>My viewpoint is this: evolution theory is valid. But not quite to the extent that most people caught up in it think.
It's the not case that most people who believe in evolution don't believe God was involved. Here are some results from polls questioning Americans on the matter. In a recent (2004) Gallup poll listed 13% as believing in evolution without God and 38% as believing in evolution guided by God.
Evolution doesn't argue against God's existence, only against creationism, though of course most atheists will make the next step and say it means God is "less neccessary" to our world-view, I'm an atheist and I'd agree with that (though I don't think it is actually in support of God not existing).
At any rate, I don't think the submiter was attacking religious people, he was just saying that since most of his friends are both educated and atheist then he wouldn't know many people in the 39% who believe in creationism/ID (I know educated atheists that aren't totaly sure, but none who actually support creationism/ID).
I think that was the point he was making. Most companies will expect people to act profesionally, the ones you don't want to work for are where the manager's idea of 'profesionalism' involves not questioning or disagreeing with him.
Podcasting isn't streamed audio, it's just providing an RSS feed with links to audio files so they can be downloaded automatically by a client, rather than having to actually go to the website.
Many thanks, it seemed a little odd at first to me, but that makes sense. Also, I always been a little confused that so many patents seemed to be granted more on "creative inovation" than "technological inovation", so this clears my understanding up a little.
Just to explain, the bit that threw me was the "motivation" in "There must be a documented motivation to combine the technologies".
Perhaps not the best source for law, but a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinar y_skill_in_the_art#The_Federal_Circuit">wikipedia article sugests that this is a fairly recent (last twenty years) development in Federal Circuit appeals, called the "suggestion test", which isn't really supported in section 103. Obviously it has now made its way into the official procedure of the USPTO though (which I hadn't looked at).
A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made.
To me that appears in line with what I said above, in particular "would have been obvious at the time", but obviously the methods used by the patent office disagree with me! I haven't read up on this in depth anyway, thanks for the clarification.
Being non-obvious/inventive is not the same as being new. There are many things that could be done with RFID that nobody has done yet, but that does not mean they all count as "inventive".
You claim that "There must be a documented motivation to combine the technologies, or the practice of combining them must be known to a person of ordinary skill in the relevant art." But the "person skilled in the art" clause in patent law, does not refer to an actual person who has done it before. It asks that if an imaginary "person skilled in the art" was given the same task, would they have been able to come up with the idea?
In this case was the idea was really inventive, or was it simply that no "person skilled in the art" had ever been asked to work on "personal video recorder (PVR) that recognizes viewer preferences" via a portable device "attached to a key ring, necklace, watch, in his wallet". So not "has anyone done this before" (that is the "new" clause), but "if I asked someone to invent something for this purpose, would this be an obvious approach?"
> its not proper to call an indian 'indian' or a chineese 'chineese', you have to call them 'asians'.
The standard policy appears to have Chinese seperate from Asians when giving information on one's ethnicity (eg. when applying for jobs/places at school, so they have information for use on diversity and such, this is certainly the case at the college I'm working at which does things according to government specifications).
This is a little odd in itself, the sub-catagories of Asian are Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Other. Chinese is normally just a choice between Chinese or Other, by which they mean Chinse American, Chinese British, Chinese Welsh, Chinese English, perhaps Cantonese or Hakka etc. but not other East Asian nationalities/races. So perhaps you should call Japanese and Koreans "Asian" but Chinese people are just Chinese:)
In most modern democracies, you have the right to vote for a party who will restrict your speech, or even stop election from be held in the future. You have the freedom to make that choice, but in doing that you voluntarily give up other freedoms, in some cases (eg. If you voted for a communist party who planned to never hold elections) this would be a permanent lost of freedom.
Somewhat paradoxically, the only way to preserve your freedoms is to NEVER exercise your freedom to vote for such a party.
The same is true (though not quite as severe in most cases) in the world of software, by exercising your freedom to choose non-free software, you bind yourself to a license which specifies things that you will not be able to do (use another program to access your data, update the program when the company providing it goes bankrupt etc). To preserve your freedom to do these things in the future, you cannot choose proprietary software. So if you do value your freedom to use software as you wish (not all do it seems), the "freedom" to choose proprietary software is largely worthless.
>Its an economic fact that patents are good for economy, as they push companies to invent.
Actually not everybody agrees on that. The Economist and Price WaterHouse Coopers have both spoken out that there are serious issues with the idea of software patenting, and also business method patents in the US. Neither of these are particularly left wing organisations:) Patenting encourages people to invent things, but it also provides a barier to people who want to invent things based on previously patented ideas.
