I have yet to find a copy of Opera for my Zaurus. Where did you find it? It did not come with my Zaurus, and I was disappointed that it did not. Now, I am using a P800 with Opera, but it would still be nice to have Opera on my Zaurus.
Zauruses really rock for reading books. If it were not for lack of availability, I would read every book on my Zaurus... or at least some PDA. It is much better when you can carry 10 or more books with you and read whatever you feel like than having to be constrained by weight into choosing one book to carry all the time.
I have been using PDAs for precisely this function for about 2 years now. I avoid eBooks like the plague because of DRM and other stupid old technology features (like pages). (For a good example of the limitations of eBooks read Chapter 10 of Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig). I also use PDAs to read news I gather from the Net. From my experience:
Zaurus:
The webbrowsing and text viewing applications are fairly fast once they have been loaded into memory. NetFront (the webbrowser) supports CSS and properly renders PNGs. Web pages are generally pretty, although getting large fonts to work is a bit of a hassle. Both CF and SD/MMC cards are supported.
The screen on the Zaurus is unbelieably bright (especially if you have used an iPAQ before). The colors are breathtaking. The screen is really amazing. The resolution is also really 640x480 like on a desktop (for post C700 models).
The Zaurus battery is rechargable and replaceable like a cellphone battery. It lasts for hours even when playing mp3s.
iPAQ:
PocketIE is very slow. It starts up quickly but loads pages slowly. It does not support CSS and renders PNGs improperly. It often crashes or locks. The screen cannot be scrolled while it is loading. For older web pages, it is not bad, though.
Text is loaded in PocketWord. This is, for lack of a better word, a beast. It is extremely slow, and you would not want to read with it. If you have a CF card expansion pack, forget reading text files. It cannot handle large text files (read: Gutenberg etext files) well or at all (I have not tried in a long time). If you have a CF card expansion pack, forget PocketWord: It will not work.
The screen is bright enough and the resolution is good enough for reading. The colors are nice enough. In addition, the iPAQ comes with a sort of sunscreen case, which makes it readable in extremely bright sunlight (that is a difficult feat even for paper books).
My iPAQ does not have a replacable battery, but most of the new models I have seen do. The battery life is very good. It should last many hours even when playing mp3s. There are expansion packs with extra batteries.
PalmOS:
From what I have been told (by vendors), the Palm does not have a webbrowser. I know there are specialty programs, like Plucker, for converting web pages to PalmOS compatible formats, but I think this is terribly old fashioned of the Palm people to leave this feature out.
The displays on Palms I have looked at in stores have not impressed me. There could be a model with an unbelievable display, but I have not seen it.
I cannot comment on anything related to batteries because I have not used a Palm.
For the first two reasons, I never waisted my money on a Palm. It seems they are trapped in a time warp of what "PDA owners" of 1996 wanted or something. They do not seem to be concerned with putting a computer in your pocket. For people who use PDAs for their PDA functions, however, I have heard that Palm is the best.
Finally, I have not used actual eBook or PDF software on any of the three. I think HTML is the way to go anyway. I just want some pretty text. I do not want pages or DRM or other restrictions. I also like to be able to scroll text. I also want images, but I do not want them locked into the document where I cannot view them separately (many webbrowsers, PocketIE in particular, shrink images to an unreadable size, but image display programs will still display them properly).
Many kernel hackers choose to ignore bug reports from systems that have loaded closed-source modules since there's a very good chance that the bug is in code that they can't access and fix.
Could Linuxant be trying to use the kernel developer's bug fixes in their closed source code? It seems that if the kernel developers were tricked into working on problems in Linuxant's buggy code, they might have insights that the Linuxant developers might not. Or maybe just tracking the mailing lists would help them identify and solve problems faster without sharing with the rest of the community.
This feels a little like shared source: Ask community members for bug reports but do not allow them to change anything. Use their efforts to improve the value of your product without paying them.
Last time I checked, it seems the only rights you have in the U.S. are to privacy and to not be offended.
