Well, as long as you knew, or should reasonably have known, that such a contract was involved in the purchase, of certianly I'm fine with it. I, of course, wouldn't buy a TV like that. And I'd hope enough other people would behave like me and there'd be companies that want our business.
And, yes, agree that in some cases, EULAs aren't such that one can reasonably know what they are before the purchase has been made - and I'm all for legislation that requires EULAs be made available before the purchase is made, and for returning the product for a full refund otherwise.
But I think one of the issues at play here is that there are a number of 'things' that people are 'used to buying', like music and software, and now some vendors are trying to change it from 'buying' to 'licensing'. Of course, as a consumer, I'd much rather own it than license it. And, yes, I'm a little worried that all music is going to turn in to a license deal, and that's going to make it harder for me to do with my songs what I want to.
But are we really going to tell the marketplace that two agents cannot enter in to an informed and consensual licensing contract? That a small software company can't write a contract with a large commercial entity to license some itellectual property to them in a very limited manner? It seems ludicrous to suggest that such behaviour should be outlawed.
And if not, why not let a musician enter in to a licensing deal with some set of listeners? Not all musicians need to do that. But if Joe Guitar player decides that's the business he wants to engage in, and Sally Afficionado is willing to sign Joe's contract, who are we to tell them they can't do that? We had no right to Joe's music in the first place.
So let Joe and Sally do their thing, and we'll do our thing with musicians or developers that are willing to sell or license their work-product to us on better terms. It's a big world out there, and there's room for all sorts of business models.
Yes, but the kinds of things that make contracts void are very few indeed. To say "I think some people would be better off if this particular contract was unenforcable" is not a good reason to void it.
Yeah, I agree with you that it'd be nice, in general, to be able to reverse engineer software, particularly for white-hat reasons. But there are a lot of people out there who might not write software if they couldn't protect their investments with contracts like that. And you might not care if those pieces of software never got written, but there are a lot of people out there that may not care about reverse engineering it and want to buy it anyways. So contracts like this are really useful to ensure that they get to buy softwre they want.
There's room in the market for FOSS software and for closed-source, proprietary, non-reverse-engineer-able software. Let the users decide which ones they want. If FOSS is really that much better, they'll go that route (provided they're sufficiently eductated...and that's your/our job).
There are really two kinds of "measuring affects things" at play. The first is more understandable by the lay person - when you look at buckingham palace, you're not changing it, but you're changing the photons that had reflected off it. Had you not looked, your eyes would not have been in the way and absorbed them, so they'd have continued on. In a more general sense, to detect anything, be it the velocity of a particle, the location of a particle, the energy level of a particle, etc., you need to do something to it that affects something about the particle.
The other kind "measuring affects things" is a little harder to grasp, and is exemplified by the schroedinger's cat example. There are situations where a particle/system/etc. can probabalistically be in one of several states. But until someone or something measures it to determine which state it is in, "the universe hasn't decided yet". So it's kind of like telling someone "I'm thinking of either a car or a dog" and not really deciding which one you're thinking of until someone asks you to tell them which it is. It's not the case that someone really has to look at it for it to "determine" itself - something about the universe could depend on the state, which is as good as an observer looking at it.
Actually, with most of the exokernels that actually existed in the wild, even things like the filesystem and the network stack existed within the process of the application using it. For apps that shared the same implementation, they'd use a shared library - a purely performance hack so that the text segments didn't use up lots of memory. But each app could chose to implement their own version. You could think of an Exokernel as a monolithic kernel except that the abstractions that the kernel present to the process are much lower level (e.g. disk blocks and packet filters) than with traditional monolithic kernels (e.g. files and sockets). The main premise of Exokernels was that OS's have traditionally, secured hardware resources, multiplexed hardware resources and abstracted hardware resources - the first two are good ideas, but the last one is better left up to the application since it knows what it's doing with them.
Since they gave you the content, when you break the DRM for the purpose of listening to it, you're not breaking it for the purpose of copying it (necessarily). They gave you the copy on purpose...so it'd seem that tools designed to give you access to content that was given to you by the copyright owners might not be covered by the same DMCA.
