The Motorola RAZR is a truly amazing telephone. It has a feature for making your credit last as long as possible. The battery simply does not last long enough for you to make a long call, so you run out of juice before you run out of talk time. The flimsy recharge socket is a pain; but at least the recharger is a lightweight, switched mode one, so you can just Araldite the plug in place, and know your recharger will always be handy.
All Nokia phones use the same recharger; and there is an old Nokia recharger somewhere in every home or office, that went with someone's old 5110 or 3210. So you could be forgiven for thinking that a Nokia would be a good choice for your next phone. However, Nokia phones are as ugly as sin and getting uglier. One day soon, somebody will poke out their own eyes rather than look at a Nokia phone.
Whilst Nokia phones have been getting uglier, Sony Ericsson phones have been getting prettier. And more reliable -- the veritable k750i seems to be able to last for up to a whole day without crashing! But they're part of Sony. 'Nuff said already.
Now, that's just broken. You can't prove when something was invented. Was it the night someone had a dream with the idea in it? Was it the day they started work building it? Or the day the prototype was first tested and found to work? None of these events would be officially recorded, and could be falsified far too easily {most camcorders allow you to set the date and time to anything you like.....} There is an official record, however, of the date that you take your paperwork to the Town Hall, Patent Office or wherever; in fact, there would be an official record if you phoned them up in advance to tell them you were coming with an invention.
Going by date of filing is the only really fair way to award patents. It encourages people to file patents as soon as possible -- which, of course, means that they will expire and pass to the Public Domain as soon as possible. And getting inventions into the Public Domain is the real intent behind the system -- the "reward" of temporary exclusivity is a part of the means, not the end.
Suppose A invents something but keeps it a secret. Then B comes along, and invents the same thing completely, and demonstrably, independently of A. Now B is free to apply for a patent and seek backing -- leaving A in the lurch, unless A can prove to the satisfaction of a court that B stole A's secret. Which B didn't, because B invented it independently and didn't even know of the existence of the secret.
That's what would stop people from keeping things secret: the fact that inventions sometimes cry out to more than one person. How about Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison? Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray? Hell, the second I heard that someone had invented a fridge door that could be opened from either side without mucking about swapping hinges and handles over, I knew exactly how to make one. But I don't expect anyone to believe me on that one:)
This sounds like "Age of Plenty" economics talking, and it's a lot different from the "age of scarcity" that should have come to an end years ago -- except that those who stood to lose the most from the transition from scarcity to plenty started a war just to keep the scarcity going.
In the Age of Plenty, everyone will be allocated an equal share of the sum total of the resources available to Humankind {today this means the Earth's resources, tomorrow who knows?} -- but which must be given back in full when they die. Obviously this means you can't do anything like burning oil, because then you can't give it back -- but things like metals can be melted down when done with, and you can use up all the plant and animal products you can grow on your allocation of land.
It's all very different from what we have today, and it's almost understandable that people would seek to prevent it; it's the greatest change that Humankind has ever faced. I think a Stone-age hunter-gatherer probably would understand today's society easier than someone today would understand the coming Age of Plenty. But that's still no reason not to press ahead.
First let me say I don't hate mathematics at all. In fact, I took my O-level maths a year early, did additional maths alt. O-level in my fifth year {the last year of O-levels, before the introduction of GCSEs}, then took my A-level maths a year early and did Further maths in my second year sixth -- so I have four qualifications in the subject, plus a B.Eng. which {it's been said} contains just as much mathematics as a mathematics degree.
Mathematics belongs to everyone, and it's simply not reasonable to patent it. If you can patent a way of compressing data {which is really just a mathematical operation -- or a series of mathematical operations, which can be taken to the nth degree}, then can you patent more abstract mathematical operations? Everything in Nature is representable mathematically. Think how much you would owe in royalties if someone patented the function y = sin(x)..... though they'd end up splitting them with whoever owned the patent on y = cos(x)! And then what if someone owned a patent on the differential equation d2y/dx2 = -y? It's ridiculous even to think about it. Could you patent multiplying a vector by a vector, and getting a scalar? You might own every joule of kinetic energy in the world!
Someone spends months or years finding a really good way to factor very large numbers, doesn't that deserve a reward of some sort?
The only reward it deserves is the satisfaction of having done it, and to have your name associated with it for the duration of living memory. It certainly does not deserve exclusivity. Patents on mathematics are about the ultimate dog-in-a-manger-ism.
