The idea that every little bit of copying is a copyright violation is nonsense and needs to stop. Especially in this case, as sufficent rights to actually use software that you have legal title to (such as the software that AOL sends you in the mail) is explicitly granted.
If someone sent you a book you have every right in the world to set up your own printing press (or bulk copier) and run off a bajillion copies of it. Maybe you want to use them to lay a foundation for your house or something. If someone sends you a CD, you can do whatever you want with that CD, including reading the bits off of it and manipulating them in whatever way you desire. The amount of legal force in an EULA (in a non-UCITA state, anyway) is barely any more than an email disclaimer, and even then only because it requires affirmation that you've seen it. Bypass the installer and there's no legal weight at all
You do not need a special license to use softare. Period. There's no law anywhere in the US that says you do, not even UCITA. There's no case law supporting the idea that you do. There are some very tenuous cases where clicking "I Agree" to a shrinkwrap will constitute a real contract, but you don't have to agree to that contract, and can use your legally obtained software anyway.
At the risk of getting flamed as someone who worships at the altar of Microsoft (I don't, I promise), the Windows clipboard is _far_ more sane. Just one. Global. You can store your selection in as many formats as you know how to handle. Applications can take pastes in as many formats as they know how to handle, in whatever order they want. You can register new formats. It's simple and logical (although the API suffers from some old cruft before it was quite as good as it is now). As evidence, there is probably not a single person who has written anything like this Ask Slashdot about copy/paste in windows.
Note that copy on select can still be used in windows (I've got a couple apps that do it). However, I think it's a terrible idea because it saves a single keystrok, bfd, at the expense of accident paste, awkward copy/replace, and potentially disasterous cut/replace. Over the history of X, I'd be willing to get that _far_ more keystrokes have been wasted because of those problems than have ever been saved because of copy on selection.
I'm not saying that copyright should be abolished, or that people shouldn't be compensated for it. I'm saying that extending that monopoly down to the finest grain level (for example, software "copies into memory" were once considered infringing), or even to a level that interferes with the passing of work into the public domain (such as DRM - in the sadly hypothetical case that copyright on anything written in the last hundred years ever expires, DRM _still_ won't let you copy it) is against the goals and ideals of copyright. People taking your work and, say, putting in a magazine or on a book cover and selling it is clearly against your copyright. Me making a color photocopy of one of your covers to use as decoration on my wall is not. Fair use is perhaps the most important part of copyright law and it's getting ignored in the interests of using it as a buisness model - which is not the intent. Copyright isn't there to create a market, it's there to add value to society. The creation of a market is incidental and in many ways detrimental - for example, DRM and the paid lobbying which is extending copyright power.
It's an interesting (but apparently little known) fact that the purpose of copyright law is not to generate money for copyright holders. Shocking but true! Therefore, there are a number of restrictions on the rights granted to copyright holders. For example, playing a CD where more than one person can hear it isn't automatically public performance. Likewise, limited copying and sharing with friends isn't copyright infringment! Gasp! It's when the copying becomes large scale (7 million anonymous friends on the internet...) or commercial that it becomes infringment.
It's interesting that you make the point of scanning and reprinting. How many people do you know will photocopy an interesting magazine article or newspaper clipping to give to a friend? I certainly have seen it plent of times.
This is the important point: The rights of the copyright holder are LESS IMPORTANT than the goal of getting the information to the public. It's a balance. The copyright holder does not need to be paid for every single copy that takes place, no matter how much record labels whine. It's about reasonable compensation as an incentive to release works to the public, NOT about guaranteeing a revenue stream.
The government looks at it that way, too. Speeding tickets are basically counted as a tax by law enforcment - thats why theres (usually informal, to prevent PR outbreaks) quotas about them. Delivery services in NYC count parking tickets as part of the cost of doing buisness - and it really is, there. The city government is perfectly happy with "taxing" these companies by ticketing vans rather than having any sort of formal licensing (and, honestly, it almost makes sense - the red tape and politics involved in a new licensing deal is far more than the cost of simply ticketing people using the existing system).
It's not so much knowing every little detail of what happens - thats obviously impossible. However, good leaders should be (at least) aware of general policy decisions. They should also be accountable, whether or not they had knowledge - they're in charge, and it's thier responsibility to make sure that the people they're in charge of are following policy. If someone is breaking the rules, then they'r responsible (directly or indirectly) for finding that out and for correcting the situation.
