Well, okay, but the GPL has always been a balance between freedom and widespread usage. That there is a loophole here is pretty apparent, at least to me; you could theoretically serve any software package at all remotely, especially as the cost of bandwidth comes down and web browser's support of dynamic content improves, and get out of any source distribution requirement. So it seems pretty logical to require a term in the license to prevent this kind of abuse.
And realistically, ANY term in the GPL that limits the choice of the user will convince SOME people to use proprietary software instead. And we're by and large okay with that; the philosophy behind the GPL is incompatible with some kinds of interests, but on balance it's better than the alternatives.
So the Department of Defense will have a choice: either it can distribute the software to people who visit its websites (and really, I kind of wonder whether they are really putting state secrets into software that runs websites that just anyone can visit), in which case the pool of available GPL code is enriched to all of our benefit, or it can switch to something proprietary, in which case we're no worse off than we are now, since they're keeping the software to themselves anyway.
Well, okay, I agree that this is often the case. A document retrieval script, for example, does nothing more than serve documents which the end user browses. In that case I agree that the web surfer is not "morally" the user of the software; that instead, the guy who owns the server is the user.
But take the case of complex financial software that helps the user do all sorts of esoteric financial and strategic tax planning. I think you'd have to agree that the person who enters the necessary parameters, gets a result, tweaks the parameters slightly to try different strategies and so forth is "morally" the user in this case. Putting it on the web so that the user doesn't need to physically install the software on his own computer does not make him stop being the user, I think. He's still engaging in a complex interaction with the software, and that interaction is his purpose for visiting the website.
So we take it one step further. Take ANY OSS program and put it on a server. Granted, the bandwidth requirements for some programs make this infeasible, but plenty would work fine. Should this technical, morally irrelevant step of delivering only results rather than the package itself really exonerate the distributor (i.e. owner of the server) from making the code available? I think it shouldn't. Otherwise you could imagine a company putting a program like GIMP online -- maybe not now, but certainly if bandwidth becomes cheaper -- just to get out of the source distribution requirement.
So, if you need to make a blanket rule, I'd say you should err on the side of safety. Make everyone distribute the code, even if it's just serving documents, so that you don't open a tremendous loophole that might ultimately defeat the GPL and allow commercial interests to de facto transform open software into proprietary software.
So what? If you adjust for inflation, a cheap set of clothes in 1850 probably cost $300. That doesn't mean a consumer today would be willing to pay that much.
The problem with Wind Waker and Sunshine isn't that they innovated; it's that they were less fun than their predecessors. I personally didn't care much for the WW graphical style, but that didn't matter much to me. What did matter was the boring and scarce dungeons (compared to prequels), repetitive and irritating cut-scenes (every single time you change wind direction or warp), and mind-numbingly dull sections of the game that lasted for hours (the triforce scavenger hunt, or sailing in a straight line for twenty minutes).
Besides, even if the graphical style were my primary objection, so what? I gave it a chance. I didn't like it. To read your post, it almost sounds like you believe all radical change is for the best. Some of it is, no doubt; Ocarina had boatloads of radical change, and it was good enough to call innovation. But at other times, the change is for the worse. To cast the detractors of any particular change as being against innovation in general is a bit dishonest and annoying of you.
"What White Wolf are saying is that if people run and use White Wolf games at conventions and charge people money to play for a *profit*, then they need to obtain a license to make said profit using White Wolf's material as the key engine for doing so."
Yes, but on what grounds? Running a game using WW's rules doesn't require a copyright license, since you're not making a copy or performing the work publicly or creating derivative works or anything else that falls under the aegis of copyright. It doesn't require a patent license, because they don't have patents to cover their games. It's not trademark infringement, because the only use of their trademark in your materials legitimately refers to their trade. And it's not trade secrets, because they publish the rules.
You'd be in favor of a law that said that anyone who "profits" off of someone else's "IP" should have to pay royalties? I guess that'd be the end of libraries, book critics, etc.
"If Sony and MS are overhyping their systems then so is Nintendo."
False! I don't know how old you were last console cycle, but Nintendo was very realistic about the Gamecube's abilities before it was released. They said, "it can render 9 million polygons per second under realistic conditions." Cue Sony: "Well ours can render ONE HUNDRED BILLION polygons per second!" and then microsoft: "We can do INFINITY BILLION TO THE INFINITY POWER!!!". So it isn't at all clear to me why the fact that Sony and MS overhype indicates that Nintendo overhypes.
I saw a presentation by Jimbo Wales in which he compared the readership of Wikipedia, Slashdot, and NYTimes.com. Wikipedia recently passed NYTimes, and slashdot doesn't even compare. In fact, he noted with something of a smile that Wikipedia would probably bring Slashdot to its knees with a front-page link.
statistically, the vast majority of child abuse does not involve the stereotypical sketchy guy in a white van with tinted windows saying in a gravelly voice, "hey little girl, want some candy?"
how does a map change how you protect your kids? you vary the extent to which you're willing to let them run around the neighborhood unsupervised with the other kids based partly on how many red dots are in the neighborhood. duh.
