Does ripping them to the hard drive and never sharing them over any P2P network count as a backup?
By your definition or by the MPAA's definition? Am I stealing the material when I do this, or exercising fair use in exchanging one medium for another without actually redistributing or otherwise pirating the product?
I have an extensive music collection and it's either rip them to my hard drive or get a 1000+ disc changer to keep it all organized and accessible.
I'm curious how much extra the local cable company is making using crap like this. I've noticed a much more than usual cut-off of the commercials in the past year or so. It's only a second or two per commercial but over the course of the day that's god knows how many more ad spots they can run and how many companies get shorted on their ad dollars.
The source code has to be made available to anyone to whom you have provided the binary at no additional charge.
It doesn't have to be given to just anybody who wants it, but it *does* have to be available to anyone who buys the binary program and it *does* still have to be under GPL.
He's not allowed to do as he is doing. He is trying to take GPL code which isn't his, break the terms of the GPL by re-licensing it incompatibly with the GPL and then selling it in a binary distribution.
He is allowed to do something *similar* to what he is doing. If he hadn't tried to monkey with the licensing he could go ahead and sell a binary version so long as he provided the source code.
With or without source code, the only thing shady about what he's doing is the re-licensing part.
I wish that were the case. Maybe last time he got it through a botched election but this time the polls are showing Kerry dropping in popularity.
The backdoor on the voting machines is just a safety net to make absolutely certain that he can't lose.
Don't the terms of the GPL license in fact explicitly state that modifications to GPL code must be licensed under the GPL?
And doesn't the GPL only state that the source must be freely available with a binary distribution, not that the binary itself be distributed freely?
My understanding is this: he can't relicense someone else's code without their explicit permission but he is free to sell the binary Windows release however he sees fit so long as he *also* gives the complete source code along, under GPL, with the binary release.
If you've not seen his live show, I'd recommend it.
He makes no bones about his humor being low-brow and pretty much just accepts any of that criticism on the basis that the critics just didn't get it.
By his own admission he makes movies for himself and for his friends. If the critics go for it, great, if not... well... at least he got to make a movie he liked. Big budget or no budget, his taste is consistent and that's why his movies are "all the same". It's when he makes a movie like "Jersey Girl" that he's pandering to Hollywood crap.
Until MS lobbied their government for support of their intellectual property at which point everyone is forced to stop using their computers or forced to pay MS for the privelege of using their computers.
Considering this tactic is already being used in southeast asia by Microsoft as a ploy to get users hooked and then jack up the price, I'd rather these impoverished regions use a Free free system than a proprietary-but-pirated free system and they hopefully agree.
On the electronic machines we used in California you're handed a smart-card which you use to access the machine.
Presumably the process I watched was:
Scan barcode for (hopefully randomly assigned) voter ID Program smart-card with ID Hand card to voter, cross name off list Put smart-card into machine, vote, register ID as having voted Return card to official who wipes the ID and reprograms with the next voter ID
Nobody got to vote a hundred times, your name was crossed off the list so you can't get another card and the machine knew that this card/ID had already been used to vote so you couldn't just plug it back in and vote again.
Keep in mind that with DMCA-like legislation in place it's illegal to even tamper with the lock, not to mention if you break open the lock *and* steal the goodies inside.
Just fidgeting with the DRM stuff is a crime even if you're just curious and even if you're not successful.
Volunteering for a non-profit is a much different thing than volunteering to be free customer support. The EQ management offloaded too much work on people who had little or no incentive to be responsible with the power they were given.
You have the case of a good guide spending more hours on supporting other players than on playing.
You have the case of the bad guide playing god and having allegiances to certain guilds and groups.
Neither one is the gig for which they had signed on.
Most businesses *need* a computer like they *need* electricity.
They need it to work reliably and consistently. They need to know that if they plug in an extension cord it will interoperate favorably with something plugged into the other end of it.
