When I bought a computer book recently I found it pretty funny that this was on the label stuck to the case with the CD: By breaking the seal of this software packet, you accept the terms and conditions of the End-User License Agreement and/or the GNU General Public License included with this product.
I wonder if an EULA and the GPL even out each other...
I have been looking at solutions for a small store to integrate their cash register with most likely a Microsoft system like C5 or Attain (comparable to Axapta but inteded for smaller companies).
There aren't any limits in the system itself - but a lot of software limits have been placed. Among those are the size of the database. First of all if you move beyond a certain size you will have to pay an amount (starting at $3000 if I remember correctly) to get an MSSQL instead of just using a file. And secondly you have to pay for the size of the database - a cost that can easily move beyond both 5 and 10 thousand dollars if you have gigabytes of data. And those systems are not great at saving space.
Also if you think it sounds cheap - then this is for a small system of up to 5 concurrent users - about enough for perhaps two small stores.
Hard drives may be cheap - but here it's Microsoft making the limitations.
It has been a much abused word here in Europe where rightwing parties have been accused for being fascist - however, it seems the current American administration is getting close.
From Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary:
An extreme rightwing political system or attitude, which favours strong central authority and does not allow freedom of speech.
Patriot I and II pretty much goes for the strong central authority and DMCA + some patriot goes for freedom of speech. Perhaps not a perfect fit - but it's still quite sad.
Don't get me wrong. I love americans and their country - it's just that the slope is rather slippery post 9/11 - and it really seems to be going down hill at a very fast pace. I have no idea what this will eventually lead to - and hopefully the people will stand up and demand their freedom be given back. Otherwise we in Europe are probably screwed as well - events in America often forebode what is going to happen here.
Allowing anyone and everyone into your country can't possibly be considered a good thing for most countries. But I see a lot of good things coming from letting students enter your country - just as students from your country enter mine.
How about cultural understanding? The USA doesn't exactly have the best reputation here in Europe. You might not care - but we are quite a few people who would have live in a World where people understanding each others cultural backgrounds - so we can all be at least friendly on some level.
I went to Virginia as a high school exchange student - spent a year there and learned a lot about americans the US in general that I would never have learned as a tourist. When you live among people you learn quite a lot more about them than when you just stay at they hotels and see their monuments. This knowledge I took back to my home country (Denmark) and have since then told a lot about my experience - and I believe that I to some degree have given quite a few danes a more varied impression of the US. Likewise I have told countless of americans about Denmark - and they have experienced how we really aren't that different from them.
And just like I went to the USA some american student (although all too few and even fewer in these times) take the trip to a froeign country - both promoting the US and taking back an understanding of a different culture.
Closing down your country is not the answer. Not economically and not culturally. Americans have a tendency to believe they can pretty much handle everything themselves. Although that is true to a degree it is, and has always been, far from true in all cases. You need to trade with the rest of the World - and to do that you need foreigners who know your country and your culture - and most importantly you need a lot of foreigners who have a positive attitude towards you. Otherwise we're all pretty much screwed (or at least worse off financially).
I don't think a very light-gray on a white background warrants "clearly" labeled. It is labeled alright - but I didn't notice these when I first looked at the search. You might know this if you use MSN search on a regular basis - but it is really bad journalism when just a few readers can't tell the adds from the rest.
But once the kid discovers that the doll won't say certain words - wohoo - here goes the great quest to find out what words she will say! Or how to make her say the words by spelling them slightly different (how would she read phuck?) or in different languages or whatever. If she just said it... well the kid's just been a bit naughty... but this way the kid will actively try to trick the doll into saying naughty things.
I'm not even saying this is a bad thing - it just seems like the classic example of censorship (like banned internet sites) which often seem to spur just the kind of activity that the censorship was intended to limit.
I served military duty in the Danish Emergency Management Agency and was shocked when I saw they were implementing the entire system for reporting all kinds of disasters and emergencies (everything from tunnel fires to radiation leeks) on Windows 2000. These computers were connected to the net - and knowing the place they would probably never be updated. And even worse - it wasn't even a stripped down Windows 2000 that only ran the necessary services - it was a default (apparently unpatched) installation complete with an autostarting Messenger.
I'm not all that great on securing Windows boxes - but that sure didn't seem right. Considering this would be the first way (and for something like 5 minutes!) to warn the local emergency services of something - which could very well be a tunnel collapse/fire/whatever where 5 minutes easily can make a lot of difference in human lives. The program that was custom-made for emergency-reporting also seemed of pretty poor quality - most likely a case of lowest bidder with noone competent seeting intelligent rules for the bidders.
I have a certificate that I use when filing taxes online and doing other business with the government.
Don't know if it will be possible for private websites to use the certificate - haven't looked that much into it. Does anyone know?
But it works - and is compatible with both Mozilla (+Netscape) and IE... dunno about other browsers.
Alright - you win =)
That's really, really sick... which was what I thought before. Just hoped (naive me) that reality was more reasonable than that...
However, shouldn't "prior art" then be able to be argued in this case? With the millions of melodies composed more than 200 years ago (or how long until the copyright expires) - they should easily account for most of the 46,656 different melodies?
Well, there may be less than 50,000 4-note melodies - but then again those 4 notes can be played in a trillion different ways.
Even if the notes are played using the same instrument, a piano for example, those 4 notes would could still be worlds apart by changing the duration of each note, how much pressure applied, using the pedal, sharp or soft and probably more I can't think of.
Using a piano I could easily play those 4 notes so you would probably not even recognize the melody - then moving on to a guitar I could do the same - then moving on to...
So talking about limiting the number of unique melodies to 50,000 is nonsense - change the rhytm a bit and it would pass through any court.
