The storage was never actually XML, just a similar looking arbitrary format. The filename ended in.xml, and XML parsers worked on it, but it wasn't fully compliant. There were no DTDs supplied, for example, and some fields were totally undocumented. However, since the data was all fat ascii, it was trivial to reverse-engineer the important parts.
From a performance perspective, switching away from XML is a big win. You can't really argue it, technically. The pseudo-XML format wasted space and was slow. If they'd just provide documentation on the binary format (and also a prediction as to how long that format will be remaining unchanged), then everything would be fine.
In fact, since the system is based on Free Software, they should just release the whole source code to their PIM apps and be done with it. A programmer would jump up from the "community" to take care of their Linux synchronization needs- and probably someone else would volunteer to improve the UI on the PIM itself (which needs a lot of work in comparison to the competition from Palm)
By selling a Linux PDA, but not distributing the code to most of the applications, Sharp is getting the worst of both worlds in terms of user acceptance.
Some more technical detail: Why does pseudo-XML waste space? Because more than 50% of the total file is repetitive boilerplate. The addressbook.xml looks like this: < Contact FirstName="Bob" MiddleName="Mack" LastName="Dobbs" FileAs="Dobbs, Bob Mack" Company="CoSG" BusinessPhone="866-512-7801" > Not only are strings like "FirstName" and "BusinessPhone" repeated for every entry, but each person's name is stored twice! And remember, on a handheld portable, file size is more precious than on desktops or laptops.
Why is pseudo-XML slow? Because XML is a linear file format. If you have 900 entries in the contact list (not at all unrealistic), and you add a new email address to contact #356, then the entire file past that point will have to be re-written. (Unless the programmer was extra-careful and used specialized file-shifting code, which still won't help in all cases). In practice, this meant that Zaurus users with thousands of contacts had to withstand startup or shutdown times of 20+ seconds.
Windows 2000 has finally given Microsoft the "five nines" it needs to compete in the business market. (99.999% uptime)
To really hit five nines, the software not only must run without crashing or freezing, but also without otherwise being unavailable, such as when rebooting. That means there must not be many OS patches released.
"Five nines" leaves you only 5 minutes 15 seconds of annual downtime (0.001% of a year).
Windows2000 is 2 years old, and has had 4 service packs. So unless each pack was installable with less than 2.6 minutes of downtime, they've lost "five nines".
And in reality, there have been several more critical security patches over those 2 years than there have been service packs. So for computers connected to the internet (thus needing to be secure), Windows2000 cannot possibly have achieved five nines.
I doubt Linux could claim this either. OpenBSD seems to go 3+ years between security holes, so they might attain five nines.
The reasons not to provide the full source of all packages are:
The reasons to provide full source is: 1) It is ILLEGAL not to. (If you don't include a written offer- and you don't) 2) If obeying the law isn't enough, other practical reasons are described by the FSF. For the link impaired, here is the text of their explanation:
Q. I want to distribute binaries, but distributing complete source is inconvenient. Is it ok if I give users the diffs from the "standard" version along with the binaries?
A. This is a well-meaning request, but this method of providing the source doesn't really do the job. A user that wants the source a year from now may be unable to get the proper version from another site at that time. The standard distribution site may have a newer version, but the same diffs probably won't work with that version. So you need to provide complete sources, not just diffs, with the binaries.
In the case of OpenZaurus, it's even worse. The project is derived not from one single package, but from more than a dozen. They are intermediate versions, hosted on several different sites, with some files being replaced after just a few days. I have tried many times to compile the "buildroot", and never succeeded, because the source packages it depends on have already been obseleted.
best regards Denes
If you are a maintainer of OpenZaurus, you should add an entry on the credits page so that people can contact you (or at least verify affiliation). The name "Denes" is on there, but only parenthetically.
