How about strapping a few gigapixel cameras to every airliner with a little computer box along with it saving the images and using the on-board navigation systems to figure out the coordinates of in the image. That ought to provide plenty of imagery - well up-to-date! You could even create animated maps and see how the world is changing!
The real issue with banning the bundling of operating systems is that it will incur extra cost and frustration for non-geeks (i.e. mums and dads everywhere) who don't know how to install an OS.
But what about businesses? The article is talking about (well, of course I didn't actually read the article) "a burden on EU businesses". In your average company there's someone, be it a dedicated IT geek or a part-time computer hobbyist, capable of installing an operating system. If the company doesn't really require Windows to run specific software, they could actually save a buck by not paying for it! Same goes for schools, colleges, public libraries, etc. How much would it amount to on EU's macroeconomic scale?
Uh, oh. Microsoft's specification is flawed? To whom good sir is this news?
Slashdot's slogan "News for nerds" would imply that anything posted on Slashdot is 'news', which usually is characterised by 'information'. Shannon's information theory dictates that in order for something to contain information, the probability of you not knowing the value of the message being passed is high. The probability of MS's specification being flawed and dangerous: approaching 1. Ergo, this is not news!
Oh and don't get me even started on the "Stuff that matters" part here..
I'd really like to see more of university student's contribution in wikipedia(s). There's a lot of work being done all over the world by millions of students every year. Tapping into that source would really help wikipedia to grow. With professors and lecturers checking their work anyway, they'd be already peer reviewed by the experts. I wouldn't have minded if some of my work would have been shared to the community - instead of just being buried within my backups. Even lower level schoolwork could be beneficial. Reports on this famous person or that small town could really be useful to someone.
"..the GMS based service was extremely buggy, and moving from service area to service area caused an almost constant loss of signal. The device was ahead of its time."
Yeah, ahead of its time indeed! It was clearly anticipating the features of the latest 3G phones.
I can't believe you really just recommended a beta product for someone to base a company of 100 people off of... HI2u!
I can't believe you just called Fedora Directory Server "a beta product".:-) FDS is the same as Redhat DS, which in turn used to be Netscape Directory Server. NDS then is the same Directory Server which is being shipped inside HP-UX operating system and provides some of the core functionality of HP-UX (would they ship some crappy DS?). Also, Sun's Directory Server comes from the source of Netscape Directory Server.
Fedora Directory Server is by no means a beta product.
I worked for a firm earlier where we had to change our passwords every week where the password had to 1) be exactly 14 characters and 2) be ~60% different to the previous four passwords.
This is probably quite a standard thing nowadays in most firms. Luckily it's usually not required every week!
But it actually strikes me odd that this is ever required! Do they think that passwords go bad somehow after a while? It's not food, now is it! IMO, it's one of the stupider things ever meant for security. The old rule-of-thumb of quality management is that you get what you measure. In this case, you get passwords that are ~60% different to previous ones - but not a single bit more secure. And they are bound to be formulated based on some sort of technique of shifting and/or circulation.
At the local university they used to run a program which would test all the passwords against a dictionary and all the accounts that are broken would be automatically closed. IMO, this is a much better way to ensure good passwords.
Better would be to help people create a secure password in the first place. I use a small program which generates a list of words based on an input text. Words are generated so that they are pronouncable and so are easy to remember. Then add a few digits here and there, change a couple of letters to uppercase in your head and you have a very VERY good password. And it won't go bad!
I've built electric cars. (college solar car team).
This car does not get 80 mpg. It uses 1 gallon of gas for every 80 miles it travels... but he gets power from the wall, which had to come from somewhere.
Maybe you could then comment on this idea: how about having a solar panel on the top of the car which charges those batteries. In e.g. San Francisco where this guy lives, you could expect getting plenty of sun on the roof while the car is parked at your office, or at home.
How much should be invested in a solar panel to charge the batteries in, let's say something like, 5 hours of sun light every day? You could even push the extra power back to the grid on a good sunny day (and vice versa on a rainy day).
In western societies we don't eat carnivores of any kind. That's why we don't eat dogs.
The reason (I think) that we started eating pigs and cows in the first place was that they could be fed with the surplus agricultural products. Try to raise dogs for eating by feeding them grains!
Working period is 8 hours a day, five days a week -- forty hours a week. 5,000 hours is therefore 125 weeks, or about two and a half years. Multiply that figure by the number of square feet a standard bulb can illuminate (it'd be, what, about 50 square feet at a guess?), and you have a break-even point of 125 years.