The data and information is akin to the electricity in this scenario. Windows is the plug because it is the filter/interface to that data.
Any screwball plug can be made to work, but how much effort should really be put into making weird nonstandard plugs rather than perfecting the standard plug?
After that (and now i am being pessimistic) i would not even be surprised if they start to try to making unlicensed *content* illegal.
Isn't this what Palladium is about? And whatever law would be used to force it down our throats?
If you want to be able to watch your home movies you better make sure that they're licensed and encoded with approval from a regulatory body which will of course need money to perform its work so you'll have to pay a nominal fee for each work licensed and...
The wonders of capitalist society. "Free" speech sold by the slice!
They specifically addressed this in the legal proceedings.
To make a parody of a song is to change the lyrics in such a way as to make fun of the original work.
JibJab was "satire" which is *not* protected Fair Use as it was using an existing work and using it to make fun of the candidates rather than the original work.
There is of course that nasty geological record at the Atlantic rift showing a periodic reversal of the magnetic alignment in newly formed rock going back millions and millions of years.
That of course doesn't count because humans didn't record it, right?
View the Open Source community as a trade guild.
They regulate themselves ensuring a minimum level of quality for the product. They ensure a sort of "best practices" in the marketplace and they set a standard for the value of the product.
In a more stringently regulated guild you might find the ugliness of price fixing and blackballing but in this case that can easily be minimized by choosing a different "community". You can work with Gnome, KDE, Blackbox, etc. and these are all different groups and cultures who offer comparable products with the same basic ideals.
They aren't limiting how much money you can make, not intentionally nor directly. They limit how much you can lower the quality and value of your product to inflate your margins without losing customers.
For a long time I've been wishing that console gaming companies would understand this.
The Mario Party line of games in particular is a good example. My friends and I loved Mario Party and Mario Party 2 was a big jump forward, simply fantastic.
Then Mario Party 3 which wasn't as good.
And Mario Party 4 which sucked badly.
And Mario Party 5 which we haven't bothered to try.
The two best games for this series are on the N64 platform. We would have easily gotten newer prettier versions of the same if they'd been available but they aren't and the "innovative" versions suck.
A great way to make use of all of that content which is now supposedly obsolete would be a sort of anthology with mix and match rules. I'd love to play a Mario Party 3 board by Mario Party 2 rules. That however is unlikely to happen because the company involved isn't going to "recycle content". Not even to create a superior product.
If gaming companies brought back something like Pac-Man in it's original form and didn't charge some outrageous price for an unnecessarily revamped version they would stand to make some money but it isn't happening in the mainstream because they're all too fascinated with the new content.
This is very weird. The one time I ever used the extended warranty I had no problem with it and this was at Fry's no less.
My mom's MB blew up, we took it in and they tested it and agreed that it was dead. They didn't carry that one anymore so they gave us another equivalent board that actually had a couple of better features (still bottom of the barrel for their stock, but better than what I'd brought them) with no argument.
As for the rebate on the 120 GB drive I bought from them 2 years ago... I still haven't seen that money back. I don't even factor the rebate into my purchasing anymore because I can count on not getting it.
Isn't it a requirement of the patent system that you give them a blueprint or otherwise sufficiently detailed documentation of a specific implementation of your idea?
The idea being that you can't patent flying but you can patent an airplane? You can't patent cooking but you can patent a stove?
And the barrier is based on the obviousness to a peer within your field of endeavor, not whether any layman could or couldn't have thought of it. This gives the impression that patent examiners *are* in fact supposed to have some specific understanding what the hell they're examining.
On the whole I'd say the patent system needs to be revamped. All of the existing patents should be re-scanned, typed up, whatever into a publicly searchable online database. Disputing any given patent shouldn't require a lawyer. Patent examination should be revised and there should be experts at least as consultants if not as examiners themselves.
Streamline this process any way you like but there are 2 essential bits that must be put in place: Patents must be cheaply and easily disputable and they must be publicly searchable. Any company or individual who cares to re-examine some patents should be capable of doing so.