Neither of these are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
U.S. Constitution:
Amendment [IV] The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This device appears to suck for a number of reasons, most of which can be attributed to trying to hang onto all the features/limitations of old technology.
Here are the things I notice at first glance from the press release:
This "first ever" Philips' display utilizes E Ink's revolutionary electronic ink technology which offers a truly paper-like reading experience with contrast that is the same as newsprint.
Why would I want to read anything like newsprint? Are newspapers not printed on cheap paper and low in quality when compared with magazines? Is the "experience" of newspaper not a direct consequence of its cheapness? At least this device does not appear to have a newspaper's awkward page size and related difficulty of having to fold pages.
The Electronic Paper Display is reflective and can be easily read in bright sunlight or dimly lit environments while being able to be seen at virtually any angle - just like paper.
Does this mean it does not have a backlight? Paper sucks for several reasons:
It cannot change color.
It cannot be read in a dark place (back of a taxi, some place where people are sleeping).
It is heavy.
Why would someone want a device that emulated technology over 1,000 years old?
Its black and white ink-on-paper look, combined with a resolution in excess of most portable devices at approximately 170 pixels per inch (PPI), gives an appearance similar to that of the most widely read material on the planet - newspaper.
Just because newspapers are widely read does not mean they are high quality. This is yet another case of the fact that popularity does not necessarily imply goodness (but everyone here knows that: Just look at MS).
Because the display uses power only when an image is changed, a user can read more than 10,000 pages before the four AAA Alkaline batteries need to be replaced.
Disposable batteries are great for the environment. So, I guess the user will have to go to 7-11 from time to time to get new power. Recharging at home would be much more convenient.
Sony's e-Book reader LIBRIe... is similar in size and design to a paperback book.
So, this will not fit in my pocket? What happens if I am not carrying a backpack today? Are books not the size they are because of the constraints of the medium: paper? The point is to get the advantages of paper without its limitations. This device seems to be emulating many of paper's limitations.
LIBRIe allows users to download published content, such as books or comic strips from the Internet, and enjoy it anywhere at any time.
So can any modern PDA such as an iPAQ, a Zaurus, or even a smartphone like the Sony Ericsson P800. However, those devices can do so much more. They certainly have backlights. They display HTML. They can be used to read PDF documents as well. Unless it is really cheap, what is the point of buying a dedicated ebook reader? This is especially true since most ebooks contain DRM and HTML pages do not. What sort of DRM garbage does this device have? What limitations will there be on my downloads? What constraints will there be on how and when I read?
LIBRIe can store up to 500 downloaded books.
So can any device with an MTD reader. Not only that, but additional cards can be purchased to contain more books. Plus, multi-function devices such as PDAs can play music and tell you what time it is in Nairobi (if you cared, of course).
"In today's mobile world, we know that the quality of the experience and ease-of-use are important in driving consumer adoption of mobile devices.
Can this device be used with one hand? If not, the ease-of-use argume
the EU's number one software product is that Finnish thing
Since when can the EU take credit for marketing someone's hobby? This is a joke. The fact is: This is the world's product, and no country can claim credit for it. The code Linus wrote in Finland was a minute fraction of the current code.
Linux is not a product of the EU or the US or any other business or governmental entity. It is a product of the Internet. It is full of contributions from India, China, and most other non-EU/US countries.
Stop thumping your chest for a minute and realize that Linux is the property of no nation or region. It is everybody's property.
Many universities (my own alma mater being an exception) tend not particularly progressive in any area but instruction.
Since when did universities start becoming progressive in instruction? I graduated in the 90's, and I was still seeing old professors with yellowed notes giving lectures to 300+ students. They had the audacity to call that a class. Let's face it: Lecture classes are technology from about 1000 years ago in the West and 2000+ years ago in China.
The majority of texts are still contained on paper. This is a Chinese invention of great antiquity. Printing may have revolutionized Europe, but that was a very long time ago.
TV has been around since the 50's and video courses did not appear until the 90's. This is also absurd.