there is a regularly updated snaphsot of the BK repo on the sf site
That the buildroot is stored in BitKeeper is a non-problem compared to the fact that it's only patches. The snapshot you're talking about is probably this file? The timestamp on that changes every day- but.I downloaded it in September2002 and March2003, and got identical files. (I haven't tried again recently). And anyway, as a snapshot of the latest code, it doesn't suffice for the GPL- it would have to be a historical snapshot from back when OZ3.2 was released.
if you insist I will certainly send you the sources by mail
What I'd like is for the OpenZaurus project to obey the GPL (and by extension, international law). That means either adding a link to the full OpenZaurus3.2 source on the download page, or a least putting an explanation there of what the license terms are, and how source can be obtained. (By "full source", I mean whatever goes into the zImage files- not all the packages in the feed. Those are downloaded separately, and can have source provided separately, as appropriate)
They (the Openzaurus packagers) provided no such written offer.
The GPL only requires you to make that offer if you don't provide the whole source along with the binaries. They neither make that offer, nor provide source. But they claim that since their BitKeeper repository is public, that's equivalent to providing source. (Even though it only contains patches, which aren't sufficient, as described in the GPL FAQ I referenced above)
Even if the Zaurus could run the games quickly, they still wouldn't be "playable", as you don't have an effective input device. (For reference, here's a picture of the Zaurus's buttons)
The directional pad on the SL550 and 5600 is the worst I've ever handled on a portable device. Worse than Gameboy or PocketPC (Ipaq, etc); even worse than many cellphones.
A good D-Pad should let the player move in any of 4 cardinal directions just by shifting the force applied by his thumb. You can't do this with the Zaurus- the D-Pad is a large, hollow circle with a separate button inside it. Your thumb can only be positioned to press 3 directions at once. If you're pressing up, and want to go down, you've got to either lift your finger across the gap, or circle it all the way around the ring to the opposite side.
Speed-based games requiring quick changes of direction are simply not playable.
About the most intense game that works is Snake, and only because the player is limited to 3 possible directions at any one time.
Not to mention that unlike some other PDAs, there are no convenient buttons to use for the other game controls. Even if you did somehow manage to handle up/down/left/right with one thumb on the D-Pad, the only buttons you could use to shoot/jump are clustered right next to the D-Pad. Ideally you'd want one hand on each side of the screen, for maximum stability. Other PDAs (the PocketPC line, again) at least have some buttons on the far edge of the case (such as for scrolling documents) that you could use as the fire button.
Downloading an unpacking those binaries won't reveal any licensing information, nor "an offer good for three years to supply source to any third party".
Searching around on the Openzaurus site for source code, I find an intriguing FAQ entry which claims that Openzaurus code is GPL, and another which explains a way to get the source. Or rather... a way to get some source code. Actually... patches against other, 3rd party distributions. Which if you had those distributions, you might be able to assemble into the Openzaurus source code... The code to some version of Openzaurus, not necessarily the same code that built the binaries you have.
It was a joke- of course I know about single-assignment variables. Have trouble writing all these compilers if I didn't.
However, the post I responded to was pedantically incorrect. The claim "Once you've assigned to a variable, it's an error to attempt to reassign it" is false. After assigning a variable, you can assign it again- in a different function call.
It's possible for a language to be functional even if it allows variable reassignment within a function- there's nothing wrong with the compiler silently appending _1 _2 _3 as you change the definition of XYZ during a linear sequence of code. This could be said to introduce an unneeded distjunction between what is written and what is meant, though.
However, some functional languages (to be more attractive to mainline programmers?) include iteration operators, even though such things are redundant with recursion. If "forall" or something is present, or if there is a semantic to assign a variable within a function argument, then it's important that programmers not think they can use a variable as an accumulator, which is what reassignment within a loop implies.
do is force an expiration on all of their products that is less than the protection, and then noone else is ever capable of distributing the work.
They already do this. Chemical breakdown will probably render most DVDs unusable within 40-50 years. (There's no real way to predict this, of course, but degradation of CD-Roms has already been observed, and the movie companies who sell DVDs have no motivation to improve the longevity of the media).
