So it's not like the NPEs have complete control over whether a dispute ends up in court; far from it, in fact.
I'm only suggesting not drawing conclusions from numbers that have significant bias in them. In this case, I think the conclusion is right but the inference is wrong.
In more depth:
I believe the quality of software patents is horrible; and I believe both PEs and NPE mostly play with patents that should never have been issued. However, agreeing with the conclusion doesn't make me agree with the way it is argued - I want my side to come with strong and rational arguments.
"Lots of cases are lost" by itself doesn't really indicate anything about the average quality of patents. Assuming equal resources on both sides and that the cost/benefit of licensing is evenly distributed, the naive equilibrium should be that 50% of the cases go in either direction; if the win looks more obvious in either direction, pre-litigation agreement should become more and more likely. If we have a disparity in the number of cases won, it should indicate either bad evaluation, unrealistic licensing requirements, or disparity in the value of enforcing/not enforcing the patent on the patent owner and patent target side.
The 39% (Practicing Entity) could be the result of companies fighting harder because otherwise they would be forced to shut down (compared to the patent owner getting some extra revenue), and the patent owner cutting their legal costs. My intuition is that the natural state with most patents being valid would be for the patent owner to win more than 50% of the cases, as they sometimes want to shut down a competitor, and that competitor then logically would fight even with bad odds - but the situation is complicated enough that there could easily be other confounding factors that I can't think of.
The 23% (Non-Practicing Entity) could be the result of the practicing entities keeping the best patents for themselves, leaving the NPEs with the few garbage patents that exists - but the NPEs still can make money off suing with garbage patents, so they do. Again, I don't believe that is what is happening - I believe patents are granted way too easily, and possibly should not be granted at all, for any field - but I don't think the win/loss numbers shed any light on the overall quality level.
Second, please note that all comments in this post are regarding unix or linux as a desktop operating system as opposed to HPC or server-based usage.
Now to move on: Currently the only wayland compositor implementation is weston. Weston requires kms, which makes it pragmatically linux-only, and it also requires udev, which makes it *actually* linux-only. To compound the problem, the developers are talking about integrating it with systemd. When asked how that will affect porting efforts, developer response was along the lines of "just port systemd to bsd."
This is a prime example of Linux developers doing "Embrace, extend, extinguish" on Unix. "We're dominant - let's lock everything down to our solution, and force anybody else to play catchup."
It may not be particularly intentional to damage other systems - having Linux blinders on, it's easy to see "All the world's a Linux machine", just like it used to be "All the world's a VAX" and "All the world's a Windows machine" - but it does the same kind of damage as if it was intentional.
Due to selection bias, such numbers say very little. If a case would be obviously won - in either direction - then it will most likely be settled instead of going to court.
I doubt it is the vast majority; but I will believe it is the vast majority of your social circle. Among my social circle (which does not include teenagers), people mostly do not trade in games. We do buy some used, but the only cases I've heard of people trading in games is when they clearly felt the game sucked.
I suspect the teenager gamers do the trade ins; and also some fair amount of hardcore gamers. The latter clearly buy a higher number of games - but the question is how much profit it leads to for the game developers. If they buy and resell, it's a low profit per unit - and each time one of us that don't resell buy a used game, it creates a loss of almost the same number of dollars as we pay for the game developer, assuming we're price sensitive enough that we'd only buy it at that price. Or more dollars, if we would have been willing to pay more but got a used game because it was or would become available.
Now, locking out used games would lijkely also lock out using the games at a friend's house, and lending/borrowing games, and using the games without an Internet connection. The latter is a dealbreaker for me; not being able to borrow and lend would also be annoying.
Assuming he would not otherwise buy the game. If he would otherwise buy they game, you lose one sale.
My limitation on buying games is mostly time to play them; I have a fair amount of disposable income, but little time. I pick up used games because I don't care much about release dates, and I don't see any reason to just throw money away. I'd probably buy fewer games in total but more new games if there was no used games market. And I don't buy DLC; I don't trust the security of games publishers.
If there are lots of people like me in the market, then blocking used sales makes more profit. If there are lots of people that buy DLC and are restricted by money, it may be more profit in letting the resale market run.
I'm not entirely clear what I think of all of this - I know I think I should be allowed to use my own hardware fully and be allowed to use content I buy on all hardware I have access to that is capable of running it. Resale is tricky; it works OK when it's tied to a physical object, but not so well when it's an online transfer, as there is perfect fidelity on the transferred good as well as close to zero transaction costs, making it ultimately end up as "buy a used copy each time you are about to use something, resell it when you're finished" - and as soon as that market is 100% functioning, the producer would only get paid for the number of copies that are concurrently in use at the same time. That's only sustainable if the initial price is much, much higher than what we see today.
