Does anybody care? E-mail is a heap of toss anyway. For every one legitimate e-mail, I get about ten assorted others peddling dodgy shares, "men's health" products, replica watches and counterfeit software. And I have paid for a domain name and MX record, and own the machine to which it points.
Hotmail is an even bigger heap of toss than ordinary e-mail. Providing an e-mail address costs someone money (for the domain registration, and the maintenance of the server -- to say nothing of mains and net). With Hotmail, you don't pay anything for it, therefore you're being sold to advertisers as a potential viewer. Once you cease to be a person and become a product, you can expect your owners to treat you with slightly less care than the average National Express driver lavishes on a passenger's suitcase.
Socialism is the one that favours State monopolies. "The State shall own the means of production, distribution and exchange"
Actually, it's the workers that are supposed to own the means of production, distribution and exchange. What actually happens in practice is that the state starts out acting as a proxy for the workers; then forgets its mandate and acts as though it controls them.
I personally think that in an ideal world, the means of production &c. would be owned and controlled not by the workers, nor by the corporations; but by the poor sods that actually have to buy the stuff they make.
It's really not that big a deal. Distros are aimed at specific niches. You might as well say there are too many sorts of knife, after all, they're all for cutting; but then, you probably don't really want a machete for opening a parcel, and there are better things than a Stanley knife for gutting fish.
For businesses that want paid support, it basically comes down to a choice between RHEL or SUSE. For businesses with knowledgable in-house IT staff, CentOS or Debian. For businesses with really knowledgeable in-house IT staff, Slackware. For obsessive boy racers with pimped PCs, it has to be Gentoo. For n00bs, Mandriva or Ubuntu. If you want to pretend you're running Windows and don't care about your system being polluted with closed-source shite over which you have no control, then there is always Xandros or Linspire. All the other distributions are much less "mainstream"; nearly all are derivatives based on Fedora or Debian and accept packages intended for the parent distribution.
At any rate, the fragmentation is unimportant. Thanks to the GNU autotools, if they are used properly, it's possible to create packages which will compile and run on just about anything vaguely UNIX-like. And since nobody has an internet connection slower than 512kb/s or a HDD smaller than 80GB anymore, it's getting to the point where it is going to be feasible to include all a program's dependencies (or perhaps just the niggly little ones; for instance, I'd not expect a CD/MP3 collection organising tool using a MySQL database actually to install MySQL, but if it used cdparanoia and lame then I'd expect it to install the appropriate libraries) right there in the installation tarball, and just have the main configure script set up in/usr/local (or $HOME if you are not root) all the ones not found on the system.
Mainly, as modules written in the same interpreted language. There'll be occasions when you will hit the limits and so have to compile stuff (or install a pre-compiled binary, but that's a nasty habit that we really ought to get people out of; disk space, processor time and internet bandwidth are all cheap enough today. Gentoo proved that compiling from source needn't require more than one command, and I'll be very surprised if there isn't a neat GUI front end for Portage these days) but hopefully this will be a rare enough occurrence for people to think before they perform such an upgrade. Later distributions most probably will incorporate all the binary modules that were available at the time of the freeze, so it might simply be a case of doing "upgrade all to latest" to get something you need.
By itself, having Source Code on display isn't going to do much for the "general user". At best, more people will wake up to its importance. OTOH, it's still better to have a bigger minority who are in a position to do something with it -- read it, spot the nasties and fix them -- than a smaller minority who are in that position. More importantly, though, you have people with access to the Source Code who aren't under the influence of the vendor. It's possible -- not saying it's ever happened, but it could -- for a truly evil corporation knowingly to release defective software under the assumption that nobody would ever find out about it. If Source Code had to be made available, then this would effectively be impossible.
A licence for using a computer on the public Internet wouldn't be a bad idea in theory; but in practice, it would be about as enforcible as a licence for sex, and just as subject to abuse.
You can: you just need a hacked version of apt which uses a separate database somewhere where you can write. You can then have your own $HOME/bin, $HOME/lib32 and $HOME/lib64 directories.