This page claims DVDs "usually last 70-100 years", which is ludicrous (what, they've got a time machine?). But someday copyright terms will probably be extended to at least 152 years, comfortably more than any optical media can be expected to last. The fact that the DMCA outlaws PD extraction of works whose copyright has expired will never be noticed, since expiration will be eliminated.
No, because Project Gutenberg intentionally gave you a public domain release. They were careful to insert no changes to the PD text they started from. If they had changed it at all, the new material would be copyright to them. (And most likely, if they do make a change, they'll willingly place the result under PD. But they're not obligated to)
Good of you to bring them up, though. Visit their Copyright page and read towards the bottom of it. Notice that when someone wants to digitize a work for them, they tell you not only to select a book from before 1923, but also to make sure that the physical edition you have is prior to 1923 as well!
They say "Remember: new editions or translations can get new copyrights, though the protection of the original edition is not extended."
That's because if a new publication isn't 100% identical to the previous, it gets a new copyright.
Too bad you are wrong, wrong wrong.
Too bad that I'm right, right right. I wish I were wrong- it would be nice if PD works were easier to access- but a cursory glance at the law shows otherwise. Copyright law is excessively broad- it covers all sorts of things that can't reasonably be described as artistic or literary.
By the Berne convention of international copyright law, any original work is protected. Even "works" as trivia as a picture of paint splotches or a recording of white noise. If you can "fix in some material form", it's automatically copyrighted. And of course, when someone converts a video from analog to digital, some amount of noise is added by your equipment.
That random variation could itself be a protected "work". Unless the end-consumer (who wants to upload Metropolis to Kazaa, say) can verify that all of that conversion noise is removed from his encoding, then he can't distribute it without violating Macday's copyrights.
Even if they don't advertise it as "restored" footage, it's still non-identical to the original material. Although no specific "artist" sat down and made changes, it's still been modified in some way. That makes it a derived work, and the copyright is effective from the date the format was converted. Only if Macday explicitly declared their DVD to be public domain are you allowed to duplicate it, even by pre-DMCA laws. (And if they'd wanted it to be PD, they wouldn't use CSS at all)
Copying one VHS tape to another, for example, is the creation of a new copyrighted work, derived from the first one, but with a new expiration timer.
I own a copy of Fritz Lang's Metropolis on a DVD. The film footage of this movie is in the public domain
The unfortunate legality is that what you have is copyrighted. It's not scheduled to expire until 2099.
The material on the DVD is not identical to what was seen in theaters back at the start of the 20th century. It has been modified, both intentionally (cleanup & restoration) and inadvertently (analog-digital conversion effects). Thus, what you have is a "derivative work".
The only way you can legally pass out Metropolis (or other movies whose copyright may have expired, like possibly the Superman shorts) is if you can dig up an original theater print, and then find the equipment to digitize it.
Are you sure it's so easy to bypass? Disney's Tarzan DVD is particularly notorious for having 5 minutes of unskippable advertisements at the beginning.
The whole thing was a joke. None of the listed players are real (or at least they don't really use DeCSS). Translating out the sarcasm, he was saying: "The DeCSS lawsuit was sucessful, because mainstream Linux distributions are too afraid of liability to include working DVD players"
An example of this is the Debian package for playing DVDs. It needs DeCSS (or the equivalent libdvdcss) to work, except on rare unprotected discs. But it doesn't include DeCSS in the package- instead, it tells the user how to download it himself, and then automatically uses it if available.
(The CSS decoder is kept at http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/deb/, which is hopefully immune to US prosecution)
Elephants have the largest brain of any animal that stands foot on earth. It's not really noteworthy, because they're also the largest creature on land.
Elephant: brain = 5kg, body = 5000kg, 0.1% Dairy Cow: brain = 400g, body = 500kg, 0.08% Human: brain = 1.3kg, body = 65kg, 2%
So, the elephant is right in line with another slow moving vegetarian (actually, a little better ratio). Compared to a human, of course, its brain/body ratio is low- but we expected that.
