Is a mostly US concept. Various parts of the world have no fair use provisions at all.
Additional info on fair use
The "fair use" doctrine likely wouldn's apply regardless. Fair use exceptions don't provide for re-distribution in total, but for excerpted redestribution in support of educational and academic goals. Furthermore, fair use can not apply where it would likely diminish the commercial value of the original work.
As an example, say you were writing a book on cinematography. You could create a companion DVD containing 1 or 2 minute snippets of films demonstrating the techniques that you describe in your book. The fact that you are distributing 90 seconds of a 100 minute film is unlikely to damage the film's owner in any meaningful way.
You could not, however, redistribute the entire film, or even a substantial portion of it.
Oh, I got a printer with it too, an Epson MX80 which was driven by a Grappler card in the Apple. That printer was an absolute battle tank and still works although it's out of use now.
For me, it was an Okidata 182. NEAR LETTER QUALITY!!!
I'm not talking about % im talking about sheer numbers. In the 1991 Cencus there were 101 million muslim's in India. According to CIA world fact book, there are currently 126 million in 2003.
And there are 180 million Muslims in Indonesia and 140 million Muslims in Pakistan. Therefore India is number 3 in muslim population. It isn't even close.
India has the largest population of Islamic people in the whole world.
You're thinking of Indonesia. India is about 10-15% muslim, and there has frequently been extreme tension (including pogroms) between the Muslim minority and the Hindu majority.
It looks as though American and European jobs are being outsourced there in droves.. I think in another 50 years that India will be beside the US in terms of being a world superpower. In a hundred it will be the most powerful nation in the world.
The single biggest factor that made America great was that America found the right amound of economic and social freedom to allow entreprenuers to innovate and grow their businesses. This was the result, in large part, from inheriting the individualism alive in British culture, but stripping the aristocratic tradition out of it. Judging by the Indian nationals that I know, the future is very bright. The entreprenuerial spririt is alive and well in India, and I expect that they will be a world class economic power in less than 50 years, likely outstripping the EU.
I'm not sure what role India will play diplomatically or militarily. Because of the ongoing conflict in the Kashmir, it will be difficult for India to play any sort of "mediator" role in the Muslim world. I suspect that as long as the US remains a proponent of free trade, India will be content to be a regional power, letting the US spend most of the money to patrol the shipping lanes while India reasp the benefits.
In short, I don't forsee a long term strategic interest that puts India and the US into conflict, so why would they spend excessively to compete militarily.
I'm in the final stages of the recruitment and hiring process for a silicon valley startup. I live in NY, and I'd be doing "Professional Services" for their NY clients.
After a series of phone interviews, they told me "Our founder and CTO is going to be in NYC. We'll set up a face to face meeting."
My hair is closely cropped - mostly because I'm quite bald on top, and if I let it grow at all I look like Krusty the Clown. I put on my best navy blue interview suit, iron a really nice shirt, have my wife pick a tie, etc. I hop the train to Manhattan and meet my (hopefully) future boss.
He's got dreadlocks and a goattee!
During the interview we were chatting about some of the people that I had spoken with on the phone. He mention someone as having very long hair. That gave me the opportunity to say "And here I am wearing my best interview suit!" that got a good laugh from him. "That is East Coast vs West Coast, I guess." was his reply.
If companies do it en-masse, there will be a sizeable bandwidth increase for sure. If the general population does it, there will be a huge enormous incredible never-seen-before bandwidth increase.
I'm not too worried about this.
During a call, Vonage uses about 64kb-96kb symmetric of bandwidth. On-hook it uses a neglible amount - just an occasional ping back to the home servers. This is well within the "last-mile" capabilities of most broadband providers.
As usage grows, broadband providers will likely need to buy additional bandwidth up to the backbone, but that is neither a huge expense nor difficult to buy. A broadband ISP can add a T3 without much headache.
The backbone will grow pretty easily too. With the amount of "dark fiber" already built and waiting to be activated, it will at least a decade before adding more bandwidth to the backbone becomes costly.