Better long-term would be for people to stop using compilers for user-space applications and write everything in interpreted languages (à la OLPC). This won't help with drivers, of course.
I write proprietary code for a living as do plenty of other people here I'm sure. Why should everybody have to release code as open source? Some of us would like to get paid for what we do without having to "add value" by offering support services as well.
Some people would like to be paid for going to the toilet, but it ain't gonna happen.
At any rate, there's such a thing as software which you get in Source Code form, but have to pay for and aren't allowed to copy or distribute. There's no evidence that non-availability of Source Code prevents unauthorised distribution. There is evidence that non-availability of Source Code fucks people's computers up.
In terms of Linux drivers there are several reasons why companies do not create or want open source drivers for their hardware. The most obvious one being that you are trying to keep exactly what the hardware does secret to make it harder for your competition to copy its functionality.
You aren't allowed to keep exactly what the hardware does secret from its rightful owner. That's just Common Law Property Rights.
Personally I don't give a shit whether the drivers on my system are open or closed source, I just want them to work and closely match the functionality of the windows drivers.
And the best way to achieve that is by making the Source Code available, so that as many people as possible get the opportunity to inspect and improve the drivers. If the driver belongs in the kernel, so much the better. Linux kernel developers are by definition some of the world's best programmers.
I have no interest in looking through the code that makes up every driver on my Linux box any more than I would like to do a code audit on every version of Linux kernel before I compile it. Are you going to tell me that you have looked through the code for the various open source apps you use or do you take most of them on trust just like proprietary apps? Certainly for me this is far too much like what I do for a living to do it every night when I get home as well.
This is a variant on the Argument from Incredulity, aka Argument from Limited Imagination. As usually presented in places like Pharyngula it goes along the lines of "I can't believe ___ could have happened, so God must have done it." Here, we have "I can't believe anybody would read the Source Code so nobody does it". Same argument. Still a phallacy.
I would not want to use this particular driver as it is quite obviously a worthless piece of badly written junk but this does not mean that all proprietrary drivers need to be. Also note that this driver was revealed to be a piece of crap without needing access to the source code.
It was found to be a piece of crap by studying such parts of the Source Code as were available. Who knows what horrors would be revealed, had anyone dared look further?
For a good example of a closed source driver check out the nvidia driver. It works and has never casued me any problems. I know it has had some security holes in it but so have plenty of open source drivers.
Slave: My master is a good master! He is better than some masters, who make their slaves work in forty-five degree temperatures. At least my master lets me stop working for awhile when it gets to 40 degrees. And he feeds me every day. Even some free people don't get a meal every day.
You're deluding yourself if you think an Open Source driver would be worse.
I do think that the open source usually produces better quality software if the project is well maintained, but not this model is not suitable for every piece of code produced.
Have to disagree with you there. Keeping the Source Code hidden from end users (and -- probably more important -- developers; although
Much of the security of Linux comes from the Open Source nature of much of the software that makes it up.
We (that is, the ones who have used Linux since the days before it became all cuddly) use Linux because we want to keep full control of our systems -- and we know that i-tal software is the first of many steps towards that goal. But most people don't understand the implications of Closed vs. Open Source, and will choose -- because they don't know any better -- to pollute their system with a closed-source driver rather than forgo the use of a particular piece of hardware. There are only two ways out of that: you could outlaw the whole deplorable practice of keeping Source Code secret from users; or you could educate every single person in the whole world about the basic principles of computer security, and prevent the ones who can't or won't take responsibility for themselves from ever touching a computer.
I suspect though that what the computer industry needs in general is a more user friendly model, a method to make security easier and transparent and thus understandable to the general user. A lot of that comes with by the computer setting up more secure default settings that still allow the user to do their work. Yet don't do the "allow or deny" crap that Vista does.
The only thing that will accomplish the effect you desire is a law demanding that every computer user has the right to view the Source Code of every program running on their system, or show it to an independent expert -- even if they don't have the right to make and pass on unlimited copies.