I was actually given hand written quizzes in computer science classes. What kind of crap is that? No code runs the first time it is written. One of the major functions of compilers is to check errors. Most errors are typos. People are not machines. Still, they took off points for spelling errors in single-run paper based programming. How is that progressive? It does not even take into account the technology that is being taught.
Fact: Better technology than is being used for instruction has existed for a long time. The claim that universities are "progressive in... instruction" is very difficult to support.
... I guess that means universities are not progessive in anything, really. Maybe they are progressive in athletics. That seems to be where all the money is spent.
Why, indeed, could BitTorrent and FreeNet not be combined.
It seems that BitTorrent's way of distributing the files would provide plausible deniability for anyone hosting fragments of files on their computer, and FreeNet could be used to distribute links/addresses anonymously. This would also prevent anyone from getting a list of the files in one's shared directory.
All that is really needed is a client app to combine the two, and there are probably tons that could do this with a reasonably small amount of modification like a plugin.
You own the physical medium on which the software is carried. You do not own the copyright to the software.
For that matter, Adobe does not "own" the software, either. As stated, the copyright is owned not the software. Therefore, you do actually "own" that copy of the software, but you are restricted by copyright law (not their licences) with respect to some uses you might put it to, such as copying and selling it.
In order to steal something, you have to deprive someone of something. For this, the record industry generally argues their loss of "potential profits". However, if you would not have paid for it in the first place, there was no "potential profit", hence no theft.
"Theft" and "stealing" are misrepresentations stated to give you the impression that ideas are property. They are improper analogies that stand up to neither factual nor legal analysis.
Kodak has filed a lawsuit against Sony alleging that 10 of its patents have been used without permission.
If I recall correctly, Kodak worked the court system in a premeditated move to profit at the expense of Polaroid a few years back.
This page has some information about the case (I do not have time to read it now, though).
This page gives the year of the lawsuit, 1978, but incorrectly calls the suit a "copyright infringment" lawsuit.
However, what I remember from the time was that Kodak started producing its Instamatic cameras after calculating the maximum penalty for a patent infringement lawsuit and then calculating that even with the settlement, they would still make a massive profit. Therefore, if memory serves, they deliberately sidestepped the legal system to obtain illicit profits.
Again, I can find no information on this on the Net, but I remember that even with the huge settlement that they paid out, they still came out on top. Their customers, of course, were screwed as Kodak was prohibited from selling film for the cameras after the trial.
Does a company that so blatantly disregards other peoples rights deserve any itself? If they are willing to make illicit profits from someone else's patents, why should the government enforce theirs?
Talk all the trash you want. That does not change the fact that smart cards are uniquely identifiable like credit cards and therefore lack the most important aspect of cash: anonymity. If you like telemarketing calls and spam and do not believe in privacy, credit cards and/or smart cards are for you. Either one can be used to profile you, and neither is equivalent to cash.
As an aside, if I remember correctly, French people boycotted Eurodisney just because it was from the US, so is your post not a bit of the pot calling the kettle black?
This could be defeated with a silent partner. The thief could use a trusted friend's thumb print to access the device.
If the thief were caught, all he would have to do was not to divulge the identity of the person with the fingerprint, and both would go free.
If the thief was careful to wipe off the partner's fingerprints after every access, the investigators would have no way to find which one of his acquaintances the partner might be even if the partner had a criminal record. In fact, the thief could even claim that he could not understand why the device did not work the way it used to before he was arrested.
This is unless, of course, there was a backdoor in the software as another poster suggested. This also assumes that a fingerprint is not required for every transaction executed by the device.
There are orders of magnitude diffence in what the artists and the **aas can realistically make under the current scheme compared to what they can make under the EFF scheme.
What the RIAA/MPAA stand to make and what the artists stand to make are two entirely different things. The RIAA/MPAA do not represent the artists. They never have, and they never will. They are greedy middlemen gouging the consumer with monopoly rents and ripping off artists with cryptic contracts and questionable legal tactics.
Seen in this light, if the artists were to make a quarter of the money that the RIAA/MPAA makes off of the artists, they would probably see a massive increase in their finances.
Remember, 100% of 8 dollars is better than 5% of 12.