It shouldn't require more data processing just to run a larger body
Why shouldn't it? Most animals don't do much planning or even abstract thinking- the most important task for the neurons in the brain is to operate each and every muscular fiber in the limbs and organs.
Let us say "It shouldn't require more Human Resources staff to run a larger corporation". That's obviously wrong- of course you need more as you have more things under control.
One could imagine a hierarchal system: similarly-sized brains for house cats and tigers (whose body shapes are equivalent), with intermediate nerve clusters as an "abstraction layer" that protects the brain from needing to handle the full details of larger body sizes. It sounds like a reasonable idea, but this isn't how animals really work. A certain dinosaur tried this distributed system, but that turned out to be a dead-end, evolutionarily.
Furthermore, it sounds like that wasn't the case for dinosaurs, some of which had little bird-sized brains in enormous bodies.
The uptime argument is now more important than ever. Today, all computers are very fast. 700Mhz, 1Ghz, 3.2Ghz... it hardly even matters. For any normal task, they're essentially equivalent. The CPU spends 99% of its time waiting for an operator or remote system to give it an input, and then takes between 0.001 and 0.00042 milliseconds to return the response, before going back to idle mode.
In a world like this, the dollar value of the speed increase between 700Mhz and 3Ghz is tiny. But if the slower computer has 99% uptime and the faster one only 90%, then the slower box gives your enterprise much more productivity.
For most computer tasks, reliablity is far more important than speed.
That method doesn't work. It has no legal validity.
The post office won't necessarily check that the envelope is really sealed when they deliver it. You could just mail yourself an open envelope on any date, and then insert the contents years later.
I've heard that you're able to do research on the patent, but not using the patent. As if there's much of a difference.
The statement that "its always possible to use invention for research" is clearly wrong, because there are many inventions (scientific apparatus) that have no use that can't be termed "research".
In some fields, it might be possible to productively study the invention in the abstract. (Now that patents can be issued on algorithms and business methods, this is even more likely) If you make a useful improvement on the patent, you can file your own patent (which you're unlikely to be allowed to make/use without permission from the holder of the earlier patent, but at least you've got some leverage)
More than 100 years ago, if your study of the patent resulted in a different patent for an equivalent or superior invention, your new patent would essentially supercede the other. That practice seems to have ended.
Because the dvdCCA doesn't just represent Hollywood ("content producers"). It's primary role is protect the manufacturers of audiovisual hardware. (It's their patents and trade secrets, after all, that CSS comes from. Phillips & Sony are major members). Hardware developers don't care much about artistic integrity- especially if they've got an opportunity to sell more hardware.
Besides, it may be too late for dvdCCA to withhold anything. Many long term licenses have already been signed.
But in the future, it won't be up to the disc's authors to enable that ability. 3rd parties will view the disk, note which scenes should be prohibited for a certain classification, and publish the data on the internet (possibly restricted to paying subscribers to their service).
The DVD player can then download the censorship list matching a certain DVD's title, and apply those cuts while it plays. The whole process can be transparent to the viewer.
I have never seen a software controlled 'conventional DVD player',
RTA. The manufacture and sale of such devices is exactly what this lawsuit is trying to prevent.
If the suit fails, then in a few years you'll be able to toggle a G/PG13/R/NC17 switch on the front of a DVD player, and all movies will drop portions that violate the classification you prefered.
"Proof by popularity" is not valid according to strict rules of logic, but it's good enough to be the foundation of both democracy and capitalism.
The fact that 100% of the developers of even marginally successful OS kernels use a monolithic approach is a fairly strong kind of evidence.