Sex offenders have a far higher recidivism rate than all of the other crimes you list. There is a very valid distinction to track them but not the others.
"The problem is that the people most likely to be hurt by this ruling are the poor and uneducated, who have much less access to and influence over the political process."
The problem, as it always is and always has been, is that POOR PEOPLE DON'T FUCKING VOTE!
So many of our problems would be solved if we instituted mandatory voting. Good voter turnout is a categorical public good, and there is every reason to legislate appropriately.
Of course I only speak for myself, but I couldn't care less if my data is readable 1000 years from now. I'm much more concerned with 20-80 years down the line.
True. On the other hand, the lawyers spent months of their time on this with no guarantee that they would get anything at all. Should they not get paid? If they're really charging too much, why haven't other lawyers undercut their contingency rates?
Also, realize that without the lawyers, you would get $0 instead of $50.
If you really think cell phone companies are falsely advertising, then get a lawyer and start the ball rolling. The only way to keep the market fair is if parties are punished when the falsely advertise. If they aren't, then the only way to compete is to falsely advertise.
Just because so many slashdotters are lined up one one side of the fence, let me say:
I tried Windwaker. I played it all the way through. I never liked the stylized graphics. I'm very relieved they're reverting to a more traditional style.
So under your law it's legal to digitize any movie broadcast over cable, rip the ads out, and post them on a peer-to-peer network? Somehow I don't see the MPAA going for that.
Because, you know, the RIAA has a problem with their broadcast music being traded freely on P2P.
Baloney. Your hypothetical loses its credibility as soon as A and B won't talk to one another and prefer to talk to the radical minority party C and adopt its radical policy initiatives. The parliamentary system doesn't work that way. If that happens, A's voters are horrified by its sudden radicalism and vote for B, which then gains the 5% of the vote it needs to be its own coalition and takes over.
Whaa? CD tracks are lossy too, you know. There is no reason a sufficiently high bitrate mp3 need be any worse.
Turning an analogue signal (sound) into a digital format (anything at all in 1s and 0s) will result in lost information. You can approach perfect quality as your bitrate approaches infinity, but of course you can't reach it.
So your objection to mp3s is really pure uninformed idiocy.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, okay, but the GPL has always been a balance between freedom and widespread usage. That there is a loophole here is pretty apparent, at least to me; you could theoretically serve any software package at all remotely, especially as the cost of bandwidth comes down and web browser's support of dynamic content improves, and get out of any source distribution requirement. So it seems pretty logical to require a term in the license to prevent this kind of abuse.
And realistically, ANY term in the GPL that limits the choice of the user will convince SOME people to use proprietary software instead. And we're by and large okay with that; the philosophy behind the GPL is incompatible with some kinds of interests, but on balance it's better than the alternatives.
So the Department of Defense will have a choice: either it can distribute the software to people who visit its websites (and really, I kind of wonder whether they are really putting state secrets into software that runs websites that just anyone can visit), in which case the pool of available GPL code is enriched to all of our benefit, or it can switch to something proprietary, in which case we're no worse off than we are now, since they're keeping the software to themselves anyway.
Well, okay, I agree that this is often the case. A document retrieval script, for example, does nothing more than serve documents which the end user browses. In that case I agree that the web surfer is not "morally" the user of the software; that instead, the guy who owns the server is the user.
But take the case of complex financial software that helps the user do all sorts of esoteric financial and strategic tax planning. I think you'd have to agree that the person who enters the necessary parameters, gets a result, tweaks the parameters slightly to try different strategies and so forth is "morally" the user in this case. Putting it on the web so that the user doesn't need to physically install the software on his own computer does not make him stop being the user, I think. He's still engaging in a complex interaction with the software, and that interaction is his purpose for visiting the website.
So we take it one step further. Take ANY OSS program and put it on a server. Granted, the bandwidth requirements for some programs make this infeasible, but plenty would work fine. Should this technical, morally irrelevant step of delivering only results rather than the package itself really exonerate the distributor (i.e. owner of the server) from making the code available? I think it shouldn't. Otherwise you could imagine a company putting a program like GIMP online -- maybe not now, but certainly if bandwidth becomes cheaper -- just to get out of the source distribution requirement.
So, if you need to make a blanket rule, I'd say you should err on the side of safety. Make everyone distribute the code, even if it's just serving documents, so that you don't open a tremendous loophole that might ultimately defeat the GPL and allow commercial interests to de facto transform open software into proprietary software.
Ha -- Oxford's history program must not be very good, because I'm pretty sure that 1492 came before 1600.
I take it you didn't understand that "cheap set of clothes" does not mean "nice suits."
So what? If you adjust for inflation, a cheap set of clothes in 1850 probably cost $300. That doesn't mean a consumer today would be willing to pay that much.
Your sample size needs some work.
