Nonsense. Copyright law is making it illegal for me to modify and distribute software without releasing the source. In other words, copyright law is forcing me to release the source.
Not at all. Copyright law basically says that you can't make any copies of a copyrighted "something". In this case that "something" is a computer program. Copyright law basically says that you cannot make any copies of that computer program (this excludes backup copies for fair use). The GPL provides additional terms, some of which include granting you the right to copy this "something", which you would in no way be able to legally do without these additional terms.
Copyright law isn't forcing you to release source -- by simply following copyright law you could NOT release source even if you wanted to, nor copies of your software, based on somebody else's copyrighted software.
The GPL allows you to copy things you would not normally be allowed to copy under copyright law.
So why doesn't Nintendo release the GameCube in a similar form factor? It's already tiny, uses "pocket" sized DVD data...
Heck, I just wish that my GameCube could play music and video on "Pocket CDR" or "Pocket DVD" media. Then it would already be the center of my "digital world".
They could (a) rely less on fancy high bandwidth stuff and more on good old-fashioned gameplay, (b) be in partnership with the ISPs since they are providing a HUGE benefit to the ISPs by driving up bandwidth usage, instead of now being against them because they are driving up bandwidth usage, or any other number of things.
Spammers usually don't sent 100,000 individual emails from their computer to their upstream provider.
They: 1. Send one email with a very large "BCC" or "TO" or "CC" list, a one-time cost, which their upstream provider would then incur. 2. Use other people's mail servers to send their e-mail, and thus those people would be charged for the usage. This actually makes spammers even more evil. 3. Hack into other people's computers (usually via trojans) and send email directly from them (See #2).
SMTP is fundamentally broken when it comes to SPAM.
I think a more appropriate analogy would be phone service. I pay a fixed monthly fee and for it I get unlimited local calls. It doesn't matter if I spend six hours each day on the phone or don't touch it at all. I feel that charging for net access should follow the same model.
So bandwidth usage for, say, up to 3 hops should be unlimited, and everything after that should cost per minute, like telephone long distance?
Bandwidth saturation at 100% means that your network begins to crawl. The only way to make your network "work" again is to (a) increase bandwidth at great expense or (b) decrease usage. With budget crunches abounding, I can almost guarantee you that bandwidth usage is about to be decreased, forcibly, using a variety of mechanisms.
Water and electricity are commonly billed on a usage basis -- you pay $X per gallon of water, you pay $Y per megawatt of electricity. This causes certain actions, such as conservation of water and electricity, which are beneficial as these are limited resources.
Bandwidth is also a limited resource, and as it is being more and more dependent upon by business and government...
If people were paying for bandwidth like they do for many other utilies, conservation of bandwidth would be achieved and much of this piracy would be limited. When Danny's father gets the internet bill for $200, Danny's P2P software is getting uninstalled. If Danny leaves all the lights on in the house, or leaves all the faucets running water all day every day, we can easily see that his water and electricity bills would skyrocket and he would pay for his usage, as well as shortening the supply of these two shared resources for others especially in times of limited resources.
The days of flat-rate internet usage (should be) numbered. If I download a 650 MB ISO image of RedHat, or a 650 MB ISO of a pirated version of MS Office XP, it doesn't matter, similarly it doesn't matter if Danny is taking 30-minute showers or is just running the shower into the drain for 30 minutes.
Maybe that's what the UK should be looking at instead of all this DRM nonsense. The primary reason people download music is because they can get it "for free" since they are already paying their flat rate for internet access. If it actually costs them (in terms of $Z per MB) perhaps they will think twice about both downloading and potentially more expensive uploading of these files.
And maybe that will help some of these god-awful websites clean up their massively over-imaged websites.
I just want to be able to copy those mini DVDs, if nothing else to make backup copies of my discs before my 8 year old scratches the bejesus out of Zelda (RIP, Mario Sunshine Disc).
When you create your "user" when setting up XP, you're actually creating a new Administrator account, in _addition_ to the existing "Administrator" account, and, more than likely, without a password.
SOOOO many software products basically require you to be an Administrator to run properly, that the customer (user) has to run as an Administrative user just to be able to run what SHOULD be user-space applications.