You can always blame Microsoft but the contracts you sign to do business with them allows them to abdicate all responsibility.
Read the EULA. You can't sue them. If it makes your computer burst into flame instead of word processing you *still* can't sue them. If you can prove that they *intentionally* coded it that way, you still can't sue them except *maybe* on false advertising but even *then* the EULA has something to say on the matter and it sure as hell isn't in your favor.
Just because the MS name is stamped on it does *not* mean you can sue them when something goes wrong. Users, companies and governments have fallen for this crock. You can't sue MS any more than you can sue "Open Source".
Ultimately you have *no* guarantee that it works or that it will be fixed in a timely manner. The guarantee that Open Source gives you is that if it comes down to fixing it yourself or hiring someone to fix it, you're free to do so. With MS your *only* option is to hope and wait for your issue to become a priority for MS and there are no competitive bids to fix your problem.
Personally, my theory on coffee and insomnia and all the other crap that's going on is related to the kind of work we're being made to do.
We're tired all day because we've tuned our bodies to a life of sitting at a desk or on a production line for 8 hours. Then at the end of the day our minds are so fried that we just want to vegetate. When it gets to be "bedtime" our bodies aren't tired enough to sleep properly so we take pills or stay up late.
Then in the morning after not having slept well, if at all, we come to work ready for another day of doing not a whole hell of a lot. To stay awake we drink our coffee and it perks us up enough to get through the way we think we're supposed to do.
As long as employment continues to mean we sit more or less in one place for 8 or 9 hours then we really need to play harder. It'll make us sleep better which could even get us through the day better. Being barely awake enough to work and barely tired enough to sleep just doesn't seem to be cutting it.
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So everyone is all amped up about a non-portable tablet computer?
Phillips patent ran out like 2 years ago.
Does ripping them to the hard drive and never sharing them over any P2P network count as a backup?
By your definition or by the MPAA's definition? Am I stealing the material when I do this, or exercising fair use in exchanging one medium for another without actually redistributing or otherwise pirating the product?
I have an extensive music collection and it's either rip them to my hard drive or get a 1000+ disc changer to keep it all organized and accessible.
I'm curious how much extra the local cable company is making using crap like this.
I've noticed a much more than usual cut-off of the commercials in the past year or so. It's only a second or two per commercial but over the course of the day that's god knows how many more ad spots they can run and how many companies get shorted on their ad dollars.
The source code has to be made available to anyone to whom you have provided the binary at no additional charge.
It doesn't have to be given to just anybody who wants it, but it *does* have to be available to anyone who buys the binary program and it *does* still have to be under GPL.
Actually that wasn't what I was arguing.
He's not allowed to do as he is doing. He is trying to take GPL code which isn't his, break the terms of the GPL by re-licensing it incompatibly with the GPL and then selling it in a binary distribution.
He is allowed to do something *similar* to what he is doing. If he hadn't tried to monkey with the licensing he could go ahead and sell a binary version so long as he provided the source code.
With or without source code, the only thing shady about what he's doing is the re-licensing part.
I wish that were the case. Maybe last time he got it through a botched election but this time the polls are showing Kerry dropping in popularity. The backdoor on the voting machines is just a safety net to make absolutely certain that he can't lose.
Don't the terms of the GPL license in fact explicitly state that modifications to GPL code must be licensed under the GPL?
And doesn't the GPL only state that the source must be freely available with a binary distribution, not that the binary itself be distributed freely?
My understanding is this: he can't relicense someone else's code without their explicit permission but he is free to sell the binary Windows release however he sees fit so long as he *also* gives the complete source code along, under GPL, with the binary release.
If you've not seen his live show, I'd recommend it.
He makes no bones about his humor being low-brow and pretty much just accepts any of that criticism on the basis that the critics just didn't get it.
