And this is not some little dinky neighborhood ISP, this is a major national. I don't see much point in worrying about insanely implausible scenarios.
Ok, so on that point you are nonrepresentative of normal users, and immune to some of the coercive pressures they would face. Bear in mind that your conditions are implausible (or at least intractably expensive) to most other people.
But aside from merely acquiring an IP address, there are other ways TC can restrain your kernel use. For example, look at this web site. Do you like reading it, and would you like to continue reading it?
If the TC rollout suceeds, then advertisers won't pay for banner ads to run on websites which allow themselves to be displayed in an browser that wasn't signed and whitelisted as not including any adblock* technology. And if your kernel isn't the specific one compiled by Red Hat Inc and signed as TC trustworthy, it won't be able to attest that your browser is "trustworthy", so you can't read any mainstream websites, or shop in online catalogs, or play any internet video-game, etc etc.
* And, the HTTP traffic is encrypted so only the approved browsers can open it, which will keep any pesky adblock-proxies from tampering with your 100% authentic browsing enjoyment!
A second (and much more importantly), it's assigned to my router, not my computer(s).
That approved-browser-only thing a near term threat. In the long term, your router will cease working as well. TC backers aim to eventually ban internet hosts that don't support remote attestation. It will take a while, but someday they'll blacklist your "obselete" router, which was a "hazard to the rest of the internet". Why, it might've had buffer-overflows that could've gotten it hacked to spread malware and DoS. No socially-responsible upstream ISP could accept your untrustworthy packets in good conscience! You'll be happier with a shiny, new TC router.
To have a secure system it must do what it's told.
Obedience is orthogonal to security. For example, if I hack into your PC and give it commands, and it does what it's told, then you are not secure. (But I am!)
To have a secure system it must do what it's told.
DRM is meant to prevent a computer system from doing what it's told. The whole idea is that the OS will refuse the operator's instructions to copy some data because it suspects that operator might be trying to violate copyright law.
If a program requests it's information encrypted the OS it runs on should respect that.
That capability does not require any DRM.
If a program requests it's information encrypted the OS it runs on should respect that.
The modern BSD license is no "subset" of the GPL license.
Of course I use "subset" a little loosely- they aren't strict subsets, because outside of pure math, nothing ever is. But knowing that I only mean a very strong approximation, you can see why BSD is a virtual subset of GPL, and similarly why PD is a subset of BSD.
First just look at the lengths of the license files. PD is one line, BSD is 22 lines, and the GPL is 275 lines. Each of the longer licenses imposes more terms than the previous ones (PD has no terms at all). Furthermore, each of the terms in the shorter licenses are basically equivalent to a term in the longer one. Because the bigger license already includes all the terms of the smaller, code with a "smaller" license can be freely merged into a "bigger" project.
If I find some PD code, I can add it to a BSD or GPL project without violating the restrictions of the PD license (since there are no restrictions). But if I find some BSD code, I can't add it to a PD project, since I'm not the copyright holder and have no authority to release it into public domain. But I can add it into a GPL project, because all the requirements of the modern BSD license can be obeyed without violating any GPL requirements.
However, if I have a PD or BSD project and want to insert a little GPL code, I can't do that and leave the end result PD or BSD- I must change the whole thing to GPL, because that is the license with the most and most restrictive terms, and thus the superset of the others.
If you never sign, there's nothing they can do to you.
If you don't sign, they don't have to do anything to you. You already can't buy a newspaper, visit an updated library, go to a movie, or buy a TV or computer. To them, you're already good as dead. (Vendors of hardware used to view new content will be be induced by the content-authoring industries to both check for consumer compliance before selling, and also embed the rules of the contract in DRM chips. And prohibiting reverse-engineering of DRM will be another term of that contract)
If you never sign, there's nothing they can do to you.
They can blacklist you, and have as a term of the contract that members will not engage in business with someone thus blacklisted. Or, one could imagine numerous other punishments meted out by the contractees against one who flaunts their rules.
1984-esque totalitarianism.
Yes, that is indeed what might happen. Although it would be an odd kind of voluntary-membership totalitarianism, one that a person uninterested in professionally-produced content can opt to disregard.
