Some cd burners will only burn audio CD burners - the ones that were built into Sony stereo equipment are an example. I'm fairly sure that none of these products are still around though, since consumers aren't total morons.
The tax originally applied to cassette tapes. A similiar tax applies to blank video cassettes. Canada has one on all CD-Rs, the USs is only on the "audio" ones, which is why they cost more.
I do that, and it's mainly because the installation packaging tools I use assume that you want an EULA, and I'm too lazy to look up how to work around that (easier to use existing templates) and just stick the GPL in there. I don't actually care if they read or click on it or not. The default template says you have to agree, and it's too much work to disable it.
Granted, if I ever got seriously into distributing software, like for money or as a buisness or anything, I'd spend the couple days to package it right;)
It would have happened, but not on the scale that it did. It wouldn't have penetrated middle america, and p2p wouldn't be on the cover of Newsweek. It would be like file trading via IRC or the newsgroups - there, and active, but not the nationally known phenomena that p2p is.
The problem isn't inherently that a politician doesn't pay attention to his demographic, but that government has grown to the point where only the most broad base issues can get a hearing. I think everyone would agree that giving a company 2 billion dollars, and ignoring it when they fail to fulfill the contract is bad. But because this isn't an issue that directly affects people, because it won't make mainstream media, and because it doesn't have a cute mascot, it's whats going to happen. The corruption and pork in politics is a direct consequence of this.
It's a fundamental problem with democracy - this isn't something new, it's always been like this, it just gets worse as the country grows (media consolidation has a pretty big effect, too).
mean, for the decades before P2P what do you think people did to hear a song?
Um, they listented to what the music industry aligarchy wanted them to listen to. Bands without a label couldn't get widespread exposure (there are perhaps a dozen notable exceptions. Not much over the last 50 years).
This is why the RIAA hates the internet so much, and why they dropped the ball so badly as to allow P2P to start in the first place. If iTunes had been around in 1995, there would have been no Napster. They don't give a shit about piracy (well, now the probably do, it's widespread enough to hurt), because they know all the same things that people post here - people downloading who wouldn't have bought the songs aren't customers. It's the decay of thier distribution network that scares them - if you can hear anything you want on P2P, you don't have to listen to the radio. This means you aren't hearing what the songs they want to hype, and you aren't listening to the commercials for the products they want to sell.
They did this to themselves, though, so it's pretty hard for me to feel sorry for them.
A politician mostly makes decisions to the people who have access to him - this is almost exlusively high paid (and paying) lobbyists. The only (and I mean the ONLY) time that the "voice of the people" is heard over what these lobbyists are telling him is when there is an issue that meets the following requirements:
a) It's massively publicized. You need almost everyone to be aware of it, which means prime time coverage on FOX and/or CNN. You may notice that this means that the primetime news networks can communally kill just about any issue.
b) It needs to be something that people feel strongly about, because otherwise they won't care enough to do anything about. Saving the children is a good way to get this.
c) It needs to be close enough to election time that they'll remember. If he just got elected and dones something, nobody will care 2 years from now.
d) People need to either a) all feel the same way about it (Save the children) or b) split along party lines.
If these conditions aren't met, then the politician in question is going to listen to the people who he pays and who pay him to tell him to do. In theory, this is not neccesarily bad - people (as in the "voice of the people") aren't broadly or well enough informed to make rational decisions about alot of things.
Naturally, the scale of these requirements goes down the more local a politician is, and they become easier to fullfill - it's alot easier to get a school board all on the same page than a county which is easier than a state, which is (much) easier than the US.
I'm not sure what "accountability" we're talking about - it's not illegal to cheat on your wife. Now, the lying under oath is a little more serious, but I think that most people honestly don't give a shit because it was a) something that they didn't care about and b) because it was such a clear partisan powerplay.
Would you hate GWB as a person if you knew he lied, then? Do you follow the news? How about his VP and his indiscretions with Enron?
I notice you aren't taking up my request to define exactly HOW gwb is a better president...
"Please check this box if you'd like to be contacted by the President or his authorized partners regarding special offers and discounts only available to our valued subscribers"
Good, advertising has become the most fucked up unholy beast and has alot to do with whats wrong with this country. We should start actually enforcing truth in advertising laws, and then extend them so that you can't say or even imply anything that is not provably, objectively true about your product. Then maybe we could have a healthy market again.