While this is great for us Road Warriors, how can this make financial sense?
Well, let me see... Maybe they might be selling something else. If one spends US$100 per night, plus room service because the Internet could not be left alone, the hotel has made its money. All the hotel has to pay is a one time purchase of a US$60 plus a negligible (when divided by all the occupied rooms) Internet connection fee. However, the one time equipment cost is probably much less than the street price because the APs would be purchased in bulk. It is hard to believe that WLAN would take more than a week to pay for itself.
As for the airports, these are facilities that see tens or hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis and collect large landing, taxi, and takeoff fees from every airplane that passes through. Plus they sell food and magazines and all sorts of tourist garbage. Does anyone honestly believe that one or two hotspots in the airport restaurants would amount to anything that could not be covered by the change rounded off at the end of the day? It probably costs more to clean the bathrooms that to maintain WLAN hotspots at every terminal.
There was a more pragmatic realization as well: While I respect Linus's position that he's just an engineer, and really doesn't want to deal with legal issues, I think that position is much less of an option these days. We're having the law forcedon us, and if we're not careful, one day we're going to wake up in a world where IP restrictions will take all the fun out of engineering.
He really said a mouthful here. This is the problem: Why do we have to be bothered by the law on a daily basis?
This especially applies to copyright, a law that most people should not even know exists. It used to be a law for people who published books. Now it is a form of censorship and an export restriction for the common citizen.
Engineers and programmers should not be waisting their time with copyright law. They should be engineering and programming. The fact that they are waisting their time with copyright law means that progress is being hindered by the misappropriation of their intelligence to the solution of a problem that should not exist.
Therefore, yet again, copyright, rather than promoting progress, is in fact hindering it by misappropriating mental resources from more important tasks. What would Jefferson think?
Here is the text of the first letter in the PDF. Feel free to tear it apart and take Darl's lies and half-truths to task! Also, try and check if I made any mistakes in the transcription.
Letter follows:
January 8, 2004
The Honorable
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Honorable
I am writing to you to draw your attention to an important controversy that has become of of the dominant issues in the software industry. The way in which this issue is resolved will have very important ramifications for
our nation's economy
our continued ability to lead the world in technological innovation
our international competitive position in the global software industry, and even for
our national security
The source of this controversy is the rapid spread of a form of software called "Open Source software." The most widely used Open Source product is a software environment called Linux. Open source Linux software is developed and enhanced by a loose, worldwide group of volunteers usually called "the Open Source community." Through the work of this community of volunteers, lately abetted by the efforts of several major computing companies, Linux software has become a popular was to run computer server systems, Web sites, networks and many applications.
Innovation in software in itself is not a problem -- new computing technologies have long been an engine of growth for our nation. But there are two serious problems associated with the spread of Linux and the Open Source approach to software development and distribution.
First, Linux and Open Source software are developed and distributed (often at no cost) under a scheme called the GNU General Public License (GPL) which, some believe, is in direct contradiction to U.S. Copyright law, to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMXCA), and to the recent Supreme Court decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft. I have attached a document that describes in detail the problems of the GPL and the ways in which it violates current U.S. statutes.
Those who designed the GPL readily admit that they created this license to have the effect of "freeing" software - taking it out of the realm of copyright protection by placing it in the public domain. The author of the GPL is well-known for his view that proprietary software (meaning software as an intellectual asset from which the designer can derive profit) is unacceptable.
The GPL seeks to commoditize software by reducing its monetary value to zero and making it freely available to anyone. The GPL is carefully designed to have a viral effect - it "frees" the software that proprietary, licensable, and a source of income from the companies that developed it. Until now it has been generally agreed that the GPL has never faced a legal test. SCO is involved in a major software intellectual property case through with the GPL will face such a test.