Once the info is out in GPL for Linux, can't the OpenBSD folks "steal" the knowledge from it? GPL protects the literal code (i.e. copyright) not the ideas contained within it. In the same sense that I can read your GPL'd code and re-implement it under the BSD license (or a comercial license), it would seem they could do the same with this.
Spaf: You can't secure a machine with a privileged user.
evilviper : That's nice to hear, but I completely disagree. The only problems it has ever caused is the fact that people are lazy and run everything as Root. Run every service as a normal user, remove SUID everywhere possible, and there is no way anyone can break-in, without a very bad kernel bug, or some sort of system misconfiguration.
That's nice to hear, as well, but there have been numerous instances where the privileged user model has caused security problems. The privileged user model forces you to have more authority than you want when you need to do any number of things. That, combined with resource naming indirection (e.g. filenames to inodes) and race conditions (e.g. if (has_certian_attributes(filename)) { delete(filename); } where someone can change what filename refers to beween the if and the then) has a long a ugly history of allowing non-trusted code to trick trusted (i.e. privileged) code to do Bad Things(tm). And it's not because the privileged code should have been run as a normal user, since there are many things that only root can do.
Just look at how complicated sshd has had to become to try to prevent these kinds of problems. It's unacceptable that every program which needs to do one minor root-only task needs to be this complicated.
Systems which use explicit non-indirected resource-specific privilige tokens (so you can bestow on an application the rights to do exactly what it needs to be able to do, and nothing more) are much less susceptible to such bugs/attacks.
why is this news? Some guy gets upset and sues everyone and their neighbor in a way that even the most jaded and pessemistic of us know won't fly in court. Yippee.
If I recall correctly from 6.313 (Tom Knight's Contemporary Computer Design Course), signals can appear to travel faster than the speed of light, but leading edges of frequency changes cannot, so information still obeys the speed limit (well, leaving aside quantum partical physics games).
Re:Atmospheric Conductivity Issues
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
If it is conductive, then it will act just like
a lightning rod, but not in the way you imply. Contrary to popular opinion, lightning rods keep lightning from happening near them by slowly bleeding off the charge differential - NOT by having the lightning hit them instead of surrounding object. A really tall conductive cable would allow charge build-up in the clouds to be discharged before it reached "lightning-proportions".
Taking this to an extreme, if we turned the Earth into a porcuipine of really tall lightning rods, we could theoretically eradicate lightning all together. Wow. A new cause to unite around.
Many of the comments refer to EULA's prohibiting
you from copying them. As you can clearly read
the EULA without agreeing to it, the EULA itself
cannot encumber you with respect to this. Copyright law would be the controlling issue, and I suspect Fair Use would allow you to keep track a DB of them for Consumer Protection reasons. Hey, look at Consumer Reports and how they reprint a number of product-related literature for similar reasons.
While there are certianly examples where this is true, there are counter examples. I don't think
the Internet has decisively come down on either side of this debate. Look at web/streaming proxy/caches : there are numerous network topologies where these are clear wins. Admittedly, I wouldn't want a lot of "smarts" embedded in ASICs in my network, but the "network" is a lot more than routers and wire these days.
And, on a completely different angle, I wouldn't be suprised if some/most of the uses of this are target ed towards non-network type of uses. For instances, using them for interconnects in a box or between two very localized boxes. Yeah, a network by some definition, but the "Internet" hasn't really taught us much about PCI buses.
They do lose brownie points. If you've ever seen a confirmation hearing, the percentage of case overturned comes up frequently.
As an aside, though, our court system is not structured such that all decisions result in the decision that Supreme Court would have made, either because they're made "correctly" or because they're "fixed" on appeal. The barrier to overturn a decision on appeal is higher than just "I would have done it differently", so, in practice, lower courts _do_ get to "make precendent" often-times if they get a case first. The Supreme court typically only intervenes in cases of conflicting precedent (so we can have a uniform law of the land) or if the lower court made a sufficiently "wrong" decision.
that when their droid army is finally complete,
they don't want Yoda coming in to save the day.
You're not naive enough to think that they
haven't seen ATOC too, are you?
Because the government steps in when technology disrupts previous mechanisms of copyright royalty payements, but the technology is deemed useful enough not to stifle. They did the same with radio, and there is a proposal from Verizon that they do it with _all_ content (music, movies) on the internet.