All the commercial libraries I use impose substantial additional obligations for distribution, such as limiting what I can do with my application (non-compete, for example), distribution of the source code (there's a couple that prohibit open-sourcing your application if you use the library), and the paying of royalties. And why is selling the binaries alone a straw man? It's a limitation of the license that does not apply to the (L)GPL - if I aquire a license to a (L)GPLed product, I can resell it if I want. Maybe I'm a reseller AND a developer. We aren't just talking about developers, here.
In 50 words or less, describe what a President should do. Be sure that you use objective, measurable qualitites, so that we can then compare Bush and Clinton to define who "the better President" is. You're at least as much of a sheep as you're claiming the OP is, because you'd hate Clinton regardless of anything else as well. I don't give a shit that he got blowjobs in office, why should I? I've had sex in my workplace before. I even lied about it when I got caught.
I'm not sure what the point of your link is - are you trying to tell me that Republicans are NOT pro-big money? Fuck election stats, look at BEHAVIOR if you want to see that. And you'll find that pretty much every one in politics is in favor of supporting their pet industries (which industry that is varies, of course), and supports all the regulation or deregulation that industry wants.
The GPL is no different from other licenses in that you should know about it and review it BEFORE you use the code. The fact that some people don't treat it as a "real" license, get bit by it, and then scream about how it's viral is one of the things the "GPL-heads" are trying to prevent by saying that it's like any other license.
You're also incorrect about commercial licenses, at least in my experience - library software is almost always sold under a development license, where you're allow to use the code & source internally, and distribute binaries with your project, but you aren't allowed to sell the binaries alone, or provide the source to people outside the organization. There's usually a no-compete style clause, too, where you can't, for example, use a widget library to make your own commercial widget libaray (ie, you can't re-sell the same product with a thin wrapper around it).
While I nominally I agree with you, I belive the argument is that the header files and stub code inserted by the linker constitute a derived work. Now, if you reverse engineer (clean room of course) the function signatures from the library, and load it at runtime (rather than at loadtime), maybe you've got a point there. On the other hand, your software is clearly deriving in some ways from the GPLed work no matter what the technicality of how you link to it...
This is one reason I stick with the LGPL for libraries - it's how I think the GPL should work, but just in case I'm wrong in a legal sense it's good to be covered.
It's like this: A clerk needs to have access to all employee records, because he might have a legitimate need to access any given employees records. He access lots every day, and it's not worth the layer of beurocracy to have him fill out forms for every access. On the other hand, he shouldn't be going browsing, because thats a violation of privacy. So you add records that he would NEVER legitimatly be asked to look at, and if those are accessed then you know he's been doing something he's not supposed to.
It's because copyright doesn't work well with software, and the people in charge of writing this sort of law are technically competent to do so. Say you have a book with lots of footnotes referring to other sources. Dynamic linking just tells you where the footnote comes from, you have to go get the book off the shelf and do your lookup yourself. Static linking sticks all your sources in the back of the book.
Now, I happen to agree with you with regards to software - but the comparison to print media is what makes this a (potentially) thorny legal issue.
There's no diminishing supply of IP, which is why the RIAA hates the internet so much - the entire concept of distributing music the way they do is predicated on being able to create an artificial scarcity (which, of course, lets you set the price however you want).
Now, you're correct that current copyright law doesn't allow for this (which wasn't much of an issue when it was written, because it only lasted 14 years, and there wasn't much trouble keeping it around when it entered the public domain), but now that copyright lasts for 3 generations, the artificial scarcity of old works can become enormous - which is a total misappropriation of copyright and the senators who let it happen should be beaten to death.
In a couple years when we can get some nice ruggedized ones, we'll use them in place of the handhelds we're deploying to the field now. The clipboard-sized form factor is alot better for field work, and the increased screen size is a real boon to the inspectors, who have trouble writing notes into tiny text boxes and picking items from tiny list controls.
It's the old problem of finding physical world analagies for digital media. The hard part, of course, is that theres no exact correlation.
My version of the same thing: You publish a newspaper, giving it out for free to anyone who comes to you asking for a copy. Every morning, I go and get my copy, and stick it in my warehouse. Anyone who comes to me can look at the old versions. This is exactly the case with libraries and newspaper archives right now.
There's a further issue, which is the point of copyright, and whether the public interest is better served by caching or by allowing producers to retain control. Personally, I believe that the public benefits of archival (for freely available content) far outweigh the rights of publishers to restrict that content - in fact, I can't see a compelling argument to allow that control at all (I don't consider either "It's mine and I'll do what I want with it" or "Someone might sue me for what I said a long time ago" to be compelling).
