Even if J.K Rowling was a US citizen (she's not) your understanding of the law is lacking. Let me explain using short sentences...
A work is the property of the author. Rights to that work can be transferred and sold. Copyright exists to provide incentive and protection for creation of new work, such incentive and protection deemed to be in the public's best interests. That protection exists for a limited time, AFTER which it's no longer enforced, and upon which that work is said to enter the public domain.
Major erorrs: It's not a "lease". Rights do not "revert", because they were never the public's rights to begin with. The public can not sell licenses to public domain works.
And while media can be your property, your rights regarding that copy are limited. You don't "own" that work, just the physical representation of it. Those aren't your words, that isn't your film, and that's not your music.
The original article certainly had that implication, yes. However, the parent post to which you provided advice regarding the ease and cost of implementing a firewall did not mention what systems they were using.
"You probably use quite a few of them without even knowing it."
Nice try, but I'm running Safari on OS X.;)
And not to disrupt your screed, but email trojans are by far the most used tool of "spyware authors". Second seems to be buffer overruns aimed at ports, and third is bad data contained within theoretically benign files (images, movies). ActiveX is pretty far down the list.
I believe the parent is referring to the amount of administrative paperwork a doctor or hospital is forced to do simply to submit a claim. Much of which could be done more easily by the insurance company, but is foisted upon the hospital, under the idea that if they want to get paid, they'll do our work for us.
"While it may be difficult to deal with the inherent instability often present in Windows-based system..."
And just where did the parent say his medical records access was dependent on unstable Windows-based systems? Your suggestion about the firewall was a good one, but as a whole would have been better off without the Windows-bashing rhetoric.
The author apparently pulled his own work out of embarassment, and understandably so. The article was a badly written opinion piece flaming Microsoft and praising Linux. Imagine that. Almost no mention of the "Executable Internet" at all.
Reading it's a waste of time, but here's the mirror for those interested.
"This would be more like paying to have your house connected to the road system and then being told that to be allowed to drive your Rover on it will cost twice as much as your neighbour pays to drive his Ford."
Have you looked at the taxes and license registration fees on that Rover as compared to that Ford?
"Unfortunately, a huge majority of these applications are going active-x..."
Okay, your application did, but a "huge majority"? I work in the technical field, and I don't get that sense at all. Any stats to back up your "majority" claim?
I was nodding along right up until I got to the last line. The "government"? Last time I checked it was the corporations who were trying to grab more money off the web in the form of charging for "preferred" and "guaranteed" services. This after most companies already pay for bandwidth on one side, and users already pay to access it on the other.
Actually, in this case I hope the government does have control, as in legislating some form of internet neutrality act.
I think it's great that you've found your own private form of civil disobedience. And one from which you can personally benefit at the same time. How... convenient.
So? Read your email. Read a book or manual or trade rag. Prep for a meeting. Clean off your desk. Go take that note where it needs to be. Work on your rationale for getting a raise. Add a suggestion to the box. Rough out your next project. Check out what your competition is doing. File those papers. Fill out your expense report. Go to the supply room. Attend a webinar. Make a to do list. Do an item on your to do list.
There are dozens upon dozens of sufficiently "offtask" change-of-viewpoint sharpen-the-saw things you could be doing... and playing games is not one of them.
"... we need to reform the legal system to make it easier for the little guy to sue the big guy."
Like Forgent suing Canon and Sony and Apple? Or NTP suing RIM? But again, the problem with a non-enforcement clause is with the period. You're saying if someone uses my patent and I don't defend it for, say, a year (or whatever period), then I've lost the ability to do so.
But how am I supposed to monitor every company in the world? What happens if, two years from now, I finally discover you've used my invention in your product?
You could say I have a year from the time I know you've done it, but that just gives rise to another problem. Namely, how does anyone else know when I knew? Who can prove when NTP knew RIM was infringing?
The bottom line is that, like most real-world problems, it's a complex issue.
How about assuming that the people doing this aren't complete and total idiots. How about asking yourself, instead, what you would do if you were about to "buy" an OSS project?
How about, for starters, hiring the top 5 developers? (To be fair, you did mention that.) So, how about making the key people sign a non-compete contract as a condition to their becoming millionaires?
People who are about to spend a lot of money on something generally want to know that they're getting something for their dollars.
