The highest punishment in Norway is 21 years imprisonment. We do have snipers, but they tend to spend their time picking off wolves and bears and the like when the govt isn't looking.
It's not even difficult. During WW2, we were Germany's supplier of heavy water for its nuke research. Saddam is a young upstart compared to us - we aided and abetted the _original_ Axis of evil:-) (of course, we were under invasion at the time, but inconvenient details like that can always be edited out before publication...)
I rather like the following (no idea who invented it): A universe in which the arbitrary manipulation of the past is possible will be subject to chaotic changes until at some time, someone does something to uninvent time travel. This will happen every time time travel is reinvented. At any given time, then, time travel is not invented because if it had been, someone would have uninvented it at some time in the past. Therefore, a universe where manipulation of the past is possible is indistinguishable from one in where it is not. We might as well treat the universe as if unrestricted time travel was not possible.
It also depends what exactly is meant by "observing" something. I may have observed my "father" just before I travelled back but for all I know, my "father" may be an impersonator. Perhaps my real father _is_ dead and this is someone in disguise taking his place. I cannot really know that for sure before I travel back in time, because I can never be 100% certain that my senses are giving me an accurate image of the present. Would this be enough of a loophole to be able to go back and kill my father or do the quantum fairies keep tabs of which things I observe that I come to correct conclusions about and which things I am mistaken about? I should perhaps add that I've always favoured this way of doing time travelling role playing campaigns. The basic rule was "you cannot set into motion a chain of events the outcome of which is to change something you know about in the past or in the present". This has the interesting effect of causing people not to want to know too much because if they know about it they can't go back in time to change it. The classical example of how to exploit this kind of time travelling is the general who is fighting a losing battle and sends back a time squad that goes about building a primitive tribe which eventually becomes a high-tech society that just happens to come charging across the hill and enter the fray one minute after the general send the squad back in time. The general had made sure not to know what was on the other side of the hill before the battle so it did not violate his knowledge for him to cause an army to have evolved over there.
I mostly use Opera, having told it to delete all cookies on program shutdown and ask me before accepting any new cookie. I routinely answer Refuse when I get those popups and if I get more than two requests from any one site it goes on my "banned" list. Only sites I know I trust get accepted. This has the main advantage of maintaining my privacy, but it has the very nice side effect of filtering out web sites written by incompetents. Whenever a web site says "you need cookies to enter this site", I hit the Back-button with a smile on my face in the knowledge that I've probably just been spared an abysmal experience:-) I have the same attitude towards JavaScript. If a web site absolutely requires it, it's probably written by a bells and whistles fanatic with little to no emphasis on content. Anyone with half a brain and a desire to make a site pÃoeple will actually want to visit will have made sure the site was at least visitable without scripts. I should probably add that I am posting this from Lynx... if a site isn't usable with Lynx, it's probably a useless graphics-fest anyway. But IÃ'm getting off topic:-)
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
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· Score: 1
The point is that even if they _do_ take back a GPL license, the work will be useless now because it depends upon other GPL works that it can no longer (legally) use. I am no expert on copyright law and licensing, but I find it plausible that a license _can_ be retracted at some point. When this happens, it might matter _when_ you obtained the work and which license was in effect at the time. I consider it unlikely that a "time-unlimited" type clause will be enough to bar the copyright holder from later retracting the license.
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
The problem is that this is only in effect until you die, at which point whoever inherits you gets to take the work out of the "public domain" again. If the work really were in the public domain, this wouldn't be possible as that is rather the definition of the term. You might also lose control over the copyright after a bankruptcy, but I'm not sure exactly how that would work. This is, I might add, part of the genious of the GPL. If you have created a work that bases itself heavily on GPL (not LGPL) libraries then it is undesirable for anyone (your employer, your inheritors, anyone acquiring the legal rights) to change the license of your work. It won't work properly without being linked with GPL works and so it needs to be GPL itself. If something like this could be devised for other types of creative works, then it might become feasible to create a work that is _effectively_ public domain (ish) but until then, you only control your work so long as you remain in control of the work:-)
I probably would not be digging ditches in the first place if there wasn't some guaranteed renumeration or other useful consequence to me from doing so. Nevertheless, I don't think it is illegal for some random schmuck to go around claiming he dug a ditch that I actually dug. It might be frowned upon and if his lies were to be exposed, he might face some social consequences, but I don't know that there should be a law against it. If I had an employer that behaved the way you indicate, I'd find myself a different one.