Beside which, the method existed, in its own abstract little sort of a way, even before you discovered it or found a use for it.
Once "Inventor I" has an official description of their invention, which combines the two elements: proof that it works, and a temporary monopoly on its use, they can go and show that to any company. If the first one doesn't want to know, they can try another, and another, and so on. By looking at the patent, they've already committed themselves not to exploit the invention commercially as long as the patent remains in force. Of course, it's possible that nobody would be interested, and the patent would lapse. But then anyone could build the invention, without the protection of the patent. So, by waiting out the two years as you suggest, a company won't have to pay the inventor any royalties; but they also miss out on the best part of twenty years without direct competition. And every moment of those two years adds to the risk that another company will be interested in the invention, licence the patent and hold them out of business for at least 18 years.
If you had the knowledge to build a cold fusion reactor, you can bank on someone wanting that, and wanting it to themselves for as long as possible.
I can think of a few good places for where to start reforming the system. Demand that the inventor demonstrate a functional prototype before a patent is issued. This always used to be done {a patent could actually be annulled by destroying the only prototype}. A patent application which is not supported by a prototype is nothing but a work of science fiction. Annul any unworked patents after two years. Don't allow people to sit on patents in the hope that someone else will make use of them; force them to make use of their inventions or forfeit the privilege of a patent. Pay a bounty for evidence of prior art which could be had from the non-refundable deposit. This would encourage people to search for prior art which could be used to block patent applications. No patents on mathematics. This should be obvious.
Yes, but it's true: there really are people out there who really do believe that God really is really real and the Bible really is really true.
There really are people out there who literally believe all that stuff, as though it was true.
The problem is that most rational people simply can't accept that anyone could be that irrational; their perception filters block it. But people can be that irrational -- look at the history of Europe in the Middle Ages. The Middle East is at about the same stage now as we were then {except they have electricity and guns}. And it's scary.
The gas laws hold up fairly well actually..... they break down where the assumption on which they are founded {which is, that the molecules themselves are negligible compared to the space between them} breaks down. In other words, high pressures {when you have lots of molecules crammed into not much space} and low temperatures {when the vibration of the molecules due to temperature is not enough to overcome the attractive force between molecules}.
Under these conditions, gases tend to stop being gases.
Re:Muslims offended by cartoon but not by murder
on
NASA Science Under Attack
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
When your five-year-old has an Imaginary Friend whom they blame for their own wrongdoings -- the I.F. either did it, or made them do it -- then it's time for Mr and Mrs Spank to pay a visit to Bottyville.
So why do we put up with adults having Imaginary Friends, if their Imaginary Friend is called "God" ?
The SIM is "your" identity. You used to be able to pop any SIM in any phone, and that phone would answer to your number and show your credit level. {But then, phone companies started locking phones to accept only their own SIMs; fortunately there are ways around this.} But the phone itself has an identity of its own; its IMEI, which is basically a kind of serial number. IMEIs are hard to falsify properly {though if you do ever want one for some purpose, you can always put a bag in a public place with a sign "RECYCLE YOUR USED MOBILE PHONE HERE" -- not many people report the scrapping of their mobile to the appropriate authorities, so its old IMEI is most probably still valid}. You will need to give a phone a new IMEI if it has been reported stolen.
If the phone is powered off {battery removed if absolutely paranoid} or inside a Faraday cage, then it cannot report its whereabouts. Calls will start going to voicemail until the SIM next registers with a base station.
The best way to avoid being tracked is to leave your phone in a known safe place, and just divert all your calls to another phone that nobody knows about. However, you will then have to pay for the second leg of the diverted calls. Worse, if the phone runs out of credit, they will all go to voicemail -- and then you'll have to put on credit just to listen to them!
No; the Mondeo will out-perform the BMW, thanks to its front-wheel drive. Pull something, and it can only ever come towards you; push it, and it has 180 degrees' worth of directions to choose from. Remember, most "real world" driving consists of sitting in a traffic jam, occasionally bringing up the clutch pedal to creep a few centimetres forward {lest someone try to overtake you [bonus points if it's on the nearside] and get into the gap} and then braking. The twisty mountain roads you see in advertisements are not representative of real-world conditions {and I wouldn't dare travel on such a road in a back-end-drive anyway}.