"...I'm afraid that the massive, OSS, J2EE market simply doesn't exist."
Not to mention that most people seem to be staying away from J2EE anyway and using lightweight beans and tools like Spring, Hibernate, and Velocity.
For many problems, using J2EE is like using a 12-pound sledge-hammer to pound a tack into the wall. And if you do happen to have those kinds of problems, chances are you're big enough to want and be able to pay for a stable, commercial solution.
The issue here is the oft-mentioned small inventor, who typically doesn't have the funds to continually defend a patent. Hence biggie-corp's A, B, and C could all kill the little guy by forcing him to hire lawyers and drowning him in legal fees.
"Does that sound like a company whose business model doesn't work?"
That remains to be seen. What it sounds like at the moment is a company with too much money on its hands who thinks aquistions will "fix" everything...
"A smart ISP who is handling things well will make the whitelisting as easy..."
Except that this will take the place of the current whitelist system. You either pay or get bounced. And while a "smart" ISP might do what you suggest, one going into the protection racket would not...
Except that you can't make a solid case for encrypting a legally obtainable sofware release. You deliberately want slower performance? You deliberately want to inconvenience other usaes and negatively impact the servers providing the downloads?
Face it, the number one use for an encrypted torrent would be to hide the fact someone is trading copywritten music, movies, and/or software.
To quote, "ExxonMobil announced $36 billion in profits -- in profits -- last year. That's three billion dollars every month, which if ExxonMobil were a country would make it the 90th richest country in the world. This astronomical number is a 42-percent increase from last year's record-breaking profits. Chevron also bested its record profits for the second year in a row, raking in $27.4 billion in 2005. This is, once again, the company's highest profits in its 126-year history."
"It just gets back to my old rant that RAID is a waste of money..."
Yeah, that's why one of my primary servers stayed up last week dispite a failed drive. And not to discount your "controller controller" story, but a mechanical system is much more likely to fail, by several orders of magnitude, than an electronic one.
Based on past experience, the most likely failure modes are: hard drives, power supplies, cables, and electronics. And in that order. As such, I don't consider fault-tolerant, redundant, mirrored drives a "waste of money". Especially in a mission critical, 24/7, always-on system.
First, it's not a prediction, but an analysis of current manufacturer's products. I won't argue that you couldn't do it another way, but since they don't, your argument has little bearing on the cameras people are actually using.
Second, you're not downsampling from 10-bit to 8-bit in-camera unless you're demosaicing and converting to jpeg, in which case you're converting from the sensor's RGBG representation to RGB-triplets. All of the colorspace calculations and tonal mapping is occuring in high-bit math to improve accuracy before the final result is downsampled. It's not a simple lop-off-a-few-bits and here's your value process.
As an expert on the subject, you no doubt realize the advantages of doing the math first, then downsampling, as opposed to downsampling your sensor data first, and then doing all of your bayer calculations at your final bit count.
Slashdot Mirror
A work is the property of the author. Rights to that work can be transferred and sold. Copyright exists to provide incentive and protection for creation of new work, such incentive and protection deemed to be in the public's best interests. That protection exists for a limited time, AFTER which it's no longer enforced, and upon which that work is said to enter the public domain.
Major erorrs: It's not a "lease". Rights do not "revert", because they were never the public's rights to begin with. The public can not sell licenses to public domain works.
And while media can be your property, your rights regarding that copy are limited. You don't "own" that work, just the physical representation of it. Those aren't your words, that isn't your film, and that's not your music.
The original article certainly had that implication, yes. However, the parent post to which you provided advice regarding the ease and cost of implementing a firewall did not mention what systems they were using.
Nice try, but I'm running Safari on OS X. ;)
And not to disrupt your screed, but email trojans are by far the most used tool of "spyware authors". Second seems to be buffer overruns aimed at ports, and third is bad data contained within theoretically benign files (images, movies). ActiveX is pretty far down the list.
I believe the parent is referring to the amount of administrative paperwork a doctor or hospital is forced to do simply to submit a claim. Much of which could be done more easily by the insurance company, but is foisted upon the hospital, under the idea that if they want to get paid, they'll do our work for us.
And just where did the parent say his medical records access was dependent on unstable Windows-based systems? Your suggestion about the firewall was a good one, but as a whole would have been better off without the Windows-bashing rhetoric.