50 sq feet on a light bulb seems a bit optimistic. The room I'm in right now is about 50 sq feet or maybe a bit more and I have 12x58W fluorescent lights each some 1.5m long.
Sure, a light bulb casts some light on the 50 sq feet but it most certainly isn't considered enough for office working. I don't remember any figures but to not stress your eyes while working, you need quite a lot of light!
I for one would welcome some of that sun to my office since I'm at the north side of the building!
No, I don't believe that either had a copyright, at least as we know them. Maybe something in the vein of a stationer's copyright, but that's a totally different animal. Remember that copyright laws first appeared in 1710 in England, and spread slowly. Most of Europe had something in the 19th century, but much of the world didn't until the 20th.
True, the copyright law didn't exist at that time. I was rather trying to point out that a compositions are protected by copyright laws, just as recorded songs are. The original post was asking what is protected by copyrights. I tried to point out that the composition of notes is copyrighted material.:-)
If it's an uncopyrighted performance, it's in the public domain.
Can you elaborate a bit more what is an uncopyrighted performance? I'm thinking that maybe performing cover songs or copying in some other way someone else's performance (be it music, comedy, etc) might not fulfil the criteria of copyright law. But in this case BBC Orchestra could argue that they are not copying anything, they are actually making their own interpretation of the composition, although it may sound just like any other interpretation of the same piece of music.
Could you clarify, because I think you're forgetting about first sale, if you're saying what I think you're saying.
I was saying that you could not start mass-copying the freely received CD and sell it at the marketplace. I.e. the free CD was free as in beer.;-)
Not for ideas but for your work (of art). In the US, copyright means one's right to commercially benefit from one's work. In Europe, it's basically more about being recognized as the creator of some work. (moral rights vs. commercial rights)
In this case copyright applies to the compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, etc. For those works the copyrights have expired already so you can exploit those works for your own commercial benefit.
BUT, copyrights also apply to the music performed and recorded by the BBC Orchestra. They own the rights to their recordings.
Or the protection of individual performances?
As said, both.
Can you play only public domain songs, sell it, and then have people trading your performances withouit purchasing them be pirates?
No. The performance is also protected by copyright laws. You can't e.g. record a band's performance and then sell it (bootlegs) just because you recorded it. Same applies for something you get for free, you don't have the right to redistribute it. Unless, of course, the copyright holder explicitly gives you that right.
It's strange that this issue has not been discussed earlier already. Saying that developing "greener" products, such as cars, better solar panels, refrigerators, etc, hurts the economy is shortsighted statement. Investing now to research for environmental sustainability WILL pay off later when other countries are forced to follow (due to political or economical reasons). Having leading knowledge of solar power utilisation, hybrid cards, etc. could boost e.g. Europe's economy in a decade or so.
Well, throwing some features off the top of my head:
* multi-master replication (up to 4 servers) * very, VERY extensive plugin interface * useful access logging and log file analysers * SNMP reporting * configuration under cn=config branch (updatable over LDAP) * you can take backups by sending commands over LDAP
Any copyrights expire in 70 years after the death of the copyright holder. Thus, paintings by Da Vinci are "free game", as it were.
What comes to selling copyrights, you can license all the rights to your copyright material, including rights to resell and relicense your works. You can even make a license that forbids yourself from selling your work! (this has happened many a time before!)
In Europe, copyrights are considered "moral rights"(droit d'auteur); the right to claim something was made by you; in U.S. the rights protect your privilege to economically profit from your work.
As such, it's possible to acquire an open source project - you just need to hire everyone who has worked on the project and change the license of all future versions.
There are some restrictions on the patenting of course. Like that the patent must not have been published anywhere. Elliptic curve encryption has been patented and therefore published. If I remember correctly, there is some limited time during which you have the chance to apply for a patent - although it would have been patented elsewhere thus making it public.
I reckon there will be a lot of discussion about this issue. And I think that US patents won't have any effect in EU even after EU would grant software patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Well with the "coronal mass ejection", you betcha it did!
How about strapping a few gigapixel cameras to every airliner with a little computer box along with it saving the images and using the on-board navigation systems to figure out the coordinates of in the image. That ought to provide plenty of imagery - well up-to-date! You could even create animated maps and see how the world is changing!
