Not only that, but according to the article the formula's of ODF are in fact based on those of Excel in the first place. One might reasonably expect Microsoft to have some idea of how to interpret those...
DGPS still relies on you having a signal in the first place. Most supermarkets around where I live have too much steel and concrete in their structure to allow any kind of signal while inside - and it certainly won't work in caves.
You are all making jokes but you are missing the big picture. The WHO is an agency of the United Nations, and they *want* you to panic so they can take over your government! Haven't you people learned nothing from Deus Ex!?
There needs to be a clause saying that the copyright cannot be renewed when the original artist is dead. Otherwise if I sell copyright to something to a company (or person) they can just renew it indefinitely, unless copyright was made non-transferable.
But that would be great! As long as they pay for the privilege... This should be the way to attack this problem: everything under copyright, automatically, for 14 years, and then yearly payments to extend specific copyrights on a year-by-year basis. This way there is an automatic trade off between the value of the product under copyright and the length of its duration.
The advantages are that there is something in it for everyone: consumers, who see a much richer public domain; producers, who can keep profitable items under copyright forever (and the price should be high enough that this cannot be done at a whim); and the government, who gets a nice new source of income.
Obviously we need to decide whether the yearly payments should be constant or rising, and we would need a rule saying that once something enters public domain, it stays there (i.e. copyright cannot retroactively be bought back), but the whole idea appears massively appealing to me.
With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered.
Is anyone surprised at this? Seriously, does copyright ever end these days?
Of course not. How will the poor authors ever be stimulated to write something ever again if they cannot reap the rewards of their hard labour? Really, won't someone think of the mummy's?
Incidentally, I'm wondering if there is anyone on the planet who is not directly descended from the people who wrote this 8000 years ago. I think I'd like to claim my share of the incoming generated by this now please!
Unless one considers absolutist copyright maximalism to be a virtue for its own sake, enforcing copyright on such works is insane.
Say you are a really large copyright organisation. Not only are you competing with other, similar organisations, but you are also competing with the public domain. Getting rid of that competition means getting rid of the public domain, which is what they are doing.
So yes, I imagine they are really all in favor of enforcing that absolutist copyright maximalism.
Please stop responding to SPAM. If no one responds to it, then they won't make any money and they'll stop.
I admire your optimism but doubt your conclusion. The problem is that you only have to convince people who actually pay for the spam to pay, and all you really have to convince them is rumours of past success by other spam runs. If I can make you believe that spamming is a succesful advertising strategy, then you might be willing to pay me to use it.
Of course you would not come back for a second round, but hey, there's another one born every minute...
I sense your sarcasm, but economy _is_ a zero-sum game. It is so big that you cannot see all the parts, but if you add them all up they do add up to zero.
The reason is easy to see: your hard work may add _value_, but value by itself is not _money_. Money can only be created by the fed (and similar institutions in other countries), so if they charge interest for creating money than inevitably, the sum of all the money they loaned out will be less than the sum owed back to them.
It _is_ a giant ponzi scheme, and after running for about 400 years it _is_ about to fail completely. Sit back and enjoy the show, it will be spectacular...
Hah, at first I thought you must have been on my team, but there were only three of us, and none were named Johannes (and there were no cigars)
Man, that sounds amazingly similar. Although the details that I left out do differ: there were only two of us, for one thing. And in our case, the software really did suck: the design (which was done by an external consultant) pretty much guaranteed that nobody would be able to work with it to begin with, and our implementation had significant flaws on top of that as well.
The external consultant, who also acted as project (micro-)manager, spent long hours each day just watching us work, and in at least one case dictated individual keystrokes to my colleague.
Other forms of abuse we had to deal with included such joyful events as people randomly disconnecting network cables in the building and blaming us for the resulting chaos, equipment and personal belongings mysteriously disappearing, and threats of bodily harm from the companies' staff.
The project finally ended when an 'accident' destroyed their entire dataset during nightly batch-processing. My colleague always maintained that it was an honest mistake - and who am I to argue with that? They honestly had it coming, after all...
Postscript: The VP of Engineering for this company, not surprisingly, passed away from a heart attack a few years later, I heard. He was in his mid-thirties.