Breezy theorizing can make it seem that the time is nigh for the dominance of microkernels- hardware is excessively fast, OS development remains painfully slow, application crashes are numerous and expensive- but the truth on the ground says otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, since the system is based on Free Software, they should just release the whole source code to their PIM apps and be done with it. A programmer would jump up from the "community" to take care of their Linux synchronization needs- and probably someone else would volunteer to improve the UI on the PIM itself (which needs a lot of work in comparison to the competition from Palm)
By selling a Linux PDA, but not distributing the code to most of the applications, Sharp is getting the worst of both worlds in terms of user acceptance.
Some more technical detail:
Why does pseudo-XML waste space?
Because more than 50% of the total file is repetitive boilerplate. The addressbook.xml looks like this:
< Contact FirstName="Bob" MiddleName="Mack" LastName="Dobbs" FileAs="Dobbs, Bob Mack" Company="CoSG" BusinessPhone="866-512-7801" >
Not only are strings like "FirstName" and "BusinessPhone" repeated for every entry, but each person's name is stored twice! And remember, on a handheld portable, file size is more precious than on desktops or laptops.
Why is pseudo-XML slow?
Because XML is a linear file format. If you have 900 entries in the contact list (not at all unrealistic), and you add a new email address to contact #356, then the entire file past that point will have to be re-written. (Unless the programmer was extra-careful and used specialized file-shifting code, which still won't help in all cases). In practice, this meant that Zaurus users with thousands of contacts had to withstand startup or shutdown times of 20+ seconds.
Windows 2000 has finally given Microsoft the "five nines" it needs to compete in the business market. (99.999% uptime)
To really hit five nines, the software not only must run without crashing or freezing, but also without otherwise being unavailable, such as when rebooting. That means there must not be many OS patches released.
"Five nines" leaves you only 5 minutes 15 seconds of annual downtime (0.001% of a year).
Windows2000 is 2 years old, and has had 4 service packs. So unless each pack was installable with less than 2.6 minutes of downtime, they've lost "five nines".
And in reality, there have been several more critical security patches over those 2 years than there have been service packs. So for computers connected to the internet (thus needing to be secure), Windows2000 cannot possibly have achieved five nines.
I doubt Linux could claim this either. OpenBSD seems to go 3+ years between security holes, so they might attain five nines.
The reasons to provide full source is:
1) It is ILLEGAL not to. (If you don't include a written offer- and you don't)
2) If obeying the law isn't enough, other practical reasons are described by the FSF. For the link impaired, here is the text of their explanation:
A. This is a well-meaning request, but this method of providing the source doesn't really do the job.
A user that wants the source a year from now may be unable to get the proper version from another site at that time. The standard distribution site may have a newer version, but the same diffs probably won't work with that version.
So you need to provide complete sources, not just diffs, with the binaries.
In the case of OpenZaurus, it's even worse. The project is derived not from one single package, but from more than a dozen. They are intermediate versions, hosted on several different sites, with some files being replaced after just a few days. I have tried many times to compile the "buildroot", and never succeeded, because the source packages it depends on have already been obseleted.
best regards
Denes
If you are a maintainer of OpenZaurus, you should add an entry on the credits page so that people can contact you (or at least verify affiliation). The name "Denes" is on there, but only parenthetically.
there is a regularly updated snaphsot of the BK repo on the sf site
That the buildroot is stored in BitKeeper is a non-problem compared to the fact that it's only patches. The snapshot you're talking about is probably this file? The timestamp on that changes every day- but.I downloaded it in September2002 and March2003, and got identical files. (I haven't tried again recently). And anyway, as a snapshot of the latest code, it doesn't suffice for the GPL- it would have to be a historical snapshot from back when OZ3.2 was released.
if you insist I will certainly send you the sources by mail
What I'd like is for the OpenZaurus project to obey the GPL (and by extension, international law). That means either adding a link to the full OpenZaurus3.2 source on the download page, or a least putting an explanation there of what the license terms are, and how source can be obtained. (By "full source", I mean whatever goes into the zImage files- not all the packages in the feed. Those are downloaded separately, and can have source provided separately, as appropriate)
Saline injections, you mean?
They (the Openzaurus packagers) provided no such written offer.