Keeping the Source Code secret from users is, to put it bluntly, a cunt's trick.
The proprietary driver fiasco has gone on far too long. It's time to stand up and say Enough Already!
Let's all get writing to our elected representatives and demand that hardware manufacturers be obliged, by law, to provide detailed specifications which would enable a sufficiently-competent programmer to write a driver program enabling any of the features of their product to be used on any sufficiently-capable computer.
Failure to do this places the rightful owners of hardware at a disadvantage. They can only use it in conjunction with certain Operating Systems. They are restricted to using it as the manufacturer thought fit. If a driver has a programming flaw, the user's computer can be compromised. If the Operating System is updated in such a way as the driver no longer works, the user is at the mercy of the manufacturer to release a new version of the driver -- or else the hardware is unusable (or at best, usable only through a bodge involving multi-booting: at the boot prompt, type linux to be able to use the Internet, or linuxOLD to be able to print).
It's unfortunate, but this measure really needs to be brought in through legislation, because manufacturers will not do it voluntarily. There are two reasons: (1) they are paranoid of competitors {despite the fact that their competitors are busy reverse-engineering their products in secret while they reverse-engineer the competitors' products} and (2) they habitually lie through their back teeth in their advertising literature about the capabilities of their hardware, and such lies would be exposed with disclosure (e.g. a camera with a 2 megapixel image sensor, spitting out JPEG images interpolated up to 6 megapixels).
How many times does this have to happen before someone gets the message?
CLOSED-SOURCE SOFTWARE IS THE BEGINNING AND END OF THE MALWARE PROBLEM.
Open up the source code. Let the bad guys read it. Because at least that way, the good guys get to read it too -- and there are more good guys than bad guys.
On a tangent, what's the betting that if Apple sold chastity belts, Steve Jobs would have a master key that fit them all? And that customers would claim to like it that way?
Now, that's an idea! Let's make a display that is physically incapable of reproducing the colour ginger! Then, sufferers will be able to show other people digital photographs of themselves looking normal.....
Well, it's meant as a starting point for negotiations, obviously.
[A]uthors would try to hide the existence of royalty payments for the first ten years (minus a day), and then declare they just received a royalty cheque, at which point they get another ten years of protection (total of 20 years). It would be simpler to just set it at ten years from the moment of production/publication.
As long as you insist for all payments to go through a collection agency, they ought to know exactly when payments have been made -- and how much. The penalty for attempting to bypass the collection agency would have to include annulment of the copyright in question, of course.
The GPL and public domain are not the same thing. You can take public domain open-source code, modify it, close the source, and distribute/sell without restriction. You cannot do this with GPL code, which requires those modifications to be distributed also. It is this requirement to contribute-back that makes the GPL so powerful. Under your system, a binary based on public domain would be public domain itself, but there seems to be no guarantee that the modified source would have to be released. In any case, people would still be free to license their code under the GPL for the 10 copyrighted years, after which it falls into the public domain.
This does actually require another change in the law to make it work; which is, require all software to be distributed with Source Code (even if distribution is not allowed). Food has to be labelled with its ingredients and nutritional analysis, so why shouldn't software be "labelled" with its Source Code? This gets around the problem of a binary being PD but not the Source Code, because binaries without Source Code would already be illegal. (Note that when the BSD licence was drafted, computers were so incompatible that binary-only distribution was next to inconceivable; furthermore, the BSD licence actually grants you the right to distribute the Source Code even if you only received a binary. Advances in decompilation technology will leave teethmarks on many arses.) The combination of (the Derived Work is not subject to copyright) and (the Source Code must be available) together make it effectively impossible to "re-cage" software released as PD.
You certainly could place your software under GPL for the ten-year copyright; but there wouldn't be much benefit in doing so, since the Law of the Land would already offer you the same protection.
I suppose I should have made it clearer about the requirement to release Source Code. Thing is, I have a much bigger gripe against someone who won't let me see the Source Code than I have against someone who wants me to pay for software. Hell, if Windows came with the Source Code, at least I could make an informed decision as to whether or not I wanted to use it -- but right now, it's "no way Pedro" by default.
