[Rant]
I am so very tired of overused adjectives, and "super" is the worst of them. Everything is super-something. Here we get three in a row, and another one further down in the summary paragraph. I don't even know what they mean anymore. How compact? How fast? How powerful compared to current units? This has gone on for years, and communicates nothing anymore. So this is my super-sized outburst.
[/Rant]
"For some time now, if ever there was anyone who wanted to be provided with updates on how things are progressing with regard to the litigation on various fronts, there was never really a site they could go and hear SCO's side of the story," he said. "We'd like to provide a venue for that."
Novell intends to continue to compete based on such criteria.
But is this move irrevokable? What if Novell is bought-out and and some new owner decides to make their profits off of IP licensing? How safe is it to assume that this makes you safe from infringment litigation?
First, copyright shouldn't last nearly as long as it does...
Second of all, I want to see fair use vastly strengthened.
What I'd like to see is a requirement to publish.
What I mean by that is that if you own the copyright -- say to popular songs of the 1960's -- you must have new product in the market every five years, or lose your copyright altogether. A lot of people get into P2P to locate stuff they can't buy anymore. They are equally guilty, even when they trade stuff the record company will not sell themselves anymore. This is wrong!
And oh, you can't hide it in a collection of 1000 songs for $1000 either. It has to be in an affordable form at least as convenient as its original packaging.
Disney wouldn't be where it is today without the public domain (expired copyright) contributions of the Brothers Grim and many others.
In some cases, not even expired copyright. For Rite of Spring in Fantasia, the composer (don't ask me to spell that name properly) didn't like Disney's offer. Disney then discovered that the copyright was not valid in the United States (so much for respecting rights of other countries and composers) and went ahead anyway. I wonder to this day if Fantasia can legally be shown in Russia.
Unless enough justices have a personal interest in the case, the Supreme Court rarely considers a case except to resolve conflicting decisions among the US Courts of Appeals.
All that the RIAA has to do now is get another US Court of Appeals to decide differently, and we're right back here again.
Does anybody believe that this is beyond their abilities?
Enhanced For-Loop (the foreach construct in C# 1.0, duh!)
How about Double Duh? For...Each goes back to when Visual Basic still had version numbers, as opposed to.NET release years and product names, and C# wasn't even a gleam in Bill's eye.
No I'm not trolling. It is the Microsoft software that has allowed me to:
Store Retrieve Burn to CD
and Listen to MP3 files. As well as: Execute all the P2P programs available
which are likely Written using MS development tools.
There are probably people out there that have only bought computers with MS software on them for the sole purpose of connecting to the Internet to download free music.
None of this would be possible without Microsoft's enabling software. After all, I locate and download my illegal P2P software using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and run it all under Microsoft Windows.
My first point is that these attacks against P2P software companies seem exceptionally selective. If this was a true attack against the enablers of this technology, then Microsoft is the biggest infringer. And they get a complete pass on this.
On the more serious note my second point is, there are certainly a lot of other people who want to determine what you are allowed to write and run on your own d@mn PC (or Mac).
All this violates my overall sense of fairness and individual rights!
the fact that Gates is one of the most philantrophic billionaires
I would reserve that honor for Andrew Carnegie, who basically sold his empire for $485M and spent the rest of his life giving away all his money to good causes. Bill Gates is a far cry from that so far.
Just as a point of/. interest, what is the conversion factor between ACMs (Andrew Carnegie Millions) and BGBs (Bill Gates Billions)?
Putting the LoC on-line is only the first step. How long before those Internet book printing stations that can create an entire book for you from an electronic image in a deciminute for $1 tap into this? I'd have to think that this would be good for everyone except B&N who are busy reprinting old classics under their own label right now.
Is there a rest of the story? I wonder. This was unlikely to damage or impair said server. The only fame the employee would have gotten would to be either in the top of the list for Seti workloads processed, or if that machine turned out to get a "hit".
Most government employees -- federal, state, and local -- have strong job protections once they've passed probation on the job. There have to be levels of warnings and chances to correct improper behavior first. To escalate this to a "misuse of state equipment" charge and fire the guy where it's hard to show that any damage or lost to the state occured sounds to me like there's more than happened than we've heard.