No, the more likely result of abolishing copyright
Please note that the result I predicted is based on the unavoidable realities described by Professor Larry Lessig in his book "Code and other laws of Cyberspace". Profit finds a way.
It would certainly upset all the people addicted to their soap operas or sitcoms
Yes, and since those people are so much more numerous and influential than folk-art lovers, their support for upholding the status quo is what would create that non-government-supported copyright regime in the first place.
(Of course, this is all impossible hypotheticals- the existence of those masses of happy RIAA/MPAA customers is the reason the legislature would never, ever abolish copyright anyway)
Without copyright, any "proprietary" code that managed to find its way into the hands of the public would be Free.
Without government-declared copyright, publishing companies would join together to create a private form of copyright even worse than what we have already. You'd need to sign a contract and get a card before purchasing any book/music/software, and that agreement would subject you to harsh penalities if you copy a work, or redistribute an authorized copy to someone without a card. People who refuse to sign won't be allowed to buy copyrighted materials. Most of the features of existing copyright will be there, except for due process and (hypothetical) expiration.
That's a similar thing to what would happen if a nation decided to legalize murder: private corporations would sell murder-insurance, including a promise to punish your killer by murdering him in turn. All the features of a normal court system could be duplicated, but it'd be worse than the existing method, because the system is no longer even theoretically trying to serve the public good.
Sure. If you KNOW the file is broken, and take steps to conceal that fact, then what you've done is an intentional denial-of-service attack. This is illegal under the usual anti-hacking regulations.
Downloading a digital copy is a very effective way to make a backup.
Maybe it's effective, but it's still illegal. Around 5 years ago mp3.com ran a service where people who demonstrated they owned a CD could play internet-streaming audio of that album. The inevitable lawsuit was no contest and the high damages nearly destroyed the company.
The US courts have consistently held that the act of downloading is not making a copy and hence cannot violate copyright.
When have they EVER done so? I know that lawyers frequently concoct alternative definitions for existing words (like "statutory rape"), but what you suggest would be a huge violation of both the English and Computer Science definitions of "copying".
Also, if that were the case, then the RIAA's dozens of successful lawsuits against music downloaders would've never happened.
Nope, a derivate work still infringes on the copyright of the original.
Only if it's distribution was without the copyright holder's permission. If a file is an infringing copy, then both the sender and reciever are liable for cooperating in copying it (no copy would occur if there had been only an uploader or only a downloader). Either both upload and download is illegal, or neither is illegal.
But of course, the people distributing these tainted files are not exposing themselves to liability, because they were hired by the copyright holder and are her approved agents.
If the derivative copy is unauthorized, then these hackers cannot be serving corrupted files without breaking the law. If the derviative copy is authorized, then whoever downloads it is not breaking the law.
All the copyright holder's lawyers can do is demonstrate an intent to infringe, which is adequate for many of their desired "chilling effects", and also as leads in further investigations.
It's no different from the already-present clause that says that any commands in the program to display the license to the user must be preserved.
There is no such clause in GPLv2. It does require that a program which has a splashscreen (or other startup message) mention the GPL in that splashscreen, but it does not prohibit anyone from removing the splashscreen entirely:
If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
A person can easily change a program so it doesn't normally have an announcement, thus qualifying for the exception.
Law Enforcement might be able to entrap people (undercover cops pretending to be hookers for example) but private citizens can't do it
Completely backwards. Entrapment is only illegal for cops or other government agents; private citizens can happily "entrap" all day long. By the legal definition, it is completely impossible for anyone besides a law enforcement officer to commit entrapment.
The moment the employee touches a single line of code, it becomes a non-free version until he publishes his change back to the 'net.
No. Read the GPL. It doesn't say anything about "publish". The word it uses is "distribute". Publication is a form of distribution, but not the only kind. Handing out a program to other members of your company, or even merely installing it on computers in different rooms, is also distribution (according to any dictionary, legal or standard).
Just imagine somebody trying to argue otherwise: A: Did you distribute these secret plans to anyone? B: No, I absolutely didn't. Of course, I did forward them to all the other 40,000 Wal-Mart associates, but after all- we're all in the same company. So it wasn't distributed. A: Ha ha, ha ha ha!
Pretty much *every* author that chooses the BSD license is unwilling to license their code under the GPL.
Really? Well, tough luck, because they already did!