Slashdot Mirror
When I bought a computer book recently I found it pretty funny that this was on the label stuck to the case with the CD:
...
By breaking the seal of this software packet, you accept the terms and conditions of the End-User License Agreement and/or the GNU General Public License included with this product.
I wonder if an EULA and the GPL even out each other
Actually that's a valid concern.
I have been looking at solutions for a small store to integrate their cash register with most likely a Microsoft system like C5 or Attain (comparable to Axapta but inteded for smaller companies).
There aren't any limits in the system itself - but a lot of software limits have been placed. Among those are the size of the database. First of all if you move beyond a certain size you will have to pay an amount (starting at $3000 if I remember correctly) to get an MSSQL instead of just using a file. And secondly you have to pay for the size of the database - a cost that can easily move beyond both 5 and 10 thousand dollars if you have gigabytes of data. And those systems are not great at saving space.
Also if you think it sounds cheap - then this is for a small system of up to 5 concurrent users - about enough for perhaps two small stores.
Hard drives may be cheap - but here it's Microsoft making the limitations.
It has been a much abused word here in Europe where rightwing parties have been accused for being fascist - however, it seems the current American administration is getting close.
From Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary:
An extreme rightwing political system or attitude, which favours strong central authority and does not allow freedom of speech.
Patriot I and II pretty much goes for the strong central authority and DMCA + some patriot goes for freedom of speech. Perhaps not a perfect fit - but it's still quite sad.
Don't get me wrong. I love americans and their country - it's just that the slope is rather slippery post 9/11 - and it really seems to be going down hill at a very fast pace. I have no idea what this will eventually lead to - and hopefully the people will stand up and demand their freedom be given back. Otherwise we in Europe are probably screwed as well - events in America often forebode what is going to happen here.
Allowing anyone and everyone into your country can't possibly be considered a good thing for most countries. But I see a lot of good things coming from letting students enter your country - just as students from your country enter mine.
How about cultural understanding? The USA doesn't exactly have the best reputation here in Europe. You might not care - but we are quite a few people who would have live in a World where people understanding each others cultural backgrounds - so we can all be at least friendly on some level.
I went to Virginia as a high school exchange student - spent a year there and learned a lot about americans the US in general that I would never have learned as a tourist. When you live among people you learn quite a lot more about them than when you just stay at they hotels and see their monuments. This knowledge I took back to my home country (Denmark) and have since then told a lot about my experience - and I believe that I to some degree have given quite a few danes a more varied impression of the US. Likewise I have told countless of americans about Denmark - and they have experienced how we really aren't that different from them.
And just like I went to the USA some american student (although all too few and even fewer in these times) take the trip to a froeign country - both promoting the US and taking back an understanding of a different culture.
Closing down your country is not the answer. Not economically and not culturally. Americans have a tendency to believe they can pretty much handle everything themselves. Although that is true to a degree it is, and has always been, far from true in all cases. You need to trade with the rest of the World - and to do that you need foreigners who know your country and your culture - and most importantly you need a lot of foreigners who have a positive attitude towards you. Otherwise we're all pretty much screwed (or at least worse off financially).
I don't think a very light-gray on a white background warrants "clearly" labeled. It is labeled alright - but I didn't notice these when I first looked at the search. You might know this if you use MSN search on a regular basis - but it is really bad journalism when just a few readers can't tell the adds from the rest.
But once the kid discovers that the doll won't say certain words - wohoo - here goes the great quest to find out what words she will say! Or how to make her say the words by spelling them slightly different (how would she read phuck?) or in different languages or whatever. If she just said it ... well the kid's just been a bit naughty ... but this way the kid will actively try to trick the doll into saying naughty things.
I'm not even saying this is a bad thing - it just seems like the classic example of censorship (like banned internet sites) which often seem to spur just the kind of activity that the censorship was intended to limit.
I served military duty in the Danish Emergency Management Agency and was shocked when I saw they were implementing the entire system for reporting all kinds of disasters and emergencies (everything from tunnel fires to radiation leeks) on Windows 2000. These computers were connected to the net - and knowing the place they would probably never be updated. And even worse - it wasn't even a stripped down Windows 2000 that only ran the necessary services - it was a default (apparently unpatched) installation complete with an autostarting Messenger.
I'm not all that great on securing Windows boxes - but that sure didn't seem right. Considering this would be the first way (and for something like 5 minutes!) to warn the local emergency services of something - which could very well be a tunnel collapse/fire/whatever where 5 minutes easily can make a lot of difference in human lives. The program that was custom-made for emergency-reporting also seemed of pretty poor quality - most likely a case of lowest bidder with noone competent seeting intelligent rules for the bidders.
I have a certificate that I use when filing taxes online and doing other business with the government. Don't know if it will be possible for private websites to use the certificate - haven't looked that much into it. Does anyone know? But it works - and is compatible with both Mozilla (+Netscape) and IE ... dunno about other browsers.
Alright - you win =) That's really, really sick ... which was what I thought before. Just hoped (naive me) that reality was more reasonable than that ...
However, shouldn't "prior art" then be able to be argued in this case? With the millions of melodies composed more than 200 years ago (or how long until the copyright expires) - they should easily account for most of the 46,656 different melodies?
Well, there may be less than 50,000 4-note melodies - but then again those 4 notes can be played in a trillion different ways. Even if the notes are played using the same instrument, a piano for example, those 4 notes would could still be worlds apart by changing the duration of each note, how much pressure applied, using the pedal, sharp or soft and probably more I can't think of. Using a piano I could easily play those 4 notes so you would probably not even recognize the melody - then moving on to a guitar I could do the same - then moving on to ...
So talking about limiting the number of unique melodies to 50,000 is nonsense - change the rhytm a bit and it would pass through any court.