At any rate, the parent was talking about value in terms of usefulness to the population, not simply financial growth. Non-profit companies are capable of doing somethings more efficiently than companies that much make profit for shareholders/executives (hence wasting money that could be used to lower prices/produce more) in some situations. They may not always be better, they don't have the same incentives (or financial means) to try new things sometimes.
Well maybe the problem is that the players aren't good enough, or they have the wrong game. I remember when I first watched a game of quakeworld with really top level players playing, I was completely stunned, because the way they played the game was so different to the way I played with my friends or online. When I was gaming actively I used to spend just as much time watching games as playing, if not more, it's pretty practical though as a player because you can learn stuff by watching a good player for 30 minutes that would take you months to work out on you own.
Anyway, there are quite a lot of people out there who do like watching games, many websites providing large numbers of recordings and also web radio stations dedicated to live commentary of matches. Some big championship matches have hit 20,000+ live viewers, OK that may not be enough for TV, but there is some potential. Remember in Korea they have live televisted profesional gaming (starcraft and warcraft 3 mainly, I think), so it definately posible, but perhaps not in the West right now. But perhaps they (G4) could have carved out a niche in this area if they had sent some cameras to the major world gaming events and done some serious coverage.
I certainly don't think copyright law as a principle is immoral, but I would argue that the present set of copyright laws are immoral. The rightful place for all creative works is in the public domain, creative works belong to humanity as a whole rather than the author/artist, copyright expires after a time for this reason.
Copyright is merely to provide an incentive to create, the base situation is that artists don't have to create anything if they don't want to, and people don't have to pay them for something that they choose to do of their own free will.
Now most people would agree that copyright, in principle, is not immoral; it provides us all with a much large of creative works to appreciate, by providing a convinient method for funding creation of such works. However copyright laws that are too strong can cause society more harm than benifit, as it resricts peoples ability to create new works based on old ones (the Reduced Shakespeare Company, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Techno remixes of Beethoven). Copyright law protects/restricts works for seventy years after the death of the artist/author in the US; I don't have a problem with supporting authors and artists who create work that I get to appreciate, but I do think it is very unreasonable to expect me to still be supporting their families up to seventy years after their deaths. In other countries the laws are not as severe, but I still think that extending copyright periods significantly past thirty years is excesive (the law originally allowed protection for twenty seven years in the US I belive).
Of course, civil disobedience on this issue would be rather different to downloading and sharing copies of whatever you wanted, as it would need to be limited to older works. I personally don't see anything wrong with copying works from the mid-sixties and before, most authors will have either succeeded or failed by now in their attempt to make back their investments and make a profit from their work. Copyright doesn't need to do anything other than provide that oportunity to them, so by now it has outlived its usefulness.
The issue is that you have less flexibility with a binary program than you do with source code, flexibility that you will often get with other mediums either text or audio. You say that you need rights from you do do *anything* use copyrighted works but this isn't really true, anybody that tried to stop people from listening to music or reading books that they had legally purchased would come into some major obstacles in court.
Here are a few examples that show the difference quite well imho:
I have a Chinese dictionary with Chinese characters alongside an English translation and romanised Mandarin. However, I have also written romanised Cantonese in myself. Doing this this is trivial, I look up the Cantonese pronunciation either on the web or in a Cantonese dictionary, then I pick up a pen and write it in the book. It would be much more complicated to do this for a "teach yourself Chinese" computer program distributed as only in binary form, but if I had the source code it would be closer to writing in a book (though editing code is harder than writing for most people). I have not harmed the author by doing this to my book either, I am not photocopying and redistributing it (not even writing on my own photocopy in this case), just editing it for my own use, I still had to buy the book.
Likewise for music I could mix two CDs together and record a copy for my own use, technically this does involve copying copyrighter material but it would normally be considered to be fair use, (certainly it is not criminal infringment and if you could prove that nobody was listening to the originals while your mix was in use then a court would have trouble showing there was any harm cause to the artists (whose CDs you have purchased), and therefore wouldn't be able to award damages). In fact you could probably even make a case for writing a program for a PC to mix them with both CDs in cd-drives and distribute this, for anyone to use it legally they would have to purchase a CD from each artist so once again no harm is caused. However there is no way to do this with binary computer file, I can't buy a copy of Photoshop and mix it with Fireworks, or mix IE and Opera. However with source code this is possible and there are cases of people doing similar things. When Minix was released with Tanenbaum's textbook, the source code was available, so people could write patches for their own system, they could also distribute the patches as long as they did not include Minix source code with them. This is less flexible than an open source licence but still gave people the ability to do what they wanted on their own system, much like they could with a book or cd, but baring no resemblance to the situation with binary only programs.