In recent years (well, to be honest, more or less gradually since the founding of the Union) the balance of power in copyright has been slowly tilting more and more toward the publisher (not the author), and away from the public domain. This is visible not only in extremely long copyrigh durations, but also in the unprecedented amount of control we grant to publishers. It's made more extreme by the reaction against digital media, because traditional copyright logic doesn't apply as cleanly - the natural state of copyright leans toward the publisher with physical media (because you have to go to them to get your physical copy, and it's hard to reproduce yourself), whereas digital media leans toward the public domain (where it's so easy to copy things that in many cases it's simpler as well as cheaper to get it illegally)
I don't go often enough for the cookie to stay around. Besides, it pissed me off enough the first time it happened that I didn't feel like registering.
If you have a problem with your employer holding you responsible for things you said years ago, maybe you should talk to your employer about that.
All this talk about copyright isn't really relevent, in my eyes - this is information thats clearly of use and it's in the public interest to have an archive of it. It's the same reason that libraries maintain archives of dead tree newspapers (they don't have to pay anything special for that, by the way). Copyright exists to serve the public interest. If you don't want your work in the public view, then don't publish it.
My personal view is that caching the exact content of information thats made freely and publically accessible by the author can hardly constitute a breach of copyright, and the benefit of having documentation of the state of the web far outweighs any niggly little pedants interest in hiding what he's said.
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Some cd burners will only burn audio CD burners - the ones that were built into Sony stereo equipment are an example. I'm fairly sure that none of these products are still around though, since consumers aren't total morons.
The tax originally applied to cassette tapes. A similiar tax applies to blank video cassettes. Canada has one on all CD-Rs, the USs is only on the "audio" ones, which is why they cost more.
Granted, if I ever got seriously into distributing software, like for money or as a buisness or anything, I'd spend the couple days to package it right ;)
It would have happened, but not on the scale that it did. It wouldn't have penetrated middle america, and p2p wouldn't be on the cover of Newsweek. It would be like file trading via IRC or the newsgroups - there, and active, but not the nationally known phenomena that p2p is.
It's a fundamental problem with democracy - this isn't something new, it's always been like this, it just gets worse as the country grows (media consolidation has a pretty big effect, too).
Um, they listented to what the music industry aligarchy wanted them to listen to. Bands without a label couldn't get widespread exposure (there are perhaps a dozen notable exceptions. Not much over the last 50 years).
This is why the RIAA hates the internet so much, and why they dropped the ball so badly as to allow P2P to start in the first place. If iTunes had been around in 1995, there would have been no Napster. They don't give a shit about piracy (well, now the probably do, it's widespread enough to hurt), because they know all the same things that people post here - people downloading who wouldn't have bought the songs aren't customers. It's the decay of thier distribution network that scares them - if you can hear anything you want on P2P, you don't have to listen to the radio. This means you aren't hearing what the songs they want to hype, and you aren't listening to the commercials for the products they want to sell.
They did this to themselves, though, so it's pretty hard for me to feel sorry for them.
a) It's massively publicized. You need almost everyone to be aware of it, which means prime time coverage on FOX and/or CNN. You may notice that this means that the primetime news networks can communally kill just about any issue.
b) It needs to be something that people feel strongly about, because otherwise they won't care enough to do anything about. Saving the children is a good way to get this.
c) It needs to be close enough to election time that they'll remember. If he just got elected and dones something, nobody will care 2 years from now.
d) People need to either a) all feel the same way about it (Save the children) or b) split along party lines.
If these conditions aren't met, then the politician in question is going to listen to the people who he pays and who pay him to tell him to do. In theory, this is not neccesarily bad - people (as in the "voice of the people") aren't broadly or well enough informed to make rational decisions about alot of things.
Naturally, the scale of these requirements goes down the more local a politician is, and they become easier to fullfill - it's alot easier to get a school board all on the same page than a county which is easier than a state, which is (much) easier than the US.
Would you hate GWB as a person if you knew he lied, then? Do you follow the news? How about his VP and his indiscretions with Enron?
I notice you aren't taking up my request to define exactly HOW gwb is a better president...
"Please check this box if you'd like to be contacted by the President or his authorized partners regarding special offers and discounts only available to our valued subscribers"
Good, advertising has become the most fucked up unholy beast and has alot to do with whats wrong with this country. We should start actually enforcing truth in advertising laws, and then extend them so that you can't say or even imply anything that is not provably, objectively true about your product. Then maybe we could have a healthy market again.