I worry that making "intellectual property" more like tangible property from a legal perspective merely worsens things. As long as the law is out of sync with reality (where, I would argue, intellectual constructs, though valuable, cannot be owned as such), the system will be ridiculous, abused, and unfair. Although your system solves an immediate problem, I fear it has long-term repercussions we can't yet see.
Well, the power to seize tangible property already exists and there isn't a great amount of abuse of that. It should not be a problem, as long as the time limits involved are reasonable. I don't yet know of a case where "intellectual property" has been seized by the courts, but if and when it happens it will make people a damn sight less cocky.
Threatening people with weapons is not normally a viable business model, because you can have them confiscated. However, a whole industry has sprung up in the USA: patents are wielded as weapons with impunity by trolls seeking to game a fundamentally broken system. (In most other
Copyright protection to run for ten years from the date of receipt of the first royalty payment, or ten years from the date of publication if no royalties are ever paid in respect of the work. Rationale: If a work earns no royalties in ten years, it's never, ever going to. Quit flogging a dead horse already.
After the ten years are up, if and only if royalties have been received, renewal of copyright in annual increments. The first year for a fee equal to 5% of the sum total of all royalties received to date in respect of the work. Every subsequent year's protection for a fee equal to the sum total of all extension payments made to date. Rationale: Works which are still capable of raising revenue can be protected for as long as they remain lucrative. Works which have ceased to be lucrative need to be fast-tracked into the Public Domain.
Derivative works based upon a work already in the Public Domain are themselves in the Public Domain and cannot be copyrighted. Rationale: Obviates the need for the GPL. If you wish to make something Free, just set it free.
Copyrights to be subject to lien and expropriation, exactly as though they were tangible, perishable goods. A court order forbidding a person from benefitting from any copyright for a stated period. Rationale: If "intellectual property" is to be treated as property, it should be possible to use it as collateral for a loan -- and the lender needs to be given the choice to extend copyright or allow it to lapse at their own option (imagine you had acquired a load of food in return for an unpaid debt. Depending upon the circumstances, it might be economically viable to pay to keep it under refrigeration, preventing it from spoiling and so improving your chances of selling it; or it might be better just to accept the spoilage and write off the debt. You, as the creditor, need the power to make that decision). Where intellectual property has been misused, it might be best to allow it to be seized and handed over to another person (or, in some cases, reverted to the Public Domain). In particularly outrageous cases, courts should have the power to bar a person from owning "intellectual property" altogether (cf. orders forbidding the keeping of livestock).
For chuff's sake, just run a kamikaze mission. Don't even bother about getting the astronauts back. Enough lives are being wasted pointlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan. If a few astronauts give their lives collecting important data which can be sent back to Earth and used to plan a safer mission in future, well, that counts as much more pointful than getting blown to bits in a war there is no hope of winning.
Every programming language I know accepts arguments for trig functions as radians.
Then you've obviously never used PostScript.
I once wrote a bit of PostScript under the assumption that arguments to sin and cos were meant to be in radians (because, as you said, that's the way it's done in other languages..... then again, in other languages you write the name of the function first and then the arguments, so perhaps I should have been just a teeny-weeny bit suspicious). It took me a long time to work out why my rotated objects were not rotating as much as I was expecting!
I took some small consolation from thinking that I probably was not the first person this had happened to, nor would I be the last.
There's a very simple reason why the Founding Fathers never mentioned privacy in the US Constitution.
Not so very long ago, privacy used to be readily available. If you wanted to have a conversation and not be overheard, you could just go for a walk in the woods. If you really wanted to make sure, you might even probe the undergrowth with your cane to make sure nobody was hiding in a bush.
The Founding Fathers never envisaged microphones, tape recorders, video cameras or anything like that. Come to think of it, they probably never envisaged a time when there wouldn't be plenty of open space in which anyone could place themself beyond earshot.