Accountability, after all, is why (supposedly) we pay CEOs all that money. You're the ultimate go-to guy at a corporation and all responsibility and accountability ultimately rests with you. It's the same with the commander-in-chief - it's not just about being able to tell the Army to go kill people, there is responsibility involved as well. After all, you're the voice of the military to the public, and you're expected to have satisfying answers when stuff like this ends up in the public eye. Trying to pass the buck when you're the guy in charge is a sign of weakness and poor leadership, imo.
It's the opposite in the US, "congolmerate" style names are used in the singular. Company names in particular. I belive this has a great deal to do with our legal fiction that corporations are people.
In fairness, I scored 740 on verbal and I can't write my way out of a paper bag. I read a tremendous amount and have a feel for proper English but little formal understanding of the rules, very little patience for those rules, and none of the creative spark required to write engaging essays. SAT verbal doesn't really test any of that stuff.
I'm aware of that and it's addressed in the flamewar. The freedom of Linux is one thing that allowed this - if Tannenbaum (and PH) and allowed forks, then Minix could have had all this without compromising the educational aspects. Further, today, all that stuff IS on low end student hardware and yet Minix doesn't have it.
I've re-read that old flameware a few times over the years. It's kinda interesting how one reason he derides the performance hack is that "you don't need them", because normal PCs only have one job running. Certainly nobody envisioned the kind of systems we'd be running today (note the comment about 10 years from now when we're all on 200mips 64MB sparcs. That'd barely qualify as a toaster today....), but Linux rose to the challenge, Minix pretty much didn't. I think the freedom of Linux had alot to do with that (and he misses the point during the flamewar on that, too).
12 years ago, who would have imagined that it is normal and in fact essential for a desktop OS to be able to smoothly handle many IO intensive processes at the same time?
Open source isn't any sort of panacea for electronic voting because the end user doesn't control the actual system. This is different than when you're a paranoid security fanatic and you hand check every line of source that you compile on your personal machine, as well as verifying the output with 3 different compilers. Someone _else_ is loading the software and firmware onto those touchscreens and you can't ensure that that code is the open source code. Thats what the auditing is for, because thats where it's important. Open source development might help make it more secure (both algorithmically and in code), but it doesn't address the issues that really concern her.
That is almost competely untrue. Especially when, in a case like this, the FBI has its choice of judges. I'd be suprised if they're looking for anything more specific than a list of IPs to compare to traffic logs on the VoteHere site. "Correlation between traffic at site a and site b" would be plenty with the right judge.
Unlike discovery in a trial, "fishing" warrants are perfectly legit, assuming you've got a sufficently friendly judge.
It's happened, actually. Some guy took the open source (BSD-style) CD ripper CDex and repacked it (with nothing more than a simple string replace on the name, no less) into a new installer that included mounds of spyware.
Theres a couple tools for packing Python into a single binary. The Python runtime itself is fairly small, but most apps will need a signifigant supset of the standard libraries as well, so you'll be shipping some pretty large files. When using wxPython it walks all over Java, though.
Fair use certainly DOES apply. You may be in violation of your TOS, but thats not a LEGAL issue, it's s civil issue between you and Apple. Doing this is NOT a violation of copyright under any reasonable interperation, although writing and distributing this application may be unlawful under the DMCA, which only makes provisions for research and not for fair use.
It is extremely questionable and probably false that the licensing terms from iTunes (or, indeed, for any other online music store) can be applied to anything except the service provided by the store. For historical examples, look at book publishing and pay-per-view TV, both of which tried very, very hard to force a "licensed, not bought" model on consumers and were smacked down in court. It's certainly not any sort of clear cut "this is illegal wah!" as you seem to be claiming.
Well, if you don't know, or if what you believe is not the truth, then to YOU it doesn't really matter. However, if what you think is an 18 year old hot chick when in reality she's a 15 year old girl with a snoopy mother, you may be in a world of hurt.
That was a very informative and helpful post, which sadly failed to have any relevence because the Kasner family holds no trademark on the word "googol".
Also, there is no argument that "Google" is NOT based on "googol", as it's clearly spelled out in the very first paragraph of Googles corporate information page.
The name is indeed based on the word googol. Google gives credit to the inventors: I quote from the Google coporate information page:
Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.