Most Microsoft applications actually do the right thing, they keep your application data on a user-basis, but a TON of third-party applications (and GAMES) basically want the user to be able to write to "Program Files" or specific directories, and/or the registry, just to USE the application.
This is difference between a 50 speed writer and a 5 speed writer. Order of magnitude. Much as they discovered that UNIX is 3 orders of magnitude (e.g., 1000, 2000, etc, in this case 4000 times) harder to crack than Windows.
it costs a lot to actually ship automobiles by sea
Reminds me of either a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson book (probably both). Basically the theory is that eventually it is cheap enough to ship things anywhere that the jobs can move anywhere as well, even for things like building cars for the American car market.
1 - gave up caffeine (I know!). I was drinking 3-4 cans of coke a day. I think doing that alone did me a huge deal of good.
If you were drinking 3-4 cans of coke a day, you do realise that caffeine aside that is the equivalent to pouring 3-4 cups of sugar down your throat every day?
In other words, are you sure it was the giving up caffeine, or giving up the multiple cups of sugar intake?
I hope their download file quality is higher than their sample quality, which is:
Windows Media Audio 9 20 kbps, 22 kHz, mono 1-pass CBR
20 kbps? Are you joking? That might make it onto my wife's 5-year-old Rio (well it won't considering it's not a "supported" device) but why bother burning a 20 kbps file onto a CD?
Also, I can somewhat understand limiting the number of times you can burn a CD with the track (although once on CD, it can be ripped and copied as much as you want so it's a moot point as always). But I don't understand the limitation of only being able to download the file onto a portable device X number of times. Who came up with it and why, why, why? It just doesn't make any sense.
Stallman doesn't care if you sell your software source code for $100,000 or offer binaries for a dozen architectures for free download, and neither does the GPL.
He doesn't care if you sell your encrypted CDs in a store for $20 or offer free downloads in MP3/Ogg/WMA or any other format.
It's not about the money, it's about the freedom, baby.
RMS is not telling the BK writers that they can't sell their software, or that they can't give it away, etc. He's telling a particular set of BK _users_ (in this case the LKML) that they are entering a world of pain and vendor lock-in, which would be a tragedy as he sees it.
He's warning yet again that this particular vendor (BK) licenses their software in a very contrary way to the way this particular user group (LKML) licenses their software.
To use one of your analogies, you have a group of people who enjoy making good music for free, and all of a sudden this really great guitar player shows up and you write all your songs based on his abilities -- he plays some fantastic riffs, gets some crazy sounds that you just couldn't find anywhere else.
Now here's the catch -- this guitar player sees you all giving away your music like you've been doing quite happily for over a decade and says, "Whoa dudes! We should be getting _paid_ for this stuff. No more of this horsing around, I'm not playing any more with you guys until I get the cash!"
And now your band is broken, since your songs all depend on this guitar player.
RMS is the guy who, when this new guitar player shows up, shows the rest of the band the guitar player's contract with Sony Records and says, "Uh... guys... this guy is definitely not one of us. We had better not count on him!"
Then, when the lead singer of the band ignores RMS and hires the guitar player anyway, tries to go out and find other guitar players and teach them how to play the way this new guy plays -- all the hard solos, the mega riffs, the sweet effects -- and BK Guitar Man says, "Hey man, you're cramping my style. Can't you read my contract? You can't copy my sounds! And if you try, I'll keep playing harder and stranger songs and getting the whole band to move on, depending on me even more, so there's no way any of your crazy guitar player wannabes can keep up with me."
Now RMS is the guy saying, "OK now we _really_ need a new guitar player, really really bad now. Somebody learn how to play guitar!"
The point is that the act of filming someone is not an illegal act if done on your property with their knowledge. Bringing in the "gas them to death" nonsense is a complete red herring. Killing people is already illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that you had to buy the "XBox Live!" package to get the 100Mbit network adapter? Or is that only to get "online" not LAN play?
The new Kirby's Air Ride game is already released in Japan and fully supports LAN play.
Nonsense. Copyright law is making it illegal for me to modify and distribute software without releasing the source. In other words, copyright law is forcing me to release the source.