The thing is, governments can and do make laws about what other people can do or say about you, and there are procedures in place for dealing with most people and organisations' excesses of authority. For instance, you can't be subjected to disciplinary action at work because of anything you did while you were off the clock, outside company premises and not wearing company uniform. If your vegan boss tries to fire you just because you ate a beefburger one Saturday, an Industrial Tribunal will award you a nice wadge of cash and your old job back.
But to whom are governments ultimately answerable, if they exceed their authority?
I suspect that the "Britishness Test" is really a "Londoner Test". What the Government don't seem to get is that most of Britain is outside the M25. Also, the simple fact of Never Having Been To London is the mark of a True Northerner.
Remembers fondly the time I was in a newsagent's shop in London and I told the assistant "I think there's summat wrong wi' your pricing gun, duck! It says 28p on this Kit Kat! And had to repeat it about three times to make myself understood. Actually, I long for the days when a Kit Kat cost 28p up here, never mind in London!
Just buy one SIM-free in some or other EU member state when they launch over here. All phones approved for sale in Europe have to be unlockable. They can be locked to the SIM if they are sold on a pay-as-you-go tariff, but by law they have to be unlockable to work with any provider's SIM (barring RF module limitations, but that ceased to be an issue c.2001 with the advent of dual-band 900/1800MHz phones - I don't think anyone makes a single-band phone anymore). Likewise, DVD players sold on the Continent -- but not in Britain, thanks to some treaty we opted out of -- have to be multi-region. (Though, there's no law preventing you setting a DVD player purchased in Britain to multi-region, if you can find the necessary remote hack, or importing one and fitting a British plug.)
Slashdot Mirror
Does anybody care? E-mail is a heap of toss anyway. For every one legitimate e-mail, I get about ten assorted others peddling dodgy shares, "men's health" products, replica watches and counterfeit software. And I have paid for a domain name and MX record, and own the machine to which it points.
Hotmail is an even bigger heap of toss than ordinary e-mail. Providing an e-mail address costs someone money (for the domain registration, and the maintenance of the server -- to say nothing of mains and net). With Hotmail, you don't pay anything for it, therefore you're being sold to advertisers as a potential viewer. Once you cease to be a person and become a product, you can expect your owners to treat you with slightly less care than the average National Express driver lavishes on a passenger's suitcase.
I personally think that in an ideal world, the means of production &c. would be owned and controlled not by the workers, nor by the corporations; but by the poor sods that actually have to buy the stuff they make.
Of course evolution exists! How else could you explain this?
It's really not that big a deal. Distros are aimed at specific niches. You might as well say there are too many sorts of knife, after all, they're all for cutting; but then, you probably don't really want a machete for opening a parcel, and there are better things than a Stanley knife for gutting fish.
/usr/local (or $HOME if you are not root) all the ones not found on the system.
For businesses that want paid support, it basically comes down to a choice between RHEL or SUSE. For businesses with knowledgable in-house IT staff, CentOS or Debian. For businesses with really knowledgeable in-house IT staff, Slackware. For obsessive boy racers with pimped PCs, it has to be Gentoo. For n00bs, Mandriva or Ubuntu. If you want to pretend you're running Windows and don't care about your system being polluted with closed-source shite over which you have no control, then there is always Xandros or Linspire. All the other distributions are much less "mainstream"; nearly all are derivatives based on Fedora or Debian and accept packages intended for the parent distribution.
At any rate, the fragmentation is unimportant. Thanks to the GNU autotools, if they are used properly, it's possible to create packages which will compile and run on just about anything vaguely UNIX-like. And since nobody has an internet connection slower than 512kb/s or a HDD smaller than 80GB anymore, it's getting to the point where it is going to be feasible to include all a program's dependencies (or perhaps just the niggly little ones; for instance, I'd not expect a CD/MP3 collection organising tool using a MySQL database actually to install MySQL, but if it used cdparanoia and lame then I'd expect it to install the appropriate libraries) right there in the installation tarball, and just have the main configure script set up in
Mainly, as modules written in the same interpreted language. There'll be occasions when you will hit the limits and so have to compile stuff (or install a pre-compiled binary, but that's a nasty habit that we really ought to get people out of; disk space, processor time and internet bandwidth are all cheap enough today. Gentoo proved that compiling from source needn't require more than one command, and I'll be very surprised if there isn't a neat GUI front end for Portage these days) but hopefully this will be a rare enough occurrence for people to think before they perform such an upgrade. Later distributions most probably will incorporate all the binary modules that were available at the time of the freeze, so it might simply be a case of doing "upgrade all to latest" to get something you need.
