I'm not saying your wrong, but the evidence you've given only proves correlation, not causation.
It could well be that HIV is an opportunistic infection that happens when some unknown virus causes AIDS. Or that HIV works in tandem with another virus to cause AIDS.
At one stage there were some cases of HIV not leading to AIDS that have not been explained, though I don't know if that's still true.
Given the medical establishment's very poor record on comparatively simple diseases like stomach ulcers (helicobacter pylori) I am inclined to be very wary of evidence from studies funded by drug companies with a major financial interest in perpetual treatments, not cures.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
f your answer involves "open source" then you can stop right there. Nobody (except about half the slashdot audience) gives a rat's ass about source code as long as the software works properly.
Nonsense. Everybody cares when they have to pay more because of cosy licensing deals with no realistic competition, unfixable software, hidden gotcha's and perpetual monopoly rents amongst many other problems.
Open-ness matters to everybody, either directly or indirectly, and closed source marketing 'droids trying to obscure that fact doesn't make it any less true.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance - Thomas Jefferson.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
As a user I look forward to quality and usability improvements from this.
As a user I do not look forward to even more braindead industrial design by idiot designers who confuse artistic "creativity" (blech) with function.
A GUI is the language the computer uses to interact with the user. Being creative with that language may or may not be entertaining but it's unlikely to be be good communication for day-to-day tasks.
Standards matter, in language as much as any other field. The shit that industry designers force on us may be good marketting but it's often trash. Mainly because it was written for the average marketer and not the average consumer. e.g. for just one example look at the unusability of the majority of VCR's by the majority of consumers. Let alone mobiles, PC's and car computers. Even house airconditioning controllers and dishwashers. The functional "design" is in general appalling.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
The latter is a reaction to the former, and does not suprise me in the least.
No, it's revenue stream maximization by the media cartels, nothing more. Just look at the abortion that is the mobile ringtone "industry". Media cartels would be buying law and DRM'ing to the hilt whether or not sharing was happening.
Sharing of media by consumers is just life as usual - people have been sharing songs since before recorded history.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
But if you make one copy of Star Wars and one copy of Empire, then you could be liable for $300,000, since there are two works infringed upon now, not just the one.
And there in a nutshell is a big part of why the general population does not and will not take copyright law seriously.
Even the general population understands that level of numerical idiocy.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
You're mistaken. OOo Calc has a user interface and functionality similar to M$Excel, including full online help. M$Excel is currently king because of inertia, the economic network effect and marketing, not because it's vastly superior.
---
Are you thinking long term? Just because a TCO may be good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
You can't do a tenth of the stuff you can do in Excel in Calc.
And I'm not even talking about VBA scripting.
Sure, you can make a table with your friends names, their screen names, their favorite colors and their girl friends, but try doing some hardcore data analysis and you will be left dead in the water.
You are mistaken.
Calc has more than 360 functions including a variety of data analysis functions, full scripting in several languages, DataPilot, charting and graphics.
If Excel can be said to do "hard core data analysis" at all then Calc does as well.
It's a country of a billion people, more than three times the size of the USA's three hundred million. India is sensibly using the expertese they have to do all of the above and much, much more.
Investment in a space program now will give them long term dividends, both now and into the future. As just one example now weather and resources satellites give them a big per capita payoff. Other posts here list more.
M$ is doing eveything in its power to reduce interroperability when they can get away with it, up to and including treacherous computing (TC), close M$Word formats and patented FAT file systems.
Even if they decided to use more OSS they'd certainly make sure to minimize interoperability.
In any case they're raking in $40,000,000,000+ per year because of the economic network effect. And expending almost nothing to earn it. Spending a once off billion or two to develop software instead of using OSS is in the noise.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
One course should be enough to at least cover the crucial basics.
I agree with you in part but you need to be careful. If software student learns more about law then they're learning less about software.