Not at all. Copyright law basically says that you can't make any copies of a copyrighted "something". In this case that "something" is a computer program. Copyright law basically says that you cannot make any copies of that computer program (this excludes backup copies for fair use). The GPL provides additional terms, some of which include granting you the right to copy this "something", which you would in no way be able to legally do without these additional terms.
So?
The GPL is less restrictive than pure copyright.
Copyright law isn't forcing you to release source -- by simply following copyright law you could NOT release source even if you wanted to, nor copies of your software, based on somebody else's copyrighted software.
The GPL allows you to copy things you would not normally be allowed to copy under copyright law.
So why doesn't Nintendo release the GameCube in a similar form factor? It's already tiny, uses "pocket" sized DVD data...
Heck, I just wish that my GameCube could play music and video on "Pocket CDR" or "Pocket DVD" media. Then it would already be the center of my "digital world".
This is just Isaiah telling us that the world isn't flat, thousands of years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, right?
They could (a) rely less on fancy high bandwidth stuff and more on good old-fashioned gameplay, (b) be in partnership with the ISPs since they are providing a HUGE benefit to the ISPs by driving up bandwidth usage, instead of now being against them because they are driving up bandwidth usage, or any other number of things.
Spammers usually don't sent 100,000 individual emails from their computer to their upstream provider.
They:
1. Send one email with a very large "BCC" or "TO" or "CC" list, a one-time cost, which their upstream provider would then incur.
2. Use other people's mail servers to send their e-mail, and thus those people would be charged for the usage. This actually makes spammers even more evil.
3. Hack into other people's computers (usually via trojans) and send email directly from them (See #2).
SMTP is fundamentally broken when it comes to SPAM.
I think a more appropriate analogy would be phone service. I pay a fixed monthly fee and for it I get unlimited local calls. It doesn't matter if I spend six hours each day on the phone or don't touch it at all. I feel that charging for net access should follow the same model.
So bandwidth usage for, say, up to 3 hops should be unlimited, and everything after that should cost per minute, like telephone long distance?
Bandwidth saturation at 100% means that your network begins to crawl. The only way to make your network "work" again is to (a) increase bandwidth at great expense or (b) decrease usage. With budget crunches abounding, I can almost guarantee you that bandwidth usage is about to be decreased, forcibly, using a variety of mechanisms.
Water, electricity... bandwidth?
Water and electricity are commonly billed on a usage basis -- you pay $X per gallon of water, you pay $Y per megawatt of electricity. This causes certain actions, such as conservation of water and electricity, which are beneficial as these are limited resources.
Bandwidth is also a limited resource, and as it is being more and more dependent upon by business and government...
If people were paying for bandwidth like they do for many other utilies, conservation of bandwidth would be achieved and much of this piracy would be limited. When Danny's father gets the internet bill for $200, Danny's P2P software is getting uninstalled. If Danny leaves all the lights on in the house, or leaves all the faucets running water all day every day, we can easily see that his water and electricity bills would skyrocket and he would pay for his usage, as well as shortening the supply of these two shared resources for others especially in times of limited resources.
The days of flat-rate internet usage (should be) numbered. If I download a 650 MB ISO image of RedHat, or a 650 MB ISO of a pirated version of MS Office XP, it doesn't matter, similarly it doesn't matter if Danny is taking 30-minute showers or is just running the shower into the drain for 30 minutes.
Maybe that's what the UK should be looking at instead of all this DRM nonsense. The primary reason people download music is because they can get it "for free" since they are already paying their flat rate for internet access. If it actually costs them (in terms of $Z per MB) perhaps they will think twice about both downloading and potentially more expensive uploading of these files.
And maybe that will help some of these god-awful websites clean up their massively over-imaged websites.
I wish someone would port PopCap's Typer Shark Deluxe to the GameCube. They could offer it in a bundle with a GameCube keyboard.
I just want to be able to copy those mini DVDs, if nothing else to make backup copies of my discs before my 8 year old scratches the bejesus out of Zelda (RIP, Mario Sunshine Disc).
Try this. Install XP and it asks for your desired user name. You enter your user name, how about "jkarlin". Boom. "jkarlin" is now an Administrator.
When you create your "user" when setting up XP, you're actually creating a new Administrator account, in _addition_ to the existing "Administrator" account, and, more than likely, without a password.