If you release a program as BSD, I can take the whole thing, change one semicolon, and re-release as GPL. The modern, no-advertising-clause BSD license is a compatible subset of the GPL.
RMS is using weasel words but it's basically true that 1 line of GPL3 code forces the entire code GPL3.. and as an author that's not acceptable.
As rude ACs have mentioned, nobody will force you to accept the patch. However, depending on the quality of the submitted code, you might wish to use it, and the "or later" clause keeps that option open.
Scenario: Alice releases Foo under GPL. Bob uses Foo, and makes a few edits for his own needs. Then he tries another program, Bar, which is GPLv3+ and has a few features he enjoys. He'd like to copy that Bar code into Foo, and then send it to his friends.
If Foo is GPLv2 only, then he's not allowed to do that. If Foo were GPLv2+, then he can make the choice to bring in that code and license, as his circumstances dictate.
This whole 'force GPL3' thing is precisely the reason I removed 'or later' from all my GPL code.
There are better reason to be afraid of the "or later" clause- specifically, the FSF may someday go collectively insane and release GPLv4 as a BSD-equivalent license. They might particularly do that if some billionaire hired them...
Using the "or later" clause means trusting that the FSF will never be subverted in the future, and they say that every man has his price...
It's certainly possible, as can be heard in Disney's Ghilbi dubs. Although weak points can be found in Mononoke Hime, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Porco Rosso, they are all basically decent (and, I can't recall any shortcomings in Spirited Away).
There are a few chronic obstacles that prevent typical anime companies from doing similarly good jobs. (a) Cheapness. Typical anime are dubbed in just a few takes. Keeping the actors and director together long enough to do proper emotions would require much more time, meaning must bigger paychecks. The importer gets enough sales already, so they have no incentive for more investment.
(b) Bad actors. This is subjective, but for a bit of objectivity, consider that English anime actors are basically in their own job category, separate from those who do voices for native English animations (including video games). For example, look at anime dubber Mary McGlynn, as opposed to voice actors for native projects, like Scott Menville or Phil LaMarr (wow, he's also a real actor!). There isn't much crossover. If anime dub voices were any good, they'd also get jobs for domestic projects- but they essentially don't.
(c) Wrong editing priorities. The editors and directors who handle the dubbing care too much about matching the soundtrack to facial movements, and not enough on the attitude and emotion expressed by the speech itself. This links back to the brief studio sessions: once they've got a line reading that's basically OK, the actors go home, and then the editor goes about digitally squeezing it into place on the soundtrack. To match speech to lip-flaps, Software is used to change the speed of individual words while holding pitch constant. Anime importers claim that the modern software is so good that no distortion remains, but that's not quite true. Although a listener can't generally describe the nature of the problem, it's easy enough to distinquish the "before" and "after" line readings in a blindfolded test.
but the US's use of land mines (which kill friend and foe indiscriminately, even long after a battle) contradicts this principle.
But they don't HAVE a use of landmines. The only remaining landmines are left in place from the still-inconclusive Korean war. The USA on principle refuses to employ landmines in general.
I doubt either MS, Sony or a third party can legally make a revolution knock-off.
Maybe, although MS has superb lawyer-power to beat most IP claims. But in extremis, if they were blocked from copying it AND the Nintendo Revolution starts to take over the market, prehaps they could just build an adapter to allow Nintendo's own controllers to hook into a USB port?
(I'm hoping somebody builds a product along those lines, so I can use my PC cursor with remote wand-action)
out of curiousity, if I may, what was with Fallout that you did not like?
I'll just jump in a couple of major Fallout gripes: 1. Turn-based combat animation. As a rule mechanic, the turn-based approach was OK. But most turn-based games restrict turn-taking to actual combatants, not all the rest of uninvolved NPCs across the board. Try getting into a little brawl in the corner of a city, and watching 25 NPCs to stroll around in between each shot of your gun. (Was also a problem in the cathedral, although in that case, you actually were fighting all the people, but it was still unwieldy). The second sequel had an option to change the turn-system a little, but the problem wasn't completely fixed (simultaneous execution of everyone's turn-based actions would've been better)
2. Weak inventory GUI. Ok, money is bottlecaps, and I've got 13,000 of them, and I've got to click up an arrow 1 at a time to set an offer for a purchase?