International bandwidth might be the only sticking point.
Using "quotation marks" in the "wrong places" makes everything you "say" seem "suspicious".. Like you're trying to "pull one over" on the "reader" by insinuating theres a double "meaning" to the "word" in "quotes".
You're absolutely "right", nothing annoys "me" more than overuse of this "technique". I "literally" claw my eyes out everytime someone "misuses" quotes.
Why can't trials in the US (especially regarding technology) be overseen by judges with relevant expertise? Doesn't that seem like an obvious component of having a fair, just ruling?
Defendants in criminal cases have the ability to waive the jury and submit to a "bench trial", in which the judge is both the finder of law and the finder of fact. It is a tactic used very frequently when the case turns on something very subtle, and the defendant believes the jury might be confused. Judges have extensive experience dealing with subtle and confusing issues.
There are ways to get a bench trial in civil cases as well, but I'm not sure of all the rules.
Not to take anything away from Alan Cox, but this phrase:
...and widely accepted as second only to Linus Torvalds himself in the echelons of open source illuminati...
That's just silly. If they had said Linux kernel source illuminati instead, obviously I'd agree. But all of open source? I'm sorry, that just isn't so.
Diamond argues that two cultural families have become dominant in the world - the fertile crescent culture which is the root of today's European and American cultures and Chinese culture which has spread throughout Asia. He further argues that these cultures are dominant for no other reason than environmental and geographic reasons. Both these areas had wild versions of a variety of domesticable staple agricultural products, readily domesticable draft animals, and room to spread out.
Other "root" cultures did not have all these factors. For instance, inidiginous Americans had no draft animals while horse and oxen were available in Mesopotamia. Corn was not readily domesticable in its wild form, and several thousand years passed before the right mutations occured to make corn a good staple crop whereas the wheat, barley, and oats that grew wild in Mesopotamia were easily domesticated. When corn was domesticated, it took a very long time for corn farmers from central America to spread through the deserts of Mexico and the American Southwest to the Mississippi valley. (The great plains are virtually unfarmable without more modern plows and draft animals because of the tough sod.) The Mesopotamian farmers spread far into Russia, the middle east, and Europe before running into barriers.
Very few people outside the United States know that the president is not actually elected by the people.
Yes, it was a bizarre mistake although I don't know what the reasoning for it was.
There are a number of historical reasons for the existence of the electoral college, and a number of practical reasons that it has continued to exist.
First, consider that the USofA was originally formed as a federation of sovereign, independant nations - states - and only formed a national character around the time of the civil war 90 years later. Like one would suspect, the small states were concerned about being utterly dominated by the larger states.
Second, consider that the economy of the Sourthern states was largely slaveholding while the people of the north - particularly New England - had pro-abolition views. Again there is a concern that one region would dominate over another.
The electoral college provides a practical way to balance these interests. Basically, the electoral college sets up a system such that, in a close election, the candidate with broader support (state by state) will win.
Today, the electoral college still provides benefits. Aside from the regional power sharing, which remains an issue (though not as great as it once was), the electoral college has the effect of limiting the incidence of voter fraud. Political "machines" in places like Chicago and New York City have frequently controlled the vote in their areas of influence. Their impact on a presidential election, however, is limited. No matter how many votes they "manufacture", they can never have a greater impact than the number of electoral votes in their state. In a purely popular vote, the local political machines would be motivated to generate every vote possible, since every extra vote they manufacture could negate the legitimate vote of someone in another state, or the vote generated by a competing fraudulaent political machine.
The challenge to this lies not in refugees or economics but in engineering.
The deepest tunnel currently is in Japan and is 100m below a 140m channel. Engineering a tunnel 240m down is seriously non-trivial, and Japan is seriously hooked-in when it comes to engineering. Spain and Morocco, really have no hope of pulling this off without outsourcing the whole deal.