A lot of law is like real life nomic, an arms race where the only winners are the lawyers. By putting more legal expertese into the community all you're doing is raising the bar overall so people waste even more resources on legal manoeuvres rather than actually producing something worthwhile.
---
The USA and Europe should harmonize their software patent laws with China and India.
"Information wants to be free" is a just shorthand way of saying that it's usually easier to copy bits than to lock bits. This helps makes bits valuable. Deal with it.
I think governments have no business in entreprises that involve shaping what media citizens see.
I think big business has no business in enterprises that involve shaping what media citizens see.
Just kidding, but your bias is showing.
Government at least purports to represent all citizens, unlike big business which in practice often represents only the rich. In media companies it's quite impressive how often reports are spin doctored to make big companies (i.e. the advertisers) look good. Quite apart from all the spin doctoring to make government look bad.
I trust government run organisations a lot more than many big media companies to give me objective news.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Actually it's the various industries that work in these fields that are the main problem. They want the benefit of artificial monopolies to improve, enhance, and deny to others their positions in the market.
Well, as they say the responsibility is joint and several. Just because the lawyers are being paid to do their job doesn't mean they're not partially responsible. They're the ones giving these options to the industries involved and they're the ones supplying the expertese which makes it possible.
There are plenty of lawyers who don't like harmonization and who don't like the extremes that we're now burdened with.
True. I have a lot of respect for people like Larry Lessig, Eben Moglen and many others (e.g. on groklaw) who are working hard to preserve various freedoms.
The problems arise because the "system" as it currently stands tends to reward lawyers who game the system at the expense of others. Lawyers have to have a strong ethical streak or other incentives to buck that tendency.
Unfortunately, I think it's a big weakness in the constitution that the founding fathers weren't able to consider current technology circumstances. That is, using technical tricks to do end runs around the law (e.g. the DMCA and region coding indirectly denies personal freedoms) or the fact that the mass media is itself a political player that controls public perception and thus votes.
---
The USA and Europe should harmonise their software patent laws with China and India.
Nonsense. Possibly reduced in value but not worthless. In fact, if the copier wasn't going to buy it then it doesn't reduce the value at all. In fact it increases the net value to society as a whole. A net ethical and moral good, whether the originator likes it or not.
by removing the natural monopoly
The unnatural monopoly enforced by artifical laws you mean?
on this technology from the licensed distributor, you are making the work of these people just as worthless
Please, enough with the emotive, content free language. This is not an either-or situation. Just because something has no copyrights or patents doesn't make it worthless and just because it has copyrights or patents doesn't make it worthwhile.
Current copyright law is only one of an infinite number of copyright law possibilities. Discussing these possibilities is one of the things done on/. . The lazy, parasitic freeloaders at the RIAA will never consider alternatives - they're making too much money for minimal work using existing copyright law.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A bad ruling on this could create precedents that affect you whether you badly. e.g. What are you going to do when you want to publish software bug statistics?
Something like this needs to be fought at every stage.
That's a problem with the law. The stroke of a pen can restrict the freedoms of millions of people.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Why? You seem to be overlooking the possibility that a/. poster might support copyrights if the rights were limited in such a way that effectively mirrored the GPL, but opposes broader copyrights, such as the system we are presently burdened with.
Thus one could have a consistant position that people who violate the GPL are in the wrong and that P2P sharing of RIAA music is perfectly fine.
And your example is only one of an infinite number of possibilities. Copyright is a creation of the mind. What is currently defined in law is only one of many options. e.g. Vary the copyright term. Non-profit copying okay. Copying by minors okay. Copying by non-profits okay. Copying for any personal use okay. Copying by people who weren't going to buy okay (ie. onus on copyright owner to prove copier would've bought if they couldn't copy) Every copy stopped must be paid for by the originator. Copyright lapses after n copies limited. Copyright laps on defacto standards. My sig. etc.