This holds true with other mediums, such as posters or photos, which you can draw on, paint over or rip up and stick on your wall in pieces:) Technically you can alter binary programs, but it is very difficult to get them to do anything that is new and useful unless it is very simple. Binary programs cannot be really compared to other mediums in terms of the use you get from copyrighted material, but programs with source code sit alongside other mediums quite nicely.
OK maybe I'm silly responding to an AC like this but I think it's an important point. There is a huge difference between narrowing the search after a crime is committed and pre-emptively profiling. Searching for given criteria is the only way to find someone known to have committed a crime (excluding dying hair with complete plastic surgery etc.), when you have an identity parade looking for someone who's 6' tall with brown hair you won't see the police dragging in some 4 year old kid with ginger hair just because he was in the area at the time and "it's best to be safe".
Now with airport security you have two things to do, one is to look for known criminals and the other is to do general searches of everybody. With known criminals, you would hope that they actually have proper inteligence with real information on these suspected criminals, they wouldn't just drag people over for fitting some minor criteria (eg. black haired Arabian with two initials matching), though from the Florida fellons ballot hassle this does seem to be typical American behavior with "criminals";) It also fits in with the huge number of false positives matched in the algorithm for checking names of people entering the US (this was mentioned in a/. article a year or two ago, can't find it tho).
If you are picking people out for their appearance without suspecting them of being someone else (ie. the general searching, random searches alongside the bag scanning and such) then that is even worse, because terrorists can then pick people specially to get around security (recruit a nutty white guy rather than an Arabian guy, or sneak equipment into "American" looking people bags). So in both cases it is a bad idea to pick people out on vague criteria, in one case it's unproductive, in the other it is actively dangerous. So it's a rather different situation to the police looking for suspects to check out.
I suspect that's what he means, I've heard many others whinge about it before, but whether it's matters to you or not partially depends on what sort of music you listen to. For albums made of discrete tracks it isn't really an issue, but if you are listening to anything recorded live, or dance music, ambient music and such then you don't really want to listen to it with breaks. The album will be split into individual tracks for convenience but it's annoying to have to listen to a continuous 1 hour recording and have a gap every 10 mins or so.
That's pretty short term thinking though, the whole point of the UN is that getting everybody to work together will be better for everybody in the end. At first some countries will have a slightly better time of it than others but knee-jerk reactions to support your country now may well end up screwing over future generations.
For example, the War on Terror's roots can be traced back to being about oil, regardless of your opinion on the Iraq war. The West has been involved in the Middle East for a long time, as their industrialised economies are reliant on oil. At first this involved occupying the countries (British Empire and such), then it moved to them using their economic power to push things in their favor, but force was still used when they wanted (USA and UK overthrew a democratic goverment in Iran in the 50s over oil prices being raised).
Now all of this may have been in the best interests of their citizens back then, but it has caused some people to get rather annoyed and form/join terrorist groups leading to some rather nasty attacks against Western countries. Now more investment in other energy technologies and encoraging lower consumption of oil may have made things harder for a while but they could have helped decrease dependance on the Middle East and the resentment that their involvement generated.
Long term thinking is pretty important, and you tend to find idealism and pragmatism come a bit closer together when looking at things in those terms. At any rate, if a country doesn't think working with other nations will be benificial to their situation long term then why don't they just quit the UN and go it alone?
>Again and again we apply their framework beyond what they envisioned, and again and again it proves successful.
I'm going to call BS on that. Time and time again the vision of the founding fathers has been spun into a version that supports the desires of the people in power. This makes America as an idealogical state all the more dangerous, as people will quote nice soundbites the Constitution, Jefferson, Washington etc. whenever it helps them, but not understand the context and real meanings.
Furthermore they ignore the opinions the founding fathers when they oppose present day Americans' way of life. Jefferson was very much against coporations and their power to undermine the good of the people. Nobody wanted a party based political system (certainly not one with only two major parties!), and they also intended almost all the power should be left to the states with a very weak federal goverment, no longer present in the ideologies of Democrats or Republicans.