The second problem with Open Source software is that it is not all original. Linux software contains significant UNIX software code that has been inappropriately, and without authorization, placed in Linux. I know this because my company, The XCO Group, owns the rights to UNIX code originally developed by AT&T. SCO holds licenses to this valuable asset with more that 6,000 companies, universities, government agencies and other organization. But as the use of Linux has grown, license revenue from UNIX has shrunk. Why wouldn't it? Why would someone license UNIX code from SCO and other legitimate providers when they can get much of that same doe, for free, in Linux? The damage this has inflicted on SCO's UNIX business is an example of what could happen to the entire software industry if the current Open Source model continues. For this reason, SCO has taken legal action against those who, we believe, have misappropriated our most important corporate asset. By taking action, our company h
The guy who wrote this article is not all that intelligent, is he? I have MythTV and RH9 running on almost the same hardware he described. It is playing my music right now. I have lots of DVDs, and it plays all of them. In addition, Gentoo and several other distros are reported to work with his setup.
I also know for a fact that Fedora Core does not fail to install because it lacks a floppy drive because no computer I have built -- ever -- has had a floppy drive (yes, people thought I was completely insane in 1998, but floppy drives were as useless then as they are now). I installed Fedora Core on a floppyless PC last month, and it has been working great since then.
Is this guy a Microsuck employee or something? Only one of MS' employees could be so incompetent.
While both the BBC and Slashdot articles refer to stereoscopic images taken during WWII, I have seen no mention that these images would actually be posted to the Net.
Are they going to post all the images or just a few flat 2D images?
Will we be able to access both stereoscopic photographs in order to make our own 3D OpenGL or VRML topographs?
Finally, what kind of resolution will we get with the images? Will it be as good as the originals? Or just those small press images as seen in the BBC article?
Second, even if a creator says "that's mine", what happens? They don't go after the end users.
Why not? What is it about proprietary software that protects against this?
It is not as if individuals were not responsible for any questionable code contributions to the Linux kernel. What to the end users have to do with this in open source or proprietary software?
The answer is: nothing. SCO's claim against end users is completely fraudulent. There is nothing the end users could have done to prevent it. In fact, the end users could not have even known of the infringement, if there was infringment at all. Infringement is willful. If intent cannot be proven, infringement does not exist.
What does having the source code have to do with willful infringement?
SCO is trying to extort licensing revenue from anyone stupid enough to take the bait. They have no evidence, and they are threatening people who could not be liable. It is fraud.
This image
shows marks in the martian soil (upper right) made by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's airbags during their final deflation and retraction. The picture was taken by the panoramic camera on the rover.
I do not know about anyone else, but that image looks a lot like a deflated airbag to me. The shadows definitely create that impression. The image gives one the impression that the airbag popped and did not retract properly. I guess we have begun to litter on Mars.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Zauruses really rock for reading books. If it were not for lack of availability, I would read every book on my Zaurus... or at least some PDA. It is much better when you can carry 10 or more books with you and read whatever you feel like than having to be constrained by weight into choosing one book to carry all the time.
I have been using PDAs for precisely this function for about 2 years now. I avoid eBooks like the plague because of DRM and other stupid old technology features (like pages). (For a good example of the limitations of eBooks read Chapter 10 of Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig). I also use PDAs to read news I gather from the Net. From my experience:
The webbrowsing and text viewing applications are fairly fast once they have been loaded into memory. NetFront (the webbrowser) supports CSS and properly renders PNGs. Web pages are generally pretty, although getting large fonts to work is a bit of a hassle. Both CF and SD/MMC cards are supported.
The screen on the Zaurus is unbelieably bright (especially if you have used an iPAQ before). The colors are breathtaking. The screen is really amazing. The resolution is also really 640x480 like on a desktop (for post C700 models).
The Zaurus battery is rechargable and replaceable like a cellphone battery. It lasts for hours even when playing mp3s.
PocketIE is very slow. It starts up quickly but loads pages slowly. It does not support CSS and renders PNGs improperly. It often crashes or locks. The screen cannot be scrolled while it is loading. For older web pages, it is not bad, though.
Text is loaded in PocketWord. This is, for lack of a better word, a beast. It is extremely slow, and you would not want to read with it. If you have a CF card expansion pack, forget reading text files. It cannot handle large text files (read: Gutenberg etext files) well or at all (I have not tried in a long time). If you have a CF card expansion pack, forget PocketWord: It will not work.
