Wolfram Alpha tells me that $3 million a day is $34.72 per second. So, Google's copyright malfeasance scored them a market-leading edge of at least $173.60.
Oracle's unjust loss must be made right! Oracle must be made whole!
Too bad it's too small for a Kickstarter or something. Maybe an PayPal donation site?
This is not about the fantasyland in your head. This is not about how you or me or the spooky guy in the corner thinks the world should be.
In the 9th Circuit, for this particular set of circumstances, this is the law until a new case replaces it. The Supreme Court specifically declined the opportunity to contradict this, so it stands.
I don't understand why people have a hard time accepting this. This is not "oooh, we're doomed, we're screwed, give up now..". This is "Here's where we stand right now, and we've suffered a setback; we lose even more if we don't acknowledge it and adjust our battle plans to compensate."
Is that just an incredibly naive way to say "it's not wrong if they don't get caught"?
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
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· Score: 1
Interesting. That's the behavior of the WoW live patcher. I guess it makes sense they're repurpose that.
I guess I have to wonder how much DIII is the WoW engine with the serial numbers filed off. Or, to speak more professionally, I wonder what their reuse efficiency factors are.
There's just as good of a chance that people will see this and think "The government is going too far, and I need to do help fight this."
That worked out well in 1933 in Germany. The decent German folk rose up and fought down the rising oppression of the Nazi party and restored the democratic government of the Wiemar Republic.
(Yes, I just Godwinned this discussion, and by God, it's applicable and on-topic. So there.)
Some people just don't want to believe the lessons taught by history, and summarized so well by Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
I'm thinking "organs." All the vindictive screwups responsible for this abortion of justice have to give up one transplantable organ, liquidated on the open market, and the money goes to Sonne. Or the organ, if he needs it and is biocompatible. Or just wants to display it in formaldehyde on a shelf in his apartment.
"You're engaging in hindsight, which of course is 20-20," said police spokesman Mark Pugash. "... There was sufficient evidence to arrest, there was sufficient evidence to charge," he added.
Pugash said it was a "dangerous assumption" to think that because a case was acquitted it should not have made it to court.
"We investigated, we arrested, we charged... the Crown took the case forward."
The mere fact of innocence doesn't reduce the civic lesson value of this entire episode: You can be imprisoned for nearly a year, held almost incommunicado, and lose your most important personal relationships, simply because you're loudly opposed to the mechanisms of state security. Your "acquittal" does nothing to ameliorate that. Even if you win, you will still have lost, and nothing will change.
Well, we can hope the police spokeman was wrong about the last part.
I suspect the internal benchmark in the courts' thinking is "tangible physical good" v. "intangible infinitely-reproducible digital good". Licensing of a copyrighted tangible good has been shot down originally in Bobbs-Merril v. Straus, the case which introduced First Sale as a legal doctrine.
I suspect the tangible nature of the ink cartridges in Lexmark v. SCC was the distinction: the ink cartridges and the printer itself are tangible, and the "software" in question (DRM firmware in the both the cartridges and the printer strictly for the purposes of enforcing "genuine Lexmark") didn't rise to the level of a critical functional element, so licensing requirements of this software weren't binding and First Sale won out.*
With Apple v. Psystar, the software is the only product, and it's utterly intangible. It seems that courts give pure-licensing arrangements for software a lot of credibility in these types of case, and one part of "licensed, not sold" is that First Sale doesn't apply.
*Actually, First Sale never came up in Lexmark v. SCC, but the thinking in the appellate ruling feels kind of like First Sale. Ideas like the software in the cartridge and the printer were functional components, so not particularly creative and of dubious copyrightability; or that ownership of the printer hardware was an implicit license to run any software necessary to operate the printer, including non-Lexmark firmware in non-Lexmark cartridges.
I've seen this ignorance spouted repeatedly. Let me quote, once again, directly from the actual ruling of this case:
Psystar's [Copyright] Misuse Defense fails because it is an attempt to apply the First Sale Doctrine to a valid licensing agreement.
See that? First Sale DOES NOT APPLY in a valid licensing agreement, which is the Mac OS X EULA in this case.
Yup. You don't buy software, no matter how you refer to the transaction in the colloquial. You license it. And you are obligated to honor the terms of the license, or are liable for infringement if a court decides that the terms are reasonable and enforceable.
Sorry. I kind of wish First Sale did apply, but unfortunately, in the real world it doesn't. In this case, and any other EULAs which make it clear that the software is licensed, not sold, and that there are certain "reasonable" (from a purely legal point of view) restrictions on use and possession.