It's also a bit of a stretch to believe they'd support America in "humanitarian intervention", read their words on the topic with relation to the British Empire and other European powers who went through that stage in the past.
Many of the cherished features of present day America were feared by the founding fathers, they had hoped they had done enough to prevent those fears becoming reality but it appears they didn't. Perhaps it is an imposible task without the will of the people fully behind the ideals, and that's nearly imposible as those in power will always undermine that. It would be nice to think that Americans could look to the future rather than dwelling on old ideas, but at the moment looking to the past is probably the easiest way to learn, even if most are reluctant to do it.
I don't see many people here approving of the actions of the shopowner, just saying it's good to see a judge taking a balanced approach on one of the issues. There will be some people here who think that copyright should be abolished entirely but most would just rather see it weakened a bit. This court case may not have helped the artist, but hopefully it will help push in a better law that can help the artist without screwing over the public, so long term it is better result.
It's true people here have very different views on GPL infringement to illegal music sharing, but this is not necesarily hypocritical, the two situations are very different.
For example, p2p music/movie sharing is non-comercial copyright infringment, whereas GPL infringement is almost always for profit (I know of once case that wasn't, a version of the original Quake built on the GPLed source, the guy didn't release the code till it was out of beta). Commercial and non-commercial infringment are different in the eyes of the law and I think many would agree a very different moral situation (see the opinions of anime fans on different sorts of piracy).
Also while in both situations the person commiting the crime (ie. the distributor) could be seen to screwing over the author/developer, the situation from the point of view of the downloader/consumer is very different. With the p2p sharing, people can obtain music they might not be able to afford, they can trybefore they buy etc. so they are being helped (albeit at the expense of the artist). However, with the program that contains GPLed code they are being forced to buy something rather than trying it first (as people will who download Mandrake Linux before joining the club for example), or simply getting it for free, and they are being denied sourcecode that they should have access to, so they are losing out.
Anyway, I don't think it's a good idea to confuse the situations, the law and morals involed in both are rather different.
>It is definitely a *behavioral problem* for animals, since animals have sex only to reproduce(with a few exceptions), and homosexual sex does not permit that.
Not strictly true, it has other possible advantages, not to the individual but possibly to the herd/flock/pride. For example it could provide surplus adults, with no young of their own they can help look after others' children (this is one theory anyway). I'm not an expert by any means, but just because one animal doesn't pass on its genes directly that doesn't mean it is a failure, it can also (with some luck) pass on it's genes through its siblings (which share 50% of its genes).
IANAL but I thought trademark law required some kind of misleading to occur for there to be a violation. As long as it is clear that he's not pretending to be Jerry Falwell this it doesn't matter whether he is benifiting comercially or not. Trademark law is to protect harm to a company and consumer when the consumer thinks they are buying something from one company but actually they are not. Given that he states at the top of his page "This website is NOT affiliated with Jerry Falwell or his ministry." I don't think he can reasonably be accused of misleading people.
There is plenty of stuff out there that is OSS (and found on many linux distributions but not part of the GNU project. For example x.org and xfree86 are not GNU, neither is KDE and all the programs written for it, the BSD userland is not GNU and Apache, Open Office, MySQL and Mozilla variants are not GNU.
If I switched from GNU/Linux to *BSD I probably wouldn't bother to replace all the BSD userland stuff with GNU. And most of the stuff I run on top of that is not GNU either, tho stuff like gcc would still be in use and I'm sure there are other bits in a BSD system. The GNU project is fantastic, but it is possible to run a UNIX type OS (and an open source one at that) without having to depend on it at every point.
>Let's say, there is Novell's implementation of IPX and GPL implementation of TCP/IP... If I go with GPL, I have to release my source code and find a new business model, since I will no longer be able to sell binary copies of my stuff without a serious support contract.
While I agree with your point that having a public domain reference implementation is a good idea, this case would not force people to GPL their code. They could look at the GPL version and work out the workings of TCP/IP from that and then get someone else to code a different version independantly of the GPLed implementation. It forces you do do some work yourself but you can still keep your code closed and use the standard for free (subject to it not being patented!).
That may work OK with volunteer work, but a business may have trouble explaining to their shareholders why they are giving away their work away with no strings attached. At least with the GPL they know that they benefit from any attempts to improve it, and even if the people redistributing it don't bother to develop on top of it they may end up doing bug fixes and such.
Slashdot Mirror
>My viewpoint is this: evolution theory is valid. But not quite to the extent that most people caught up in it think.