People who talk about copyright as it currently stands in the law being the only possibility have blinkers on.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Your reasoning is a good example of "When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
This is a common problem with many of the lawyer posters on/. - they often have a blind spot to the fact that much of the terminology and ideas they push have reasonable definitions outside the particular legal definitions they've been trained to use. Since written law is applicable to so much of human activity it's easy to fall into the trap of assuming the law is the definitive description of human activity but that's simply not the case. There is no definitive description and other points of view are equally valid.
In other words just because there's legal definitions of the terms you mention doesn't mean there's no other definitions as well. In this case I was making the point that the supreme court's legal definition of limited time is bunk compared to other definitions. It's also quite arbitrary and does not correspond either to the points-of-views of either what I regard as experts on limits and infinities (mathematicians have many definitions depending on the context) or the general populace (most "reasonable people" have the intuition that "limited time" corresponds to a small fraction of a person's lifetime e.g. "on sale for limited time" or "I'm only going to be here a limited time").
This problem unfortunately means that legal reasoning frequently builds castles in the air that have little correspondence with reality. The legal logic is solid, but just like much of mathematical logic it's abstract and doesn't reflect reality.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Welcome to the Brave New World of "limited" meaning "forever and all encompassing minus one."
Unfortunately a classic example of a mathematical amateur making a mathematical judgement. Any reasonable person would've said limited with respect to a person's lifetime.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying your wrong, but the evidence you've given only proves correlation, not causation.
It could well be that HIV is an opportunistic infection that happens when some unknown virus causes AIDS. Or that HIV works in tandem with another virus to cause AIDS.
At one stage there were some cases of HIV not leading to AIDS that have not been explained, though I don't know if that's still true.
Given the medical establishment's very poor record on comparatively simple diseases like stomach ulcers (helicobacter pylori) I am inclined to be very wary of evidence from studies funded by drug companies with a major financial interest in perpetual treatments, not cures.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
f your answer involves "open source" then you can stop right there. Nobody (except about half the slashdot audience) gives a rat's ass about source code as long as the software works properly.
Nonsense. Everybody cares when they have to pay more because of cosy licensing deals with no realistic competition, unfixable software, hidden gotcha's and perpetual monopoly rents amongst many other problems.
Open-ness matters to everybody, either directly or indirectly, and closed source marketing 'droids trying to obscure that fact doesn't make it any less true.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance - Thomas Jefferson.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
As a user I look forward to quality and usability improvements from this.
As a user I do not look forward to even more braindead industrial design by idiot designers who confuse artistic "creativity" (blech) with function.
A GUI is the language the computer uses to interact with the user. Being creative with that language may or may not be entertaining but it's unlikely to be be good communication for day-to-day tasks.
Standards matter, in language as much as any other field. The shit that industry designers force on us may be good marketting but it's often trash. Mainly because it was written for the average marketer and not the average consumer. e.g. for just one example look at the unusability of the majority of VCR's by the majority of consumers. Let alone mobiles, PC's and car computers. Even house airconditioning controllers and dishwashers. The functional "design" is in general appalling.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
The latter is a reaction to the former, and does not suprise me in the least.
No, it's revenue stream maximization by the media cartels, nothing more. Just look at the abortion that is the mobile ringtone "industry". Media cartels would be buying law and DRM'ing to the hilt whether or not sharing was happening.
Sharing of media by consumers is just life as usual - people have been sharing songs since before recorded history.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
But if you make one copy of Star Wars and one copy of Empire, then you could be liable for $300,000, since there are two works infringed upon now, not just the one.
And there in a nutshell is a big part of why the general population does not and will not take copyright law seriously.
Even the general population understands that level of numerical idiocy.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
still half finished usability.
You're mistaken. OOo Calc has a user interface and functionality similar to M$Excel, including full online help. M$Excel is currently king because of inertia, the economic network effect and marketing, not because it's vastly superior.
---
Are you thinking long term? Just because a TCO may be good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
You're exaggerating.
OOo Calc has more than 360 functions, full scripting in multiple languages, DataPilot, charting, graphics and a user interface similar to M$Excel.