The GPL only requires you to make that offer if you don't provide the whole source along with the binaries. They neither make that offer, nor provide source. But they claim that since their BitKeeper repository is public, that's equivalent to providing source. (Even though it only contains patches, which aren't sufficient, as described in the GPL FAQ I referenced above)
Even if the Zaurus could run the games quickly, they still wouldn't be "playable", as you don't have an effective input device. (For reference, here's a picture of the Zaurus's buttons)
The directional pad on the SL550 and 5600 is the worst I've ever handled on a portable device. Worse than Gameboy or PocketPC (Ipaq, etc); even worse than many cellphones.
A good D-Pad should let the player move in any of 4 cardinal directions just by shifting the force applied by his thumb. You can't do this with the Zaurus- the D-Pad is a large, hollow circle with a separate button inside it. Your thumb can only be positioned to press 3 directions at once. If you're pressing up, and want to go down, you've got to either lift your finger across the gap, or circle it all the way around the ring to the opposite side.
Speed-based games requiring quick changes of direction are simply not playable.
About the most intense game that works is Snake, and only because the player is limited to 3 possible directions at any one time.
Not to mention that unlike some other PDAs, there are no convenient buttons to use for the other game controls. Even if you did somehow manage to handle up/down/left/right with one thumb on the D-Pad, the only buttons you could use to shoot/jump are clustered right next to the D-Pad. Ideally you'd want one hand on each side of the screen, for maximum stability. Other PDAs (the PocketPC line, again) at least have some buttons on the far edge of the case (such as for scrolling documents) that you could use as the fire button.
OpenZaurus, a completely open source
Open source, eh? Do you happen to know what license it's under, then?
Their website doesn't mention anything about that.
Since it's apparently based on Linux, I'd expect it to be under the GPL (at least in part). But that obviously isn't the case. Look at the Openzaurus download page. There are links to 20 different binary packages, but no links to source code. According to the GPL, you must put source links in the same place as binary ones.
Downloading an unpacking those binaries won't reveal any licensing information, nor "an offer good for three years to supply source to any third party".
Searching around on the Openzaurus site for source code, I find an intriguing FAQ entry which claims that Openzaurus code is GPL, and another which explains a way to get the source. Or rather... a way to get some source code. Actually... patches against other, 3rd party distributions. Which if you had those distributions, you might be able to assemble into the Openzaurus source code... The code to some version of Openzaurus, not necessarily the same code that built the binaries you have.
All of that is completely against the GPL.
You can't give out patches- it must be the whole source.
The source code and binaries you provide must correspond exactly (same revision).
Shall I say "duh"?
It was a joke- of course I know about single-assignment variables. Have trouble writing all these compilers if I didn't.
However, the post I responded to was pedantically incorrect. The claim "Once you've assigned to a variable, it's an error to attempt to reassign it" is false. After assigning a variable, you can assign it again- in a different function call.
It's possible for a language to be functional even if it allows variable reassignment within a function- there's nothing wrong with the compiler silently appending _1 _2 _3 as you change the definition of XYZ during a linear sequence of code. This could be said to introduce an unneeded distjunction between what is written and what is meant, though.
However, some functional languages (to be more attractive to mainline programmers?) include iteration operators, even though such things are redundant with recursion. If "forall" or something is present, or if there is a semantic to assign a variable within a function argument, then it's important that programmers not think they can use a variable as an accumulator, which is what reassignment within a loop implies.
do is force an expiration on all of their products that is less than the protection, and then noone else is ever capable of distributing the work.
They already do this. Chemical breakdown will probably render most DVDs unusable within 40-50 years. (There's no real way to predict this, of course, but degradation of CD-Roms has already been observed, and the movie companies who sell DVDs have no motivation to improve the longevity of the media).
This page claims DVDs "usually last 70-100 years", which is ludicrous (what, they've got a time machine?). But someday copyright terms will probably be extended to at least 152 years, comfortably more than any optical media can be expected to last. The fact that the DMCA outlaws PD extraction of works whose copyright has expired will never be noticed, since expiration will be eliminated.