It's the not case that most people who believe in evolution don't believe God was involved. Here are some results from polls questioning Americans on the matter. In a recent (2004) Gallup poll listed 13% as believing in evolution without God and 38% as believing in evolution guided by God.
Evolution doesn't argue against God's existence, only against creationism, though of course most atheists will make the next step and say it means God is "less neccessary" to our world-view, I'm an atheist and I'd agree with that (though I don't think it is actually in support of God not existing).
At any rate, I don't think the submiter was attacking religious people, he was just saying that since most of his friends are both educated and atheist then he wouldn't know many people in the 39% who believe in creationism/ID (I know educated atheists that aren't totaly sure, but none who actually support creationism/ID).
I think that was the point he was making. Most companies will expect people to act profesionally, the ones you don't want to work for are where the manager's idea of 'profesionalism' involves not questioning or disagreeing with him.
Podcasting isn't streamed audio, it's just providing an RSS feed with links to audio files so they can be downloaded automatically by a client, rather than having to actually go to the website.
Many thanks, it seemed a little odd at first to me, but that makes sense. Also, I always been a little confused that so many patents seemed to be granted more on "creative inovation" than "technological inovation", so this clears my understanding up a little.
Just to explain, the bit that threw me was the "motivation" in "There must be a documented motivation to combine the technologies".
r y_skill_in_the_art#The_Federal_Circuit">wikipedia article sugests that this is a fairly recent (last twenty years) development in Federal Circuit appeals, called the "suggestion test", which isn't really supported in section 103. Obviously it has now made its way into the official procedure of the USPTO though (which I hadn't looked at).
Perhaps not the best source for law, but a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordina
Thanks for the links.
I was going from the top of 35 U.S.C. 103 Conditions for patentability; non-obvious subject matter.. Which I appear to have misinterpreted.
A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made.
To me that appears in line with what I said above, in particular "would have been obvious at the time", but obviously the methods used by the patent office disagree with me! I haven't read up on this in depth anyway, thanks for the clarification.
Being non-obvious/inventive is not the same as being new. There are many things that could be done with RFID that nobody has done yet, but that does not mean they all count as "inventive".
You claim that "There must be a documented motivation to combine the technologies, or the practice of combining them must be known to a person of ordinary skill in the relevant art." But the "person skilled in the art" clause in patent law, does not refer to an actual person who has done it before. It asks that if an imaginary "person skilled in the art" was given the same task, would they have been able to come up with the idea?
In this case was the idea was really inventive, or was it simply that no "person skilled in the art" had ever been asked to work on "personal video recorder (PVR) that recognizes viewer preferences" via a portable device "attached to a key ring, necklace, watch, in his wallet". So not "has anyone done this before" (that is the "new" clause), but "if I asked someone to invent something for this purpose, would this be an obvious approach?"
> its not proper to call an indian 'indian' or a chineese 'chineese', you have to call them 'asians'.
:)
The standard policy appears to have Chinese seperate from Asians when giving information on one's ethnicity (eg. when applying for jobs/places at school, so they have information for use on diversity and such, this is certainly the case at the college I'm working at which does things according to government specifications).
This is a little odd in itself, the sub-catagories of Asian are Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Other. Chinese is normally just a choice between Chinese or Other, by which they mean Chinse American, Chinese British, Chinese Welsh, Chinese English, perhaps Cantonese or Hakka etc. but not other East Asian nationalities/races. So perhaps you should call Japanese and Koreans "Asian" but Chinese people are just Chinese
In most modern democracies, you have the right to vote for a party who will restrict your speech, or even stop election from be held in the future. You have the freedom to make that choice, but in doing that you voluntarily give up other freedoms, in some cases (eg. If you voted for a communist party who planned to never hold elections) this would be a permanent lost of freedom.
Somewhat paradoxically, the only way to preserve your freedoms is to NEVER exercise your freedom to vote for such a party.
The same is true (though not quite as severe in most cases) in the world of software, by exercising your freedom to choose non-free software, you bind yourself to a license which specifies things that you will not be able to do (use another program to access your data, update the program when the company providing it goes bankrupt etc). To preserve your freedom to do these things in the future, you cannot choose proprietary software. So if you do value your freedom to use software as you wish (not all do it seems), the "freedom" to choose proprietary software is largely worthless.
>Its an economic fact that patents are good for economy, as they push companies to invent.
:) Patenting encourages people to invent things, but it also provides a barier to people who want to invent things based on previously patented ideas.