The tunnel would need to be 300m + 100m below sea level (1/4 mile). That depth presents numerous difficulties with removing seep water, air density, and a host of other things. The geology is not nearly as receptive to a tunnel as it was for the chunnel engineers and they'll find that it's much, much more difficult cutting through than the chalk that is present beneath the English Channel.
This is easily an order of magnitude more difficult to build than the chunnel was. I'd be surprised if it's ever built.
The depth of 400m is not a big deal to deal with. Plenty of verticle shaft mines are dug 3,500m deep. The biggest problem with very deep mining is that the ambient temperature increases roughly 15C for every 1,000m. Obviously a 70C envirnoment is not great for miners, so they need cooling equipment. The +6C at the deepest part of this rail tunnel is not a big deal.
As far as cutting through harder stone, read up on NYC's Water Tunnel #3. Workers are excavating about 17 meters per day at a 7 meter diameter, at a depth of about 200m. They are boring through granite, a very hard rock. The tunnel is partially operational right now, but will be 100km long when completed.
And before you start bitching about WW2: The US got involved because Mister Fuhrer sunk a few US ships too many.
Another poster already pointed out that Japan, not Germany, did the ship sinking.
Perhaps you'd better brush up on your history. While Pearl Harbor was the start of the US's overt involvement in hostilities, care to estimate how many American pilots entered into the RAF and RCAF with the tacit permission of the US government? What about all those Americans fighting the Japanese in China as part of the American Expeditionary Group aka The Flying Tigers. What about the US Navy actively hunting German U-Boats in the North Atlantic? What about the military hardware that was supplied to Britain, the Soviet Union, and their allies? What about the economic blockades of Axis countries?
The US was involved with WWII well before Pearl Harbor. As just a start, try reading Roosevelt's Secret War by Joseph Persico. Please come back and offer your opinions when you actually have some knowledge behind them.
Oxenhielm attacks the problem by considering first a special case called the Lienard equation and approximating its solution by harmonic oscillation. The proof begins: "Noticing that the state variable x of the Lienard equation (1) behaves approximately like a sine function in simulations (see Fig.1),we assume -- in order to make a good approximation of x -- that both state variables are dominated by a harmonic term...."
You'fe heard of the race horse trainer who hires a physicist to help prepare his horse for the Kentucky Derby? The physicist's ideas all begin "Assume a perfectly spherical horse..."
I remember hearing a story that I thought was pretty clever. It may be urban legend, or some of the details that I recall may be incorrect.
The law at this time was that any "document" that contained certain pieces of information (your name, account number, bank name and address, payee, amount, date, signature, etc.) was a check and had to be accepted as such. I have some older account doucments that actually contain a section on how to draw up your own checks.
A group of steel workers in Pittsburgh were annoyed at paying some tax or fee to the government. They marked all the pertintent information onto steel construction plates, the kind used to temporarily cover holes in roadways. Each of these plates weighs several hundred pounds. The courts required the government to accept the payment, but the laws pertaining to negotiable paper were rapidly updated to prevent a recurrence.
So no, it does not read through metal. It doesn't read through body parts. It had a hard time reading unless it's sitting in the middle of the winshield directly in the middle of the lane. Really, it's pitiful how poorly it does work.
When I received one of my EZ-Pass tags, I was also given a small anti-static bag (The kind with the metallic sheen, not the pinkish kind) with the instructions to keep the tag in the bag if I wanted to pay cash instead.
Out of curiosity, how much does a PC-based server cost to run? Say there's no monitor plugged in and it idles most of the time.. Roughly what does that come out to per month?
Simple math, but how much of the 300 watts is used for an idling PC, and what's the average cost per kwh?
I've researched this a little bit before. IIRC, it works out to about $6 or $7 a month. There are a tremendous number of variables so it is difficult to predict a particular situation. for instance, many of the "old" PCs that people toss in the corner as headless file servers don't support idling. Rather than go into a low power state, the CPU runs at full power in a noop loop. Sometimes older machines don't spin down the disk properly either. Newer machines should go to a low power state much more readily, but will require much more power while they are running.