A 90nm chip fab process doesn't produce "very small things." It produces "very small patterns in pretty large things." A lump of coal isn't particularly dangerous. Carbon nanotubes, however, very well might be _if_ they have many of the same physical properties as asbestos does (and they might). Really small things can get everywhere, including inside organisms. It is much easier to damage an organism from the inside than from the outside. Therefore, manufacturing massive quantities of very small things that current lifeforms haven't evolved to adapt to might be a bad idea. Then again, it might not, but little if any research has been done on this and so I think the theory is "let's not do another DDT - let's research this properly before jumping in."
I didn't get into details on how to make money mostly because copyrights cover a wide range of different products and so covering the whole topic would require at least one book on the issue. Anyway, if you write books and your books are popular, you can easily make money on preorders and on the first print run. There will be a noticable delay between your book hitting the shelves and the knockoffs doing the same and in the mean time, your more avid fans (and those for whom the purchase of one single book isn't a noticable expense) will have paid you for it. Even after the knock-offs hit the shelves, a good few will want the original rather than some cheap copy and will still be buying from your print run. This is really little other than a distributed sort of market segmentation. Additionally, if your books are indeed good, then you will be able to profit from personal appearances, works for hire, pre-release donations as well as spin-off merchandise and derived works in other formats (movies, games, etc.) Moreover, by maintaining a constant presence on-line, you will be able to take in revenue from any web-based services you care to provide and advertising revenue. The revenue from your spin-offs is likely to increase the more people know and love your works, so the people selling copies of your books are in fact doing you the service of increasing your fan base and therefore increasing your profits. If there is one thing that can be learned from modern media, it is that "if you're popular, money will just come pouring in." If people like or respect you, they need only very little encouragement before they will give you money.
Stripping away your strawmen, I will respond to what is left. Tell me, how do you make a living? I am a programmer. I get monthly wages for improving our product. How would you feel if some random schlub got paid for the work YOU did? That really depends how the schlub went about it. If he misrepresented who produced a piece of code in a way that somehow inconvenienced me, I would take it up with him or with management.
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
Technically, such a license might not even be legal. In Norway, there is a small set of privileges granted by copyright law that the copyright holder simply cannot sign away. Even if he tries, such a clause would be invalid. Anyway, as a matter of philosophy, we are here talking about the difference between a license that gives freedom in the present (BSD) vs one that guarantees the persistence of freedom into the future (GPL). I think it all boils down to the difference between those with a philosophical viewpoint (GNU/FSF) and those with a purely technical/practical viewpoint (OSS). Both camps will be able to produce decent points in their own favour and it really comes down to what you think the word "free" should mean in this context. Personally, I am happy to adopt the OSS take on "free" when talking to OSS people and the GNU variant when talking to GNU people...
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
I don't know that it is actually possible to put one's own works into the public domain. I have read Norwegian copyright law and while it acknowledges the existence of the public domain, it does not make provisions for actively putting a work into it. Therefore, phrases along the lines of "this work is donated to the public domain" might not hold any legal water at all...
Re:the code of conduct for free software distribut
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
This is incorrect. Licenses exist in order to grant a privilege that would normally not be allowed to you. In this case, a software package that does not come bundled with a license is protected by a very stringent set of copyright restrictions. The exact nature of these restrictions will vary from one country to the next, but most countries will have them. The license is what frees you (to varying extents) from these copyright restrictions.