The problem with Wind Waker and Sunshine isn't that they innovated; it's that they were less fun than their predecessors. I personally didn't care much for the WW graphical style, but that didn't matter much to me. What did matter was the boring and scarce dungeons (compared to prequels), repetitive and irritating cut-scenes (every single time you change wind direction or warp), and mind-numbingly dull sections of the game that lasted for hours (the triforce scavenger hunt, or sailing in a straight line for twenty minutes).
Besides, even if the graphical style were my primary objection, so what? I gave it a chance. I didn't like it. To read your post, it almost sounds like you believe all radical change is for the best. Some of it is, no doubt; Ocarina had boatloads of radical change, and it was good enough to call innovation. But at other times, the change is for the worse. To cast the detractors of any particular change as being against innovation in general is a bit dishonest and annoying of you.
This is exactly why it's such a travesty that IM is largely owned and operated proprietarily by a single corporation.
This world really needs Jabber to catch on.
"What White Wolf are saying is that if people run and use White Wolf games at conventions and charge people money to play for a *profit*, then they need to obtain a license to make said profit using White Wolf's material as the key engine for doing so."
Yes, but on what grounds? Running a game using WW's rules doesn't require a copyright license, since you're not making a copy or performing the work publicly or creating derivative works or anything else that falls under the aegis of copyright. It doesn't require a patent license, because they don't have patents to cover their games. It's not trademark infringement, because the only use of their trademark in your materials legitimately refers to their trade. And it's not trade secrets, because they publish the rules.
You'd be in favor of a law that said that anyone who "profits" off of someone else's "IP" should have to pay royalties? I guess that'd be the end of libraries, book critics, etc.
you couldn't fit a very impressive bomb in an ipod case.
"If Sony and MS are overhyping their systems then so is Nintendo."
False! I don't know how old you were last console cycle, but Nintendo was very realistic about the Gamecube's abilities before it was released. They said, "it can render 9 million polygons per second under realistic conditions." Cue Sony: "Well ours can render ONE HUNDRED BILLION polygons per second!" and then microsoft: "We can do INFINITY BILLION TO THE INFINITY POWER!!!". So it isn't at all clear to me why the fact that Sony and MS overhype indicates that Nintendo overhypes.
I saw a presentation by Jimbo Wales in which he compared the readership of Wikipedia, Slashdot, and NYTimes.com. Wikipedia recently passed NYTimes, and slashdot doesn't even compare. In fact, he noted with something of a smile that Wikipedia would probably bring Slashdot to its knees with a front-page link.
Slashdot ain't got squat on Wikipedia.
statistically, the vast majority of child abuse does not involve the stereotypical sketchy guy in a white van with tinted windows saying in a gravelly voice, "hey little girl, want some candy?"
how does a map change how you protect your kids? you vary the extent to which you're willing to let them run around the neighborhood unsupervised with the other kids based partly on how many red dots are in the neighborhood. duh.
Sex offenders have a far higher recidivism rate than all of the other crimes you list. There is a very valid distinction to track them but not the others.
"The problem is that the people most likely to be hurt by this ruling are the poor and uneducated, who have much less access to and influence over the political process."
The problem, as it always is and always has been, is that POOR PEOPLE DON'T FUCKING VOTE!
So many of our problems would be solved if we instituted mandatory voting. Good voter turnout is a categorical public good, and there is every reason to legislate appropriately.
Of course I only speak for myself, but I couldn't care less if my data is readable 1000 years from now. I'm much more concerned with 20-80 years down the line.
So let the libraries require a PIN to use the card, and keep a spare card at home. Problem solved.
True. On the other hand, the lawyers spent months of their time on this with no guarantee that they would get anything at all. Should they not get paid? If they're really charging too much, why haven't other lawyers undercut their contingency rates?
Also, realize that without the lawyers, you would get $0 instead of $50.
If you really think cell phone companies are falsely advertising, then get a lawyer and start the ball rolling. The only way to keep the market fair is if parties are punished when the falsely advertise. If they aren't, then the only way to compete is to falsely advertise.
I'm pretty sure you can opt out of the class either explicitly or simply by not cashing in your $50.
Just because so many slashdotters are lined up one one side of the fence, let me say:
I tried Windwaker. I played it all the way through. I never liked the stylized graphics. I'm very relieved they're reverting to a more traditional style.
So under your law it's legal to digitize any movie broadcast over cable, rip the ads out, and post them on a peer-to-peer network? Somehow I don't see the MPAA going for that.
Because, you know, the RIAA has a problem with their broadcast music being traded freely on P2P.
Baloney. Your hypothetical loses its credibility as soon as A and B won't talk to one another and prefer to talk to the radical minority party C and adopt its radical policy initiatives. The parliamentary system doesn't work that way. If that happens, A's voters are horrified by its sudden radicalism and vote for B, which then gains the 5% of the vote it needs to be its own coalition and takes over.
Whaa? CD tracks are lossy too, you know. There is no reason a sufficiently high bitrate mp3 need be any worse. Turning an analogue signal (sound) into a digital format (anything at all in 1s and 0s) will result in lost information. You can approach perfect quality as your bitrate approaches infinity, but of course you can't reach it. So your objection to mp3s is really pure uninformed idiocy.