No need for expensive software, just use something like this;
<? if (preg_match("/googlebot/i", $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"])) { # google's version } else { # everyone else's version }; ?>
And wait to get delisted.
I sometimes use "googlebot" as a browser ident string. It tends to get you into places that otherwise expect a subscription.....
Re:No, Google is only dictating how you Do No Evil
on
Google Delists BMW-Germany
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you configure Firefox to accept Google's cookie for the session only, and access Google via a different random open proxy each day, then they aren't even able to save that much information about you. The ten-results-per-page default is a bit of a bummer; but it's still nothing that can't be got around with a simple local proxyserver, in a few lines of Perl, just to send a sanitised version of the preferences cookie to Google {via the proxy-of-the-day of course}.
If I have a lighted candle, and you light your candle from it, my room does not get any darker. Likewise, if you have a piece of software, and I make a copy of it using my materials and my equipment, you still have the software: it can be shared, without being diminished by the act of sharing.
Regardless of the amount of time and money {some of which was actually other people's time and money} you have invested in the production of your software, it was entirely your choice to do so. You were fully aware that your software could and would be shared, that it would in fact be physically impossible to prevent this, and yet you went ahead and spent time and money developing 8080 BASIC.
We did not ask you to create BASIC. You did, but this does not mean that you have some automatic right to get paid for it. Cut your losses and be glad of the $2 per hour you have earned. It is still $2 more than you deserve.
Programmers have to eat, but they do not have to program.
Basically, what GPL3 says is that copying a work which is covered by GPL3 will never be subject to action under the US DMCA {or other analogous legislation elsewhere in the world}. However, all remaining provisions of the law still apply. This means that if a GPL3-licenced Work is distributed on some medium which unavoidably includes copy-protection measures, you are not breaking the DMCA et am by doing any act necessary to copy that GPL3-licenced Work.
Suppose you wake up one morning in the future and you find that the only way to get a program that you wrote to work on somebody else's computer which they want you to do involves bypassing a technological protection measure..... perhaps the latest generation of storage devices associate themselves with a specific machine {so what you saved on the card won't load into any other computer except the one it was saved from}, or are bought with pre-installed, digitally-signed software; and in order to get a program you saved on your PC to run on someone else's PC, then you would have to fake a digital signature. This is exactly what Microsoft, the MPAA and RIAA want to see in the long run.
The DMCA is essentially flawed because it is based around the presumption that a copyright holder will never, ever give permission for anyone else to copy their Work {which, of course, is what the GPL was founded on; it gives explicit permission to copy a copyrighted Work, subject to conditions that amount to you not abusing the privilege}. It even seems to prohibit decrypting an encrypted message even if you are the rightful intended recipient of that message. That is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to begin explaining; but it would be foolish {at least in the USA, where the law is taken much more seriously} to rely on the Police and/or the Courts not to enforce unjust laws. GPL3 section 3 is an attempt to provide for such a case.
It's an ultimatum. If you want to use our software; you pretty much have to give up your copyright legal protections.
The Microsoft EULA is an ultimatum: if you want to use our software, you have to {at least pretend to} give up your Fair Dealing / Fair Use rights. I happen to value those rights, and wouldn't sign them away even if that were legally possible, so I don't use software which comes with such a restrictive licence agreement. If you as a developer don't believe in users' rights, then surely the logical thing to do is not to base your work on software which comes with a licence guaranteeing users their rights.
The problem is; owner rights and users rights.
What problem? Software doesn't have owners. To be owned, something must be capable of being destroyed. I think you mean the creator's right; which is this: The creator of a Work has the right to have their name associated with that Work, including all derivatives based on non-trivial portions, for the duration of living memory. GPL3 provides for this. Users have four rights: the right to ENJOY the use of the software without artificial restriction being imposed by its creator; the right to STUDY the software; the right to SHARE the software with their neighbours; and the right to ADAPT the software to the requirements of their particular situation. GPL3 provides for this also.
The only people who could possibly have any quarrel with any version of the GPL are those who want to take someone else's Work, which they have already decreed should be shared with everyone; and build a closed-source, non-shareable, proprietary product out of it, so only they benefit. Which is exactly the kind of behaviour the GPL seeks to prevent in the first place!
Has anybody here actually read and understood the anti-DRM provisions of GPLv3, or are you all just spouting off?