Boot from this floppy
Because this doesn't require physical access to the machine? Because now some l33t d00d from another country can get passwords?
SOOOO many software products basically require you to be an Administrator to run properly, that the customer (user) has to run as an Administrative user just to be able to run what SHOULD be user-space applications.
Most Microsoft applications actually do the right thing, they keep your application data on a user-basis, but a TON of third-party applications (and GAMES) basically want the user to be able to write to "Program Files" or specific directories, and/or the registry, just to USE the application.
This is difference between a 50 speed writer and a 5 speed writer. Order of magnitude. Much as they discovered that UNIX is 3 orders of magnitude (e.g., 1000, 2000, etc, in this case 4000 times) harder to crack than Windows.
it costs a lot to actually ship automobiles by sea
Reminds me of either a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson book (probably both). Basically the theory is that eventually it is cheap enough to ship things anywhere that the jobs can move anywhere as well, even for things like building cars for the American car market.
I'm scared. I have a wife, mortgage, 2 car payments, 2 student loan payments, insurance, etc, etc.
If I lose my job there is a 100% chance I will be ensuring that my wife collects my life insurance policy in a fairly rapid fashion.
1 - gave up caffeine (I know!). I was drinking 3-4 cans of coke a day. I think doing that alone did me a huge deal of good.
If you were drinking 3-4 cans of coke a day, you do realise that caffeine aside that is the equivalent to pouring 3-4 cups of sugar down your throat every day?
In other words, are you sure it was the giving up caffeine, or giving up the multiple cups of sugar intake?
Actually Amazon has a book detailing an excercise you can do.
20 kbps? Are you joking? That might make it onto my wife's 5-year-old Rio (well it won't considering it's not a "supported" device) but why bother burning a 20 kbps file onto a CD?
Also, I can somewhat understand limiting the number of times you can burn a CD with the track (although once on CD, it can be ripped and copied as much as you want so it's a moot point as always). But I don't understand the limitation of only being able to download the file onto a portable device X number of times. Who came up with it and why, why, why? It just doesn't make any sense.
Stallman doesn't care if you sell your software source code for $100,000 or offer binaries for a dozen architectures for free download, and neither does the GPL.
He doesn't care if you sell your encrypted CDs in a store for $20 or offer free downloads in MP3/Ogg/WMA or any other format.
It's not about the money, it's about the freedom, baby.
RMS is not telling the BK writers that they can't sell their software, or that they can't give it away, etc. He's telling a particular set of BK _users_ (in this case the LKML) that they are entering a world of pain and vendor lock-in, which would be a tragedy as he sees it.
He's warning yet again that this particular vendor (BK) licenses their software in a very contrary way to the way this particular user group (LKML) licenses their software.
To use one of your analogies, you have a group of people who enjoy making good music for free, and all of a sudden this really great guitar player shows up and you write all your songs based on his abilities -- he plays some fantastic riffs, gets some crazy sounds that you just couldn't find anywhere else.
Now here's the catch -- this guitar player sees you all giving away your music like you've been doing quite happily for over a decade and says, "Whoa dudes! We should be getting _paid_ for this stuff. No more of this horsing around, I'm not playing any more with you guys until I get the cash!"
And now your band is broken, since your songs all depend on this guitar player.
RMS is the guy who, when this new guitar player shows up, shows the rest of the band the guitar player's contract with Sony Records and says, "Uh... guys... this guy is definitely not one of us. We had better not count on him!"
Then, when the lead singer of the band ignores RMS and hires the guitar player anyway, tries to go out and find other guitar players and teach them how to play the way this new guy plays -- all the hard solos, the mega riffs, the sweet effects -- and BK Guitar Man says, "Hey man, you're cramping my style. Can't you read my contract? You can't copy my sounds! And if you try, I'll keep playing harder and stranger songs and getting the whole band to move on, depending on me even more, so there's no way any of your crazy guitar player wannabes can keep up with me."
Now RMS is the guy saying, "OK now we _really_ need a new guitar player, really really bad now. Somebody learn how to play guitar!"
The point is that the act of filming someone is not an illegal act if done on your property with their knowledge. Bringing in the "gas them to death" nonsense is a complete red herring. Killing people is already illegal.