...going to be finding out who is good at doing what, and breaking up hard problems into components that can be shipped to the people that are good at working on them. It doesn't seem like technology is the real problem here. More human and project management skills.
Given that the devil in most large systems is in the number of inter-dependencies, not the complexity of any one given component, not having everyone involved relatively close in meatspace is going to make re-constituting a total solution based on the individual component solutions quite difficult indeed.
<mandatory-lcs-grad-rip-on-the-media-lab>
But atleast this project is has more societal value than some of the other a virtual dog that you can pet.
</mandatory-lcs-grad-rip-on-the-media-lab >
Again, like so many other issues, it's not a problem that a company is trying to thwart its competitors. It's not even a problem that they try to do it "covertly", or through interpretting contracts as aggressively as possible.
It's a problem that Microsoft, a "convicted" monopoly is doing it. It's just that simple.
Not quite. Heat is the ambient kinetic energy of the particles (atoms/molecules) that make up the thing that it hot. They're effectively shaking back and forth more or less rapidly. Hot objects may radiate energy in the form of photons, but heat, itself, is just kinetic energy.
There is a double standard, and that's because of the monopolistic power that MS has. The fact that MS, by not porting "key" software to other platforms uses the synergy of their application and OS market-share to exploit their pseudo-monopoly and re-inforce their entrenched market position. This is bad for the market. Apple, by doing this, does not have the same effect, and thus, should not warrant the same concern.
The only trick to this is that it's not just "if you improve our stuff", but it's also "if you use our stuff with your stuff in certian ways, your stuff becomes our stuff". This is the scary part to many companies.
It's not that they're going to base their revenue off of a N-line diff of a GPL package, but they're going to use a GPL component/library to implement some component of their system, and they worry (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) that this results in their entire system being "infected".
Where's the line between "your product is just an improvement on GPL-package FOO" and "your product uses FOO as a sub-component"? That's a tough question, and the GPL tries to define it (and the LGPL was a reaction to this issue), but for many companies, it's not quite so simple.
I could understand if someone was taking content
from their site and embedding it in their own site. But linking is effectively saying "there is something interested over there", similar to me posting "hey, read page 46 of random book".
I can't imagine how someone would claim it is copyright infrigement if the "infringer" never touches the content in the alleged infringing act.
As has been stated before, if you don't want someone to get your content unless they go through your site, don't serve it to them. But don't expect other people to implement this for you.
I'd be the last one to say I agree with the current setup of copyright laws, but to say that the government has no responsibility in enforcing the property rights of people is ludicrous. Just think if they did the same for trespassing, burglary or auto-theft. The people do have an interest in the government protecting their rights. That's what allows us to avoid vigilantism.
Doubt Fanning (the younger) got much of anything out of this one. I suspect that more than $15 was dumped into Napster through VC and angel investment, and most likely, much, if not all, of it is going to be skimmed off the top by preferred stock holders before it gets to the common stock holders like Shawn. Added to that, I doubt he has a significant slice of the pie, so whatever crumbs _are_ left, won't amount to much.
This, for a company that at one point in time was one of the hottest things on the Net.
Corporations do not have social security numbers. They have Tax ID's (Called Employer's FED ID Number on your W-2), and no, they're not as "alive" as people.
Corporations exist as legal entities for a variety of very useful reasons, and while some can be abused, the ones people complain about (owning stock, lobbying the government, etc.) turn out to be very useful actions for them to take on behalf of their stock holders, all of which are (indirectly, perhaps) actual people.
Would you rather they not exist legally, and when a company's product causes you harm, not be able to sue anyone, since no one person in the firm was individuall liable?
Corporations are a convienient whipping boy, but just take a moment to think about how our economy would work without them.
Slashdot Mirror
And, yes, agree that in some cases, EULAs aren't such that one can reasonably know what they are before the purchase has been made - and I'm all for legislation that requires EULAs be made available before the purchase is made, and for returning the product for a full refund otherwise.