Section Three -- the anti-DRM provision -- basically says that any work covered by the GPLv3 is not to be construed as a copy-prevention measure. In other words, if some mis-worded legislation makes it onto the statute books -- specifically legislation which apparently makes an act illegal, ignoring that a copyright holder might well have given permission for such an act -- GPLv3 3 is there to make it quite clear that the copying is being carried out with the blessing of the author.
It also ensures that if software subject to GPLv3 is recorded on some medium which attempts to restrict copying, that any user who is forced to bypass anti-copying restrictions in order to perform a legitimate act for which permission had already been granted, has a legal defence for doing so.
YES! I agree 100%. I'd go further: if you don't make an unencumbered copy available to the Appointed Guardians of the Public Domain within a reasonable timeframe, then you forfeit copyright protection and the work passes into the public domain right there and then.
Yes, because RMS believes that failure to share, in the case where the thing being shared is not diminished by the act of sharing, is a form of deliberately depriving someone of something that should be theirs.
Rather than embrace the Age of Plenty which was ushered in by the first Industrial Revolution, it seems that some would create their own artificial scarcity in order to prolong the Age of Scarcity.
All Britain need do is pass a law that obliges DRM peddlers to make provision for the fact that copyright will expire one day {if there isn't such a law already}.
The fact that the DRM peddlers will ignore such a law is neither here nor there. The difference between "law abiding citizen" and "criminal", in Britain where most things are in fact technically illegal, has nothing to do with whether or not one has actually broken any laws.
When the copyright expires, if the DRM schemes do not include provision for this, then members of the public will automatically get the right to use reasonable force {like "fair dealing", it is ultimately for the courts to determine what constitutes this} to recover what is theirs by right.
I finally figured out how to count STVs on the fly with something like this -- but it's not very nice. Basically, there has to be one counter representing each possible way of filling out a ballot paper; and one "master counter" for each possible preference ranking. The maths start to get really hard; and you haven't even the benefit of being able to divide the papers up into piles and shove them around the table. And that's before you look at the VBU, where there needs to be some way to prevent a candidate from being voted at more than one preference while at the same time preventing a preference being allocated to more than one candidate -- it's beginning to get past the "any school leaver could understand it" point, which was one of my design criteria:(
There is no incentive for any piece of closed-source software ever to be perfect.
I suppose you have heard of/bin/cat? That is a perfect program. It does exactly what it is supposed to do, no more and no less.
Once a piece of software works perfectly in all conceivable circumstances, it is finished. It is dead. There is nowhere else for it to go. And when everyone else has a copy of it, there is no more reason for them ever to upgrade. It's not as though software ever wears out..... once you've got it, you've effectively got it forever.
IE will never be perfect, and for that matter Windows will never be perfect; because if they were, then Microsoft would not be able to sell you new versions.
Slashdot Mirror
The Motorola RAZR is a truly amazing telephone. It has a feature for making your credit last as long as possible. The battery simply does not last long enough for you to make a long call, so you run out of juice before you run out of talk time. The flimsy recharge socket is a pain; but at least the recharger is a lightweight, switched mode one, so you can just Araldite the plug in place, and know your recharger will always be handy.
All Nokia phones use the same recharger; and there is an old Nokia recharger somewhere in every home or office, that went with someone's old 5110 or 3210. So you could be forgiven for thinking that a Nokia would be a good choice for your next phone. However, Nokia phones are as ugly as sin and getting uglier. One day soon, somebody will poke out their own eyes rather than look at a Nokia phone.
Whilst Nokia phones have been getting uglier, Sony Ericsson phones have been getting prettier. And more reliable -- the veritable k750i seems to be able to last for up to a whole day without crashing! But they're part of Sony. 'Nuff said already.
Best tip? Stick to cocoa tins and string.
Now, that's just broken. You can't prove when something was invented. Was it the night someone had a dream with the idea in it? Was it the day they started work building it? Or the day the prototype was first tested and found to work? None of these events would be officially recorded, and could be falsified far too easily {most camcorders allow you to set the date and time to anything you like .....} There is an official record, however, of the date that you take your paperwork to the Town Hall, Patent Office or wherever; in fact, there would be an official record if you phoned them up in advance to tell them you were coming with an invention.