I agree that it's a money grab. There's not even any valid trademarks for the term "googol" by itself, the only "live" ones are all part of something else, and none are even remotely related to web searching.
The two aren't unrelated. An atheist, by definition, has no belief in (a) God. Period. "Extremist" definitions of atheism are usually only trotted out for flame wars or as ad-hominim attacks.
It is NOT as, alot of religious folk like to pretend "a belief that there is no God", and nor would such a belief be hypocritical, as is often claimed. If God decided to make himself known obviously (desecend from the heavens on shining lightbeams, get interviewed on E!, that sort of thing) most atheists would concede he exists.
Myself, I reserve judgment on the existence of God, although I tend toward the negative. But at least if we're talking about the God in the Christian bible, I wouldn't worship whether I knew he existed or not.
We call then the "upper class" now that we're all democratic and stuff, but it's the same niche as the ruling class in a feudal society - they control vast amounts of wealth and because of this hold tremendous influence. It's not JUST because the "main herd" doesn't want to ask questions. They also hold all the cards and all the power and any sort of head to head confrontation is pretty much doomed. Incidentlly, this is why no dedicated group of politcal outsiders has stepped forward as political candidates to force the government to be more transparent. Or, more accurately, why none has been successfull.
Members of the military who mouth off publically can expect reprisals, official or not. They don't have whistleblower protection, for example.
And as far as abuse of prisoners go, I think that anyone with any knowledge of military history will agree that it's commonplace. The military mindset seems to breed it. That's not to say that we should accept it or that we shouldn't strive for a higher standard, but portraying our soldiers as shining glorious heroes is a little excessive. And, of course, thats one reason the whole scandal is shocking people in the US so much - there was a tremendous respect for the troops, even among people who objected to the war and they feel betrayed. In any case, if all the reports as to the contents of the "private" videos only the white house has seen are accurate, this was far to widespread to be just a few people - this was a systemic policy of abuse and degredation (hardcore sex shows for the prisoners aside).
I'm also going to have to disagree with you as far as disobeying unlawful orders go. In general, it gets lip service at best, and the military courts understand this. Unless they need a scapegoat they generally don't prosecute soldiers for following unlawful orders. Obedience is far more important to the military than "correctness".
The short answer is no. Of course, those market incentives don't work in "all other markets", either. Hows your privately funded highway system working for you?
The more complicated answer is that a voucher/merit system will end up placing the burden of the market (you know all the people that get fucked over by a free market, like steel workers in PA?) on students, especially "high risk" ones like kids with learning disabilities. Teachers already try to avoid those kids and shuffle them because they're more work, it'll be alot worse if the teachers job and/or pay is involved. Note that this covers kids who're just hyper or annoying or whatever too, not just kids with diagnosed disabilities.
Even more than that is how you define a "bad teacher". Kids don't just have one tutor for thier entire school career. Which teacher is responsible for a childs bad performance? Theres no simple answer and it's something that needs to be dealt with on an individual basis and while the current system is far from perfect the model is sound.
That's even assuming that a voucher system can work at all, which it hasn't in any meaningful way as far as I know - just because you've got the option of taking your voucher somewhere else doesn't mean that you can bus your kid out there, or even that there are any other options. There's plenty of private schools out there already, for the people who can afford them and are willing to take that route.
I said "properly", not "more". I don't even know wtf the NEA is. It's not a matter of money not being present but of it being soaked up in beurocracy (the main source of problems with US education doesn't lie with individual teachers or even with individual schools but more at the county and state level). Distribution is a huge problem. The fact that school funds are often policically 'earmarked' is another - a school gets a ton of money for a new computer lab but the history classes are still using textbooks from the 80s. It's not UNDERfunded, it's MISfunded.
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If someone sent you a book you have every right in the world to set up your own printing press (or bulk copier) and run off a bajillion copies of it. Maybe you want to use them to lay a foundation for your house or something. If someone sends you a CD, you can do whatever you want with that CD, including reading the bits off of it and manipulating them in whatever way you desire. The amount of legal force in an EULA (in a non-UCITA state, anyway) is barely any more than an email disclaimer, and even then only because it requires affirmation that you've seen it. Bypass the installer and there's no legal weight at all
You do not need a special license to use softare. Period. There's no law anywhere in the US that says you do, not even UCITA. There's no case law supporting the idea that you do. There are some very tenuous cases where clicking "I Agree" to a shrinkwrap will constitute a real contract, but you don't have to agree to that contract, and can use your legally obtained software anyway.