3. Boring targeting GUI. You've got an option to do a precision shot for much more damage by taking slightly more time (time that's basically worthless to you, since leftover actions in one round don't carry over to the next). Therefore, each and every time I fire on a baddy, I've got to call up a separate window with his wireframe portrait and click on the eyeball (you always, ALWAYS want to shoot everything in the eyeball). This gets tedious real fast- players may actually want to take the "Flaw" prohibiting precision shots, just to speed things along.
(those were the two biggies, both worst in actual effect and potentially easiest for programmers to fix. Following are some vaguer complaints)
4. Too easy to build a worthless character. Look at that interesting array of skills... and then look at how useful any of them really were. For viable builds, there were 2 shooters, melee, and also the stealth option. But things like science, survival, and primitive weapons should've been handy in that setting, but weren't.
5. World was sparse and undynamic, limiting replay and exploration. What it needed were some randomly positioned encounters- bandit camps, struggling villages, pre-war ruins, and mutant scorpion nests. Places to discover anew on each play-through, and to possibly return to multiple times. Also, places you attack should repair (or at least tidy-up) if you leave and return (particularly apparent with the mutant fort).
6. No ally control in combat. Full control isn't needed, but at least give the ability to shout a broad suggestion.
7. Short, sparse game. Outside of the two "boss bases", there is only one vaguely high-level monster: the deathclaw nest. Grinding those same 2 deathclaws is the only way to level past 14. Why can't the wasteland be filled with more vicious giant mutants? (Fallout2 filled out this gap a lot)
since booby-trapping of any kind is illegal in almost every state:
Although the implementation as shown is an illegal booby-trap, that need not be the case. A little software work could add a feature for a human operator (security guard in a central location) to watch the video and nominate specific targets for shooting. (Probably if they had already disregarded intercom commands to back away from the door).
Configurations like that would render it just another firearm operated by a human who holds the liability for unjustified shootings. Or, to make it even safer, load it up with indelible paintballs to mark suspects for later apprehension. (Not pepper, though, that's too lethal!)
Opera got dumped on for so long on Slashdot just for having banner ads (you know, just like Slashdot's banner ads...)
So you're saying that Opera's ads are positioned just like Slashdot's, at the top of a 10,000 line page so that they're completely invisible once I start reading any comments?
Maybe if slashdot starts to put banners between/alongside comments you can fairly compare it to Opera.
As proof, I will point out that the "Disable Javascript" option found in Netscape 4.0 (the predecessor to Mozilla) is missing, along with the ability to prevent image loading.
Everyone else is giggling at you, but I'll spoil the joke.
Run firefox. Go to the "Edit" menu, and pick Preferences. In the icons on the left, hit "Web Features". Six checkboxes come up in the main panel. Look at the ones labelled "Load Images" and "Enable Javascript", and think hard about what they might do.
simple web browsing is still "safer" in Firefox. Your computer might get pwn3d
than to have a hacker gain any kind of control over your machine.
Do you even know what the word "pwn" means? It is "to seize total control, almost as if the legal owner". A pwn3d PC must be assumed to have a bo2k install or even worse.
It's grammar that you criticize. Linguistics is another topic altogether.
Wrong and wrong. Punctuation and spelling are not grammar, although all three are subcategories of linguistics (which is something you have apparently confused with post-modern linguistic anthropology, which is something else altogether)
What I meant to say was that all the stuff I mentioned was released by the copyright owners on the P2P applications in order to distribute it
False again. The distribution of the "star wars kid" video, for example, was absolutely not approved by the performer. Most of the other things were published in smaller-scale, more controllable and profitable ways (such as by banner ads on their websites), and only placed on P2P when 3rd parties had downloaded and illegally redistributed them.
Personal photos and sound-bites are not placed on P2p as far as I know, except in the rare occasion when they prove entertaining to a wide audience, generally because they contain something unexpectedly embarassing. In that case, the copyright holders certainly don't enjoy the illegal redistribution. Likewise, "amateur" porn"is mostly placed on paid-access (or ad-supported) websites, and is shared on P2p without permission.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is not some little dinky neighborhood ISP, this is a major national. I don't see much point in worrying about insanely implausible scenarios.