Actually, not BSD, but APSL, which is slightly closer to what the FSF can live with. Not quite free enough, but better than BSD, according to Stallman and Co.
So, yeah, at the end of the day, what Psystar did boils down to copyright infringement. Quoting the 9th Circuit's ruling (which stands because the Supremes denied cert):
Psystar's [Copyright] Misuse Defense fails because it is an attempt to apply the First Sale Doctrine to a valid licensing agreement.
Yaaaay. Another affirmation that you never really buy software, you license it and have no say in what you can do with it. OTOH, at least that continues to support GPL and copyleft's basis of control: you can't distribute GPL software in violation of its license terms without infringing on the copyright.
Remember when Apple tried blocking third-party hardware from their software and a judge ruled that they can?
Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you. And wishing for consistency among different actions at law with only surface similarities is much too much to ask for.
I swear I have seen my 13-month-old get a "challenge accepted" look on her face when I try to put something she wants out of her reach. She's basically fearless (too young to have learned fear, I guess) and a scarily-good climber, so we have to watch her quite closely when this happens, because otherwise I know we'll find her on top of the entertainment center or the dining table or trying to push the sliding door open.
For appropriate values of "Grandpa", Grandpa has always been more entertaining than the teletubbies. This speaks well of the entertainment value of certain Grandpas, and poorly (but accurately) of the entertainment value of preschoolers' edutainment television programming.
The obvious answer is to rightsource the job. You can get 18 contract wombs in India for the price of just one here. So, you can have Baby 2.0 delivered within three* weeks of specification.
*Yeah, within three. Fabrication requires two weeks, but unless you're paying for teleportation technology, the fastest you'll get the baby delivered is a few days after completion of manufacturing.
Who is going to pay a team of digital artists $100 an hour to create a 3D model of something when you can just tell Jimmy Olsen to go take a picture of it for a pittance?
Someone who wants a "picture" for evidence of an event which never actually happened. If the synthesized image is good enough, it will gain all the credibility that apparently-untouched photographs have. If the viewer can't tell it's 'shopped, it would take remarkable skepticism or some inherent distrust of whomever's presenting the image to disbelieve it.
Their rolling upgrades policy and initial hostile stance on browser version stability don't give me much confidence in anything being "too stupid" for them. Mozilla "leadership" seems to fall in love with their own brainstorms and implement them, come hell or high water, user concerns be damned. So all it takes is one influential dev or architect catching a fever or dropping some particularly good hallucinogens or developing just the right brain tumor and the "no plugins except through our store" policy will be the wave of the day. And the user community will have to grin and eat it.
Indeed. The article is essentially whining that Linux FF won't get the sparkly My Little Pony training wheels that the Windows and Mac variants will get.
Yeah. Color me confused. I suppose that there are still the Open Source populist advocates that argue that we need to have those training wheels available so that we can get some sweet sweet market share from those other platforms. I say, those platforms can keep their training wheels. I prefer to use my platform among other people who actually know how to use it without training wheels (i.e., real functional package management, etc.)
Apparently according to those clowns, it will cost nearly as much as the carrier itself to
fit the EM CATOBAR system to a carrier designed to have a CATOBAR system.
Well, if you boil the government-contractor discussion down to something resembling conversation, it's easy to see why BAe answered they way they did:
MoD: Hey, BAe, rather than continuing to sink money into the STOVL F-35B variant, we'd like to buy some FA-18 Super Hornets as a contingency and maybe switch over to the CATOBAR F-35C variant later. I know that buying Super Hornets doesn't make you a cent, but still, it might be good for the country, and at the rate F-35 development is going, it's looking like HMS Queen Elizabeth will be ready before her squadrons will. So, BAe, tell me, what do you think it'd cost us to have you put in an electromagnetic catapult system?
BAe: Um... let's see... putting in a EMALS to defer and maybe take away aircraft sales from us? Let's see... <whispering> crap. it wouldn't really be that expensive, since the carrier was designed with basic provisions and space for that system already. But we really can't risk losing F-35B sales. <not whispering> Bad news, guv'nor. It's going to be expensive. Eye-wateringly expensive. Really really really expensive. At least as expensive as the rest of the ship. Really.
You'd be better off avoiding those nasty Super Hornets and just sticking with the plan to give us lots of money I MEAN buying those F-35Bs. Yeah.
Back a few years while I was still wearing funny clothes at work, I had the privilege of working with a few folks from DERA on a project. Smart, reasonable, apparently quite dedicated to making sure the UK got the best technology available and working well with its allies' technical infrastructure.