Actually not everybody agrees on that. The Economist and Price WaterHouse Coopers have both spoken out that there are serious issues with the idea of software patenting, and also business method patents in the US. Neither of these are particularly left wing organisations
At any rate, the parent was talking about value in terms of usefulness to the population, not simply financial growth. Non-profit companies are capable of doing somethings more efficiently than companies that much make profit for shareholders/executives (hence wasting money that could be used to lower prices/produce more) in some situations. They may not always be better, they don't have the same incentives (or financial means) to try new things sometimes.
Well maybe the problem is that the players aren't good enough, or they have the wrong game. I remember when I first watched a game of quakeworld with really top level players playing, I was completely stunned, because the way they played the game was so different to the way I played with my friends or online. When I was gaming actively I used to spend just as much time watching games as playing, if not more, it's pretty practical though as a player because you can learn stuff by watching a good player for 30 minutes that would take you months to work out on you own.
Anyway, there are quite a lot of people out there who do like watching games, many websites providing large numbers of recordings and also web radio stations dedicated to live commentary of matches. Some big championship matches have hit 20,000+ live viewers, OK that may not be enough for TV, but there is some potential. Remember in Korea they have live televisted profesional gaming (starcraft and warcraft 3 mainly, I think), so it definately posible, but perhaps not in the West right now. But perhaps they (G4) could have carved out a niche in this area if they had sent some cameras to the major world gaming events and done some serious coverage.
I certainly don't think copyright law as a principle is immoral, but I would argue that the present set of copyright laws are immoral. The rightful place for all creative works is in the public domain, creative works belong to humanity as a whole rather than the author/artist, copyright expires after a time for this reason.
Copyright is merely to provide an incentive to create, the base situation is that artists don't have to create anything if they don't want to, and people don't have to pay them for something that they choose to do of their own free will.
Now most people would agree that copyright, in principle, is not immoral; it provides us all with a much large of creative works to appreciate, by providing a convinient method for funding creation of such works. However copyright laws that are too strong can cause society more harm than benifit, as it resricts peoples ability to create new works based on old ones (the Reduced Shakespeare Company, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Techno remixes of Beethoven). Copyright law protects/restricts works for seventy years after the death of the artist/author in the US; I don't have a problem with supporting authors and artists who create work that I get to appreciate, but I do think it is very unreasonable to expect me to still be supporting their families up to seventy years after their deaths. In other countries the laws are not as severe, but I still think that extending copyright periods significantly past thirty years is excesive (the law originally allowed protection for twenty seven years in the US I belive).
Of course, civil disobedience on this issue would be rather different to downloading and sharing copies of whatever you wanted, as it would need to be limited to older works. I personally don't see anything wrong with copying works from the mid-sixties and before, most authors will have either succeeded or failed by now in their attempt to make back their investments and make a profit from their work. Copyright doesn't need to do anything other than provide that oportunity to them, so by now it has outlived its usefulness.
The issue is that you have less flexibility with a binary program than you do with source code, flexibility that you will often get with other mediums either text or audio. You say that you need rights from you do do *anything* use copyrighted works but this isn't really true, anybody that tried to stop people from listening to music or reading books that they had legally purchased would come into some major obstacles in court.
:) Technically you can alter binary programs, but it is very difficult to get them to do anything that is new and useful unless it is very simple. Binary programs cannot be really compared to other mediums in terms of the use you get from copyrighted material, but programs with source code sit alongside other mediums quite nicely.
Here are a few examples that show the difference quite well imho:
I have a Chinese dictionary with Chinese characters alongside an English translation and romanised Mandarin. However, I have also written romanised Cantonese in myself. Doing this this is trivial, I look up the Cantonese pronunciation either on the web or in a Cantonese dictionary, then I pick up a pen and write it in the book. It would be much more complicated to do this for a "teach yourself Chinese" computer program distributed as only in binary form, but if I had the source code it would be closer to writing in a book (though editing code is harder than writing for most people). I have not harmed the author by doing this to my book either, I am not photocopying and redistributing it (not even writing on my own photocopy in this case), just editing it for my own use, I still had to buy the book.