No, because Project Gutenberg intentionally gave you a public domain release. They were careful to insert no changes to the PD text they started from. If they had changed it at all, the new material would be copyright to them. (And most likely, if they do make a change, they'll willingly place the result under PD. But they're not obligated to)
Good of you to bring them up, though. Visit their Copyright page and read towards the bottom of it. Notice that when someone wants to digitize a work for them, they tell you not only to select a book from before 1923, but also to make sure that the physical edition you have is prior to 1923 as well!
They say "Remember: new editions or translations can get new copyrights, though the protection of the original edition is not extended."
That's because if a new publication isn't 100% identical to the previous, it gets a new copyright.
Too bad you are wrong, wrong wrong.
Too bad that I'm right, right right. I wish I were wrong- it would be nice if PD works were easier to access- but a cursory glance at the law shows otherwise. Copyright law is excessively broad- it covers all sorts of things that can't reasonably be described as artistic or literary.
By the Berne convention of international copyright law, any original work is protected. Even "works" as trivia as a picture of paint splotches or a recording of white noise. If you can "fix in some material form", it's automatically copyrighted. And of course, when someone converts a video from analog to digital, some amount of noise is added by your equipment.
That random variation could itself be a protected "work". Unless the end-consumer (who wants to upload Metropolis to Kazaa, say) can verify that all of that conversion noise is removed from his encoding, then he can't distribute it without violating Macday's copyrights.
Even if they don't advertise it as "restored" footage, it's still non-identical to the original material. Although no specific "artist" sat down and made changes, it's still been modified in some way. That makes it a derived work, and the copyright is effective from the date the format was converted. Only if Macday explicitly declared their DVD to be public domain are you allowed to duplicate it, even by pre-DMCA laws. (And if they'd wanted it to be PD, they wouldn't use CSS at all)
Copying one VHS tape to another, for example, is the creation of a new copyrighted work, derived from the first one, but with a new expiration timer.
I own a copy of Fritz Lang's Metropolis on a DVD. The film footage of this movie is in the public domain
The unfortunate legality is that what you have is copyrighted. It's not scheduled to expire until 2099.
The material on the DVD is not identical to what was seen in theaters back at the start of the 20th century. It has been modified, both intentionally (cleanup & restoration) and inadvertently (analog-digital conversion effects). Thus, what you have is a "derivative work".
The only way you can legally pass out Metropolis (or other movies whose copyright may have expired, like possibly the Superman shorts) is if you can dig up an original theater print, and then find the equipment to digitize it.
Are you sure it's so easy to bypass? Disney's Tarzan DVD is particularly notorious for having 5 minutes of unskippable advertisements at the beginning.
The whole thing was a joke. None of the listed players are real (or at least they don't really use DeCSS). Translating out the sarcasm, he was saying: "The DeCSS lawsuit was sucessful, because mainstream Linux distributions are too afraid of liability to include working DVD players"
An example of this is the Debian package for playing DVDs. It needs DeCSS (or the equivalent libdvdcss) to work, except on rare unprotected discs. But it doesn't include DeCSS in the package- instead, it tells the user how to download it himself, and then automatically uses it if available.
(The CSS decoder is kept at http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/deb/, which is hopefully immune to US prosecution)
Sighted dude: "Why do you even care what movie is playing? You want to listen to the gorgeous Hulk soundtrack?"
Their brains are not tiny.
Elephants have the largest brain of any animal that stands foot on earth. It's not really noteworthy, because they're also the largest creature on land.
Elephant: brain = 5kg, body = 5000kg, 0.1%
Dairy Cow: brain = 400g, body = 500kg, 0.08%
Human: brain = 1.3kg, body = 65kg, 2%
So, the elephant is right in line with another slow moving vegetarian (actually, a little better ratio). Compared to a human, of course, its brain/body ratio is low- but we expected that.