All the commercial libraries I use impose substantial additional obligations for distribution, such as limiting what I can do with my application (non-compete, for example), distribution of the source code (there's a couple that prohibit open-sourcing your application if you use the library), and the paying of royalties. And why is selling the binaries alone a straw man? It's a limitation of the license that does not apply to the (L)GPL - if I aquire a license to a (L)GPLed product, I can resell it if I want. Maybe I'm a reseller AND a developer. We aren't just talking about developers, here.
I'm not sure what the point of your link is - are you trying to tell me that Republicans are NOT pro-big money? Fuck election stats, look at BEHAVIOR if you want to see that. And you'll find that pretty much every one in politics is in favor of supporting their pet industries (which industry that is varies, of course), and supports all the regulation or deregulation that industry wants.
You're also incorrect about commercial licenses, at least in my experience - library software is almost always sold under a development license, where you're allow to use the code & source internally, and distribute binaries with your project, but you aren't allowed to sell the binaries alone, or provide the source to people outside the organization. There's usually a no-compete style clause, too, where you can't, for example, use a widget library to make your own commercial widget libaray (ie, you can't re-sell the same product with a thin wrapper around it).
This is one reason I stick with the LGPL for libraries - it's how I think the GPL should work, but just in case I'm wrong in a legal sense it's good to be covered.
It's like this: A clerk needs to have access to all employee records, because he might have a legitimate need to access any given employees records. He access lots every day, and it's not worth the layer of beurocracy to have him fill out forms for every access. On the other hand, he shouldn't be going browsing, because thats a violation of privacy. So you add records that he would NEVER legitimatly be asked to look at, and if those are accessed then you know he's been doing something he's not supposed to.
Now, I happen to agree with you with regards to software - but the comparison to print media is what makes this a (potentially) thorny legal issue.
Now, you're correct that current copyright law doesn't allow for this (which wasn't much of an issue when it was written, because it only lasted 14 years, and there wasn't much trouble keeping it around when it entered the public domain), but now that copyright lasts for 3 generations, the artificial scarcity of old works can become enormous - which is a total misappropriation of copyright and the senators who let it happen should be beaten to death.
In a couple years when we can get some nice ruggedized ones, we'll use them in place of the handhelds we're deploying to the field now. The clipboard-sized form factor is alot better for field work, and the increased screen size is a real boon to the inspectors, who have trouble writing notes into tiny text boxes and picking items from tiny list controls.
The XML is zipped.
Who said that my personal views had anything to do with law? I believe that the law is WRONG. Whats so hard to understand about that?
My version of the same thing: You publish a newspaper, giving it out for free to anyone who comes to you asking for a copy. Every morning, I go and get my copy, and stick it in my warehouse. Anyone who comes to me can look at the old versions. This is exactly the case with libraries and newspaper archives right now.
There's a further issue, which is the point of copyright, and whether the public interest is better served by caching or by allowing producers to retain control. Personally, I believe that the public benefits of archival (for freely available content) far outweigh the rights of publishers to restrict that content - in fact, I can't see a compelling argument to allow that control at all (I don't consider either "It's mine and I'll do what I want with it" or "Someone might sue me for what I said a long time ago" to be compelling).
In recent years (well, to be honest, more or less gradually since the founding of the Union) the balance of power in copyright has been slowly tilting more and more toward the publisher (not the author), and away from the public domain. This is visible not only in extremely long copyrigh durations, but also in the unprecedented amount of control we grant to publishers. It's made more extreme by the reaction against digital media, because traditional copyright logic doesn't apply as cleanly - the natural state of copyright leans toward the publisher with physical media (because you have to go to them to get your physical copy, and it's hard to reproduce yourself), whereas digital media leans toward the public domain (where it's so easy to copy things that in many cases it's simpler as well as cheaper to get it illegally)
I don't go often enough for the cookie to stay around. Besides, it pissed me off enough the first time it happened that I didn't feel like registering.
I never heard anyone who wasn't in a Yahoo commercial use Yahoo as a verb. Ever.
All this talk about copyright isn't really relevent, in my eyes - this is information thats clearly of use and it's in the public interest to have an archive of it. It's the same reason that libraries maintain archives of dead tree newspapers (they don't have to pay anything special for that, by the way). Copyright exists to serve the public interest. If you don't want your work in the public view, then don't publish it.
My personal view is that caching the exact content of information thats made freely and publically accessible by the author can hardly constitute a breach of copyright, and the benefit of having documentation of the state of the web far outweighs any niggly little pedants interest in hiding what he's said.