By his own admission he makes movies for himself and for his friends. If the critics go for it, great, if not... well... at least he got to make a movie he liked. Big budget or no budget, his taste is consistent and that's why his movies are "all the same". It's when he makes a movie like "Jersey Girl" that he's pandering to Hollywood crap.
Until MS lobbied their government for support of their intellectual property at which point everyone is forced to stop using their computers or forced to pay MS for the privelege of using their computers.
Considering this tactic is already being used in southeast asia by Microsoft as a ploy to get users hooked and then jack up the price, I'd rather these impoverished regions use a Free free system than a proprietary-but-pirated free system and they hopefully agree.
On the electronic machines we used in California you're handed a smart-card which you use to access the machine.
Presumably the process I watched was:
Scan barcode for (hopefully randomly assigned) voter ID
Program smart-card with ID
Hand card to voter, cross name off list
Put smart-card into machine, vote, register ID as having voted
Return card to official who wipes the ID and reprograms with the next voter ID
Nobody got to vote a hundred times, your name was crossed off the list so you can't get another card and the machine knew that this card/ID had already been used to vote so you couldn't just plug it back in and vote again.
Keep in mind that with DMCA-like legislation in place it's illegal to even tamper with the lock, not to mention if you break open the lock *and* steal the goodies inside.
Just fidgeting with the DRM stuff is a crime even if you're just curious and even if you're not successful.
Volunteering for a non-profit is a much different thing than volunteering to be free customer support. The EQ management offloaded too much work on people who had little or no incentive to be responsible with the power they were given.
You have the case of a good guide spending more hours on supporting other players than on playing.
You have the case of the bad guide playing god and having allegiances to certain guilds and groups.
Neither one is the gig for which they had signed on.
Most businesses *need* a computer like they *need* electricity.
They need it to work reliably and consistently. They need to know that if they plug in an extension cord it will interoperate favorably with something plugged into the other end of it.
The data and information is akin to the electricity in this scenario. Windows is the plug because it is the filter/interface to that data.
Any screwball plug can be made to work, but how much effort should really be put into making weird nonstandard plugs rather than perfecting the standard plug?
After that (and now i am being pessimistic) i would not even be surprised if they start to try to making unlicensed *content* illegal. Isn't this what Palladium is about? And whatever law would be used to force it down our throats? If you want to be able to watch your home movies you better make sure that they're licensed and encoded with approval from a regulatory body which will of course need money to perform its work so you'll have to pay a nominal fee for each work licensed and... The wonders of capitalist society. "Free" speech sold by the slice!
They specifically addressed this in the legal proceedings.
To make a parody of a song is to change the lyrics in such a way as to make fun of the original work.
JibJab was "satire" which is *not* protected Fair Use as it was using an existing work and using it to make fun of the candidates rather than the original work.
So you can have an "Offically" unsupported product?
There is of course that nasty geological record at the Atlantic rift showing a periodic reversal of the magnetic alignment in newly formed rock going back millions and millions of years.
That of course doesn't count because humans didn't record it, right?
Isn't an RSS feed kind of what you're looking for?
And wouldn't that be a perfect form of targetted advertising? Only customers who actually *want* what you're selling would opt in.
If you don't have good word of mouth spreading awareness of you and your product then how do you expect to sell it even when people *are* aware of it?
View the Open Source community as a trade guild. They regulate themselves ensuring a minimum level of quality for the product. They ensure a sort of "best practices" in the marketplace and they set a standard for the value of the product. In a more stringently regulated guild you might find the ugliness of price fixing and blackballing but in this case that can easily be minimized by choosing a different "community". You can work with Gnome, KDE, Blackbox, etc. and these are all different groups and cultures who offer comparable products with the same basic ideals. They aren't limiting how much money you can make, not intentionally nor directly. They limit how much you can lower the quality and value of your product to inflate your margins without losing customers.