As for the guy's "boss", based on his statements, that guy doesn't even seem to understand the technology he is supposed to be managing. He seems to have gotten his entire scientific education from watching reruns of Star Trek.
Arizona is considering this too. And it's not the BFD that it is being made out to be. To wit:
1: Anything that makes a license harder to counterfeit is a good thing. Unless, that is, you are an illegal alien seeking identification, an underage kid who feels he (or she) has some Constitutional right to do whatever you d@mn well please, including underage drinking, or currently in the business of providing counterfeit documents to the above.
2: These things are not exactly long-range transmitters. Three feet would be pretty good for a lot of the ones I've seen. So the federal government doesn't have some satellite in LEO tracking you as you race across the desert from one dirty deal to the next. Your self-powered cell phone tells more about your location than that.
3: Everyone who really cares about his or her privacy is simply going to wrap theirs in aluminum foil when they're not using it for its identification purpose anyway. (Will aluminum foil soon be against the DMCA as foiling a technological protection measure? Right up there next to the Shift Key?)
So get over it. There's just nothing here to get excited over, unless you are a criminal to start with. And if you are a criminal, or potential future criminal, I really don't care about protecting your privacy anyway!
Just remember this: Aluminum Foil -- it's not just for hats anymore.
Took them 10 years to figure out that they're being infringed upon? Not a company I'd want to own stock in.
Or is this an outright scam? Wait until everyone is using it and then sue, as opposed to telling them in the beginning and letting them decide to license, work around, or do without.
If this has been a scam to wait until it is widely adopted, and then ask for all back royalities, the patent should be invalidated for lack of notice and enforcement, and Honeywell should be given NOTHING!
stop people from dumping boosters on people's houses
What you've got to stop are people building their new houses in the booster landing zone!
And then there the inevitable lawsuits from people who can't subdivide and develop their property because they're in the fallout area. They will want government (aka other people's money) for the loss in value of their property.
In fact, I'm surprised that NASA hasn't been sued into oblivion for polluting the world's oceans yet by the environmentally sensitive other countries.
Slashdot Mirror
So we'll be able to catch the dumb terrorists now.
[Rant]
I am so very tired of overused adjectives, and "super" is the worst of them. Everything is super-something. Here we get three in a row, and another one further down in the summary paragraph. I don't even know what they mean anymore. How compact? How fast? How powerful compared to current units? This has gone on for years, and communicates nothing anymore. So this is my super-sized outburst.
[/Rant]
Uh, what about: www.sco.com?
But is this move irrevokable? What if Novell is bought-out and and some new owner decides to make their profits off of IP licensing? How safe is it to assume that this makes you safe from infringment litigation?
Second of all, I want to see fair use vastly strengthened.
What I'd like to see is a requirement to publish.
What I mean by that is that if you own the copyright -- say to popular songs of the 1960's -- you must have new product in the market every five years, or lose your copyright altogether. A lot of people get into P2P to locate stuff they can't buy anymore. They are equally guilty, even when they trade stuff the record company will not sell themselves anymore. This is wrong!
And oh, you can't hide it in a collection of 1000 songs for $1000 either. It has to be in an affordable form at least as convenient as its original packaging.
In some cases, not even expired copyright. For Rite of Spring in Fantasia, the composer (don't ask me to spell that name properly) didn't like Disney's offer. Disney then discovered that the copyright was not valid in the United States (so much for respecting rights of other countries and composers) and went ahead anyway. I wonder to this day if Fantasia can legally be shown in Russia.
Does everyone who builds their own cars cost Ford a sale?
Would I have bought a Ford if I couldn't build my own?
Or just walked instead?
What does Ford not have now that I've stolen a car?
All that the RIAA has to do now is get another US Court of Appeals to decide differently, and we're right back here again.
Does anybody believe that this is beyond their abilities?
How about Double Duh? For...Each goes back to when Visual Basic still had version numbers, as opposed to .NET release years and product names, and C# wasn't even a gleam in Bill's eye.
Okay, but them first!
Store
Retrieve
Burn to CD
and Listen to MP3 files. As well as:
Execute all the P2P programs available
which are likely Written using MS development tools.