The grandparent post was correct that running an old pentium as a firewall rather than buying a LinkSys box for $50 is a foolish economy. Of course, if one requires capabilities that the simple box doesn't provide - that is a different story.
I'm a fan of the VIA mini-itx systems for "always on" applications. With judicious use of eBay, one should be able to assemble a decent low power system for less than $300. I'm told that the 1 GHz Nehemiah based systems have good integer performance but not so good floating point performance. Think of them as about a 500 MHz Pentium equiv. Great little machines for a home file and print server, and they are practically silent aside from being good for the electric bill. If you run a mini-itx as your server/web-browser/email box and only use that Dual Athlon machine when you are actually gaming, you should see a noticable drop in your electric bill.
What do you mean by "recognized"? It is a license, which is essentially a contract. IANAL, but I do know that all licenses/contracts that do not explicitly violate laws and are by definition legal, hence "recognized" by law.
Now it hasn't been tested in court. It's possible that it violates some provision of contract law, which differ by country, but I've never heard anybody ever suggest any violation of law in the GPL, other than SCO's hallucinogenic diatribe about it being unconsititution, which doesn't pass the laugh test.
IIRC, at least in the US, there have been a number of cases in which the validity of the GPL was a factor. All those cases were settled (in favor of the GPL) because there are no "very substantial" flaws in the GPL. If the terms of a license are clear enough, there is nothing to litigate and so it never reaches the point where a judge/jury has to render a decision.
I do expect that the grey areas at the edges of the GPL will need to be litigated one day. For instance, the GPL is not crystal clear on the status of binary only loadable modules. The application of the GPL to run-time linked software like that written in Java is also questionable. The fundamental status of the GPL is quite clear, however.
Civil courts are mediums for dispute resolution. They only come into play when in these types of cases when a contract like the GPL did not specify unambiguously how it should apply to a particular set of circumstances. If the application of the contract to a particular set of facts is not ambiguous, the judge will give one of the parties to the dispute a kick in the ass and tell him to stop wasting the court's time. Hence no decision is renedered.
No money has even been stolen from our friend, Joe Programmer. His bank account has not diminshed by one red cent. He also has the original artifacts of his hard work.
For now. How about next month? And the month after that?
What Joe has lost is the opportunity to sell his software to some set of the people who might have purchased it were it not available for free.
So we agree that Joe did lose the opportunity to sell his software.
Just because people use the software at the "reduced price," whatever it may be, does not mean they would have purchased it in the first place.
It is just plain wrong, WRONG, WRONG to automatically associate failure to meet a sales goal with any one factor. There are many things to consider, including the economy, the market for a piece of software, and especially the validity of the expected number of sales, the expected price, and the expected quality of the software.
Please point out where I made that claim? Where did I say that every user of the illegally redistributed copies of Joe's software would have bought from Joe otherwise? The RIAA/MPAA can have their own foolish extremist arguments. I don't want them.
The fact is I never said that. One could reasonably suppose that some customers would have purchased the software - since many used the pirated version it must be useful software. Therefore we know that Joe did suffer some economic harm. It is difficult to quantify exactly how much, but it is greater than 0 and less than (the number of illegal copies)*(license fee).
So we agree that Joe's earnings have been diminished by some amount greater than 0 and less than (the number of illegal copies)*(license fee). Therefore something has been taken away from Joe.
Correlation does not prove causation, and copying does not equate to theft..
By your own admission, Joe's earnings have been diminished by piracy. Are we just tap-dancing around a definition? Whether by burglary, robbery, fraud, or piracy, the fact is that Joe's wallet is thinner. That sounds like theft to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Additional info on fair use
The "fair use" doctrine likely wouldn's apply regardless. Fair use exceptions don't provide for re-distribution in total, but for excerpted redestribution in support of educational and academic goals. Furthermore, fair use can not apply where it would likely diminish the commercial value of the original work.
