"Copyright is not immortal, but it is cheaper to register and can last more than a lifetime, literally. The length of copyright protection for works created after 1978 is 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation. This means the copyright registrations for the NES system are valid until about 2090. Copyright also has some substantial legal "teeth." Under certain circumstances, it is possible for executives of corporations to have personal liability for copyright infringement. Statutory damages can be as much as $150,000 per instance of infringement plus attorneys fees for egregious cases. Actual damages can be even higher. Prison time is also possible for criminal copyright infringement. All that power for a thirty dollar registration."
(Boyd in TFA)
However, while possibly advantageous for Nintendo to stop incoming unlicensed "clones" at the U.S. borders, registration does not seem to be a precondition to any of the above, as appears from the comments of the U.S. Copyright Office's Copyright Basics Circular 1 on the situation prior to 1978.
Of course, the scary aspect to the "new" legal situation is just how easy (and dangerous under the DMCA&friends) it has become to infringe the "right" of someone('s heirs) who can wield such powers, for almost a century, without even having been required to make a deliberate effort to protect (and keep publishing) one's works in the first place.
Few if any competent companies would expect that they can modify the source willy nilly and then expect direct support on what _they_ have done from the distribution vendor. [...] it is a completely impractical, if not irrational, way of working.
When has this approach ever been promoted by the Open Source community? This sounds like only something a PHB could arrive at [...]
to me it seems like Microsoft sat around a table brainstorming for potential negative aspects of OS that they could market to suitably gullible people.
Yeah, the whole story sounds so far-fetched that it's hard to believe we're even having a Slashdot article (let alone the ensuing discussion!) about it.
One can download the source to whatever needs to be customized and run make&friends in the relevant directory on pretty much every OS distro on earth - hence the name! Perfectly, legally, even to pass it on, but all of this without any legitimate concerns to be raised just because someone else (be it a Red Hat or a Green Gecko, or anything else) who didn't make these changes cannot know what the one making them may have broken. To suggest otherwise is preposterous indeed, even more so if such "concerns" are uttered by someone who won't let you have his sources to try the same things.
The sad part is that posting this article (with that headline, and without a word of caution right on top of it) on/. in the first place will only help this "non-story" being picked up by the mainstream press, at least parts of which are likely to make it sound as if genuine issues really had been found with the OSS model.
To commemorate today's remarkable conjunction of breakthroughs providing sources of almost infinite energy as well as healthier cigarettes and flying cars riding on superstrings (or something), built e.g. by 8-year-old Asian physicists...:
From now on, each year on the first weekend after Halloween, Slashdot (and probably academia as a whole) shall celebrate Crackpot Sunday. To mark the occasion, the year's best performers in freak science reporting shall be awarded an "exclusive" (or rather, compulsory?) rubber boat cruise through the Bermuda Triangle or across Loch Ness, providing journalists with a chance of their own to win fame and fortune at the forefront of research by helping disprove long-standing and broadly accepted theories - e.g. about man-eating monsters, alien abductions and anything else left unresolved on the "X Files".
... but no "Warp engineer" would want [w|W]indows in their machine room. They are used to running Windows where it belongs according to its own name: in windows (i.e. as a guest OS). There are not many hosts to match the OS/2 experience in stability (though Linux would quite possibly qualify for most these days), and Windows XP, in spite of improvements (and an impressive unofficial list of supported guests), is not necessarily one of them.
Is there a term for this kind of intermittant site inaccessability due to Internet outage -- not the user or the server being offline, but the Internet failing?
Yes. Domesday as predicted in the ancient scrolls. In this day and age it is commonly called The End of the World as We Know It.
...especially as many banks would certainly want to pay for the privilege of getting another few years out of their legacy apps on that platform.
Other than the lack of OS/2 support, however, VMWare does not seem to have any other important shortcomings, now that the free player allows to "clone and ship entire virtual machines" e.g. for the hassle-free demo and deployment of FOSS solutions.
Besides, it's a blessing for many computer classrooms, helping in particular to make them less Microsoft-centric and saving much time for administration at the same time...