While M$Excel, depending on the individual application, may be the better choice, your comment "don't even come close" is mistaken.
---
Are you thinking long term? Just because a TCO may be good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
Not all of it, even then, but yes, it does better than government.
Not when it happens that the profit is maximised by a marketing arms race. Everybody except the marketing industry loses then.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Calc sucks.
You can't do a tenth of the stuff you can do in Excel in Calc.
And I'm not even talking about VBA scripting.
Sure, you can make a table with your friends names, their screen names, their favorite colors and their girl friends, but try doing some hardcore data analysis and you will be left dead in the water.
You are mistaken.
Calc has more than 360 functions including a variety of data analysis functions, full scripting in several languages, DataPilot, charting and graphics.
If Excel can be said to do "hard core data analysis" at all then Calc does as well.
It's a country of a billion people, more than three times the size of the USA's three hundred million. India is sensibly using the expertese they have to do all of the above and much, much more.
Investment in a space program now will give them long term dividends, both now and into the future. As just one example now weather and resources satellites give them a big per capita payoff. Other posts here list more.
---
Are you a creator or a consumer?
M$ is doing eveything in its power to reduce interroperability when they can get away with it, up to and including treacherous computing (TC), close M$Word formats and patented FAT file systems.
Even if they decided to use more OSS they'd certainly make sure to minimize interoperability.
In any case they're raking in $40,000,000,000+ per year because of the economic network effect. And expending almost nothing to earn it. Spending a once off billion or two to develop software instead of using OSS is in the noise.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
One course should be enough to at least cover the crucial basics.
I agree with you in part but you need to be careful. If software student learns more about law then they're learning less about software.
A lot of law is like real life nomic, an arms race where the only winners are the lawyers. By putting more legal expertese into the community all you're doing is raising the bar overall so people waste even more resources on legal manoeuvres rather than actually producing something worthwhile.
---
The USA and Europe should harmonize their software patent laws with China and India.
Information doesn't want shit, deal with it.
"Information wants to be free" is a just shorthand way of saying that it's usually easier to copy bits than to lock bits. This helps makes bits valuable. Deal with it.
---
Keep your options open!
Your blinkers are showing. The BBC news is streets ahead of most commercial news outlets. In fact, government run news outlets in general are.
Governments are big groups of people cooperating, just like big companies. Both can stuff up, both can get it right.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
I think governments have no business in entreprises that involve shaping what media citizens see.
I think big business has no business in enterprises that involve shaping what media citizens see.
Just kidding, but your bias is showing.
Government at least purports to represent all citizens, unlike big business which in practice often represents only the rich. In media companies it's quite impressive how often reports are spin doctored to make big companies (i.e. the advertisers) look good. Quite apart from all the spin doctoring to make government look bad.
I trust government run organisations a lot more than many big media companies to give me objective news.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
I agree. I'd take it a lot further but it's a start. I'm not sure how to get to there from here though.
---
The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
Actually it's the various industries that work in these fields that are the main problem. They want the benefit of artificial monopolies to improve, enhance, and deny to others their positions in the market.
Well, as they say the responsibility is joint and several. Just because the lawyers are being paid to do their job doesn't mean they're not partially responsible. They're the ones giving these options to the industries involved and they're the ones supplying the expertese which makes it possible.
There are plenty of lawyers who don't like harmonization and who don't like the extremes that we're now burdened with.
True. I have a lot of respect for people like Larry Lessig, Eben Moglen and many others (e.g. on groklaw) who are working hard to preserve various freedoms.
The problems arise because the "system" as it currently stands tends to reward lawyers who game the system at the expense of others. Lawyers have to have a strong ethical streak or other incentives to buck that tendency.
Unfortunately, I think it's a big weakness in the constitution that the founding fathers weren't able to consider current technology circumstances. That is, using technical tricks to do end runs around the law (e.g. the DMCA and region coding indirectly denies personal freedoms) or the fact that the mass media is itself a political player that controls public perception and thus votes.