Likewise for music I could mix two CDs together and record a copy for my own use, technically this does involve copying copyrighter material but it would normally be considered to be fair use, (certainly it is not criminal infringment and if you could prove that nobody was listening to the originals while your mix was in use then a court would have trouble showing there was any harm cause to the artists (whose CDs you have purchased), and therefore wouldn't be able to award damages). In fact you could probably even make a case for writing a program for a PC to mix them with both CDs in cd-drives and distribute this, for anyone to use it legally they would have to purchase a CD from each artist so once again no harm is caused. However there is no way to do this with binary computer file, I can't buy a copy of Photoshop and mix it with Fireworks, or mix IE and Opera. However with source code this is possible and there are cases of people doing similar things. When Minix was released with Tanenbaum's textbook, the source code was available, so people could write patches for their own system, they could also distribute the patches as long as they did not include Minix source code with them. This is less flexible than an open source licence but still gave people the ability to do what they wanted on their own system, much like they could with a book or cd, but baring no resemblance to the situation with binary only programs.
This holds true with other mediums, such as posters or photos, which you can draw on, paint over or rip up and stick on your wall in pieces
OK maybe I'm silly responding to an AC like this but I think it's an important point. There is a huge difference between narrowing the search after a crime is committed and pre-emptively profiling. Searching for given criteria is the only way to find someone known to have committed a crime (excluding dying hair with complete plastic surgery etc.), when you have an identity parade looking for someone who's 6' tall with brown hair you won't see the police dragging in some 4 year old kid with ginger hair just because he was in the area at the time and "it's best to be safe".
;) It also fits in with the huge number of false positives matched in the algorithm for checking names of people entering the US (this was mentioned in a /. article a year or two ago, can't find it tho).
Now with airport security you have two things to do, one is to look for known criminals and the other is to do general searches of everybody. With known criminals, you would hope that they actually have proper inteligence with real information on these suspected criminals, they wouldn't just drag people over for fitting some minor criteria (eg. black haired Arabian with two initials matching), though from the Florida fellons ballot hassle this does seem to be typical American behavior with "criminals"
If you are picking people out for their appearance without suspecting them of being someone else (ie. the general searching, random searches alongside the bag scanning and such) then that is even worse, because terrorists can then pick people specially to get around security (recruit a nutty white guy rather than an Arabian guy, or sneak equipment into "American" looking people bags). So in both cases it is a bad idea to pick people out on vague criteria, in one case it's unproductive, in the other it is actively dangerous. So it's a rather different situation to the police looking for suspects to check out.
I suspect that's what he means, I've heard many others whinge about it before, but whether it's matters to you or not partially depends on what sort of music you listen to. For albums made of discrete tracks it isn't really an issue, but if you are listening to anything recorded live, or dance music, ambient music and such then you don't really want to listen to it with breaks. The album will be split into individual tracks for convenience but it's annoying to have to listen to a continuous 1 hour recording and have a gap every 10 mins or so.
That's pretty short term thinking though, the whole point of the UN is that getting everybody to work together will be better for everybody in the end. At first some countries will have a slightly better time of it than others but knee-jerk reactions to support your country now may well end up screwing over future generations.
For example, the War on Terror's roots can be traced back to being about oil, regardless of your opinion on the Iraq war. The West has been involved in the Middle East for a long time, as their industrialised economies are reliant on oil. At first this involved occupying the countries (British Empire and such), then it moved to them using their economic power to push things in their favor, but force was still used when they wanted (USA and UK overthrew a democratic goverment in Iran in the 50s over oil prices being raised).
Now all of this may have been in the best interests of their citizens back then, but it has caused some people to get rather annoyed and form/join terrorist groups leading to some rather nasty attacks against Western countries. Now more investment in other energy technologies and encoraging lower consumption of oil may have made things harder for a while but they could have helped decrease dependance on the Middle East and the resentment that their involvement generated.
Long term thinking is pretty important, and you tend to find idealism and pragmatism come a bit closer together when looking at things in those terms. At any rate, if a country doesn't think working with other nations will be benificial to their situation long term then why don't they just quit the UN and go it alone?
>Again and again we apply their framework beyond what they envisioned, and again and again it proves successful.
I'm going to call BS on that. Time and time again the vision of the founding fathers has been spun into a version that supports the desires of the people in power. This makes America as an idealogical state all the more dangerous, as people will quote nice soundbites the Constitution, Jefferson, Washington etc. whenever it helps them, but not understand the context and real meanings.
Furthermore they ignore the opinions the founding fathers when they oppose present day Americans' way of life. Jefferson was very much against coporations and their power to undermine the good of the people. Nobody wanted a party based political system (certainly not one with only two major parties!), and they also intended almost all the power should be left to the states with a very weak federal goverment, no longer present in the ideologies of Democrats or Republicans.