As an example, say you were writing a book on cinematography. You could create a companion DVD containing 1 or 2 minute snippets of films demonstrating the techniques that you describe in your book. The fact that you are distributing 90 seconds of a 100 minute film is unlikely to damage the film's owner in any meaningful way.
You could not, however, redistribute the entire film, or even a substantial portion of it.
Merry Christmas, dude. How are the "Charlie's Angels girls?
I'm 95% sure I have that job doing EII wrapped up :), but I won't know for sure until after Christmas. :(
No TRS-80 pics, though... odd...
I sometime get the feeling that the computer industry is trying to deny that the TRS-80 Color Computer ever even existed.
For me, it was an Okidata 182. NEAR LETTER QUALITY!!!
I'm not talking about % im talking about sheer numbers. In the 1991 Cencus there were 101 million muslim's in India. According to CIA world fact book, there are currently 126 million in 2003.
And there are 180 million Muslims in Indonesia and 140 million Muslims in Pakistan. Therefore India is number 3 in muslim population. It isn't even close.
India has the largest population of Islamic people in the whole world.
You're thinking of Indonesia. India is about 10-15% muslim, and there has frequently been extreme tension (including pogroms) between the Muslim minority and the Hindu majority.
The single biggest factor that made America great was that America found the right amound of economic and social freedom to allow entreprenuers to innovate and grow their businesses. This was the result, in large part, from inheriting the individualism alive in British culture, but stripping the aristocratic tradition out of it. Judging by the Indian nationals that I know, the future is very bright. The entreprenuerial spririt is alive and well in India, and I expect that they will be a world class economic power in less than 50 years, likely outstripping the EU.
I'm not sure what role India will play diplomatically or militarily. Because of the ongoing conflict in the Kashmir, it will be difficult for India to play any sort of "mediator" role in the Muslim world. I suspect that as long as the US remains a proponent of free trade, India will be content to be a regional power, letting the US spend most of the money to patrol the shipping lanes while India reasp the benefits.
In short, I don't forsee a long term strategic interest that puts India and the US into conflict, so why would they spend excessively to compete militarily.
China, on the other hand...
I'm in the final stages of the recruitment and hiring process for a silicon valley startup. I live in NY, and I'd be doing "Professional Services" for their NY clients.
After a series of phone interviews, they told me "Our founder and CTO is going to be in NYC. We'll set up a face to face meeting."
My hair is closely cropped - mostly because I'm quite bald on top, and if I let it grow at all I look like Krusty the Clown. I put on my best navy blue interview suit, iron a really nice shirt, have my wife pick a tie, etc. I hop the train to Manhattan and meet my (hopefully) future boss.
He's got dreadlocks and a goattee!
During the interview we were chatting about some of the people that I had spoken with on the phone. He mention someone as having very long hair. That gave me the opportunity to say "And here I am wearing my best interview suit!" that got a good laugh from him. "That is East Coast vs West Coast, I guess." was his reply.
I'm not too worried about this.
During a call, Vonage uses about 64kb-96kb symmetric of bandwidth. On-hook it uses a neglible amount - just an occasional ping back to the home servers. This is well within the "last-mile" capabilities of most broadband providers.
As usage grows, broadband providers will likely need to buy additional bandwidth up to the backbone, but that is neither a huge expense nor difficult to buy. A broadband ISP can add a T3 without much headache.
The backbone will grow pretty easily too. With the amount of "dark fiber" already built and waiting to be activated, it will at least a decade before adding more bandwidth to the backbone becomes costly.
International bandwidth might be the only sticking point.
You're absolutely "right", nothing annoys "me" more than overuse of this "technique". I "literally" claw my eyes out everytime someone "misuses" quotes.
Defendants in criminal cases have the ability to waive the jury and submit to a "bench trial", in which the judge is both the finder of law and the finder of fact. It is a tactic used very frequently when the case turns on something very subtle, and the defendant believes the jury might be confused. Judges have extensive experience dealing with subtle and confusing issues.
