As close as it comes to your inanity is if the music company refused to let you build your own CD player to play a CD.
You said only a government completely beholden to corporate masters would prevent you from playing the media you bought.
Think of it this way: without patent protection, those specifications would be unpublished trade secrets instead.
From this angle, it sounds like the government is favoring our interests through the patent system, and it's really the term length of the patents themselves that is the problem.
Ya think?
Just think, even with a 10 year patent term, the CSS and MP3 patents would be history today.
Only with a government completely beholden to corporate masters is it possible to have a situation in which you are prevented from playing the media for which you have legally acquired a license.
10 years ago, would you have said the same thing if a music company refused to give you a free CD player with your CD purchase?
They don't "spontaneously change". They drift over time if not periodically refreshed. In fact, performing this surface refresh used to be the most valuable feature of SpinRite. Today, you can do it yourself with badblocks -n. If a sector goes unreadable due to drift, the drive firmware will automatically mark it "pending", attempt to read it periodically, and reallocate it to a spare sector either when it is successfully read, or when it is overwritten.
It's unfortunate, but this measure really needs to be brought in through legislation, because manufacturers will not do it voluntarily.
I challenge you to name one measure that manufacturers will not do voluntarily that has been brought in through legislation, in the last 25 years. I don't think Congress has the teeth to regulate businesses without their consent anymore...
It annoys the vast majority of people who neither want nor need it, and the handful that respond are then taking prescription drugs without medical supervision - something that's always likely to end badly.
Hi, you're an idiot. Exactly how is it going to end badly when I buy medicines prescribed by my M.D. offshore? You just go on and pay the U.S. pharma tax. I'm much happier paying 1/10 of the price for offshore generics.
Nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. When your arteries are already clogged and hardened, it has the potential to turn disease into death.
But the real problem is in how nicotine works together with carbon monoxide to destroy your heart. When your body takes in carbon monoxide, oxygen distribution becomes less efficient. The heart muscle specifically requires a continuous supply of oxygen to sustain itself. When you smoke a cigarette, at the same time you're taking in carbon monoxide, the nicotine is also constricting your arteries and reducing blood flow. This is the same mechanism that causes incremental micro-damage to the heart of crack cocaine smokers. Fortunately for smokers, the constricting effect of nicotine is much less pronounced than that of crack cocaine, but it takes its toll over time -- the most common time for smokers to drop dead of a heart attack seems to be right after a cigarette.
The tar is not the cancer risk. The tar is the COPD risk. The cancer risk is threefold: the radioactive heavy metals in the tar due to commercial phosphate fertilizers, the nitrosamines in the tobacco due to commercial curing processes, and nicotine's suppression of programmed cell death that allows mutations caused by the radiation and free radicals to spiral into cancer instead of self-extinguishing. The tar alone will not cause cancer, it will just put you on an oxygen tank.
I talked to the guy for 40 minutes and he wants me on a combo of three mind-altering drugs, none of which I can even afford individually?
And yet you can afford cigarettes? Hmm...
Not to say that I disagree with the rest of your post, but I don't think it's about the cost as much as finding something that works for you personally.
How in the world do you guarantee that such a notice would be considered public by a court? A notice included with an operating system kernel is hardly public, in the usual legal sense where the notice is published in a brick and mortar newspaper. How do you notify the estates of deceased developers, who probably don't even know what Linux is, even if they are aware they have an interest in it.
Anything that qualifies as a "Copyright protection measure" under the DMCA should be required to expire the day the copyright expires. There is no reason that archival should be so damn difficult. With current eternal copyright terms, this hardly makes a difference, but it should be a component of any copyright rewrite.
Allowing smoking in restaurants/bars has the side effect of pushing cancer on the poor.
Bullshit. Secondhand smoke has NOT been shown to cause lung cancer. You inhale far more carcinogens just by being outside in an industrial area than you do in a smoky bar.
Stealing. Muggery. Blackmail. There are many morally superior alternatives to copyright infringement.
And the proof that these alternatives are morally superior is that you would do less time in jail and pay less restitution than if you infringed copyright and got caught.