Reading it's a waste of time, but here's the mirror for those interested.
Have you looked at the taxes and license registration fees on that Rover as compared to that Ford?
Okay, your application did, but a "huge majority"? I work in the technical field, and I don't get that sense at all. Any stats to back up your "majority" claim?
Actually, in this case I hope the government does have control, as in legislating some form of internet neutrality act.
I think it's great that you've found your own private form of civil disobedience. And one from which you can personally benefit at the same time. How... convenient.
WTF? How can we find a solution to the inevitable if it's inevitable?
There are dozens upon dozens of sufficiently "offtask" change-of-viewpoint sharpen-the-saw things you could be doing... and playing games is not one of them.
Like Forgent suing Canon and Sony and Apple? Or NTP suing RIM? But again, the problem with a non-enforcement clause is with the period. You're saying if someone uses my patent and I don't defend it for, say, a year (or whatever period), then I've lost the ability to do so.
But how am I supposed to monitor every company in the world? What happens if, two years from now, I finally discover you've used my invention in your product? You could say I have a year from the time I know you've done it, but that just gives rise to another problem. Namely, how does anyone else know when I knew? Who can prove when NTP knew RIM was infringing?
The bottom line is that, like most real-world problems, it's a complex issue.
How about, for starters, hiring the top 5 developers? (To be fair, you did mention that.) So, how about making the key people sign a non-compete contract as a condition to their becoming millionaires?
People who are about to spend a lot of money on something generally want to know that they're getting something for their dollars.
Not to mention that most people seem to be staying away from J2EE anyway and using lightweight beans and tools like Spring, Hibernate, and Velocity.
For many problems, using J2EE is like using a 12-pound sledge-hammer to pound a tack into the wall. And if you do happen to have those kinds of problems, chances are you're big enough to want and be able to pay for a stable, commercial solution.
The issue here is the oft-mentioned small inventor, who typically doesn't have the funds to continually defend a patent. Hence biggie-corp's A, B, and C could all kill the little guy by forcing him to hire lawyers and drowning him in legal fees.
That remains to be seen. What it sounds like at the moment is a company with too much money on its hands who thinks aquistions will "fix" everything...
And the fact that if you're a business you can afford to hire an expert to setup and maintain the silly thing...
Except that this will take the place of the current whitelist system. You either pay or get bounced. And while a "smart" ISP might do what you suggest, one going into the protection racket would not...
Ah... you mean benefit. Ben-e-fit. Why do people use words when they can't even spell them? ;)
Except that you can't make a solid case for encrypting a legally obtainable sofware release. You deliberately want slower performance? You deliberately want to inconvenience other usaes and negatively impact the servers providing the downloads?
Face it, the number one use for an encrypted torrent would be to hide the fact someone is trading copywritten music, movies, and/or software.
To quote, "ExxonMobil announced $36 billion in profits -- in profits -- last year. That's three billion dollars every month, which if ExxonMobil were a country would make it the 90th richest country in the world. This astronomical number is a 42-percent increase from last year's record-breaking profits. Chevron also bested its record profits for the second year in a row, raking in $27.4 billion in 2005. This is, once again, the company's highest profits in its 126-year history."
Yeah, that's why one of my primary servers stayed up last week dispite a failed drive. And not to discount your "controller controller" story, but a mechanical system is much more likely to fail, by several orders of magnitude, than an electronic one.
Based on past experience, the most likely failure modes are: hard drives, power supplies, cables, and electronics. And in that order. As such, I don't consider fault-tolerant, redundant, mirrored drives a "waste of money". Especially in a mission critical, 24/7, always-on system.
Iraq threatened to blockade us and cut off our trade routes to the ouside world? Wow. Must have totally missed that one...
Second, you're not downsampling from 10-bit to 8-bit in-camera unless you're demosaicing and converting to jpeg, in which case you're converting from the sensor's RGBG representation to RGB-triplets. All of the colorspace calculations and tonal mapping is occuring in high-bit math to improve accuracy before the final result is downsampled. It's not a simple lop-off-a-few-bits and here's your value process.
As an expert on the subject, you no doubt realize the advantages of doing the math first, then downsampling, as opposed to downsampling your sensor data first, and then doing all of your bayer calculations at your final bit count.