But I think one of the issues at play here is that there are a number of 'things' that people are 'used to buying', like music and software, and now some vendors are trying to change it from 'buying' to 'licensing'. Of course, as a consumer, I'd much rather own it than license it. And, yes, I'm a little worried that all music is going to turn in to a license deal, and that's going to make it harder for me to do with my songs what I want to.
But are we really going to tell the marketplace that two agents cannot enter in to an informed and consensual licensing contract? That a small software company can't write a contract with a large commercial entity to license some itellectual property to them in a very limited manner? It seems ludicrous to suggest that such behaviour should be outlawed.
And if not, why not let a musician enter in to a licensing deal with some set of listeners? Not all musicians need to do that. But if Joe Guitar player decides that's the business he wants to engage in, and Sally Afficionado is willing to sign Joe's contract, who are we to tell them they can't do that? We had no right to Joe's music in the first place.
So let Joe and Sally do their thing, and we'll do our thing with musicians or developers that are willing to sell or license their work-product to us on better terms. It's a big world out there, and there's room for all sorts of business models.
Yeah, I agree with you that it'd be nice, in general, to be able to reverse engineer software, particularly for white-hat reasons. But there are a lot of people out there who might not write software if they couldn't protect their investments with contracts like that. And you might not care if those pieces of software never got written, but there are a lot of people out there that may not care about reverse engineering it and want to buy it anyways. So contracts like this are really useful to ensure that they get to buy softwre they want.
There's room in the market for FOSS software and for closed-source, proprietary, non-reverse-engineer-able software. Let the users decide which ones they want. If FOSS is really that much better, they'll go that route (provided they're sufficiently eductated...and that's your/our job).
The other kind "measuring affects things" is a little harder to grasp, and is exemplified by the schroedinger's cat example. There are situations where a particle/system/etc. can probabalistically be in one of several states. But until someone or something measures it to determine which state it is in, "the universe hasn't decided yet". So it's kind of like telling someone "I'm thinking of either a car or a dog" and not really deciding which one you're thinking of until someone asks you to tell them which it is. It's not the case that someone really has to look at it for it to "determine" itself - something about the universe could depend on the state, which is as good as an observer looking at it.
Actually, with most of the exokernels that actually existed in the wild, even things like the filesystem and the network stack existed within the process of the application using it. For apps that shared the same implementation, they'd use a shared library - a purely performance hack so that the text segments didn't use up lots of memory. But each app could chose to implement their own version. You could think of an Exokernel as a monolithic kernel except that the abstractions that the kernel present to the process are much lower level (e.g. disk blocks and packet filters) than with traditional monolithic kernels (e.g. files and sockets). The main premise of Exokernels was that OS's have traditionally, secured hardware resources, multiplexed hardware resources and abstracted hardware resources - the first two are good ideas, but the last one is better left up to the application since it knows what it's doing with them.
Since they gave you the content, when you break the DRM for the purpose of listening to it, you're not breaking it for the purpose of copying it (necessarily). They gave you the copy on purpose...so it'd seem that tools designed to give you access to content that was given to you by the copyright owners might not be covered by the same DMCA.
Once the info is out in GPL for Linux, can't the OpenBSD folks "steal" the knowledge from it? GPL protects the literal code (i.e. copyright) not the ideas contained within it. In the same sense that I can read your GPL'd code and re-implement it under the BSD license (or a comercial license), it would seem they could do the same with this.
Just look at how complicated sshd has had to become to try to prevent these kinds of problems. It's unacceptable that every program which needs to do one minor root-only task needs to be this complicated.
Systems which use explicit non-indirected resource-specific privilige tokens (so you can bestow on an application the rights to do exactly what it needs to be able to do, and nothing more) are much less susceptible to such bugs/attacks.
why is this news? Some guy gets upset and sues everyone and their neighbor in a way that even the most jaded and pessemistic of us know won't fly in court. Yippee.
If I recall correctly from 6.313 (Tom Knight's Contemporary Computer Design Course), signals can appear to travel faster than the speed of light, but leading edges of frequency changes cannot, so information still obeys the speed limit (well, leaving aside quantum partical physics games).
Taking this to an extreme, if we turned the Earth into a porcuipine of really tall lightning rods, we could theoretically eradicate lightning all together. Wow. A new cause to unite around.
From the sounds of the article, it sounds like the board and the CEO deserved each other.