Ok, so on that point you are nonrepresentative of normal users, and immune to some of the coercive pressures they would face. Bear in mind that your conditions are implausible (or at least intractably expensive) to most other people.
But aside from merely acquiring an IP address, there are other ways TC can restrain your kernel use. For example, look at this web site. Do you like reading it, and would you like to continue reading it?
If the TC rollout suceeds, then advertisers won't pay for banner ads to run on websites which allow themselves to be displayed in an browser that wasn't signed and whitelisted as not including any adblock* technology. And if your kernel isn't the specific one compiled by Red Hat Inc and signed as TC trustworthy, it won't be able to attest that your browser is "trustworthy", so you can't read any mainstream websites, or shop in online catalogs, or play any internet video-game, etc etc.
* And, the HTTP traffic is encrypted so only the approved browsers can open it, which will keep any pesky adblock-proxies from tampering with your 100% authentic browsing enjoyment!
A second (and much more importantly), it's assigned to my router, not my computer(s).
That approved-browser-only thing a near term threat. In the long term, your router will cease working as well. TC backers aim to eventually ban internet hosts that don't support remote attestation. It will take a while, but someday they'll blacklist your "obselete" router, which was a "hazard to the rest of the internet". Why, it might've had buffer-overflows that could've gotten it hacked to spread malware and DoS. No socially-responsible upstream ISP could accept your untrustworthy packets in good conscience! You'll be happier with a shiny, new TC router.
To have a secure system it must do what it's told.
Obedience is orthogonal to security. For example, if I hack into your PC and give it commands, and it does what it's told, then you are not secure. (But I am!)
To have a secure system it must do what it's told.
DRM is meant to prevent a computer system from doing what it's told. The whole idea is that the OS will refuse the operator's instructions to copy some data because it suspects that operator might be trying to violate copyright law.
If a program requests it's information encrypted the OS it runs on should respect that.
That capability does not require any DRM.
If a program requests it's information encrypted the OS it runs on should respect that.
That sentence does not require any apostrophe.
The modern BSD license is no "subset" of the GPL license.
Of course I use "subset" a little loosely- they aren't strict subsets, because outside of pure math, nothing ever is. But knowing that I only mean a very strong approximation, you can see why BSD is a virtual subset of GPL, and similarly why PD is a subset of BSD.
First just look at the lengths of the license files. PD is one line, BSD is 22 lines, and the GPL is 275 lines. Each of the longer licenses imposes more terms than the previous ones (PD has no terms at all). Furthermore, each of the terms in the shorter licenses are basically equivalent to a term in the longer one. Because the bigger license already includes all the terms of the smaller, code with a "smaller" license can be freely merged into a "bigger" project.
If I find some PD code, I can add it to a BSD or GPL project without violating the restrictions of the PD license (since there are no restrictions). But if I find some BSD code, I can't add it to a PD project, since I'm not the copyright holder and have no authority to release it into public domain. But I can add it into a GPL project, because all the requirements of the modern BSD license can be obeyed without violating any GPL requirements.
However, if I have a PD or BSD project and want to insert a little GPL code, I can't do that and leave the end result PD or BSD- I must change the whole thing to GPL, because that is the license with the most and most restrictive terms, and thus the superset of the others.
If you never sign, there's nothing they can do to you.
If you don't sign, they don't have to do anything to you. You already can't buy a newspaper, visit an updated library, go to a movie, or buy a TV or computer. To them, you're already good as dead. (Vendors of hardware used to view new content will be be induced by the content-authoring industries to both check for consumer compliance before selling, and also embed the rules of the contract in DRM chips. And prohibiting reverse-engineering of DRM will be another term of that contract)
If you never sign, there's nothing they can do to you.
They can blacklist you, and have as a term of the contract that members will not engage in business with someone thus blacklisted. Or, one could imagine numerous other punishments meted out by the contractees against one who flaunts their rules.
1984-esque totalitarianism.
Yes, that is indeed what might happen. Although it would be an odd kind of voluntary-membership totalitarianism, one that a person uninterested in professionally-produced content can opt to disregard.
No, the more likely result of abolishing copyright
Please note that the result I predicted is based on the unavoidable realities described by Professor Larry Lessig in his book "Code and other laws of Cyberspace". Profit finds a way.