By itself, having Source Code on display isn't going to do much for the "general user". At best, more people will wake up to its importance. OTOH, it's still better to have a bigger minority who are in a position to do something with it -- read it, spot the nasties and fix them -- than a smaller minority who are in that position. More importantly, though, you have people with access to the Source Code who aren't under the influence of the vendor. It's possible -- not saying it's ever happened, but it could -- for a truly evil corporation knowingly to release defective software under the assumption that nobody would ever find out about it. If Source Code had to be made available, then this would effectively be impossible.
A licence for using a computer on the public Internet wouldn't be a bad idea in theory; but in practice, it would be about as enforcible as a licence for sex, and just as subject to abuse.
You can: you just need a hacked version of apt which uses a separate database somewhere where you can write. You can then have your own $HOME/bin, $HOME/lib32 and $HOME/lib64 directories.
Better long-term would be for people to stop using compilers for user-space applications and write everything in interpreted languages (à la OLPC). This won't help with drivers, of course.
Some people would like to be paid for going to the toilet, but it ain't gonna happen.
At any rate, there's such a thing as software which you get in Source Code form, but have to pay for and aren't allowed to copy or distribute. There's no evidence that non-availability of Source Code prevents unauthorised distribution. There is evidence that non-availability of Source Code fucks people's computers up.
You aren't allowed to keep exactly what the hardware does secret from its rightful owner. That's just Common Law Property Rights.
And the best way to achieve that is by making the Source Code available, so that as many people as possible get the opportunity to inspect and improve the drivers. If the driver belongs in the kernel, so much the better. Linux kernel developers are by definition some of the world's best programmers.
This is a variant on the Argument from Incredulity, aka Argument from Limited Imagination. As usually presented in places like Pharyngula it goes along the lines of "I can't believe ___ could have happened, so God must have done it." Here, we have "I can't believe anybody would read the Source Code so nobody does it". Same argument. Still a phallacy.
It was found to be a piece of crap by studying such parts of the Source Code as were available. Who knows what horrors would be revealed, had anyone dared look further?
Slave: My master is a good master! He is better than some masters, who make their slaves work in forty-five degree temperatures. At least my master lets me stop working for awhile when it gets to 40 degrees. And he feeds me every day. Even some free people don't get a meal every day.
You're deluding yourself if you think an Open Source driver would be worse.
Have to disagree with you there. Keeping the Source Code hidden from end users (and -- probably more important -- developers; although
Much of the security of Linux comes from the Open Source nature of much of the software that makes it up.
We (that is, the ones who have used Linux since the days before it became all cuddly) use Linux because we want to keep full control of our systems -- and we know that i-tal software is the first of many steps towards that goal. But most people don't understand the implications of Closed vs. Open Source, and will choose -- because they don't know any better -- to pollute their system with a closed-source driver rather than forgo the use of a particular piece of hardware. There are only two ways out of that: you could outlaw the whole deplorable practice of keeping Source Code secret from users; or you could educate every single person in the whole world about the basic principles of computer security, and prevent the ones who can't or won't take responsibility for themselves from ever touching a computer.
Which one do you think is going to be easier?
Keeping the Source Code secret from users is, to put it bluntly, a cunt's trick.
The proprietary driver fiasco has gone on far too long. It's time to stand up and say Enough Already!
Let's all get writing to our elected representatives and demand that hardware manufacturers be obliged, by law, to provide detailed specifications which would enable a sufficiently-competent programmer to write a driver program enabling any of the features of their product to be used on any sufficiently-capable computer.