The real issue with banning the bundling of operating systems is that it will incur extra cost and frustration for non-geeks (i.e. mums and dads everywhere) who don't know how to install an OS.
But what about businesses? The article is talking about (well, of course I didn't actually read the article) "a burden on EU businesses". In your average company there's someone, be it a dedicated IT geek or a part-time computer hobbyist, capable of installing an operating system. If the company doesn't really require Windows to run specific software, they could actually save a buck by not paying for it! Same goes for schools, colleges, public libraries, etc. How much would it amount to on EU's macroeconomic scale?
Not to mention the implications this will have on the old 'replace-toilet-paper-with-something-that-shocks' prank genre.
Yeah, since that would require software actually to run on Vista. ;-)
Uh, oh. Microsoft's specification is flawed? To whom good sir is this news?
Slashdot's slogan "News for nerds" would imply that anything posted on Slashdot is 'news', which usually is characterised by 'information'. Shannon's information theory dictates that in order for something to contain information, the probability of you not knowing the value of the message being passed is high. The probability of MS's specification being flawed and dangerous: approaching 1. Ergo, this is not news!
Oh and don't get me even started on the "Stuff that matters" part here..
I'd really like to see more of university student's contribution in wikipedia(s). There's a lot of work being done all over the world by millions of students every year. Tapping into that source would really help wikipedia to grow. With professors and lecturers checking their work anyway, they'd be already peer reviewed by the experts. I wouldn't have minded if some of my work would have been shared to the community - instead of just being buried within my backups. Even lower level schoolwork could be beneficial. Reports on this famous person or that small town could really be useful to someone.
That's why I never get the first post!
This made me laugh:
"..the GMS based service was extremely buggy, and moving from service area to service area caused an almost constant loss of signal.
The device was ahead of its time."
Yeah, ahead of its time indeed! It was clearly anticipating the features of the latest 3G phones.
Yeah, there's no way any piece of hardware, no matter how complicated, could keep rootkits out of Windows!
I can't believe you just called Fedora Directory Server "a beta product". :-) FDS is the same as Redhat DS, which in turn used to be Netscape Directory Server. NDS then is the same Directory Server which is being shipped inside HP-UX operating system and provides some of the core functionality of HP-UX (would they ship some crappy DS?). Also, Sun's Directory Server comes from the source of Netscape Directory Server.
Fedora Directory Server is by no means a beta product.
I worked for a firm earlier where we had to change our passwords every week where the password had to 1) be exactly 14 characters and 2) be ~60% different to the previous four passwords.
This is probably quite a standard thing nowadays in most firms. Luckily it's usually not required every week!
But it actually strikes me odd that this is ever required! Do they think that passwords go bad somehow after a while? It's not food, now is it! IMO, it's one of the stupider things ever meant for security. The old rule-of-thumb of quality management is that you get what you measure. In this case, you get passwords that are ~60% different to previous ones - but not a single bit more secure. And they are bound to be formulated based on some sort of technique of shifting and/or circulation.
At the local university they used to run a program which would test all the passwords against a dictionary and all the accounts that are broken would be automatically closed. IMO, this is a much better way to ensure good passwords.
Better would be to help people create a secure password in the first place. I use a small program which generates a list of words based on an input text. Words are generated so that they are pronouncable and so are easy to remember. Then add a few digits here and there, change a couple of letters to uppercase in your head and you have a very VERY good password. And it won't go bad!
I've built electric cars. (college solar car team).
This car does not get 80 mpg. It uses 1 gallon of gas for every 80 miles it travels
Maybe you could then comment on this idea: how about having a solar panel on the top of the car which charges those batteries. In e.g. San Francisco where this guy lives, you could expect getting plenty of sun on the roof while the car is parked at your office, or at home.
How much should be invested in a solar panel to charge the batteries in, let's say something like, 5 hours of sun light every day? You could even push the extra power back to the grid on a good sunny day (and vice versa on a rainy day).
The reason (I think) that we started eating pigs and cows in the first place was that they could be fed with the surplus agricultural products. Try to raise dogs for eating by feeding them grains!
Well, never have I seen this! Not a single comment is above the threshold! Not a single Insightful comment, not a single Funny one!
Ladies and gentleman, I declare slashdot braindead.
Working period is 8 hours a day, five days a week -- forty hours a week. 5,000 hours is therefore 125 weeks, or about two and a half years. Multiply that figure by the number of square feet a standard bulb can illuminate (it'd be, what, about 50 square feet at a guess?), and you have a break-even point of 125 years.