It shouldn't require more data processing just to run a larger body
Why shouldn't it? Most animals don't do much planning or even abstract thinking- the most important task for the neurons in the brain is to operate each and every muscular fiber in the limbs and organs.
Let us say "It shouldn't require more Human Resources staff to run a larger corporation". That's obviously wrong- of course you need more as you have more things under control.
One could imagine a hierarchal system: similarly-sized brains for house cats and tigers (whose body shapes are equivalent), with intermediate nerve clusters as an "abstraction layer" that protects the brain from needing to handle the full details of larger body sizes. It sounds like a reasonable idea, but this isn't how animals really work. A certain dinosaur tried this distributed system, but that turned out to be a dead-end, evolutionarily.
Furthermore, it sounds like that wasn't the case for dinosaurs, some of which had little bird-sized brains in enormous bodies.
Here's a page calling that a myth.
strange about variables in Oz is that they are single assignment
Then should it really be called a "variable"?
The uptime argument is now more important than ever. Today, all computers are very fast. 700Mhz, 1Ghz, 3.2Ghz... it hardly even matters. For any normal task, they're essentially equivalent. The CPU spends 99% of its time waiting for an operator or remote system to give it an input, and then takes between 0.001 and 0.00042 milliseconds to return the response, before going back to idle mode.
In a world like this, the dollar value of the speed increase between 700Mhz and 3Ghz is tiny. But if the slower computer has 99% uptime and the faster one only 90%, then the slower box gives your enterprise much more productivity.
For most computer tasks, reliablity is far more important than speed.
That method doesn't work. It has no legal validity.
The post office won't necessarily check that the envelope is really sealed when they deliver it. You could just mail yourself an open envelope on any date, and then insert the contents years later.
I've heard that you're able to do research on the patent, but not using the patent. As if there's much of a difference.
The statement that "its always possible to use invention for research" is clearly wrong, because there are many inventions (scientific apparatus) that have no use that can't be termed "research".
In some fields, it might be possible to productively study the invention in the abstract. (Now that patents can be issued on algorithms and business methods, this is even more likely) If you make a useful improvement on the patent, you can file your own patent (which you're unlikely to be allowed to make/use without permission from the holder of the earlier patent, but at least you've got some leverage)
More than 100 years ago, if your study of the patent resulted in a different patent for an equivalent or superior invention, your new patent would essentially supercede the other. That practice seems to have ended.
If it's that easy, then why the current lawsuit?
Because the dvdCCA doesn't just represent Hollywood ("content producers"). It's primary role is protect the manufacturers of audiovisual hardware. (It's their patents and trade secrets, after all, that CSS comes from. Phillips & Sony are major members). Hardware developers don't care much about artistic integrity- especially if they've got an opportunity to sell more hardware.
Besides, it may be too late for dvdCCA to withhold anything. Many long term licenses have already been signed.
But in the future, it won't be up to the disc's authors to enable that ability. 3rd parties will view the disk, note which scenes should be prohibited for a certain classification, and publish the data on the internet (possibly restricted to paying subscribers to their service).
The DVD player can then download the censorship list matching a certain DVD's title, and apply those cuts while it plays. The whole process can be transparent to the viewer.
I have never seen a software controlled 'conventional DVD player',
RTA. The manufacture and sale of such devices is exactly what this lawsuit is trying to prevent.
If the suit fails, then in a few years you'll be able to toggle a G/PG13/R/NC17 switch on the front of a DVD player, and all movies will drop portions that violate the classification you prefered.
"Proof by popularity" is not valid according to strict rules of logic, but it's good enough to be the foundation of both democracy and capitalism.
The fact that 100% of the developers of even marginally successful OS kernels use a monolithic approach is a fairly strong kind of evidence.
Breezy theorizing can make it seem that the time is nigh for the dominance of microkernels- hardware is excessively fast, OS development remains painfully slow, application crashes are numerous and expensive- but the truth on the ground says otherwise.