It would certainly upset all the people addicted to their soap operas or sitcoms
Yes, and since those people are so much more numerous and influential than folk-art lovers, their support for upholding the status quo is what would create that non-government-supported copyright regime in the first place.
(Of course, this is all impossible hypotheticals- the existence of those masses of happy RIAA/MPAA customers is the reason the legislature would never, ever abolish copyright anyway)
Without copyright, any "proprietary" code that managed to find its way into the hands of the public would be Free.
Without government-declared copyright, publishing companies would join together to create a private form of copyright even worse than what we have already. You'd need to sign a contract and get a card before purchasing any book/music/software, and that agreement would subject you to harsh penalities if you copy a work, or redistribute an authorized copy to someone without a card. People who refuse to sign won't be allowed to buy copyrighted materials. Most of the features of existing copyright will be there, except for due process and (hypothetical) expiration.
That's a similar thing to what would happen if a nation decided to legalize murder: private corporations would sell murder-insurance, including a promise to punish your killer by murdering him in turn. All the features of a normal court system could be duplicated, but it'd be worse than the existing method, because the system is no longer even theoretically trying to serve the public good.
Hang on. - Distributing a broken file is illegal?
Sure. If you KNOW the file is broken, and take steps to conceal that fact, then what you've done is an intentional denial-of-service attack. This is illegal under the usual anti-hacking regulations.
Downloading a digital copy is a very effective way to make a backup.
Maybe it's effective, but it's still illegal. Around 5 years ago mp3.com ran a service where people who demonstrated they owned a CD could play internet-streaming audio of that album. The inevitable lawsuit was no contest and the high damages nearly destroyed the company.
The US courts have consistently held that the act of downloading is not making a copy and hence cannot violate copyright.
When have they EVER done so? I know that lawyers frequently concoct alternative definitions for existing words (like "statutory rape"), but what you suggest would be a huge violation of both the English and Computer Science definitions of "copying".
Also, if that were the case, then the RIAA's dozens of successful lawsuits against music downloaders would've never happened.
Nope, a derivate work still infringes on the copyright of the original.
Only if it's distribution was without the copyright holder's permission. If a file is an infringing copy, then both the sender and reciever are liable for cooperating in copying it (no copy would occur if there had been only an uploader or only a downloader). Either both upload and download is illegal, or neither is illegal.
But of course, the people distributing these tainted files are not exposing themselves to liability, because they were hired by the copyright holder and are her approved agents.
If the derivative copy is unauthorized, then these hackers cannot be serving corrupted files without breaking the law.
If the derviative copy is authorized, then whoever downloads it is not breaking the law.
All the copyright holder's lawyers can do is demonstrate an intent to infringe, which is adequate for many of their desired "chilling effects", and also as leads in further investigations.
There is no such clause in GPLv2. It does require that a program which has a splashscreen (or other startup message) mention the GPL in that splashscreen, but it does not prohibit anyone from removing the splashscreen entirely:
A person can easily change a program so it doesn't normally have an announcement, thus qualifying for the exception.
Law Enforcement might be able to entrap people (undercover cops pretending to be hookers for example) but private citizens can't do it
Completely backwards. Entrapment is only illegal for cops or other government agents; private citizens can happily "entrap" all day long. By the legal definition, it is completely impossible for anyone besides a law enforcement officer to commit entrapment.
The moment the employee touches a single line of code, it becomes a non-free version until he publishes his change back to the 'net.
No. Read the GPL. It doesn't say anything about "publish". The word it uses is "distribute". Publication is a form of distribution, but not the only kind. Handing out a program to other members of your company, or even merely installing it on computers in different rooms, is also distribution (according to any dictionary, legal or standard).
Just imagine somebody trying to argue otherwise:
A: Did you distribute these secret plans to anyone?
B: No, I absolutely didn't. Of course, I did forward them to all the other 40,000 Wal-Mart associates, but after all- we're all in the same company. So it wasn't distributed.
A: Ha ha, ha ha ha!
Pretty much *every* author that chooses the BSD license is unwilling to license their code under the GPL.
Really? Well, tough luck, because they already did!
If you release a program as BSD, I can take the whole thing, change one semicolon, and re-release as GPL. The modern, no-advertising-clause BSD license is a compatible subset of the GPL.