The screen is bright enough and the resolution is good enough for reading. The colors are nice enough. In addition, the iPAQ comes with a sort of sunscreen case, which makes it readable in extremely bright sunlight (that is a difficult feat even for paper books).
My iPAQ does not have a replacable battery, but most of the new models I have seen do. The battery life is very good. It should last many hours even when playing mp3s. There are expansion packs with extra batteries.
From what I have been told (by vendors), the Palm does not have a webbrowser. I know there are specialty programs, like Plucker, for converting web pages to PalmOS compatible formats, but I think this is terribly old fashioned of the Palm people to leave this feature out.
The displays on Palms I have looked at in stores have not impressed me. There could be a model with an unbelievable display, but I have not seen it.
I cannot comment on anything related to batteries because I have not used a Palm.
For the first two reasons, I never waisted my money on a Palm. It seems they are trapped in a time warp of what "PDA owners" of 1996 wanted or something. They do not seem to be concerned with putting a computer in your pocket. For people who use PDAs for their PDA functions, however, I have heard that Palm is the best.
Finally, I have not used actual eBook or PDF software on any of the three. I think HTML is the way to go anyway. I just want some pretty text. I do not want pages or DRM or other restrictions. I also like to be able to scroll text. I also want images, but I do not want them locked into the document where I cannot view them separately (many webbrowsers, PocketIE in particular, shrink images to an unreadable size, but image display programs will still display them properly).
This feels a little like shared source: Ask community members for bug reports but do not allow them to change anything. Use their efforts to improve the value of your product without paying them.
U.S. Constitution:
Check again.
Great! Now teenagers and old ladies can get sued by another content industry for sharing.
This device appears to suck for a number of reasons, most of which can be attributed to trying to hang onto all the features/limitations of old technology. Here are the things I notice at first glance from the press release:
Why would I want to read anything like newsprint? Are newspapers not printed on cheap paper and low in quality when compared with magazines? Is the "experience" of newspaper not a direct consequence of its cheapness? At least this device does not appear to have a newspaper's awkward page size and related difficulty of having to fold pages.
Does this mean it does not have a backlight? Paper sucks for several reasons:
Why would someone want a device that emulated technology over 1,000 years old?
Just because newspapers are widely read does not mean they are high quality. This is yet another case of the fact that popularity does not necessarily imply goodness (but everyone here knows that: Just look at MS).
Disposable batteries are great for the environment. So, I guess the user will have to go to 7-11 from time to time to get new power. Recharging at home would be much more convenient.
So, this will not fit in my pocket? What happens if I am not carrying a backpack today? Are books not the size they are because of the constraints of the medium: paper? The point is to get the advantages of paper without its limitations. This device seems to be emulating many of paper's limitations.
So can any modern PDA such as an iPAQ, a Zaurus, or even a smartphone like the Sony Ericsson P800. However, those devices can do so much more. They certainly have backlights. They display HTML. They can be used to read PDF documents as well. Unless it is really cheap, what is the point of buying a dedicated ebook reader? This is especially true since most ebooks contain DRM and HTML pages do not. What sort of DRM garbage does this device have? What limitations will there be on my downloads? What constraints will there be on how and when I read?
So can any device with an MTD reader. Not only that, but additional cards can be purchased to contain more books. Plus, multi-function devices such as PDAs can play music and tell you what time it is in Nairobi (if you cared, of course).
Can this device be used with one hand? If not, the ease-of-use argume
Linux is not a product of the EU or the US or any other business or governmental entity. It is a product of the Internet. It is full of contributions from India, China, and most other non-EU/US countries.
Stop thumping your chest for a minute and realize that Linux is the property of no nation or region. It is everybody's property.
The majority of texts are still contained on paper. This is a Chinese invention of great antiquity. Printing may have revolutionized Europe, but that was a very long time ago.
TV has been around since the 50's and video courses did not appear until the 90's. This is also absurd.