Going by date of filing is the only really fair way to award patents. It encourages people to file patents as soon as possible -- which, of course, means that they will expire and pass to the Public Domain as soon as possible. And getting inventions into the Public Domain is the real intent behind the system -- the "reward" of temporary exclusivity is a part of the means, not the end.
Suppose A invents something but keeps it a secret. Then B comes along, and invents the same thing completely, and demonstrably, independently of A. Now B is free to apply for a patent and seek backing -- leaving A in the lurch, unless A can prove to the satisfaction of a court that B stole A's secret. Which B didn't, because B invented it independently and didn't even know of the existence of the secret.
:)
That's what would stop people from keeping things secret: the fact that inventions sometimes cry out to more than one person. How about Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison? Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray? Hell, the second I heard that someone had invented a fridge door that could be opened from either side without mucking about swapping hinges and handles over, I knew exactly how to make one. But I don't expect anyone to believe me on that one
This sounds like "Age of Plenty" economics talking, and it's a lot different from the "age of scarcity" that should have come to an end years ago -- except that those who stood to lose the most from the transition from scarcity to plenty started a war just to keep the scarcity going.
In the Age of Plenty, everyone will be allocated an equal share of the sum total of the resources available to Humankind {today this means the Earth's resources, tomorrow who knows?} -- but which must be given back in full when they die. Obviously this means you can't do anything like burning oil, because then you can't give it back -- but things like metals can be melted down when done with, and you can use up all the plant and animal products you can grow on your allocation of land.
It's all very different from what we have today, and it's almost understandable that people would seek to prevent it; it's the greatest change that Humankind has ever faced. I think a Stone-age hunter-gatherer probably would understand today's society easier than someone today would understand the coming Age of Plenty. But that's still no reason not to press ahead.
Mathematics belongs to everyone, and it's simply not reasonable to patent it. If you can patent a way of compressing data {which is really just a mathematical operation -- or a series of mathematical operations, which can be taken to the nth degree}, then can you patent more abstract mathematical operations? Everything in Nature is representable mathematically. Think how much you would owe in royalties if someone patented the function y = sin(x)
Beside which, the method existed, in its own abstract little sort of a way, even before you discovered it or found a use for it.
Once "Inventor I" has an official description of their invention, which combines the two elements: proof that it works, and a temporary monopoly on its use, they can go and show that to any company. If the first one doesn't want to know, they can try another, and another, and so on. By looking at the patent, they've already committed themselves not to exploit the invention commercially as long as the patent remains in force. Of course, it's possible that nobody would be interested, and the patent would lapse. But then anyone could build the invention, without the protection of the patent. So, by waiting out the two years as you suggest, a company won't have to pay the inventor any royalties; but they also miss out on the best part of twenty years without direct competition. And every moment of those two years adds to the risk that another company will be interested in the invention, licence the patent and hold them out of business for at least 18 years.
If you had the knowledge to build a cold fusion reactor, you can bank on someone wanting that, and wanting it to themselves for as long as possible.
I can think of a few good places for where to start reforming the system. Demand that the inventor demonstrate a functional prototype before a patent is issued. This always used to be done {a patent could actually be annulled by destroying the only prototype}. A patent application which is not supported by a prototype is nothing but a work of science fiction. Annul any unworked patents after two years. Don't allow people to sit on patents in the hope that someone else will make use of them; force them to make use of their inventions or forfeit the privilege of a patent. Pay a bounty for evidence of prior art which could be had from the non-refundable deposit. This would encourage people to search for prior art which could be used to block patent applications. No patents on mathematics. This should be obvious.
The fundamental tenet of science is that all things are capable of being explained and understood.
One of the fundamental tenet of the monotheistic religions is that there are some things that one should never attempt to understand.
That is where the irreconcilability springs from.
Yes, but it's true: there really are people out there who really do believe that God really is really real and the Bible really is really true.
There really are people out there who literally believe all that stuff, as though it was true.
The problem is that most rational people simply can't accept that anyone could be that irrational; their perception filters block it. But people can be that irrational -- look at the history of Europe in the Middle Ages. The Middle East is at about the same stage now as we were then {except they have electricity and guns}. And it's scary.
The gas laws hold up fairly well actually ..... they break down where the assumption on which they are founded {which is, that the molecules themselves are negligible compared to the space between them} breaks down. In other words, high pressures {when you have lots of molecules crammed into not much space} and low temperatures {when the vibration of the molecules due to temperature is not enough to overcome the attractive force between molecules}.