RMS is using weasel words but it's basically true that 1 line of GPL3 code forces the entire code GPL3.. and as an author that's not acceptable.
As rude ACs have mentioned, nobody will force you to accept the patch. However, depending on the quality of the submitted code, you might wish to use it, and the "or later" clause keeps that option open.
Scenario: Alice releases Foo under GPL. Bob uses Foo, and makes a few edits for his own needs. Then he tries another program, Bar, which is GPLv3+ and has a few features he enjoys. He'd like to copy that Bar code into Foo, and then send it to his friends.
If Foo is GPLv2 only, then he's not allowed to do that. If Foo were GPLv2+, then he can make the choice to bring in that code and license, as his circumstances dictate.
This whole 'force GPL3' thing is precisely the reason I removed 'or later' from all my GPL code.
There are better reason to be afraid of the "or later" clause- specifically, the FSF may someday go collectively insane and release GPLv4 as a BSD-equivalent license. They might particularly do that if some billionaire hired them...
Using the "or later" clause means trusting that the FSF will never be subverted in the future, and they say that every man has his price...
I don't think its possible to do a good dub,
It's certainly possible, as can be heard in Disney's Ghilbi dubs. Although weak points can be found in Mononoke Hime, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Porco Rosso, they are all basically decent (and, I can't recall any shortcomings in Spirited Away).
There are a few chronic obstacles that prevent typical anime companies from doing similarly good jobs.
(a) Cheapness. Typical anime are dubbed in just a few takes. Keeping the actors and director together long enough to do proper emotions would require much more time, meaning must bigger paychecks. The importer gets enough sales already, so they have no incentive for more investment.
(b) Bad actors. This is subjective, but for a bit of objectivity, consider that English anime actors are basically in their own job category, separate from those who do voices for native English animations (including video games). For example, look at anime dubber Mary McGlynn, as opposed to voice actors for native projects, like Scott Menville or Phil LaMarr (wow, he's also a real actor!). There isn't much crossover. If anime dub voices were any good, they'd also get jobs for domestic projects- but they essentially don't.
(c) Wrong editing priorities. The editors and directors who handle the dubbing care too much about matching the soundtrack to facial movements, and not enough on the attitude and emotion expressed by the speech itself. This links back to the brief studio sessions: once they've got a line reading that's basically OK, the actors go home, and then the editor goes about digitally squeezing it into place on the soundtrack. To match speech to lip-flaps, Software is used to change the speed of individual words while holding pitch constant. Anime importers claim that the modern software is so good that no distortion remains, but that's not quite true. Although a listener can't generally describe the nature of the problem, it's easy enough to distinquish the "before" and "after" line readings in a blindfolded test.
games from the Commodore-64 days, like Lemmings.
Lemmings is a mouse-based game. The C-64 was a pre-Macintosh computer, meaning it had no mouse.
C-64: 1982
Lemmings: 1991
but the US's use of land mines (which kill friend and foe indiscriminately, even long after a battle) contradicts this principle.
But they don't HAVE a use of landmines. The only remaining landmines are left in place from the still-inconclusive Korean war. The USA on principle refuses to employ landmines in general.
I doubt either MS, Sony or a third party can legally make a revolution knock-off.
Maybe, although MS has superb lawyer-power to beat most IP claims. But in extremis, if they were blocked from copying it AND the Nintendo Revolution starts to take over the market, prehaps they could just build an adapter to allow Nintendo's own controllers to hook into a USB port?
(I'm hoping somebody builds a product along those lines, so I can use my PC cursor with remote wand-action)
out of curiousity, if I may, what was with Fallout that you did not like?
I'll just jump in a couple of major Fallout gripes:
1. Turn-based combat animation. As a rule mechanic, the turn-based approach was OK. But most turn-based games restrict turn-taking to actual combatants, not all the rest of uninvolved NPCs across the board. Try getting into a little brawl in the corner of a city, and watching 25 NPCs to stroll around in between each shot of your gun. (Was also a problem in the cathedral, although in that case, you actually were fighting all the people, but it was still unwieldy). The second sequel had an option to change the turn-system a little, but the problem wasn't completely fixed (simultaneous execution of everyone's turn-based actions would've been better)
2. Weak inventory GUI. Ok, money is bottlecaps, and I've got 13,000 of them, and I've got to click up an arrow 1 at a time to set an offer for a purchase?