Failure to do this places the rightful owners of hardware at a disadvantage. They can only use it in conjunction with certain Operating Systems. They are restricted to using it as the manufacturer thought fit. If a driver has a programming flaw, the user's computer can be compromised. If the Operating System is updated in such a way as the driver no longer works, the user is at the mercy of the manufacturer to release a new version of the driver -- or else the hardware is unusable (or at best, usable only through a bodge involving multi-booting: at the boot prompt, type linux to be able to use the Internet, or linuxOLD to be able to print).
It's unfortunate, but this measure really needs to be brought in through legislation, because manufacturers will not do it voluntarily. There are two reasons: (1) they are paranoid of competitors {despite the fact that their competitors are busy reverse-engineering their products in secret while they reverse-engineer the competitors' products} and (2) they habitually lie through their back teeth in their advertising literature about the capabilities of their hardware, and such lies would be exposed with disclosure (e.g. a camera with a 2 megapixel image sensor, spitting out JPEG images interpolated up to 6 megapixels).
How many times does this have to happen before someone gets the message?
CLOSED-SOURCE SOFTWARE IS THE BEGINNING AND END OF THE MALWARE PROBLEM.
Open up the source code. Let the bad guys read it. Because at least that way, the good guys get to read it too -- and there are more good guys than bad guys.
On a tangent, what's the betting that if Apple sold chastity belts, Steve Jobs would have a master key that fit them all? And that customers would claim to like it that way?
Now, that's an idea! Let's make a display that is physically incapable of reproducing the colour ginger! Then, sufferers will be able to show other people digital photographs of themselves looking normal .....
As long as you insist for all payments to go through a collection agency, they ought to know exactly when payments have been made -- and how much. The penalty for attempting to bypass the collection agency would have to include annulment of the copyright in question, of course.
This does actually require another change in the law to make it work; which is, require all software to be distributed with Source Code (even if distribution is not allowed). Food has to be labelled with its ingredients and nutritional analysis, so why shouldn't software be "labelled" with its Source Code? This gets around the problem of a binary being PD but not the Source Code, because binaries without Source Code would already be illegal. (Note that when the BSD licence was drafted, computers were so incompatible that binary-only distribution was next to inconceivable; furthermore, the BSD licence actually grants you the right to distribute the Source Code even if you only received a binary. Advances in decompilation technology will leave teethmarks on many arses.) The combination of (the Derived Work is not subject to copyright) and (the Source Code must be available) together make it effectively impossible to "re-cage" software released as PD.
You certainly could place your software under GPL for the ten-year copyright; but there wouldn't be much benefit in doing so, since the Law of the Land would already offer you the same protection.
I suppose I should have made it clearer about the requirement to release Source Code. Thing is, I have a much bigger gripe against someone who won't let me see the Source Code than I have against someone who wants me to pay for software. Hell, if Windows came with the Source Code, at least I could make an informed decision as to whether or not I wanted to use it -- but right now, it's "no way Pedro" by default.
Well, the power to seize tangible property already exists and there isn't a great amount of abuse of that. It should not be a problem, as long as the time limits involved are reasonable. I don't yet know of a case where "intellectual property" has been seized by the courts, but if and when it happens it will make people a damn sight less cocky.
Threatening people with weapons is not normally a viable business model, because you can have them confiscated. However, a whole industry has sprung up in the USA: patents are wielded as weapons with impunity by trolls seeking to game a fundamentally broken system. (In most other
I would propose:
Copyright protection to run for ten years from the date of receipt of the first royalty payment, or ten years from the date of publication if no royalties are ever paid in respect of the work. Rationale: If a work earns no royalties in ten years, it's never, ever going to. Quit flogging a dead horse already.
After the ten years are up, if and only if royalties have been received, renewal of copyright in annual increments. The first year for a fee equal to 5% of the sum total of all royalties received to date in respect of the work. Every subsequent year's protection for a fee equal to the sum total of all extension payments made to date. Rationale: Works which are still capable of raising revenue can be protected for as long as they remain lucrative. Works which have ceased to be lucrative need to be fast-tracked into the Public Domain.