I'm about that age (late thirties - all this happened when I was about 25, and it was my first job out of university), and one of my priorities in life is *not* being that guy... So far I'm actually doing a good job of it;-)
Customer site. There was already a contractual dispute. Entire company hated our guts (some because of the software, some because of the contract). Were perfectly happy letting us know how much they hated us.
Were in one room with company owner. Guy smoked cigars all day long. Had two PC's + keyboards + mice + documentation on a tiny six-sided table. Bad chairs.
Topping it all off, this was in an office with a view on my grandmothers house. She passed away while I was typing code in that damn office. Was taken to task by company owner for leaving work early that day. Asked for and received a transfer to another project after that.
In Europe we customarily get everything a lot later and usually at much higher prices "because it needs to be localized first". Never mind that nobody ever supports my language (Dutch) and I am forced to play the English game anyway, I still have to wait and pay the higher European prices.
So I would expect game releases in Quebec to be both later and much more expensive than they are now.
As for France, don't expect any help. Between their new three-strikes law, and my script that automatically sends out infringement notices for every IP address in the country, I expect to be able to knock them off the internet somewhere in the middle of next week...
What else? We just start sending out trumped up charges to every ISP in France, for each one of their customers - starting with the president and the government.
It is easy to automate too! All we need is a list of French ISPs, their assigned IP ranges, and a program that sends out automatic letters for each IP address in turn.
The article claims it is about childporn, but the story reminds me more of the kind of sexual repression of young people that I normally associate with countries like Iran...
I only have to go to the next few buildings: the one across the street (50m), the one across the park (80m - it is not a big park), and that's it (my building is sort-of in a corner). I'm not going to pay for their infrastructure; if they want to connect to further buildings, they can do it on their own.
The urban sprawl in which I live allows you to reach maybe 180,000 people in that way, just moving from building to building. No one would have to pay for more than, say, 200m worth of digging. And no one would be paying for that alone; each time you can make a mini-ISP as I proposed above, with a couple of home owners together.
Would the protocols actually work with this sort of connectivity? How much would it cost to wire up one building plus, say, 2-3 outbound connections?
I've been thinking about that. Let's say I organize my building into a single network - we buy our own fiber, run it to every house (48 of them), and then organize a shared link to the outside world. We'd be like a mini-ISP that way.
And of course we could peer with the building next door. Running that 50m of cable is not going to be much of a problem, so now it is two buildings.
In densely populated areas you could build quite significant networks this way, I would think... And it would be beautifully decentralized, the way internet was intended to be in the first place.
Because there are so many alternatives. If my favorite newssite starts charging money, I can get the exact same news from a dozen other sites. They are only my favorite because of their short, easy to remember URL, not because they add any kind of value to the news they report (and in fact, they don't).
Same for Slashdot: let's say it starts charging tomorrow for posting or whatever. Will I get my creditcard out for that? Hell no! There are about a million sites where I can waste most of the day reading peoples' inane opinions if I want to, and most of them are free.
Pr0n then? Haha, there is so much free pr0n to be had that I cannot afford the harddisks to put it on (and I can afford a lot of harddisks!);-)
There is, in fact, precisely one website that I would be willing to pay a subscription fee for: this one. Why? Because it offers a service I really need (it tells me if it is going to rain or not, in enough detail that I can adjust my plans for going out on the bike), and because I _cannot_ get the same information from any other sites.
Since I know a thing or two about conversions, I've looked this up for you. The answer is the following: 50,000 (British) pounds is roughly 53,823 euros.
I don't know what the answer is for Canadian pounds though... Sorry!
Not only that, but people who own both consoles might prefer to buy multiplatform games for PS3, since that platform has less problems and might be expected to have a longer future (Sony supports its old consoles, Microsoft drops them like hot potatoes).
But still... I have long wondered if Microsoft might be counting replacement sales as fresh sales. It would be interesting to know the real number of people actively using their consoles (for all three consoles).
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but according to the article the formula's of ODF are in fact based on those of Excel in the first place. One might reasonably expect Microsoft to have some idea of how to interpret those...
DGPS still relies on you having a signal in the first place. Most supermarkets around where I live have too much steel and concrete in their structure to allow any kind of signal while inside - and it certainly won't work in caves.
You are all making jokes but you are missing the big picture. The WHO is an agency of the United Nations, and they *want* you to panic so they can take over your government! Haven't you people learned nothing from Deus Ex!?