3. Boring targeting GUI. You've got an option to do a precision shot for much more damage by taking slightly more time (time that's basically worthless to you, since leftover actions in one round don't carry over to the next). Therefore, each and every time I fire on a baddy, I've got to call up a separate window with his wireframe portrait and click on the eyeball (you always, ALWAYS want to shoot everything in the eyeball). This gets tedious real fast- players may actually want to take the "Flaw" prohibiting precision shots, just to speed things along.
(those were the two biggies, both worst in actual effect and potentially easiest for programmers to fix. Following are some vaguer complaints)
4. Too easy to build a worthless character. Look at that interesting array of skills... and then look at how useful any of them really were. For viable builds, there were 2 shooters, melee, and also the stealth option. But things like science, survival, and primitive weapons should've been handy in that setting, but weren't.
5. World was sparse and undynamic, limiting replay and exploration. What it needed were some randomly positioned encounters- bandit camps, struggling villages, pre-war ruins, and mutant scorpion nests. Places to discover anew on each play-through, and to possibly return to multiple times. Also, places you attack should repair (or at least tidy-up) if you leave and return (particularly apparent with the mutant fort).
6. No ally control in combat. Full control isn't needed, but at least give the ability to shout a broad suggestion.
7. Short, sparse game. Outside of the two "boss bases", there is only one vaguely high-level monster: the deathclaw nest. Grinding those same 2 deathclaws is the only way to level past 14. Why can't the wasteland be filled with more vicious giant mutants? (Fallout2 filled out this gap a lot)
since booby-trapping of any kind is illegal in almost every state:
Although the implementation as shown is an illegal booby-trap, that need not be the case. A little software work could add a feature for a human operator (security guard in a central location) to watch the video and nominate specific targets for shooting. (Probably if they had already disregarded intercom commands to back away from the door).
Configurations like that would render it just another firearm operated by a human who holds the liability for unjustified shootings. Or, to make it even safer, load it up with indelible paintballs to mark suspects for later apprehension. (Not pepper, though, that's too lethal!)
Opera got dumped on for so long on Slashdot just for having banner ads (you know, just like Slashdot's banner ads...)
So you're saying that Opera's ads are positioned just like Slashdot's, at the top of a 10,000 line page so that they're completely invisible once I start reading any comments?
Maybe if slashdot starts to put banners between/alongside comments you can fairly compare it to Opera.
As proof, I will point out that the "Disable Javascript" option found in Netscape 4.0 (the predecessor to Mozilla) is missing, along with the ability to prevent image loading.
Everyone else is giggling at you, but I'll spoil the joke.
Run firefox. Go to the "Edit" menu, and pick Preferences. In the icons on the left, hit "Web Features". Six checkboxes come up in the main panel. Look at the ones labelled "Load Images" and "Enable Javascript", and think hard about what they might do.
simple web browsing is still "safer" in Firefox. Your computer might get pwn3d
than to have a hacker gain any kind of control over your machine.
Do you even know what the word "pwn" means? It is "to seize total control, almost as if the legal owner". A pwn3d PC must be assumed to have a bo2k install or even worse.
It's grammar that you criticize. Linguistics is another topic altogether.
Wrong and wrong. Punctuation and spelling are not grammar, although all three are subcategories of linguistics (which is something you have apparently confused with post-modern linguistic anthropology, which is something else altogether)
What I meant to say was that all the stuff I mentioned was released by the copyright owners on the P2P applications in order to distribute it
False again. The distribution of the "star wars kid" video, for example, was absolutely not approved by the performer. Most of the other things were published in smaller-scale, more controllable and profitable ways (such as by banner ads on their websites), and only placed on P2P when 3rd parties had downloaded and illegally redistributed them.
Personal photos and sound-bites are not placed on P2p as far as I know, except in the rare occasion when they prove entertaining to a wide audience, generally because they contain something unexpectedly embarassing. In that case, the copyright holders certainly don't enjoy the illegal redistribution. Likewise, "amateur" porn"is mostly placed on paid-access (or ad-supported) websites, and is shared on P2p without permission.