Many of the comments refer to EULA's prohibiting you from copying them. As you can clearly read the EULA without agreeing to it, the EULA itself cannot encumber you with respect to this. Copyright law would be the controlling issue, and I suspect Fair Use would allow you to keep track a DB of them for Consumer Protection reasons. Hey, look at Consumer Reports and how they reprint a number of product-related literature for similar reasons.
And, on a completely different angle, I wouldn't be suprised if some/most of the uses of this are target ed towards non-network type of uses. For instances, using them for interconnects in a box or between two very localized boxes. Yeah, a network by some definition, but the "Internet" hasn't really taught us much about PCI buses.
As an aside, though, our court system is not structured such that all decisions result in the decision that Supreme Court would have made, either because they're made "correctly" or because they're "fixed" on appeal. The barrier to overturn a decision on appeal is higher than just "I would have done it differently", so, in practice, lower courts _do_ get to "make precendent" often-times if they get a case first. The Supreme court typically only intervenes in cases of conflicting precedent (so we can have a uniform law of the land) or if the lower court made a sufficiently "wrong" decision.
that when their droid army is finally complete, they don't want Yoda coming in to save the day. You're not naive enough to think that they haven't seen ATOC too, are you?
Because the government steps in when technology disrupts previous mechanisms of copyright royalty payements, but the technology is deemed useful enough not to stifle. They did the same with radio, and there is a proposal from Verizon that they do it with _all_ content (music, movies) on the internet.
Given that the devil in most large systems is in the number of inter-dependencies, not the complexity of any one given component, not having everyone involved relatively close in meatspace is going to make re-constituting a total solution based on the individual component solutions quite difficult indeed.
<mandatory-lcs-grad-rip-on-the-media-lab>
But atleast this project is has more societal value than some of the other a virtual dog that you can pet.
</mandatory-lcs-grad-rip-on-the-media-lab >
It's a problem that Microsoft, a "convicted" monopoly is doing it. It's just that simple.
Not quite. Heat is the ambient kinetic energy of the particles (atoms/molecules) that make up the thing that it hot. They're effectively shaking back and forth more or less rapidly. Hot objects may radiate energy in the form of photons, but heat, itself, is just kinetic energy.
There is a double standard, and that's because of the monopolistic power that MS has. The fact that MS, by not porting "key" software to other platforms uses the synergy of their application and OS market-share to exploit their pseudo-monopoly and re-inforce their entrenched market position. This is bad for the market. Apple, by doing this, does not have the same effect, and thus, should not warrant the same concern.
It's not that they're going to base their revenue off of a N-line diff of a GPL package, but they're going to use a GPL component/library to implement some component of their system, and they worry (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) that this results in their entire system being "infected".
Where's the line between "your product is just an improvement on GPL-package FOO" and "your product uses FOO as a sub-component"? That's a tough question, and the GPL tries to define it (and the LGPL was a reaction to this issue), but for many companies, it's not quite so simple.
I can't imagine how someone would claim it is copyright infrigement if the "infringer" never touches the content in the alleged infringing act.
As has been stated before, if you don't want someone to get your content unless they go through your site, don't serve it to them. But don't expect other people to implement this for you.
I'd be the last one to say I agree with the current setup of copyright laws, but to say that the government has no responsibility in enforcing the property rights of people is ludicrous. Just think if they did the same for trespassing, burglary or auto-theft. The people do have an interest in the government protecting their rights. That's what allows us to avoid vigilantism.
This, for a company that at one point in time was one of the hottest things on the Net.
Nope, I'm sure he has some regrets...
Corporations do not have social security numbers. They have Tax ID's (Called Employer's FED ID Number on your W-2), and no, they're not as "alive" as people. Corporations exist as legal entities for a variety of very useful reasons, and while some can be abused, the ones people complain about (owning stock, lobbying the government, etc.) turn out to be very useful actions for them to take on behalf of their stock holders, all of which are (indirectly, perhaps) actual people. Would you rather they not exist legally, and when a company's product causes you harm, not be able to sue anyone, since no one person in the firm was individuall liable? Corporations are a convienient whipping boy, but just take a moment to think about how our economy would work without them.