I have no pirated HD movies; but for a long while, I had a Blu ray player (first bought for future proofing after my DVD player died) and a 30" monitor *and no way to actually watch HD content*. My contention is that HDCP has likely not stopped a single case of piracy, but it has clearly stopped a lot of purchasing of BluRays.
After I got something that was HDCP compliant, I've actually also had to give up on my PS3, because it has some bug in HDCP negotiation, and would only sync with HDCP displays occasionally.
I complain about DRM because it cause me trouble, trouble that shouldn't exist. And I don't think it does anything good for the movie industry either.
That I have closed my door does not give you the right to superglue my door shut without my permission.
That congress has passed laws does not give the president the right to sign a treaty that lock those (or similar laws) on the book permanently without congress' permission.
Stopping ACTA becoming a formally accepted treaty is a first step in making sure the laws in question can be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't mean that the cow are fed cow meat at all. The prion that cause BSE can be created naturally through mutation, and then reproduce. This kind of mutation happens very occasionally, but it does happen often enough that we have seen it happen several times. This is believed to be such a case; to quote the Associated Press coverage:
Eivind.
Norway has relatively strict gun control. We still had the Breivik situation.
I'm in favor of of gun control, but not for this reason - to decrease the overall amounts of guns going around, and the attitude towards guns. However, it won't solve the lone gunman problem.
Eivind.
As far as I understand, by Title 17, Section 602 of the American copyright law:
602. Infringing importation of copies or phonorecords (a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106 [17 USC 106], actionable under section 501 [17 USC 501].
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
Eivind.
If he had bought a "license only for region X", then he would have contracted for a license, there would be no sale of goods for the doctrine of first sale to apply. But he didn't, he bought a good, it's his, and the doctrine of first sale should apply. Only this particular circumstance for that doctrine, which includes copyright treaties in addition to US copyright law, has never been tested by the Supreme Court, so they are willing to take it up to settle the issue. Hopefully, they'll rule in the judicial conservative manner and uphold the doctrine of first sale, rather than the political "Conservative" way and side with big money. (IANAL, I don't know the details of the Berne Convention or other treaties, YMMV, etc.)
IANAL too.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a piece of US law that change this for copyrighted works, to wit:
Title 17, Section 602 of the American copyright law:
602. Infringing importation of copies or phonorecords (a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106 [17 USC 106], actionable under section 501 [17 USC 501].
There's supposedly an exception for single copies intended for personal use, also if these are incidentally resold.
I have the impression that the same kind of effect as the above statute could be created without the statute, e.g. by specifically *not* licensing the subsidiary to reproduce the book, but just have a non-enforcement agreement; that way, the merchandise would technically be counterfeit. It's also problematic to have it work the other way around; mandatory licensing in other countries could be used to basically gut copyright in the US, the way it was done by e.g. allofmp3.com
I'm on the fence about whether first sale should apply in this case; I think it probably should, but both directions have a lot of problems. Ideally, we'd have all the world at roughly purchasing power parity (and payment/hour for the same skilled labor) - alas, we're not anywhere near that.
Eivind.
Again: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I agree with you in normal, sanity-based views.
However, the law here seems to be clearly against us:
Title 17, Section 602 of the American copyright law:
602. Infringing importation of copies or phonorecords (a) Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106 [17 USC 106], actionable under section 501 [17 USC 501].
And even if it didn't, there would be tricks to get around it. E.g, the US company could refuse to license the work to its subsidiary, and just have an agreement not to prosecute in the other country, but would prosecute copies that showed up in the US. They would all technically be "counterfeit" but it would be a non-problem except in the US (and all other counterfeits would be a problem.)
Let's start with me saying that I think you are right in thinking the publishers are price-gouging - but your argument isn't sufficient to show that.
A publisher has a cost of C for creating the content of a book, and an incremental cost of I for producing a copy, it sells at price P, and it sells X copies. It will have an incremental income of P-I for each copy sold, and a total profit on the project of (copies sold)*(price - incremental cost) - content costs (X*(P-I) - C).
If it has two different segmented markets, like in the above example, it will still have C for the overall content costs, and then P1 and I1 (say, US sales with $90 price and $15 production cost), and P2 and I2 (say, Indian sales at $9 price and $5 production cost.) The overall profit will be X1*(P1-I1) + X2*(P2-I2) - C - in this example, (us sales)*$75 + (indian sales)*$4 - (content costs).