I was actually given hand written quizzes in computer science classes. What kind of crap is that? No code runs the first time it is written. One of the major functions of compilers is to check errors. Most errors are typos. People are not machines. Still, they took off points for spelling errors in single-run paper based programming. How is that progressive? It does not even take into account the technology that is being taught.
Fact: Better technology than is being used for instruction has existed for a long time. The claim that universities are "progressive in... instruction" is very difficult to support.
Why, indeed, could BitTorrent and FreeNet not be combined.
It seems that BitTorrent's way of distributing the files would provide plausible deniability for anyone hosting fragments of files on their computer, and FreeNet could be used to distribute links/addresses anonymously. This would also prevent anyone from getting a list of the files in one's shared directory.
All that is really needed is a client app to combine the two, and there are probably tons that could do this with a reasonably small amount of modification like a plugin.
Uhh... It is Softman v. Adobe, and the order is important because the plaintiff is always first.
Infringing != stealing.
In order to steal something, you have to deprive someone of something. For this, the record industry generally argues their loss of "potential profits". However, if you would not have paid for it in the first place, there was no "potential profit", hence no theft.
"Theft" and "stealing" are misrepresentations stated to give you the impression that ideas are property. They are improper analogies that stand up to neither factual nor legal analysis.
Again, I can find no information on this on the Net, but I remember that even with the huge settlement that they paid out, they still came out on top. Their customers, of course, were screwed as Kodak was prohibited from selling film for the cameras after the trial.
Does a company that so blatantly disregards other peoples rights deserve any itself? If they are willing to make illicit profits from someone else's patents, why should the government enforce theirs?
Talk all the trash you want. That does not change the fact that smart cards are uniquely identifiable like credit cards and therefore lack the most important aspect of cash: anonymity. If you like telemarketing calls and spam and do not believe in privacy, credit cards and/or smart cards are for you. Either one can be used to profile you, and neither is equivalent to cash.
As an aside, if I remember correctly, French people boycotted Eurodisney just because it was from the US, so is your post not a bit of the pot calling the kettle black?
I mean, ever been to a department store?
Ever been to a shopping mall?
This could be defeated with a silent partner. The thief could use a trusted friend's thumb print to access the device.
If the thief were caught, all he would have to do was not to divulge the identity of the person with the fingerprint, and both would go free.
If the thief was careful to wipe off the partner's fingerprints after every access, the investigators would have no way to find which one of his acquaintances the partner might be even if the partner had a criminal record. In fact, the thief could even claim that he could not understand why the device did not work the way it used to before he was arrested.
This is unless, of course, there was a backdoor in the software as another poster suggested. This also assumes that a fingerprint is not required for every transaction executed by the device.
Seen in this light, if the artists were to make a quarter of the money that the RIAA/MPAA makes off of the artists, they would probably see a massive increase in their finances.
Remember, 100% of 8 dollars is better than 5% of 12.
As for the airports, these are facilities that see tens or hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis and collect large landing, taxi, and takeoff fees from every airplane that passes through. Plus they sell food and magazines and all sorts of tourist garbage. Does anyone honestly believe that one or two hotspots in the airport restaurants would amount to anything that could not be covered by the change rounded off at the end of the day? It probably costs more to clean the bathrooms that to maintain WLAN hotspots at every terminal.
From the article:
He really said a mouthful here. This is the problem: Why do we have to be bothered by the law on a daily basis?This especially applies to copyright, a law that most people should not even know exists. It used to be a law for people who published books. Now it is a form of censorship and an export restriction for the common citizen.
Engineers and programmers should not be waisting their time with copyright law. They should be engineering and programming. The fact that they are waisting their time with copyright law means that progress is being hindered by the misappropriation of their intelligence to the solution of a problem that should not exist.
Therefore, yet again, copyright, rather than promoting progress, is in fact hindering it by misappropriating mental resources from more important tasks. What would Jefferson think?
Here is the text of the first letter in the PDF. Feel free to tear it apart and take Darl's lies and half-truths to task! Also, try and check if I made any mistakes in the transcription.