Is this discussion available online for the entertainment of all intelligent life in space?;-)
Sadly not. It began on a mailing list but I just checked and the list archive is private. Maybe one day I'll get whatever permissions are necessary and put together a web page.
Also be sure to propose including this with the next SETI transmission - and before we know it, aliens from all across the galaxy should come rushing to earth for a laugh.
Despite our differences I've found the UKPO man concerned and his colleagues deserve respect for their competence and rigour and I knew all along there was very little chance they'd granted the patent as it appears in the EPO database.
However, tell that to the SMEs who (according to the EPO, EU Council & Commission (cf. Latest News section) ought to spend much time and money on the "easy job" of checking all of their work against patent databases with entries like this...
background to an amusing discussion I had with the UKPO a while back concerning this little gem
Is this discussion available online for the entertainment of all intelligent life in space?;-)
Faith in the patent system on this planet should quickly fade in anyone staring in disbelief at the word "GRANTED" rubberstamped across a document with lines like:
a gravity wave is bent around the craft enabling the craft to float. Reference is also made to the craft being capable of travelling at many times faster than the speed of light.
Spelling obviously isn't the only problem in this thing:
CLAIM
This specification is for a completely new system of travel to build a craft that can carry any payload to be able to overcome the problem envisaged by Einstein and is [sic] encountered by all rocket propelled craft that is of it's [sic!] mass increasing with speed so that all these craft are limited in there [sic(k)?!] speed to below the speed of light.
(...) is moor [ahem] than suitable as a cheep [OMG] method of launching space satellites with a great reduction of pollution.
From Arthur C. Clarke's recent contribution on Space Elevators to the The Times:
If this ever happens, the most expensive component of travel around the solar system would be for life support -- and inflight movies.
A true visionary, he seems to have realised that the greatest threat to the survival of the human race here on earth and in space could be DRM under the DMCA&friends...
While we're at it, back in Forbidden Planet (1956), didn't they already talk about civilisations wiped out by "the monster from the id"? Also 50 years ahead of their time, truly +5 Foresightful, was that id as in RF-ID, by any chance?
All Products Listed by Ranking (...) 47. Microsoft Windows Media Player 10
If a distant (and disputed, as by parent) 47th rank is all they can score in the Top 100 for an entire year, and as the whole list seems so heavily populated by penguins (and related species), maybe in Redmond now they ought to worry even more, e.g. about their role as an "innovation leader"...
Regrettably the point of making users know less about the technology they are using, as in lines like
Microsoft Outlook is another good example of simplified computing
hardly ever is good idea: Networked computers don't become less dangerous just because they end up in the hands of those who don't know what they are doing. Giving the users powerful bloatware with an oversimplified interface that obscures the complexity is not necessarily benign either.
Even with today's PCs, "grandma at 65" as well as her ten-year-old grandson can easily be taught the basics in one afternoon - and then they'll be better off (avoiding the most ignorant blunders) for years to come. Contrary to the claims in TFA, the "secret" to producing happy first-time users may very well be to start explaining "the computer" (i.e. how a machine works in general) before moving on to less important things such as "Windows" (rather not at all) and "the mouse".
hint [for collecting IP addresses]: At the start of each school year send out a mass email to everyone you know with your address, and ask people to reply with theirs so you can update your rolodex.
I should be charging (or perhaps getting charged) for this.
Try software patents.
Oh, and the fame and fortune they (purportedly) bring... should help you with women, too.
Too bad by the time you get to use your "amazing discoveries" (made the hard way by using the "insights" from TFA -with anonymous<gasp>submission adding to the "mystery"- rather than going the easy route through Geektools or some such), DHCP may have reassigned your "target address" from Sorority House to Astrophysics Lab...;-)
Recent press reports make this sound as if Microsoft had devoured its one and only contender to the smartphone crown - and we'd all have to start clicking tiny Windows icons (and the reset button) on our cellphones, forever, really soon now. Curiously, almost all of these reports seem to forget how Symbian/Psion (and Linux itself) make a great platform for a smartphone OS while having many years of extremely loyal following by both countless customers and the mobile industry giants.