It's also a bit of a stretch to believe they'd support America in "humanitarian intervention", read their words on the topic with relation to the British Empire and other European powers who went through that stage in the past.
Many of the cherished features of present day America were feared by the founding fathers, they had hoped they had done enough to prevent those fears becoming reality but it appears they didn't. Perhaps it is an imposible task without the will of the people fully behind the ideals, and that's nearly imposible as those in power will always undermine that. It would be nice to think that Americans could look to the future rather than dwelling on old ideas, but at the moment looking to the past is probably the easiest way to learn, even if most are reluctant to do it.
I don't see many people here approving of the actions of the shopowner, just saying it's good to see a judge taking a balanced approach on one of the issues. There will be some people here who think that copyright should be abolished entirely but most would just rather see it weakened a bit. This court case may not have helped the artist, but hopefully it will help push in a better law that can help the artist without screwing over the public, so long term it is better result.
It's true people here have very different views on GPL infringement to illegal music sharing, but this is not necesarily hypocritical, the two situations are very different.
For example, p2p music/movie sharing is non-comercial copyright infringment, whereas GPL infringement is almost always for profit (I know of once case that wasn't, a version of the original Quake built on the GPLed source, the guy didn't release the code till it was out of beta). Commercial and non-commercial infringment are different in the eyes of the law and I think many would agree a very different moral situation (see the opinions of anime fans on different sorts of piracy).
Also while in both situations the person commiting the crime (ie. the distributor) could be seen to screwing over the author/developer, the situation from the point of view of the downloader/consumer is very different. With the p2p sharing, people can obtain music they might not be able to afford, they can trybefore they buy etc. so they are being helped (albeit at the expense of the artist). However, with the program that contains GPLed code they are being forced to buy something rather than trying it first (as people will who download Mandrake Linux before joining the club for example), or simply getting it for free, and they are being denied sourcecode that they should have access to, so they are losing out.
Anyway, I don't think it's a good idea to confuse the situations, the law and morals involed in both are rather different.
>It is definitely a *behavioral problem* for animals, since animals have sex only to reproduce(with a few exceptions), and homosexual sex does not permit that.
Not strictly true, it has other possible advantages, not to the individual but possibly to the herd/flock/pride. For example it could provide surplus adults, with no young of their own they can help look after others' children (this is one theory anyway). I'm not an expert by any means, but just because one animal doesn't pass on its genes directly that doesn't mean it is a failure, it can also (with some luck) pass on it's genes through its siblings (which share 50% of its genes).
required penny-arcade link :)
9 -18&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-0
IANAL but I thought trademark law required some kind of misleading to occur for there to be a violation. As long as it is clear that he's not pretending to be Jerry Falwell this it doesn't matter whether he is benifiting comercially or not. Trademark law is to protect harm to a company and consumer when the consumer thinks they are buying something from one company but actually they are not. Given that he states at the top of his page "This website is NOT affiliated with Jerry Falwell or his ministry." I don't think he can reasonably be accused of misleading people.
There is plenty of stuff out there that is OSS (and found on many linux distributions but not part of the GNU project. For example x.org and xfree86 are not GNU, neither is KDE and all the programs written for it, the BSD userland is not GNU and Apache, Open Office, MySQL and Mozilla variants are not GNU.
If I switched from GNU/Linux to *BSD I probably wouldn't bother to replace all the BSD userland stuff with GNU. And most of the stuff I run on top of that is not GNU either, tho stuff like gcc would still be in use and I'm sure there are other bits in a BSD system. The GNU project is fantastic, but it is possible to run a UNIX type OS (and an open source one at that) without having to depend on it at every point.
>Let's say, there is Novell's implementation of IPX and GPL implementation of TCP/IP ... If I go with GPL, I have to release my source code and find a new business model, since I will no longer be able to sell binary copies of my stuff without a serious support contract.
While I agree with your point that having a public domain reference implementation is a good idea, this case would not force people to GPL their code. They could look at the GPL version and work out the workings of TCP/IP from that and then get someone else to code a different version independantly of the GPLed implementation. It forces you do do some work yourself but you can still keep your code closed and use the standard for free (subject to it not being patented!).
That may work OK with volunteer work, but a business may have trouble explaining to their shareholders why they are giving away their work away with no strings attached. At least with the GPL they know that they benefit from any attempts to improve it, and even if the people redistributing it don't bother to develop on top of it they may end up doing bug fixes and such.