Years later, I was flabbergasted to discover a lot of DERA been spun off into Qinetiq, and now seems to be overrun with folks representing the defense contractor community rather than strictly government scientists and engineers.
Imagine DARPA becoming a for-profit joint venture of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. That's my impression of Qinetiq, although that's probably wrong in surface detail. But the for-profit part, and the seeming endless shilling for existing defense firms, seems to be correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Wolfram Alpha tells me that $3 million a day is $34.72 per second. So, Google's copyright malfeasance scored them a market-leading edge of at least $173.60.
Oracle's unjust loss must be made right! Oracle must be made whole!
Too bad it's too small for a Kickstarter or something. Maybe an PayPal donation site?
This is not about the fantasyland in your head. This is not about how you or me or the spooky guy in the corner thinks the world should be.
In the 9th Circuit, for this particular set of circumstances, this is the law until a new case replaces it. The Supreme Court specifically declined the opportunity to contradict this, so it stands.
I don't understand why people have a hard time accepting this. This is not "oooh, we're doomed, we're screwed, give up now..". This is "Here's where we stand right now, and we've suffered a setback; we lose even more if we don't acknowledge it and adjust our battle plans to compensate."
Is that just an incredibly naive way to say "it's not wrong if they don't get caught"?
Interesting. That's the behavior of the WoW live patcher. I guess it makes sense they're repurpose that.
I guess I have to wonder how much DIII is the WoW engine with the serial numbers filed off. Or, to speak more professionally, I wonder what their reuse efficiency factors are.
And it's only a save for reduced damage, not avoidance. The DM is definitely being hardass here.
There's just as good of a chance that people will see this and think "The government is going too far, and I need to do help fight this."
That worked out well in 1933 in Germany. The decent German folk rose up and fought down the rising oppression of the Nazi party and restored the democratic government of the Wiemar Republic.
(Yes, I just Godwinned this discussion, and by God, it's applicable and on-topic. So there.)
Some people just don't want to believe the lessons taught by history, and summarized so well by Martin Niemöller:
Sonne doesn't have a lawn. He lost his house.
I'm thinking "organs." All the vindictive screwups responsible for this abortion of justice have to give up one transplantable organ, liquidated on the open market, and the money goes to Sonne. Or the organ, if he needs it and is biocompatible. Or just wants to display it in formaldehyde on a shelf in his apartment.
The mere fact of innocence doesn't reduce the civic lesson value of this entire episode: You can be imprisoned for nearly a year, held almost incommunicado, and lose your most important personal relationships, simply because you're loudly opposed to the mechanisms of state security. Your "acquittal" does nothing to ameliorate that. Even if you win, you will still have lost, and nothing will change.
Well, we can hope the police spokeman was wrong about the last part.
I suspect the internal benchmark in the courts' thinking is "tangible physical good" v. "intangible infinitely-reproducible digital good". Licensing of a copyrighted tangible good has been shot down originally in Bobbs-Merril v. Straus , the case which introduced First Sale as a legal doctrine.
I suspect the tangible nature of the ink cartridges in Lexmark v. SCC was the distinction: the ink cartridges and the printer itself are tangible, and the "software" in question (DRM firmware in the both the cartridges and the printer strictly for the purposes of enforcing "genuine Lexmark") didn't rise to the level of a critical functional element, so licensing requirements of this software weren't binding and First Sale won out.*
With Apple v. Psystar, the software is the only product, and it's utterly intangible. It seems that courts give pure-licensing arrangements for software a lot of credibility in these types of case, and one part of "licensed, not sold" is that First Sale doesn't apply.
*Actually, First Sale never came up in Lexmark v. SCC, but the thinking in the appellate ruling feels kind of like First Sale. Ideas like the software in the cartridge and the printer were functional components, so not particularly creative and of dubious copyrightability; or that ownership of the printer hardware was an implicit license to run any software necessary to operate the printer, including non-Lexmark firmware in non-Lexmark cartridges.
Apple tried that line in 2011, the 9th Circuit bought it then, and the Supreme Court declined to disagree.
Time marches on, and Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus is utterly useless as precedent in software copyright issues.
It's dead. First Sale has no applicability in licensed software. Both the courts and Congress has spoken. Let it go.
I've seen this ignorance spouted repeatedly. Let me quote, once again, directly from the actual ruling of this case:
See that? First Sale DOES NOT APPLY in a valid licensing agreement, which is the Mac OS X EULA in this case.
Yup. You don't buy software, no matter how you refer to the transaction in the colloquial. You license it. And you are obligated to honor the terms of the license, or are liable for infringement if a court decides that the terms are reasonable and enforceable.