Note that copy on select can still be used in windows (I've got a couple apps that do it). However, I think it's a terrible idea because it saves a single keystrok, bfd, at the expense of accident paste, awkward copy/replace, and potentially disasterous cut/replace. Over the history of X, I'd be willing to get that _far_ more keystrokes have been wasted because of those problems than have ever been saved because of copy on selection.
I'm not saying that copyright should be abolished, or that people shouldn't be compensated for it. I'm saying that extending that monopoly down to the finest grain level (for example, software "copies into memory" were once considered infringing), or even to a level that interferes with the passing of work into the public domain (such as DRM - in the sadly hypothetical case that copyright on anything written in the last hundred years ever expires, DRM _still_ won't let you copy it) is against the goals and ideals of copyright. People taking your work and, say, putting in a magazine or on a book cover and selling it is clearly against your copyright. Me making a color photocopy of one of your covers to use as decoration on my wall is not. Fair use is perhaps the most important part of copyright law and it's getting ignored in the interests of using it as a buisness model - which is not the intent. Copyright isn't there to create a market, it's there to add value to society. The creation of a market is incidental and in many ways detrimental - for example, DRM and the paid lobbying which is extending copyright power.
It's interesting that you make the point of scanning and reprinting. How many people do you know will photocopy an interesting magazine article or newspaper clipping to give to a friend? I certainly have seen it plent of times.
This is the important point: The rights of the copyright holder are LESS IMPORTANT than the goal of getting the information to the public. It's a balance. The copyright holder does not need to be paid for every single copy that takes place, no matter how much record labels whine. It's about reasonable compensation as an incentive to release works to the public, NOT about guaranteeing a revenue stream.
The government looks at it that way, too. Speeding tickets are basically counted as a tax by law enforcment - thats why theres (usually informal, to prevent PR outbreaks) quotas about them. Delivery services in NYC count parking tickets as part of the cost of doing buisness - and it really is, there. The city government is perfectly happy with "taxing" these companies by ticketing vans rather than having any sort of formal licensing (and, honestly, it almost makes sense - the red tape and politics involved in a new licensing deal is far more than the cost of simply ticketing people using the existing system).
Accountability, after all, is why (supposedly) we pay CEOs all that money. You're the ultimate go-to guy at a corporation and all responsibility and accountability ultimately rests with you. It's the same with the commander-in-chief - it's not just about being able to tell the Army to go kill people, there is responsibility involved as well. After all, you're the voice of the military to the public, and you're expected to have satisfying answers when stuff like this ends up in the public eye. Trying to pass the buck when you're the guy in charge is a sign of weakness and poor leadership, imo.
It's the opposite in the US, "congolmerate" style names are used in the singular. Company names in particular. I belive this has a great deal to do with our legal fiction that corporations are people.
In fairness, I scored 740 on verbal and I can't write my way out of a paper bag. I read a tremendous amount and have a feel for proper English but little formal understanding of the rules, very little patience for those rules, and none of the creative spark required to write engaging essays. SAT verbal doesn't really test any of that stuff.
I'm aware of that and it's addressed in the flamewar. The freedom of Linux is one thing that allowed this - if Tannenbaum (and PH) and allowed forks, then Minix could have had all this without compromising the educational aspects. Further, today, all that stuff IS on low end student hardware and yet Minix doesn't have it.
12 years ago, who would have imagined that it is normal and in fact essential for a desktop OS to be able to smoothly handle many IO intensive processes at the same time?
Open source isn't any sort of panacea for electronic voting because the end user doesn't control the actual system. This is different than when you're a paranoid security fanatic and you hand check every line of source that you compile on your personal machine, as well as verifying the output with 3 different compilers. Someone _else_ is loading the software and firmware onto those touchscreens and you can't ensure that that code is the open source code. Thats what the auditing is for, because thats where it's important. Open source development might help make it more secure (both algorithmically and in code), but it doesn't address the issues that really concern her.
Unlike discovery in a trial, "fishing" warrants are perfectly legit, assuming you've got a sufficently friendly judge.
You mean like sourceforge? Anonymous CVS access is a pretty import thing to alot of projects.