Why it stays that way is more interesting, but beyond the scope of this posting.
Would it be entirely inaccurate if I could summarize that with the single word "greed"?
There needs to be a clause saying that the copyright cannot be renewed when the original artist is dead. Otherwise if I sell copyright to something to a company (or person) they can just renew it indefinitely, unless copyright was made non-transferable.
But that would be great! As long as they pay for the privilege... This should be the way to attack this problem: everything under copyright, automatically, for 14 years, and then yearly payments to extend specific copyrights on a year-by-year basis. This way there is an automatic trade off between the value of the product under copyright and the length of its duration.
The advantages are that there is something in it for everyone: consumers, who see a much richer public domain; producers, who can keep profitable items under copyright forever (and the price should be high enough that this cannot be done at a whim); and the government, who gets a nice new source of income.
Obviously we need to decide whether the yearly payments should be constant or rising, and we would need a rule saying that once something enters public domain, it stays there (i.e. copyright cannot retroactively be bought back), but the whole idea appears massively appealing to me.
With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered.
Is anyone surprised at this? Seriously, does copyright ever end these days?
Of course not. How will the poor authors ever be stimulated to write something ever again if they cannot reap the rewards of their hard labour? Really, won't someone think of the mummy's?
Incidentally, I'm wondering if there is anyone on the planet who is not directly descended from the people who wrote this 8000 years ago. I think I'd like to claim my share of the incoming generated by this now please!
Unless one considers absolutist copyright maximalism to be a virtue for its own sake, enforcing copyright on such works is insane.
Say you are a really large copyright organisation. Not only are you competing with other, similar organisations, but you are also competing with the public domain. Getting rid of that competition means getting rid of the public domain, which is what they are doing.
So yes, I imagine they are really all in favor of enforcing that absolutist copyright maximalism.
Please stop responding to SPAM. If no one responds to it, then they won't make any money and they'll stop.
I admire your optimism but doubt your conclusion. The problem is that you only have to convince people who actually pay for the spam to pay, and all you really have to convince them is rumours of past success by other spam runs. If I can make you believe that spamming is a succesful advertising strategy, then you might be willing to pay me to use it.
Of course you would not come back for a second round, but hey, there's another one born every minute...
Yes, because economy is a zero sum-game.
I sense your sarcasm, but economy _is_ a zero-sum game. It is so big that you cannot see all the parts, but if you add them all up they do add up to zero.
The reason is easy to see: your hard work may add _value_, but value by itself is not _money_. Money can only be created by the fed (and similar institutions in other countries), so if they charge interest for creating money than inevitably, the sum of all the money they loaned out will be less than the sum owed back to them.
It _is_ a giant ponzi scheme, and after running for about 400 years it _is_ about to fail completely. Sit back and enjoy the show, it will be spectacular...
Hah, at first I thought you must have been on my team, but there were only three of us, and none were named Johannes (and there were no cigars)
Man, that sounds amazingly similar. Although the details that I left out do differ: there were only two of us, for one thing. And in our case, the software really did suck: the design (which was done by an external consultant) pretty much guaranteed that nobody would be able to work with it to begin with, and our implementation had significant flaws on top of that as well.
The external consultant, who also acted as project (micro-)manager, spent long hours each day just watching us work, and in at least one case dictated individual keystrokes to my colleague.
Other forms of abuse we had to deal with included such joyful events as people randomly disconnecting network cables in the building and blaming us for the resulting chaos, equipment and personal belongings mysteriously disappearing, and threats of bodily harm from the companies' staff.
The project finally ended when an 'accident' destroyed their entire dataset during nightly batch-processing. My colleague always maintained that it was an honest mistake - and who am I to argue with that? They honestly had it coming, after all...
Postscript: The VP of Engineering for this company, not surprisingly, passed away from a heart attack a few years later, I heard. He was in his mid-thirties.
I'm about that age (late thirties - all this happened when I was about 25, and it was my first job out of university), and one of my priorities in life is *not* being that guy... So far I'm actually doing a good job of it ;-)
Nope. It was a tiny local company here in the Netherlands. I left that place a long time ago, though.
Customer site. There was already a contractual dispute. Entire company hated our guts (some because of the software, some because of the contract). Were perfectly happy letting us know how much they hated us.