Transitioning US sales to $4 per book can easily make the project have a loss if the content costs are high, even if there *is* an incremental income per copy. In this case, the Indian income is just a bonus - it's all the market can bear, so the publisher will accept it, but it's the US (and probably European) sales that actually carry the cost of the production of the content, and not providing it to the Indian market would just make it more expensive to the US/European consumers; as would selling it at a higher price there, as the market just couldn't purchase at the higher price.
Of course, lots of academic textbooks are sold with hardly anything paid to the author, so I think the publishing industry is probably engaging in price gouging (as the cost of content should be close to zero). But that's where the argument is; that they can do physical production and resale at a lower price don't mean that there is an option of having a lower price in the market that bear the brunt of the cost. It could be that the entire project goes in zero profit and these prices are the best possible; we need other evidence than the price differential to show it is different.
I'm not the OP, and I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I would argue that first sale should cover things that are "licensed only for region X" to also be used in region Y; that a sale of an information good to the general public include a license that can be re-sold, and that region restrictions cannot apply.
As it is, I believe that isn't generally applied; copyright licenses are granted by area, and importing into a different area for re-sale is not necessarily legal. I'm not sure if importing into a region for personal use is always considered OK - I hope it in general is, because I brought my collection of DVDs and CDs with me when I relocated to the US, and would hate to have them deemed contraband.
It wouldn't have been DNA; DNA is too complicated and has problems replicating without a bunch of machinery. RNA is one possibility, though I personally have the feel that it is too complicated as well. One example of a hypothesed simpler pathway is Cairn-Smith's Clay hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Clay_hypothesis) though experiments indicate that clay crystals likely aren't stable enough to work for this purpose. However, there only needs to be some kind of material with the right properties, and then evolution rapidly creates variation and more advanced structures. (For more on abiogenesis, you may want to see the nice talk.origins FAQ at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html)
Which country do you live in?
I did not put it together, but did take it out of the box. And it wasn't for not looking right - it was for not actually being the thing I thought I bought *and* being broken. Normally, I'd accept a repair/fix for something that's broken, but as it was the wrong thing, I explained the situation and IKEA accepted a return.
In detail: I had, I thought, bought four bases and four tops for cabinets. I opened and started putting together one of the tops, noticed that it was missing a screw, and opened and got the screw out of a second top and finished the one I'd started building. I then tried putting it on top of the base - and then found the top didn't fit, and was intended for wall mount. I then went back to IKEA and returned the top I'd opened for the screw (and the two unopened ones), and bought the four tops that actually went with the bases. (I was also left with an unusable wall mountable cabinet, which I later threw out.)
BTW, returns in a bookshop - I would have thought that was fine as long as the book was in perfect shape (ie, unread, etc)? Returns of unread books is standard practice for especially holiday gifts in Norway, where I'm from. Is the problem that people lack a decent library (or decency) and treat the bookshop as a library?
++!
(I've done the same. I keep meaning to write a letter to them saying that.)
As someone who doesn't abuse that, I welcome the move so we honest people get things cheaper
Are you someone who might honestly need to return two items at two different times in the course of three months?
So far not at Best Buy, but I've regularly done this at IKEA - I'll pick up things I'm not 100% sure we'll need, and then return the things we don't need (or where I was just wrong). I've spent close to $10,000 at IKEA the last year and returned maybe $300 worth of things - with all the return value immediately spent at IKEA again. They have a lot of advertisements saying that it's OK to change your mind, so I assume they're fine with it - and I know I've bought more there than I would have if I had to carefully consider each thing and consult with my wife before getting it instead of after.
Eivind.
From what I can tell, allowing returns is a store policy thing rather than a US law; see e.g. http://www.enotes.com/consumer-issues-reference/purchases-and-returns#returning-consumer-purchases
I've also found returns to usually be possible the other countries I've lived in (Norway, Ireland). I would suspect that this does not drive up prices, because it presumably leads to higher income for the store than not offering it, or the stores wouldn't. I know I've seen recommendations to offer this for new businesses - it makes it much easier to get customers, because the customers take less of a risk, and the amount of customers that use it is small enough that it isn't a problem. Basically, it's treated as a marketing expense, and is a fairly minor one.
I know it affect me personally; I do buy some things I'm uncertain about because I can return them, and usually end up keeping them. I'll also say I don't abuse the system - with the single exception of small piece of furniture from IKEA that for complicated reasons were opened by mistake, I've only returned things in their original, shrink wrapped form, and done exchange on things that were broken when I got them.)