To see someone post this kind of invitation on/. immediately made me wonder whether we need a Society for the Humane Treatment of Servers (or something) by now - looks like he tried to set alight much more than just the Burning Man this way:;-)
1440 pictures, and a fairly complete overview page, showing the highlights
"You can hear the server scream a hundred miles..."
With print publishing the situation appears to be even more intractable because the new software will make it possible to make copies without even purchasing the original, he says.
Licensing agreements may be one option he says. But also people will have to learn that certain rules of conduct still apply. "It is true that this technology may cause copyright issues if it were to be used in an unorthodox way," says the NEC spokesman. But NEC would never encourage such behaviour, he adds.
According to NEC, their software is designed to sound an alarm when being used, to avoid any copyright conflicts. The company claims that any attempts to mute the device somehow or plug in headphones will not affect the audibility of this alarm.
NEC and NAIST say they do not plan to commercialise their software for three years.
A highly useful application is to be withheld from the (paying!) public for years, and then to be seriously crippled (by making annoying noise where it is most inappropriate) for the one application where it would make most sense (to avoid the inconvenient and notoriously overburdened photocopiers) as perfectly legitimate fair use: Scanning citations in a reference library.
Well, then, if commercial developers don't even want to make money (i.e. only come up with creepy copyright considerations rather than a business case) on a feature that is most useful in academia, this looks (so much rather than: sounds;-)) like the right (scientifically challenging and quite possibly unpatentable) project to refine in the next open-sourceSummer of Code. Apply early, and BTW you'd "beta" have an early version ready by the start of this term.;-/ Coming soon to a SourceForge near you I guess...
So how is proprietary software less affected by...
on
Trouble With Open Source?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...the lack of conceptual integrity, professionalism, and innovation
[Some commercial software company] complaining how
Linux came in too many "mutations" (the basis of evolution BTW)
Didn't you know? Evolution is too controversial, so Windows Vista only supports teaching intelligent design.
...which probably wouldn't be a confusing seven different flavors (no matter how much its "creator" may wish to be revered as a god). Seems we're in the middle of an experiment to commercially&computationally prove Darwinism: The "life-form" that makes the most out of the least amount of resources will survive. Looks like they're about to learn a lesson by the power of the penguin...
This makes choosing the right Windows version to install
almost as hard as choosing the right Linux distribution. Imagine the sales [...]
There are hardly any sales involved in choosing the right Linux distribution. Downloads and magazine cover disks usually come for free (and quite legally), so it's only after picking the most promising version, and if additional support and services are required, that one will have to think about spending money at all in the first place.
there will be 7 versions of Windows Vista: Starter Edition, Home Basic Edition, Home Premium Edition, Professional Edition, Small Business Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition.
ROTFL! You couldn't even make these things up... The new worry for purchasing managers seems to become "how not to get fired for picking the wrong flavor of Windows." Makes you think twice about telling your company to stay on Windows in the first place...
Remember there was a company that had an ad complaining how Linux came in too many "mutations" (the basis of evolution BTW)?
Date: 10.31.2008
To: BillG
From: Linus
(...)
When you hired me three years ago, you had to realize that I was going to speak my mind, no matter what the consequences. You told me that if I ever hit a wall with Steve or his people, I should let you know.
(...)
Myself, I thought I was making some pretty outrageous demands. I was stunned when you agreed to accept the General Public License mandating that everything you added at the level of the new operating system would remain open. But you've been true to your side of the bargain, and you've won my respect. You never made me alter my goal, which was world domination for Linux. I'll never forget your line: "Come on, Linus, infect the mothership." I still believe that was the best recruiting pitch ever uttered. We both took a lot of criticism from our partisans, but look what we've accomplished. The world is using software that doesn't suck!
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the scary aspect to the "new" legal situation is just how easy (and dangerous under the DMCA&friends) it has become to infringe the "right" of someone('s heirs) who can wield such powers, for almost a century, without even having been required to make a deliberate effort to protect (and keep publishing) one's works in the first place.