Under these conditions, gases tend to stop being gases.
When your five-year-old has an Imaginary Friend whom they blame for their own wrongdoings -- the I.F. either did it, or made them do it -- then it's time for Mr and Mrs Spank to pay a visit to Bottyville.
So why do we put up with adults having Imaginary Friends, if their Imaginary Friend is called "God" ?
Not quite.
The SIM is "your" identity. You used to be able to pop any SIM in any phone, and that phone would answer to your number and show your credit level. {But then, phone companies started locking phones to accept only their own SIMs; fortunately there are ways around this.} But the phone itself has an identity of its own; its IMEI, which is basically a kind of serial number. IMEIs are hard to falsify properly {though if you do ever want one for some purpose, you can always put a bag in a public place with a sign "RECYCLE YOUR USED MOBILE PHONE HERE" -- not many people report the scrapping of their mobile to the appropriate authorities, so its old IMEI is most probably still valid}. You will need to give a phone a new IMEI if it has been reported stolen.
If the phone is powered off {battery removed if absolutely paranoid} or inside a Faraday cage, then it cannot report its whereabouts. Calls will start going to voicemail until the SIM next registers with a base station.
The best way to avoid being tracked is to leave your phone in a known safe place, and just divert all your calls to another phone that nobody knows about. However, you will then have to pay for the second leg of the diverted calls. Worse, if the phone runs out of credit, they will all go to voicemail -- and then you'll have to put on credit just to listen to them!
No; the Mondeo will out-perform the BMW, thanks to its front-wheel drive. Pull something, and it can only ever come towards you; push it, and it has 180 degrees' worth of directions to choose from. Remember, most "real world" driving consists of sitting in a traffic jam, occasionally bringing up the clutch pedal to creep a few centimetres forward {lest someone try to overtake you [bonus points if it's on the nearside] and get into the gap} and then braking. The twisty mountain roads you see in advertisements are not representative of real-world conditions {and I wouldn't dare travel on such a road in a back-end-drive anyway}.
What's the difference? Obeying an order to do something you know to be wrong, is just as wrong as giving that order in the first place.
I sometimes use "googlebot" as a browser ident string. It tends to get you into places that otherwise expect a subscription
If you configure Firefox to accept Google's cookie for the session only, and access Google via a different random open proxy each day, then they aren't even able to save that much information about you. The ten-results-per-page default is a bit of a bummer; but it's still nothing that can't be got around with a simple local proxyserver, in a few lines of Perl, just to send a sanitised version of the preferences cookie to Google {via the proxy-of-the-day of course}.
Dear Bill,
If I have a lighted candle, and you light your candle from it, my room does not get any darker. Likewise, if you have a piece of software, and I make a copy of it using my materials and my equipment, you still have the software: it can be shared, without being diminished by the act of sharing.
Regardless of the amount of time and money {some of which was actually other people's time and money} you have invested in the production of your software, it was entirely your choice to do so. You were fully aware that your software could and would be shared, that it would in fact be physically impossible to prevent this, and yet you went ahead and spent time and money developing 8080 BASIC.
We did not ask you to create BASIC. You did, but this does not mean that you have some automatic right to get paid for it. Cut your losses and be glad of the $2 per hour you have earned. It is still $2 more than you deserve.
Programmers have to eat, but they do not have to program.
Basically, what GPL3 says is that copying a work which is covered by GPL3 will never be subject to action under the US DMCA {or other analogous legislation elsewhere in the world}. However, all remaining provisions of the law still apply. This means that if a GPL3-licenced Work is distributed on some medium which unavoidably includes copy-protection measures, you are not breaking the DMCA et am by doing any act necessary to copy that GPL3-licenced Work.