For a long time I've been wishing that console gaming companies would understand this. The Mario Party line of games in particular is a good example. My friends and I loved Mario Party and Mario Party 2 was a big jump forward, simply fantastic. Then Mario Party 3 which wasn't as good. And Mario Party 4 which sucked badly. And Mario Party 5 which we haven't bothered to try. The two best games for this series are on the N64 platform. We would have easily gotten newer prettier versions of the same if they'd been available but they aren't and the "innovative" versions suck. A great way to make use of all of that content which is now supposedly obsolete would be a sort of anthology with mix and match rules. I'd love to play a Mario Party 3 board by Mario Party 2 rules. That however is unlikely to happen because the company involved isn't going to "recycle content". Not even to create a superior product. If gaming companies brought back something like Pac-Man in it's original form and didn't charge some outrageous price for an unnecessarily revamped version they would stand to make some money but it isn't happening in the mainstream because they're all too fascinated with the new content.
This is very weird. The one time I ever used the extended warranty I had no problem with it and this was at Fry's no less.
My mom's MB blew up, we took it in and they tested it and agreed that it was dead. They didn't carry that one anymore so they gave us another equivalent board that actually had a couple of better features (still bottom of the barrel for their stock, but better than what I'd brought them) with no argument.
As for the rebate on the 120 GB drive I bought from them 2 years ago... I still haven't seen that money back. I don't even factor the rebate into my purchasing anymore because I can count on not getting it.
Isn't it a requirement of the patent system that you give them a blueprint or otherwise sufficiently detailed documentation of a specific implementation of your idea?
The idea being that you can't patent flying but you can patent an airplane? You can't patent cooking but you can patent a stove?
And the barrier is based on the obviousness to a peer within your field of endeavor, not whether any layman could or couldn't have thought of it. This gives the impression that patent examiners *are* in fact supposed to have some specific understanding what the hell they're examining.
On the whole I'd say the patent system needs to be revamped. All of the existing patents should be re-scanned, typed up, whatever into a publicly searchable online database. Disputing any given patent shouldn't require a lawyer. Patent examination should be revised and there should be experts at least as consultants if not as examiners themselves.
Streamline this process any way you like but there are 2 essential bits that must be put in place: Patents must be cheaply and easily disputable and they must be publicly searchable. Any company or individual who cares to re-examine some patents should be capable of doing so.
You can always blame Microsoft but the contracts you sign to do business with them allows them to abdicate all responsibility.
Read the EULA. You can't sue them. If it makes your computer burst into flame instead of word processing you *still* can't sue them. If you can prove that they *intentionally* coded it that way, you still can't sue them except *maybe* on false advertising but even *then* the EULA has something to say on the matter and it sure as hell isn't in your favor.
Just because the MS name is stamped on it does *not* mean you can sue them when something goes wrong. Users, companies and governments have fallen for this crock. You can't sue MS any more than you can sue "Open Source".
Ultimately you have *no* guarantee that it works or that it will be fixed in a timely manner. The guarantee that Open Source gives you is that if it comes down to fixing it yourself or hiring someone to fix it, you're free to do so. With MS your *only* option is to hope and wait for your issue to become a priority for MS and there are no competitive bids to fix your problem.
Personally, my theory on coffee and insomnia and all the other crap that's going on is related to the kind of work we're being made to do.
We're tired all day because we've tuned our bodies to a life of sitting at a desk or on a production line for 8 hours. Then at the end of the day our minds are so fried that we just want to vegetate. When it gets to be "bedtime" our bodies aren't tired enough to sleep properly so we take pills or stay up late.
Then in the morning after not having slept well, if at all, we come to work ready for another day of doing not a whole hell of a lot. To stay awake we drink our coffee and it perks us up enough to get through the way we think we're supposed to do.
As long as employment continues to mean we sit more or less in one place for 8 or 9 hours then we really need to play harder. It'll make us sleep better which could even get us through the day better. Being barely awake enough to work and barely tired enough to sleep just doesn't seem to be cutting it.