Sorry. I kind of wish First Sale did apply, but unfortunately, in the real world it doesn't. In this case, and any other EULAs which make it clear that the software is licensed, not sold, and that there are certain "reasonable" (from a purely legal point of view) restrictions on use and possession.
Actually, not BSD, but APSL, which is slightly closer to what the FSF can live with. Not quite free enough, but better than BSD, according to Stallman and Co.
It a court says the EULA is law, then it's law within its jurisdiction. Which is exactly what happened here.
OTOH, if you succeed, you score an in-game achievement. Awesome.
Whereas now, it's just the best and most recent precedent available in any Circuit. It's not binding precedent, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
They were bound by normal copyright law, sure, but I'm not aware that they were ever accused of violating copyright.
Use of copyrighted software in excess or violation of license is copyright infringement. And the suit was explicitly about copyright infingement (see First Claim, Paragraph 25)
So, yeah, at the end of the day, what Psystar did boils down to copyright infringement. Quoting the 9th Circuit's ruling (which stands because the Supremes denied cert):
Yaaaay. Another affirmation that you never really buy software, you license it and have no say in what you can do with it. OTOH, at least that continues to support GPL and copyleft's basis of control: you can't distribute GPL software in violation of its license terms without infringing on the copyright.
Remember when Apple tried blocking third-party hardware from their software and a judge ruled that they can?
Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you. And wishing for consistency among different actions at law with only surface similarities is much too much to ask for.
No kidding.
I swear I have seen my 13-month-old get a "challenge accepted" look on her face when I try to put something she wants out of her reach. She's basically fearless (too young to have learned fear, I guess) and a scarily-good climber, so we have to watch her quite closely when this happens, because otherwise I know we'll find her on top of the entertainment center or the dining table or trying to push the sliding door open.
Ah, parenthood.
For appropriate values of "Grandpa", Grandpa has always been more entertaining than the teletubbies. This speaks well of the entertainment value of certain Grandpas, and poorly (but accurately) of the entertainment value of preschoolers' edutainment television programming.
Where did you get your MBA, Bob Jones University?
The obvious answer is to rightsource the job. You can get 18 contract wombs in India for the price of just one here. So, you can have Baby 2.0 delivered within three* weeks of specification.
*Yeah, within three. Fabrication requires two weeks, but unless you're paying for teleportation technology, the fastest you'll get the baby delivered is a few days after completion of manufacturing.
Who is going to pay a team of digital artists $100 an hour to create a 3D model of something when you can just tell Jimmy Olsen to go take a picture of it for a pittance?
Someone who wants a "picture" for evidence of an event which never actually happened. If the synthesized image is good enough, it will gain all the credibility that apparently-untouched photographs have. If the viewer can't tell it's 'shopped, it would take remarkable skepticism or some inherent distrust of whomever's presenting the image to disbelieve it.
Their rolling upgrades policy and initial hostile stance on browser version stability don't give me much confidence in anything being "too stupid" for them. Mozilla "leadership" seems to fall in love with their own brainstorms and implement them, come hell or high water, user concerns be damned. So all it takes is one influential dev or architect catching a fever or dropping some particularly good hallucinogens or developing just the right brain tumor and the "no plugins except through our store" policy will be the wave of the day. And the user community will have to grin and eat it.
Or fork. I guess secession is a viable response.
Indeed. The article is essentially whining that Linux FF won't get the sparkly My Little Pony training wheels that the Windows and Mac variants will get.
Yeah. Color me confused. I suppose that there are still the Open Source populist advocates that argue that we need to have those training wheels available so that we can get some sweet sweet market share from those other platforms. I say, those platforms can keep their training wheels. I prefer to use my platform among other people who actually know how to use it without training wheels (i.e., real functional package management, etc.)
fit the EM CATOBAR system to a carrier designed to have a CATOBAR system.
Well, if you boil the government-contractor discussion down to something resembling conversation, it's easy to see why BAe answered they way they did:
Thanks for pointing this out.
Back a few years while I was still wearing funny clothes at work, I had the privilege of working with a few folks from DERA on a project. Smart, reasonable, apparently quite dedicated to making sure the UK got the best technology available and working well with its allies' technical infrastructure.
Years later, I was flabbergasted to discover a lot of DERA been spun off into Qinetiq, and now seems to be overrun with folks representing the defense contractor community rather than strictly government scientists and engineers.
Imagine DARPA becoming a for-profit joint venture of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. That's my impression of Qinetiq, although that's probably wrong in surface detail. But the for-profit part, and the seeming endless shilling for existing defense firms, seems to be correct.
Sigh.