---
The USA and Europe should harmonise their software patent laws with China and India.
which you are now making worthless
Nonsense. Possibly reduced in value but not worthless. In fact, if the copier wasn't going to buy it then it doesn't reduce the value at all. In fact it increases the net value to society as a whole. A net ethical and moral good, whether the originator likes it or not.
by removing the natural monopoly
The unnatural monopoly enforced by artifical laws you mean?
on this technology from the licensed distributor, you are making the work of these people just as worthless
Please, enough with the emotive, content free language. This is not an either-or situation. Just because something has no copyrights or patents doesn't make it worthless and just because it has copyrights or patents doesn't make it worthwhile.
Current copyright law is only one of an infinite number of copyright law possibilities. Discussing these possibilities is one of the things done on /. . The lazy, parasitic freeloaders at the RIAA will never consider alternatives - they're making too much money for minimal work using existing copyright law.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
A bad ruling on this could create precedents that affect you whether you badly. e.g. What are you going to do when you want to publish software bug statistics?
Something like this needs to be fought at every stage.
That's a problem with the law. The stroke of a pen can restrict the freedoms of millions of people.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
It's whether a business can be based off the names and identities of the players.
Straw man. Just because a name or identity is not copy protected doesn't mean you can't make a business off of it.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
why shouldn't my estate be allowed to receive the copyright?
why should my estate be allowed to receive the copyright?
Anybody paid by the hour isn't going to get more after they're dead.
Unless they're a zombie.
---
The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
Why? You seem to be overlooking the possibility that a /. poster might support copyrights if the rights were limited in such a way that effectively mirrored the GPL, but opposes broader copyrights, such as the system we are presently burdened with.
Thus one could have a consistant position that people who violate the GPL are in the wrong and that P2P sharing of RIAA music is perfectly fine.
And your example is only one of an infinite number of possibilities. Copyright is a creation of the mind. What is currently defined in law is only one of many options. e.g. Vary the copyright term. Non-profit copying okay. Copying by minors okay. Copying by non-profits okay. Copying for any personal use okay. Copying by people who weren't going to buy okay (ie. onus on copyright owner to prove copier would've bought if they couldn't copy) Every copy stopped must be paid for by the originator. Copyright lapses after n copies limited. Copyright laps on defacto standards. My sig. etc.
People who talk about copyright as it currently stands in the law being the only possibility have blinkers on.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Your reasoning is a good example of "When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
This is a common problem with many of the lawyer posters on /. - they often have a blind spot to the fact that much of the terminology and ideas they push have reasonable definitions outside the particular legal definitions they've been trained to use. Since written law is applicable to so much of human activity it's easy to fall into the trap of assuming the law is the definitive description of human activity but that's simply not the case. There is no definitive description and other points of view are equally valid.
In other words just because there's legal definitions of the terms you mention doesn't mean there's no other definitions as well. In this case I was making the point that the supreme court's legal definition of limited time is bunk compared to other definitions. It's also quite arbitrary and does not correspond either to the points-of-views of either what I regard as experts on limits and infinities (mathematicians have many definitions depending on the context) or the general populace (most "reasonable people" have the intuition that "limited time" corresponds to a small fraction of a person's lifetime e.g. "on sale for limited time" or "I'm only going to be here a limited time").
This problem unfortunately means that legal reasoning frequently builds castles in the air that have little correspondence with reality. The legal logic is solid, but just like much of mathematical logic it's abstract and doesn't reflect reality.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
It's utterly brain dead to "complain" that flaws are found and fixed, regardless of how seriously security is being taken.
It's also utterly braindead to imply one bug is the same as another. This bug is a doozy and should've been picked up by a decent security audit.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Welcome to the Brave New World of "limited" meaning "forever and all encompassing minus one."
Unfortunately a classic example of a mathematical amateur making a mathematical judgement. Any reasonable person would've said limited with respect to a person's lifetime.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.