Letter follows:
January 8, 2004
The Honorable
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Honorable
I am writing to you to draw your attention to an important controversy that has become of of the dominant issues in the software industry. The way in which this issue is resolved will have very important ramifications for
The source of this controversy is the rapid spread of a form of software called "Open Source software." The most widely used Open Source product is a software environment called Linux. Open source Linux software is developed and enhanced by a loose, worldwide group of volunteers usually called "the Open Source community." Through the work of this community of volunteers, lately abetted by the efforts of several major computing companies, Linux software has become a popular was to run computer server systems, Web sites, networks and many applications.
Innovation in software in itself is not a problem -- new computing technologies have long been an engine of growth for our nation. But there are two serious problems associated with the spread of Linux and the Open Source approach to software development and distribution.
First, Linux and Open Source software are developed and distributed (often at no cost) under a scheme called the GNU General Public License (GPL) which, some believe, is in direct contradiction to U.S. Copyright law, to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMXCA), and to the recent Supreme Court decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft. I have attached a document that describes in detail the problems of the GPL and the ways in which it violates current U.S. statutes.
Those who designed the GPL readily admit that they created this license to have the effect of "freeing" software - taking it out of the realm of copyright protection by placing it in the public domain. The author of the GPL is well-known for his view that proprietary software (meaning software as an intellectual asset from which the designer can derive profit) is unacceptable.
The GPL seeks to commoditize software by reducing its monetary value to zero and making it freely available to anyone. The GPL is carefully designed to have a viral effect - it "frees" the software that proprietary, licensable, and a source of income from the companies that developed it. Until now it has been generally agreed that the GPL has never faced a legal test. SCO is involved in a major software intellectual property case through with the GPL will face such a test.
The second problem with Open Source software is that it is not all original. Linux software contains significant UNIX software code that has been inappropriately, and without authorization, placed in Linux. I know this because my company, The XCO Group, owns the rights to UNIX code originally developed by AT&T. SCO holds licenses to this valuable asset with more that 6,000 companies, universities, government agencies and other organization. But as the use of Linux has grown, license revenue from UNIX has shrunk. Why wouldn't it? Why would someone license UNIX code from SCO and other legitimate providers when they can get much of that same doe, for free, in Linux? The damage this has inflicted on SCO's UNIX business is an example of what could happen to the entire software industry if the current Open Source model continues. For this reason, SCO has taken legal action against those who, we believe, have misappropriated our most important corporate asset. By taking action, our company h
The guy who wrote this article is not all that intelligent, is he? I have MythTV and RH9 running on almost the same hardware he described. It is playing my music right now. I have lots of DVDs, and it plays all of them. In addition, Gentoo and several other distros are reported to work with his setup.
I also know for a fact that Fedora Core does not fail to install because it lacks a floppy drive because no computer I have built -- ever -- has had a floppy drive (yes, people thought I was completely insane in 1998, but floppy drives were as useless then as they are now). I installed Fedora Core on a floppyless PC last month, and it has been working great since then.
Is this guy a Microsuck employee or something? Only one of MS' employees could be so incompetent.
While both the BBC and Slashdot articles refer to stereoscopic images taken during WWII, I have seen no mention that these images would actually be posted to the Net.
Are they going to post all the images or just a few flat 2D images?
Will we be able to access both stereoscopic photographs in order to make our own 3D OpenGL or VRML topographs?
Finally, what kind of resolution will we get with the images? Will it be as good as the originals? Or just those small press images as seen in the BBC article?
It is not as if individuals were not responsible for any questionable code contributions to the Linux kernel. What to the end users have to do with this in open source or proprietary software?
The answer is: nothing. SCO's claim against end users is completely fraudulent. There is nothing the end users could have done to prevent it. In fact, the end users could not have even known of the infringement, if there was infringment at all. Infringement is willful. If intent cannot be proven, infringement does not exist.
What does having the source code have to do with willful infringement?
SCO is trying to extort licensing revenue from anyone stupid enough to take the bait. They have no evidence, and they are threatening people who could not be liable. It is fraud.
Evidently, though, fraud is quite profitable.