It's happened, actually. Some guy took the open source (BSD-style) CD ripper CDex and repacked it (with nothing more than a simple string replace on the name, no less) into a new installer that included mounds of spyware.
Theres a couple tools for packing Python into a single binary. The Python runtime itself is fairly small, but most apps will need a signifigant supset of the standard libraries as well, so you'll be shipping some pretty large files. When using wxPython it walks all over Java, though.
It is extremely questionable and probably false that the licensing terms from iTunes (or, indeed, for any other online music store) can be applied to anything except the service provided by the store. For historical examples, look at book publishing and pay-per-view TV, both of which tried very, very hard to force a "licensed, not bought" model on consumers and were smacked down in court. It's certainly not any sort of clear cut "this is illegal wah!" as you seem to be claiming.
Well, if you don't know, or if what you believe is not the truth, then to YOU it doesn't really matter. However, if what you think is an 18 year old hot chick when in reality she's a 15 year old girl with a snoopy mother, you may be in a world of hurt.
Also, there is no argument that "Google" is NOT based on "googol", as it's clearly spelled out in the very first paragraph of Googles corporate information page.
Trade secret!
It is NOT as, alot of religious folk like to pretend "a belief that there is no God", and nor would such a belief be hypocritical, as is often claimed. If God decided to make himself known obviously (desecend from the heavens on shining lightbeams, get interviewed on E!, that sort of thing) most atheists would concede he exists.
Myself, I reserve judgment on the existence of God, although I tend toward the negative. But at least if we're talking about the God in the Christian bible, I wouldn't worship whether I knew he existed or not.
We call then the "upper class" now that we're all democratic and stuff, but it's the same niche as the ruling class in a feudal society - they control vast amounts of wealth and because of this hold tremendous influence. It's not JUST because the "main herd" doesn't want to ask questions. They also hold all the cards and all the power and any sort of head to head confrontation is pretty much doomed. Incidentlly, this is why no dedicated group of politcal outsiders has stepped forward as political candidates to force the government to be more transparent. Or, more accurately, why none has been successfull.
And as far as abuse of prisoners go, I think that anyone with any knowledge of military history will agree that it's commonplace. The military mindset seems to breed it. That's not to say that we should accept it or that we shouldn't strive for a higher standard, but portraying our soldiers as shining glorious heroes is a little excessive. And, of course, thats one reason the whole scandal is shocking people in the US so much - there was a tremendous respect for the troops, even among people who objected to the war and they feel betrayed. In any case, if all the reports as to the contents of the "private" videos only the white house has seen are accurate, this was far to widespread to be just a few people - this was a systemic policy of abuse and degredation (hardcore sex shows for the prisoners aside). I'm also going to have to disagree with you as far as disobeying unlawful orders go. In general, it gets lip service at best, and the military courts understand this. Unless they need a scapegoat they generally don't prosecute soldiers for following unlawful orders. Obedience is far more important to the military than "correctness".
The more complicated answer is that a voucher/merit system will end up placing the burden of the market (you know all the people that get fucked over by a free market, like steel workers in PA?) on students, especially "high risk" ones like kids with learning disabilities. Teachers already try to avoid those kids and shuffle them because they're more work, it'll be alot worse if the teachers job and/or pay is involved. Note that this covers kids who're just hyper or annoying or whatever too, not just kids with diagnosed disabilities.
Even more than that is how you define a "bad teacher". Kids don't just have one tutor for thier entire school career. Which teacher is responsible for a childs bad performance? Theres no simple answer and it's something that needs to be dealt with on an individual basis and while the current system is far from perfect the model is sound. That's even assuming that a voucher system can work at all, which it hasn't in any meaningful way as far as I know - just because you've got the option of taking your voucher somewhere else doesn't mean that you can bus your kid out there, or even that there are any other options. There's plenty of private schools out there already, for the people who can afford them and are willing to take that route.
I said "properly", not "more". I don't even know wtf the NEA is. It's not a matter of money not being present but of it being soaked up in beurocracy (the main source of problems with US education doesn't lie with individual teachers or even with individual schools but more at the county and state level). Distribution is a huge problem. The fact that school funds are often policically 'earmarked' is another - a school gets a ton of money for a new computer lab but the history classes are still using textbooks from the 80s. It's not UNDERfunded, it's MISfunded.