Derivative works based upon a work already in the Public Domain are themselves in the Public Domain and cannot be copyrighted. Rationale: Obviates the need for the GPL. If you wish to make something Free, just set it free.
Copyrights to be subject to lien and expropriation, exactly as though they were tangible, perishable goods. A court order forbidding a person from benefitting from any copyright for a stated period. Rationale: If "intellectual property" is to be treated as property, it should be possible to use it as collateral for a loan -- and the lender needs to be given the choice to extend copyright or allow it to lapse at their own option (imagine you had acquired a load of food in return for an unpaid debt. Depending upon the circumstances, it might be economically viable to pay to keep it under refrigeration, preventing it from spoiling and so improving your chances of selling it; or it might be better just to accept the spoilage and write off the debt. You, as the creditor, need the power to make that decision). Where intellectual property has been misused, it might be best to allow it to be seized and handed over to another person (or, in some cases, reverted to the Public Domain). In particularly outrageous cases, courts should have the power to bar a person from owning "intellectual property" altogether (cf. orders forbidding the keeping of livestock).
Well, Stelios Haji-Ioannou owns the copyright on the colour orange.
For chuff's sake, just run a kamikaze mission. Don't even bother about getting the astronauts back. Enough lives are being wasted pointlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan. If a few astronauts give their lives collecting important data which can be sent back to Earth and used to plan a safer mission in future, well, that counts as much more pointful than getting blown to bits in a war there is no hope of winning.
I once wrote a bit of PostScript under the assumption that arguments to sin and cos were meant to be in radians (because, as you said, that's the way it's done in other languages
I took some small consolation from thinking that I probably was not the first person this had happened to, nor would I be the last.
There's a very simple reason why the Founding Fathers never mentioned privacy in the US Constitution.
Not so very long ago, privacy used to be readily available. If you wanted to have a conversation and not be overheard, you could just go for a walk in the woods. If you really wanted to make sure, you might even probe the undergrowth with your cane to make sure nobody was hiding in a bush.
The Founding Fathers never envisaged microphones, tape recorders, video cameras or anything like that. Come to think of it, they probably never envisaged a time when there wouldn't be plenty of open space in which anyone could place themself beyond earshot.
The thing is, governments can and do make laws about what other people can do or say about you, and there are procedures in place for dealing with most people and organisations' excesses of authority. For instance, you can't be subjected to disciplinary action at work because of anything you did while you were off the clock, outside company premises and not wearing company uniform. If your vegan boss tries to fire you just because you ate a beefburger one Saturday, an Industrial Tribunal will award you a nice wadge of cash and your old job back.
But to whom are governments ultimately answerable, if they exceed their authority?
Well, that's almost exactly what we're about to end up with in the UK.
So fags are good for you now?
Just make sure that report wasn't signed by anybody named Benson or Hedges!
I suspect that the "Britishness Test" is really a "Londoner Test". What the Government don't seem to get is that most of Britain is outside the M25. Also, the simple fact of Never Having Been To London is the mark of a True Northerner. Remembers fondly the time I was in a newsagent's shop in London and I told the assistant "I think there's summat wrong wi' your pricing gun, duck! It says 28p on this Kit Kat! And had to repeat it about three times to make myself understood. Actually, I long for the days when a Kit Kat cost 28p up here, never mind in London!
Just buy one SIM-free in some or other EU member state when they launch over here. All phones approved for sale in Europe have to be unlockable. They can be locked to the SIM if they are sold on a pay-as-you-go tariff, but by law they have to be unlockable to work with any provider's SIM (barring RF module limitations, but that ceased to be an issue c.2001 with the advent of dual-band 900/1800MHz phones - I don't think anyone makes a single-band phone anymore). Likewise, DVD players sold on the Continent -- but not in Britain, thanks to some treaty we opted out of -- have to be multi-region. (Though, there's no law preventing you setting a DVD player purchased in Britain to multi-region, if you can find the necessary remote hack, or importing one and fitting a British plug.)