There are ways to get a bench trial in civil cases as well, but I'm not sure of all the rules.
I have to agree. Also throw in Larry Wall.
I salute you! Kibo # 66
Actually, the book is Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.
Diamond argues that two cultural families have become dominant in the world - the fertile crescent culture which is the root of today's European and American cultures and Chinese culture which has spread throughout Asia. He further argues that these cultures are dominant for no other reason than environmental and geographic reasons. Both these areas had wild versions of a variety of domesticable staple agricultural products, readily domesticable draft animals, and room to spread out.
Other "root" cultures did not have all these factors. For instance, inidiginous Americans had no draft animals while horse and oxen were available in Mesopotamia. Corn was not readily domesticable in its wild form, and several thousand years passed before the right mutations occured to make corn a good staple crop whereas the wheat, barley, and oats that grew wild in Mesopotamia were easily domesticated. When corn was domesticated, it took a very long time for corn farmers from central America to spread through the deserts of Mexico and the American Southwest to the Mississippi valley. (The great plains are virtually unfarmable without more modern plows and draft animals because of the tough sod.) The Mesopotamian farmers spread far into Russia, the middle east, and Europe before running into barriers.
There are a number of historical reasons for the existence of the electoral college, and a number of practical reasons that it has continued to exist.
First, consider that the USofA was originally formed as a federation of sovereign, independant nations - states - and only formed a national character around the time of the civil war 90 years later. Like one would suspect, the small states were concerned about being utterly dominated by the larger states.
Second, consider that the economy of the Sourthern states was largely slaveholding while the people of the north - particularly New England - had pro-abolition views. Again there is a concern that one region would dominate over another.
The electoral college provides a practical way to balance these interests. Basically, the electoral college sets up a system such that, in a close election, the candidate with broader support (state by state) will win.
Today, the electoral college still provides benefits. Aside from the regional power sharing, which remains an issue (though not as great as it once was), the electoral college has the effect of limiting the incidence of voter fraud. Political "machines" in places like Chicago and New York City have frequently controlled the vote in their areas of influence. Their impact on a presidential election, however, is limited. No matter how many votes they "manufacture", they can never have a greater impact than the number of electoral votes in their state. In a purely popular vote, the local political machines would be motivated to generate every vote possible, since every extra vote they manufacture could negate the legitimate vote of someone in another state, or the vote generated by a competing fraudulaent political machine.
The depth of 400m is not a big deal to deal with. Plenty of verticle shaft mines are dug 3,500m deep. The biggest problem with very deep mining is that the ambient temperature increases roughly 15C for every 1,000m. Obviously a 70C envirnoment is not great for miners, so they need cooling equipment. The +6C at the deepest part of this rail tunnel is not a big deal.
As far as cutting through harder stone, read up on NYC's Water Tunnel #3. Workers are excavating about 17 meters per day at a 7 meter diameter, at a depth of about 200m. They are boring through granite, a very hard rock. The tunnel is partially operational right now, but will be 100km long when completed.
Another poster already pointed out that Japan, not Germany, did the ship sinking.
Perhaps you'd better brush up on your history. While Pearl Harbor was the start of the US's overt involvement in hostilities, care to estimate how many American pilots entered into the RAF and RCAF with the tacit permission of the US government? What about all those Americans fighting the Japanese in China as part of the American Expeditionary Group aka The Flying Tigers. What about the US Navy actively hunting German U-Boats in the North Atlantic? What about the military hardware that was supplied to Britain, the Soviet Union, and their allies? What about the economic blockades of Axis countries?
The US was involved with WWII well before Pearl Harbor. As just a start, try reading Roosevelt's Secret War by Joseph Persico. Please come back and offer your opinions when you actually have some knowledge behind them.