A better analogy: We've found car keys on a road once, so when looking for more car keys, we choose to focus on roads, rather than elsewhere, like hillsides and ocean.
Of course, the ideal place to look for lost car keys is in bars, but we don't know that - we've only found the one set.
And who cares about that?, we are stillt talking about Open Source. if this helps make development faster by reusing more code It's certainly welcome. If *BSD users want this functionality, they can write a compatibility layer, the same way they did with ALSA, then they have the source code for Wayland available.
Otherwise, they are giving Wayand devs the burden of mantaining all the ports and even their own video drivers (like in X11)
"Do not tightly depend on Linux-specific features" and "maintain your own ports" are different. There's significant differences between writing reasonably portable code (which I think it is fine to ask for) and to fully deal with creating all kinds of infrastructure (which I don't think it is reasonable to ask for.) systemd is a seemingly OK solution to a problem that's been solved a number of different ways, with intentional direct Linux dependency, created by somebody (Lennart Poettering) that works for a Linux company (Red Hat) and would have advantages to blocking off other ways of dealing with things. This has also been stopped systemd from being used by some other Linux distributions, but the author is pushing for direct dependency on systemd. I interpret that as partially ego-driven (he'd like his software used), and partially personally philosophically based (he's a consistent GPL-user) with even more than normal Linux blinders on.
Doesn't the "Extinguish" involve breaking support for while not providing source code? That doesn't apply
Source code has nothing to do with it. It involves breaking support for your competitors.
What about "Extend", which protocol is getting extended here, exactly?
Unix API space.
I'm saying "Embrace, extend, extinguish" because there are developers that very specifically tries to tie things to Linux. Wayland specifically damages it: It creates a new path which is likely to be used by significant amounts of applications, and which means those applications won't work except with Wayland.
And no, it will not be feasible to keep using old versions of things if the world moves along. It is e.g. not feasible to use an old web browser, both due to the web itself evolving and the now known security issues. You're effectively forced to upgrade a lot of things; staying with the old does not mean keeping the old features, it means losing features.
Due to selection bias, such numbers say very little. If a case would be obviously won - in either direction - then it will most likely be settled instead of going to court.
"Would be obviously won" applies to very few pre-litigation patent disputes. One look at the reversal rates at the Federal Circuit would be enough to tell you that, to say nothing of the uncertainty created by Supreme Court decisions, Federal Circuit en banc cases, and the America Invents Act.
These numbers can't be drawn conclusions from either; they have similar types of bias.
Anyway, are you suggesting that NPEs have caused a significant increase in out-of-court patent disputes all involving either obviously strong or obviously weak patents? If the patents are that obviously weak, then what's the problem? And if the patents are so obviously strong that the defendants don't bother going to court, then it sounds like there's not a problem with NPEs abusing weak patents.
And if there had been such an enormous swell in the number of out-of-court patent disputes one would expect significant spillover into the courts because of close cases. Remember that an alleged infringer can easily drag the patentee into court via a declaratory judgment action. In fact, it is almost impossible to discuss a license agreement without triggering declaratory judgment jurisdiction. So it's not like the NPEs have complete control over whether a dispute ends up in court; far from it, in fact.
I'm only suggesting not drawing conclusions from numbers that have significant bias in them. In this case, I think the conclusion is right but the inference is wrong.
In more depth:
I believe the quality of software patents is horrible; and I believe both PEs and NPE mostly play with patents that should never have been issued. However, agreeing with the conclusion doesn't make me agree with the way it is argued - I want my side to come with strong and rational arguments.
"Lots of cases are lost" by itself doesn't really indicate anything about the average quality of patents. Assuming equal resources on both sides and that the cost/benefit of licensing is evenly distributed, the naive equilibrium should be that 50% of the cases go in either direction; if the win looks more obvious in either direction, pre-litigation agreement should become more and more likely. If we have a disparity in the number of cases won, it should indicate either bad evaluation, unrealistic licensing requirements, or disparity in the value of enforcing/not enforcing the patent on the patent owner and patent target side.
The 39% (Practicing Entity) could be the result of companies fighting harder because otherwise they would be forced to shut down (compared to the patent owner getting some extra revenue), and the patent owner cutting their legal costs. My intuition is that the natural state with most patents being valid would be for the patent owner to win more than 50% of the cases, as they sometimes want to shut down a competitor, and that competitor then logically would fight even with bad odds - but the situation is complicated enough that there could easily be other confounding factors that I can't think of.