Such as? I have hardware where the already existing driver has been removed from the kernel because supposedly there aren't enough users to justify maintaining it. Also I have had hardware where the driver has been rejected from the kernel because the hardware is "ugly" or the driver could be done in userspace instead (regardless of whether or not userspace is the right approach for the particular device).
You seem to forget that ATI had fully open-source drivers until they were forced to "go closed" due to licensing another company's IP for their chipsets.
No they didn't. ATI has never developed open-source drivers. The DRI project developed open-source ATI drivers for ATI's hardware under NDA. ATI did not participate in this development.
In that particular case, the first incident was S3 Texture Compression, a feature essentially required by all modern games,
No it is not. Epic is one of the few companies who release games with S3TC compressed textures.
and apparently with patent licensing agreements that prohibit closed-source(sic) drivers
No, it doesn't prohibit open-source drivers, unless they signed a contract to that extent. Why would it? Anyone can read the patent. Roland S. implemented S3TC for Mesa and anyone can build in the support for it if they want. All the patent disallows is a binary release without a license fee. Which contradicts your thesis that ATI went binary-only because of S3TC.
The difference is that the user does not submit his hardware for inspection. The Linux kernel is available for inspection by anyone. If a bug cannot be pointed out in the kernel code after inspection by all involved, it seems more likely that the bug is in the hardware or in the user.
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Think of it this way: without patent protection, those specifications would be unpublished trade secrets instead.
From this angle, it sounds like the government is favoring our interests through the patent system, and it's really the term length of the patents themselves that is the problem.
Ya think?
Just think, even with a 10 year patent term, the CSS and MP3 patents would be history today.
Go to your local ALDI, they take foodstamps and there is no cheaper produce to be found at a grocery store (vs farmers market/co-op)
Spying on citizens' communications without probable cause should not be a matter for federal law enforcement.
But the real problem is in how nicotine works together with carbon monoxide to destroy your heart. When your body takes in carbon monoxide, oxygen distribution becomes less efficient. The heart muscle specifically requires a continuous supply of oxygen to sustain itself. When you smoke a cigarette, at the same time you're taking in carbon monoxide, the nicotine is also constricting your arteries and reducing blood flow. This is the same mechanism that causes incremental micro-damage to the heart of crack cocaine smokers. Fortunately for smokers, the constricting effect of nicotine is much less pronounced than that of crack cocaine, but it takes its toll over time -- the most common time for smokers to drop dead of a heart attack seems to be right after a cigarette.
The tar is not the cancer risk. The tar is the COPD risk. The cancer risk is threefold: the radioactive heavy metals in the tar due to commercial phosphate fertilizers, the nitrosamines in the tobacco due to commercial curing processes, and nicotine's suppression of programmed cell death that allows mutations caused by the radiation and free radicals to spiral into cancer instead of self-extinguishing. The tar alone will not cause cancer, it will just put you on an oxygen tank.
Not to say that I disagree with the rest of your post, but I don't think it's about the cost as much as finding something that works for you personally.
How in the world do you guarantee that such a notice would be considered public by a court? A notice included with an operating system kernel is hardly public, in the usual legal sense where the notice is published in a brick and mortar newspaper. How do you notify the estates of deceased developers, who probably don't even know what Linux is, even if they are aware they have an interest in it.
The only way to fix the federal government IS to start saying 'no'. Get used to it, at least if you like freedom.
And how many work visas were granted to Canadians over the same period of time? Thanks for playing.
Anything that qualifies as a "Copyright protection measure" under the DMCA should be required to expire the day the copyright expires. There is no reason that archival should be so damn difficult. With current eternal copyright terms, this hardly makes a difference, but it should be a component of any copyright rewrite.
Such as? I have hardware where the already existing driver has been removed from the kernel because supposedly there aren't enough users to justify maintaining it. Also I have had hardware where the driver has been rejected from the kernel because the hardware is "ugly" or the driver could be done in userspace instead (regardless of whether or not userspace is the right approach for the particular device).
Hmm, who could this anonymous poster be?
The difference is that the user does not submit his hardware for inspection. The Linux kernel is available for inspection by anyone. If a bug cannot be pointed out in the kernel code after inspection by all involved, it seems more likely that the bug is in the hardware or in the user.