One can download the source to whatever needs to be customized and run make&friends in the relevant directory on pretty much every OS distro on earth - hence the name! Perfectly, legally, even to pass it on, but all of this without any legitimate concerns to be raised just because someone else (be it a Red Hat or a Green Gecko, or anything else) who didn't make these changes cannot know what the one making them may have broken. To suggest otherwise is preposterous indeed, even more so if such "concerns" are uttered by someone who won't let you have his sources to try the same things.
The sad part is that posting this article (with that headline, and without a word of caution right on top of it) on /. in the first place will only help this "non-story" being picked up by the mainstream press, at least parts of which are likely to make it sound as if genuine issues really had been found with the OSS model.
They are used to running Windows where it belongs according to its own name: in windows (i.e. as a guest OS).
There are not many hosts to match the OS/2 experience in stability (though Linux would quite possibly qualify for most these days), and Windows XP, in spite of improvements (and an impressive unofficial list of supported guests), is not necessarily one of them.
Other than the lack of OS/2 support, however, VMWare does not seem to have any other important shortcomings, now that the free player allows to "clone and ship entire virtual machines" e.g. for the hassle-free demo and deployment of FOSS solutions.
Besides, it's a blessing for many computer classrooms, helping in particular to make them less Microsoft-centric and saving much time for administration at the same time...
Also be sure to propose including this with the next SETI transmission - and before we know it, aliens from all across the galaxy should come rushing to earth for a laugh.
However, tell that to the SMEs who (according to the EPO, EU Council & Commission (cf. Latest News section) ought to spend much time and money on the "easy job" of checking all of their work against patent databases with entries like this...Faith in the patent system on this planet should quickly fade in anyone staring in disbelief at the word "GRANTED" rubberstamped across a document with lines like:
Spelling obviously isn't the only problem in this thing:Beam me out of this esp@cenet, Scotty!While we're at it, back in Forbidden Planet (1956), didn't they already talk about civilisations wiped out by "the monster from the id"? Also 50 years ahead of their time, truly +5 Foresightful, was that id as in RF-ID, by any chance?
Even with today's PCs, "grandma at 65" as well as her ten-year-old grandson can easily be taught the basics in one afternoon - and then they'll be better off (avoiding the most ignorant blunders) for years to come.
Contrary to the claims in TFA, the "secret" to producing happy first-time users may very well be to start explaining "the computer" (i.e. how a machine works in general) before moving on to less important things such as "Windows" (rather not at all) and "the mouse".
Oh, and the fame and fortune they (purportedly) bring... should help you with women, too.
Too bad by the time you get to use your "amazing discoveries" (made the hard way by using the "insights" from TFA -with anonymous<gasp>submission adding to the "mystery"- rather than going the easy route through Geektools or some such), DHCP may have reassigned your "target address" from Sorority House to Astrophysics Lab...;-)
Recent press reports make this sound as if Microsoft had devoured its one and only contender to the smartphone crown - and we'd all have to start clicking tiny Windows icons (and the reset button) on our cellphones, forever, really soon now. Curiously, almost all of these reports seem to forget how Symbian/Psion (and Linux itself) make a great platform for a smartphone OS while having many years of extremely loyal following by both countless customers and the mobile industry giants.
Well, then, if commercial developers don't even want to make money (i.e. only come up with creepy copyright considerations rather than a business case) on a feature that is most useful in academia, this looks (so much rather than: sounds ;-)) like the right (scientifically challenging and quite possibly unpatentable) project to refine in the next open-source Summer of Code. Apply early, and BTW you'd "beta" have an early version ready by the start of this term. ;-/ Coming soon to a SourceForge near you I guess...
Well, after recruiting Linus (at least in the alternate reality of WIRED) and trying to get ESR as well, maybe that simply had to happen...
Remember there was a company that had an ad complaining how Linux came in too many "mutations" (the basis of evolution BTW)?
Isn't it time for someone at Slashdot to fix the ampersand handling in subject lines?