50 sq feet on a light bulb seems a bit optimistic. The room I'm in right now is about 50 sq feet or maybe a bit more and I have 12x58W fluorescent lights each some 1.5m long.
Sure, a light bulb casts some light on the 50 sq feet but it most certainly isn't considered enough for office working. I don't remember any figures but to not stress your eyes while working, you need quite a lot of light!
I for one would welcome some of that sun to my office since I'm at the north side of the building!
No, I don't believe that either had a copyright, at least as we know them. Maybe something in the vein of a stationer's copyright, but that's a totally different animal. Remember that copyright laws first appeared in 1710 in England, and spread slowly. Most of Europe had something in the 19th century, but much of the world didn't until the 20th. True, the copyright law didn't exist at that time. I was rather trying to point out that a compositions are protected by copyright laws, just as recorded songs are. The original post was asking what is protected by copyrights. I tried to point out that the composition of notes is copyrighted material. :-)
If it's an uncopyrighted performance, it's in the public domain.
Can you elaborate a bit more what is an uncopyrighted performance? I'm thinking that maybe performing cover songs or copying in some other way someone else's performance (be it music, comedy, etc) might not fulfil the criteria of copyright law. But in this case BBC Orchestra could argue that they are not copying anything, they are actually making their own interpretation of the composition, although it may sound just like any other interpretation of the same piece of music.
Could you clarify, because I think you're forgetting about first sale, if you're saying what I think you're saying.
I was saying that you could not start mass-copying the freely received CD and sell it at the marketplace. I.e. the free CD was free as in beer. ;-)
Is it for the protection of the original ideas?
Not for ideas but for your work (of art). In the US, copyright means one's right to commercially benefit from one's work. In Europe, it's basically more about being recognized as the creator of some work. (moral rights vs. commercial rights)
In this case copyright applies to the compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, etc. For those works the copyrights have expired already so you can exploit those works for your own commercial benefit.
BUT, copyrights also apply to the music performed and recorded by the BBC Orchestra. They own the rights to their recordings.
Or the protection of individual performances?
As said, both.
Can you play only public domain songs, sell it, and then have people trading your performances withouit purchasing them be pirates?
No. The performance is also protected by copyright laws. You can't e.g. record a band's performance and then sell it (bootlegs) just because you recorded it. Same applies for something you get for free, you don't have the right to redistribute it. Unless, of course, the copyright holder explicitly gives you that right.
It's strange that this issue has not been discussed earlier already. Saying that developing "greener" products, such as cars, better solar panels, refrigerators, etc, hurts the economy is shortsighted statement. Investing now to research for environmental sustainability WILL pay off later when other countries are forced to follow (due to political or economical reasons). Having leading knowledge of solar power utilisation, hybrid cards, etc. could boost e.g. Europe's economy in a decade or so.
Well, throwing some features off the top of my head:
* multi-master replication (up to 4 servers)
* very, VERY extensive plugin interface
* useful access logging and log file analysers
* SNMP reporting
* configuration under cn=config branch (updatable over LDAP)
* you can take backups by sending commands over LDAP
And it's fast as hell, compared to OpenLDAP.
Real geeks stick their tounge on a frayed Ethernet cable.
I'm connected on fibre, you insensitive clod!
Any copyrights expire in 70 years after the death of the copyright holder. Thus, paintings by Da Vinci are "free game", as it were.
What comes to selling copyrights, you can license all the rights to your copyright material, including rights to resell and relicense your works. You can even make a license that forbids yourself from selling your work! (this has happened many a time before!)
In Europe, copyrights are considered "moral rights"(droit d'auteur); the right to claim something was made by you; in U.S. the rights protect your privilege to economically profit from your work.
As such, it's possible to acquire an open source project - you just need to hire everyone who has worked on the project and change the license of all future versions.
There are some restrictions on the patenting of course. Like that the patent must not have been published anywhere. Elliptic curve encryption has been patented and therefore published. If I remember correctly, there is some limited time during which you have the chance to apply for a patent - although it would have been patented elsewhere thus making it public.
I reckon there will be a lot of discussion about this issue. And I think that US patents won't have any effect in EU even after EU would grant software patents.
Not true in EU. Here the patent is granted based on the application date, not the "discovery" date, which applies in the US. Makes it much clearer.
A good one. :-)