There are probably people out there that have only bought computers with MS software on them for the sole purpose of connecting to the Internet to download free music.
None of this would be possible without Microsoft's enabling software. After all, I locate and download my illegal P2P software using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and run it all under Microsoft Windows.
My first point is that these attacks against P2P software companies seem exceptionally selective. If this was a true attack against the enablers of this technology, then Microsoft is the biggest infringer. And they get a complete pass on this.
On the more serious note my second point is, there are certainly a lot of other people who want to determine what you are allowed to write and run on your own d@mn PC (or Mac).
All this violates my overall sense of fairness and individual rights!
And this is news???
Especially to nerds???
I would reserve that honor for Andrew Carnegie, who basically sold his empire for $485M and spent the rest of his life giving away all his money to good causes. Bill Gates is a far cry from that so far.
Just as a point of /. interest, what is the conversion factor between ACMs (Andrew Carnegie Millions) and BGBs (Bill Gates Billions)?
Putting the LoC on-line is only the first step. How long before those Internet book printing stations that can create an entire book for you from an electronic image in a deciminute for $1 tap into this? I'd have to think that this would be good for everyone except B&N who are busy reprinting old classics under their own label right now.
How about the whole world who can find any online translation service that goes from English to Local Dialect.
So when I run a Windows emulator under Linux, do I get all 20 of them?
Most government employees -- federal, state, and local -- have strong job protections once they've passed probation on the job. There have to be levels of warnings and chances to correct improper behavior first. To escalate this to a "misuse of state equipment" charge and fire the guy where it's hard to show that any damage or lost to the state occured sounds to me like there's more than happened than we've heard.
As for the guy's "boss", based on his statements, that guy doesn't even seem to understand the technology he is supposed to be managing. He seems to have gotten his entire scientific education from watching reruns of Star Trek.
3 words: Public key cryptography
And the situation where the reader can validate the card's ID against a database of valid cards in real time.
Or even hold a list of valid cards in secure memory updated daily.
1: Anything that makes a license harder to counterfeit is a good thing. Unless, that is, you are an illegal alien seeking identification, an underage kid who feels he (or she) has some Constitutional right to do whatever you d@mn well please, including underage drinking, or currently in the business of providing counterfeit documents to the above.
2: These things are not exactly long-range transmitters. Three feet would be pretty good for a lot of the ones I've seen. So the federal government doesn't have some satellite in LEO tracking you as you race across the desert from one dirty deal to the next. Your self-powered cell phone tells more about your location than that.
3: Everyone who really cares about his or her privacy is simply going to wrap theirs in aluminum foil when they're not using it for its identification purpose anyway. (Will aluminum foil soon be against the DMCA as foiling a technological protection measure? Right up there next to the Shift Key?)
So get over it. There's just nothing here to get excited over, unless you are a criminal to start with. And if you are a criminal, or potential future criminal, I really don't care about protecting your privacy anyway!
Just remember this: Aluminum Foil -- it's not just for hats anymore.
Took them 10 years to figure out that they're being infringed upon? Not a company I'd want to own stock in.
Or is this an outright scam? Wait until everyone is using it and then sue, as opposed to telling them in the beginning and letting them decide to license, work around, or do without.
If this has been a scam to wait until it is widely adopted, and then ask for all back royalities, the patent should be invalidated for lack of notice and enforcement, and Honeywell should be given NOTHING!
What you've got to stop are people building their new houses in the booster landing zone!
And then there the inevitable lawsuits from people who can't subdivide and develop their property because they're in the fallout area. They will want government (aka other people's money) for the loss in value of their property.
In fact, I'm surprised that NASA hasn't been sued into oblivion for polluting the world's oceans yet by the environmentally sensitive other countries.
Bye bye space travel!
And that's just another reason I pay them after my safe return.
But is it really fast, when you have to deal with problems like these?
It's like saying I own a really fast car, but it's in the shop a lot. Is that still the best car for you?
This should be even easier -- and faster -- on XBox 2, with it's plethora of PPC derived processors.
And they modified it how? By installing a PPC-970 mod chip perhaps??