The 23% (Non-Practicing Entity) could be the result of the practicing entities keeping the best patents for themselves, leaving the NPEs with the few garbage patents that exists - but the NPEs still can make money off suing with garbage patents, so they do. Again, I don't believe that is what is happening - I believe patents are granted way too easily, and possibly should not be granted at all, for any field - but I don't think the win/loss numbers shed any light on the overall quality level.
Eivind.
To start with: the best wayland-related comment of all time appeared right here on slashdot:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2699657&cid=39198273
Second, please note that all comments in this post are regarding unix or linux as a desktop operating system as opposed to HPC or server-based usage.
Now to move on: Currently the only wayland compositor implementation is weston. Weston requires kms, which makes it pragmatically linux-only, and it also requires udev, which makes it *actually* linux-only. To compound the problem, the developers are talking about integrating it with systemd. When asked how that will affect porting efforts, developer response was along the lines of "just port systemd to bsd."
This is a prime example of Linux developers doing "Embrace, extend, extinguish" on Unix. "We're dominant - let's lock everything down to our solution, and force anybody else to play catchup."
It may not be particularly intentional to damage other systems - having Linux blinders on, it's easy to see "All the world's a Linux machine", just like it used to be "All the world's a VAX" and "All the world's a Windows machine" - but it does the same kind of damage as if it was intentional.
Eivind.
Due to selection bias, such numbers say very little. If a case would be obviously won - in either direction - then it will most likely be settled instead of going to court.
I doubt it is the vast majority; but I will believe it is the vast majority of your social circle. Among my social circle (which does not include teenagers), people mostly do not trade in games. We do buy some used, but the only cases I've heard of people trading in games is when they clearly felt the game sucked.
I suspect the teenager gamers do the trade ins; and also some fair amount of hardcore gamers. The latter clearly buy a higher number of games - but the question is how much profit it leads to for the game developers. If they buy and resell, it's a low profit per unit - and each time one of us that don't resell buy a used game, it creates a loss of almost the same number of dollars as we pay for the game developer, assuming we're price sensitive enough that we'd only buy it at that price. Or more dollars, if we would have been willing to pay more but got a used game because it was or would become available.
Now, locking out used games would lijkely also lock out using the games at a friend's house, and lending/borrowing games, and using the games without an Internet connection. The latter is a dealbreaker for me; not being able to borrow and lend would also be annoying.
Eivind.
Assuming he would not otherwise buy the game. If he would otherwise buy they game, you lose one sale.
My limitation on buying games is mostly time to play them; I have a fair amount of disposable income, but little time. I pick up used games because I don't care much about release dates, and I don't see any reason to just throw money away. I'd probably buy fewer games in total but more new games if there was no used games market. And I don't buy DLC; I don't trust the security of games publishers.
If there are lots of people like me in the market, then blocking used sales makes more profit. If there are lots of people that buy DLC and are restricted by money, it may be more profit in letting the resale market run.
I'm not entirely clear what I think of all of this - I know I think I should be allowed to use my own hardware fully and be allowed to use content I buy on all hardware I have access to that is capable of running it. Resale is tricky; it works OK when it's tied to a physical object, but not so well when it's an online transfer, as there is perfect fidelity on the transferred good as well as close to zero transaction costs, making it ultimately end up as "buy a used copy each time you are about to use something, resell it when you're finished" - and as soon as that market is 100% functioning, the producer would only get paid for the number of copies that are concurrently in use at the same time. That's only sustainable if the initial price is much, much higher than what we see today.
Eivind.
I've got large hands and like them. I think it's more what you're used to.
Eivind.
I have no pirated HD movies; but for a long while, I had a Blu ray player (first bought for future proofing after my DVD player died) and a 30" monitor *and no way to actually watch HD content*. My contention is that HDCP has likely not stopped a single case of piracy, but it has clearly stopped a lot of purchasing of BluRays.
After I got something that was HDCP compliant, I've actually also had to give up on my PS3, because it has some bug in HDCP negotiation, and would only sync with HDCP displays occasionally.
I complain about DRM because it cause me trouble, trouble that shouldn't exist. And I don't think it does anything good for the movie industry either.
Eivind.
You argument is specious.
That I have closed my door does not give you the right to superglue my door shut without my permission.
That congress has passed laws does not give the president the right to sign a treaty that lock those (or similar laws) on the book permanently without congress' permission.
Stopping ACTA becoming a formally accepted treaty is a first step in making sure the laws in question can be fixed.