Suppose you wake up one morning in the future and you find that the only way to get a program that you wrote to work on somebody else's computer which they want you to do involves bypassing a technological protection measure
The DMCA is essentially flawed because it is based around the presumption that a copyright holder will never, ever give permission for anyone else to copy their Work {which, of course, is what the GPL was founded on; it gives explicit permission to copy a copyrighted Work, subject to conditions that amount to you not abusing the privilege}. It even seems to prohibit decrypting an encrypted message even if you are the rightful intended recipient of that message. That is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to begin explaining; but it would be foolish {at least in the USA, where the law is taken much more seriously} to rely on the Police and/or the Courts not to enforce unjust laws. GPL3 section 3 is an attempt to provide for such a case. The Microsoft EULA is an ultimatum: if you want to use our software, you have to {at least pretend to} give up your Fair Dealing / Fair Use rights. I happen to value those rights, and wouldn't sign them away even if that were legally possible, so I don't use software which comes with such a restrictive licence agreement. If you as a developer don't believe in users' rights, then surely the logical thing to do is not to base your work on software which comes with a licence guaranteeing users their rights. What problem? Software doesn't have owners. To be owned, something must be capable of being destroyed. I think you mean the creator's right; which is this: The creator of a Work has the right to have their name associated with that Work, including all derivatives based on non-trivial portions, for the duration of living memory. GPL3 provides for this. Users have four rights: the right to ENJOY the use of the software without artificial restriction being imposed by its creator; the right to STUDY the software; the right to SHARE the software with their neighbours; and the right to ADAPT the software to the requirements of their particular situation. GPL3 provides for this also.
The only people who could possibly have any quarrel with any version of the GPL are those who want to take someone else's Work, which they have already decreed should be shared with everyone; and build a closed-source, non-shareable, proprietary product out of it, so only they benefit. Which is exactly the kind of behaviour the GPL seeks to prevent in the first place!
Has anybody here actually read and understood the anti-DRM provisions of GPLv3, or are you all just spouting off?
Section Three -- the anti-DRM provision -- basically says that any work covered by the GPLv3 is not to be construed as a copy-prevention measure. In other words, if some mis-worded legislation makes it onto the statute books -- specifically legislation which apparently makes an act illegal, ignoring that a copyright holder might well have given permission for such an act -- GPLv3 3 is there to make it quite clear that the copying is being carried out with the blessing of the author.
It also ensures that if software subject to GPLv3 is recorded on some medium which attempts to restrict copying, that any user who is forced to bypass anti-copying restrictions in order to perform a legitimate act for which permission had already been granted, has a legal defence for doing so.
Which of the above don't you agree with?
YES! I agree 100%. I'd go further: if you don't make an unencumbered copy available to the Appointed Guardians of the Public Domain within a reasonable timeframe, then you forfeit copyright protection and the work passes into the public domain right there and then.
:)
Or at least, as soon as it gets hacked
Yes, because RMS believes that failure to share, in the case where the thing being shared is not diminished by the act of sharing, is a form of deliberately depriving someone of something that should be theirs.
Rather than embrace the Age of Plenty which was ushered in by the first Industrial Revolution, it seems that some would create their own artificial scarcity in order to prolong the Age of Scarcity.
All Britain need do is pass a law that obliges DRM peddlers to make provision for the fact that copyright will expire one day {if there isn't such a law already}.
The fact that the DRM peddlers will ignore such a law is neither here nor there. The difference between "law abiding citizen" and "criminal", in Britain where most things are in fact technically illegal, has nothing to do with whether or not one has actually broken any laws.
When the copyright expires, if the DRM schemes do not include provision for this, then members of the public will automatically get the right to use reasonable force {like "fair dealing", it is ultimately for the courts to determine what constitutes this} to recover what is theirs by right.
I finally figured out how to count STVs on the fly with something like this -- but it's not very nice. Basically, there has to be one counter representing each possible way of filling out a ballot paper; and one "master counter" for each possible preference ranking. The maths start to get really hard; and you haven't even the benefit of being able to divide the papers up into piles and shove them around the table. And that's before you look at the VBU, where there needs to be some way to prevent a candidate from being voted at more than one preference while at the same time preventing a preference being allocated to more than one candidate -- it's beginning to get past the "any school leaver could understand it" point, which was one of my design criteria :(
There is no incentive for any piece of closed-source software ever to be perfect.
/bin/cat? That is a perfect program. It does exactly what it is supposed to do, no more and no less.
..... once you've got it, you've effectively got it forever.
I suppose you have heard of
Once a piece of software works perfectly in all conceivable circumstances, it is finished. It is dead. There is nowhere else for it to go. And when everyone else has a copy of it, there is no more reason for them ever to upgrade. It's not as though software ever wears out
IE will never be perfect, and for that matter Windows will never be perfect; because if they were, then Microsoft would not be able to sell you new versions.