You'fe heard of the race horse trainer who hires a physicist to help prepare his horse for the Kentucky Derby? The physicist's ideas all begin "Assume a perfectly spherical horse..."
I remember hearing a story that I thought was pretty clever. It may be urban legend, or some of the details that I recall may be incorrect.
The law at this time was that any "document" that contained certain pieces of information (your name, account number, bank name and address, payee, amount, date, signature, etc.) was a check and had to be accepted as such. I have some older account doucments that actually contain a section on how to draw up your own checks.
A group of steel workers in Pittsburgh were annoyed at paying some tax or fee to the government. They marked all the pertintent information onto steel construction plates, the kind used to temporarily cover holes in roadways. Each of these plates weighs several hundred pounds. The courts required the government to accept the payment, but the laws pertaining to negotiable paper were rapidly updated to prevent a recurrence.
I've researched this a little bit before. IIRC, it works out to about $6 or $7 a month. There are a tremendous number of variables so it is difficult to predict a particular situation. for instance, many of the "old" PCs that people toss in the corner as headless file servers don't support idling. Rather than go into a low power state, the CPU runs at full power in a noop loop. Sometimes older machines don't spin down the disk properly either. Newer machines should go to a low power state much more readily, but will require much more power while they are running.
The grandparent post was correct that running an old pentium as a firewall rather than buying a LinkSys box for $50 is a foolish economy. Of course, if one requires capabilities that the simple box doesn't provide - that is a different story.
I'm a fan of the VIA mini-itx systems for "always on" applications. With judicious use of eBay, one should be able to assemble a decent low power system for less than $300. I'm told that the 1 GHz Nehemiah based systems have good integer performance but not so good floating point performance. Think of them as about a 500 MHz Pentium equiv. Great little machines for a home file and print server, and they are practically silent aside from being good for the electric bill. If you run a mini-itx as your server/web-browser/email box and only use that Dual Athlon machine when you are actually gaming, you should see a noticable drop in your electric bill.
IIRC, at least in the US, there have been a number of cases in which the validity of the GPL was a factor. All those cases were settled (in favor of the GPL) because there are no "very substantial" flaws in the GPL. If the terms of a license are clear enough, there is nothing to litigate and so it never reaches the point where a judge/jury has to render a decision.
I do expect that the grey areas at the edges of the GPL will need to be litigated one day. For instance, the GPL is not crystal clear on the status of binary only loadable modules. The application of the GPL to run-time linked software like that written in Java is also questionable. The fundamental status of the GPL is quite clear, however.
Civil courts are mediums for dispute resolution. They only come into play when in these types of cases when a contract like the GPL did not specify unambiguously how it should apply to a particular set of circumstances. If the application of the contract to a particular set of facts is not ambiguous, the judge will give one of the parties to the dispute a kick in the ass and tell him to stop wasting the court's time. Hence no decision is renedered.
Of course... With windows all you see is blue
Of course, the NWS is using Linux to replace HP-UX workstations.
I find the pornography subtext both blatent and offensive
You have a source for blatent and offensive porn? Please share it!
For now. How about next month? And the month after that?
So we agree that Joe did lose the opportunity to sell his software.
Please point out where I made that claim? Where did I say that every user of the illegally redistributed copies of Joe's software would have bought from Joe otherwise? The RIAA/MPAA can have their own foolish extremist arguments. I don't want them.
The fact is I never said that. One could reasonably suppose that some customers would have purchased the software - since many used the pirated version it must be useful software. Therefore we know that Joe did suffer some economic harm. It is difficult to quantify exactly how much, but it is greater than 0 and less than (the number of illegal copies)*(license fee).
So we agree that Joe's earnings have been diminished by some amount greater than 0 and less than (the number of illegal copies)*(license fee). Therefore something has been taken away from Joe.
By your own admission, Joe's earnings have been diminished by piracy. Are we just tap-dancing around a definition? Whether by burglary, robbery, fraud, or piracy, the fact is that Joe's wallet is thinner. That sounds like theft to me.