Were in one room with company owner. Guy smoked cigars all day long. Had two PC's + keyboards + mice + documentation on a tiny six-sided table. Bad chairs.
Topping it all off, this was in an office with a view on my grandmothers house. She passed away while I was typing code in that damn office. Was taken to task by company owner for leaving work early that day. Asked for and received a transfer to another project after that.
Read the facts about UK bank accounts here. And it is not as bad as you make it seem...
In Europe we customarily get everything a lot later and usually at much higher prices "because it needs to be localized first". Never mind that nobody ever supports my language (Dutch) and I am forced to play the English game anyway, I still have to wait and pay the higher European prices.
So I would expect game releases in Quebec to be both later and much more expensive than they are now.
As for France, don't expect any help. Between their new three-strikes law, and my script that automatically sends out infringement notices for every IP address in the country, I expect to be able to knock them off the internet somewhere in the middle of next week...
What else? We just start sending out trumped up charges to every ISP in France, for each one of their customers - starting with the president and the government.
It is easy to automate too! All we need is a list of French ISPs, their assigned IP ranges, and a program that sends out automatic letters for each IP address in turn.
Your solution advocates a
[x] stupid
solution to the problem of spam (might as well get it in now...)
The article claims it is about childporn, but the story reminds me more of the kind of sexual repression of young people that I normally associate with countries like Iran...
You wouldn't happen to have seen my car keys by any chance, would you?
I wish I could help you, but I don't play violent video games so much so my eyes are pretty bad :-(
I only have to go to the next few buildings: the one across the street (50m), the one across the park (80m - it is not a big park), and that's it (my building is sort-of in a corner). I'm not going to pay for their infrastructure; if they want to connect to further buildings, they can do it on their own.
The urban sprawl in which I live allows you to reach maybe 180,000 people in that way, just moving from building to building. No one would have to pay for more than, say, 200m worth of digging. And no one would be paying for that alone; each time you can make a mini-ISP as I proposed above, with a couple of home owners together.
Would the protocols actually work with this sort of connectivity? How much would it cost to wire up one building plus, say, 2-3 outbound connections?
I've been thinking about that. Let's say I organize my building into a single network - we buy our own fiber, run it to every house (48 of them), and then organize a shared link to the outside world. We'd be like a mini-ISP that way.
And of course we could peer with the building next door. Running that 50m of cable is not going to be much of a problem, so now it is two buildings.
In densely populated areas you could build quite significant networks this way, I would think... And it would be beautifully decentralized, the way internet was intended to be in the first place.
Because there are so many alternatives. If my favorite newssite starts charging money, I can get the exact same news from a dozen other sites. They are only my favorite because of their short, easy to remember URL, not because they add any kind of value to the news they report (and in fact, they don't).
Same for Slashdot: let's say it starts charging tomorrow for posting or whatever. Will I get my creditcard out for that? Hell no! There are about a million sites where I can waste most of the day reading peoples' inane opinions if I want to, and most of them are free.
Pr0n then? Haha, there is so much free pr0n to be had that I cannot afford the harddisks to put it on (and I can afford a lot of harddisks!) ;-)
There is, in fact, precisely one website that I would be willing to pay a subscription fee for: this one. Why? Because it offers a service I really need (it tells me if it is going to rain or not, in enough detail that I can adjust my plans for going out on the bike), and because I _cannot_ get the same information from any other sites.
Since I know a thing or two about conversions, I've looked this up for you. The answer is the following: 50,000 (British) pounds is roughly 53,823 euros.
I don't know what the answer is for Canadian pounds though... Sorry!
MS C++ is also missing "Exception Specifications" and "two-phase name lookup" and a couple of other things.
Ah, *Microsoft* has done an incomplete implementation, so that means the standard is obviously flawed!
Gee. That's a lot of flawed standards out there...
So maybe C++ has become so complex that it can't be extended properly any more.
That's rich, coming from an ADA guy...
I believe you are confusing "speed" with "greed". An understandable mistake, of course - the words do look very close.
Not only that, but people who own both consoles might prefer to buy multiplatform games for PS3, since that platform has less problems and might be expected to have a longer future (Sony supports its old consoles, Microsoft drops them like hot potatoes).
But still... I have long wondered if Microsoft might be counting replacement sales as fresh sales. It would be interesting to know the real number of people actively using their consoles (for all three consoles).