It is neither good nor bad - it just is. We cannot have an all-encompassing progress-repressing system in place only so that you can be free from experiencing a set of irrational feelings when someone else decides to distribute a text you wrote. The negative effects of such a system are just too immense. If your book is so incredible, it is inconceivable that you are not already profiting from having written it. It is unclear why others should not also be permitted to profit from involving themselves with it.
What are EU patent holders to do? Consider patenting and marketing their product in the US as well. They don't have to leave the EU in order to do this.
This is a bogus argument. Any artist that is good enough that he finds himself a sizeable audience will have no trouble generating an income - copyright or no copyright. It may have been an issue 200 years ago when communication and distribution was an actual problem. Today, distribution is easy and so building a fan base is easy (if you're good) and once the fans are there, you'll be able to extract money from them whether you sell your product or give it away. Copyright is only necessary for the copyright holders, not for the artists. If you're an artist and a copyright holder, you don't really need the copyright. If you're _only_ a copyright holder, however (also known as a leech), then you need the strongest copyright protection money can buy or your entire business model is in danger. It is not clear why we need copyright holders that are not artists.
It really is a bad idea to base copyright duration on the life of the artist. This would create a very real economic incentive for knocking off artists.
Given that the only interesting sounds within a space fighter are your own engine hum and weapons discharging, it seems plausible that the UI designers will be looking to add sounds for external events. Modern aircraft tend to have really annoying bleeping sounds to denote hostile targeting or missiles tracking you. This seems a crude approach that makes little use of the brain's ability to take in and analyze a complete soundscape and then extract the most vital portions of it. While a computer can certainly make some overall judgements as to which activities are relevant and which are not, it will likely fail a lot if depended on to make very fine-grained judgements. Therefore, if the computer can produce a complete composite soundscape that includes everything the computer considers "relevant", it leaves the detailed decision to the pilot. This might be more desirable than the current situation, and as our understanding of the brain and its ability to distinguish and categorize sound improves, it may very well be where we are headed in the future. In Luke's case, if he can keep his eyes on space in front of him and have a good surround-sound system that tells him exactly where the "laser" bolt behind him is going, that might enable him to both evade enemy fire _and_ keep the enemy in his sights at the same time, rather then just concentrating on a single one. I tend to find this a whole lot more believable than the alternative suggestion that "space fighter pilots would not get any audio feedback from their craft at all." Even if the Star Wars audio feedback is a bit on the cinematic side:-)
Well, it _could_ be seen as a good thing in that it makes the students aware of the possible negative (i.e., military or violent) consequences of their inventions. This might make them more conscious to the possible abuses of their technology when they grow older and start building stuff that actually has real potential. Or it could be a conspiracy of the military-industrial complex, of course:-)
Maybe you should rewrite it to prevent such abuses in the future The problem with the US constitution isn't that it's poorly written, it is that it's being poorly interpreted. No amount of rewriting is going to remedy that.
It is not buying or selling non-free software that is unethical. It is non-free software in itself that is unethical. You could give it away - hell, you could pay people money to accept it - and it would still be unethical because it's non-free. Price has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not entirely correct. $4 billion is the annual _maintenance cost_ for the army. Its purchase value is presumably considerably higher.
They weren't pissed off at Lindisfarne so much as they were bored and needed something to pass the time.
The highest punishment in Norway is 21 years imprisonment.
We do have snipers, but they tend to spend their time picking off wolves and bears and the like when the govt isn't looking.
It's not even difficult. During WW2, we were Germany's supplier of heavy water for its nuke research. Saddam is a young upstart compared to us - we aided and abetted the _original_ Axis of evil :-) ...)
(of course, we were under invasion at the time, but inconvenient details like that can always be edited out before publication
Copyright infringement doesn't involve "taking." It involves "copying." Definition (1) therefore does not apply. The others don't seem particularly relevant either.
I rather like the following (no idea who invented it):
A universe in which the arbitrary manipulation of the past is possible will be subject to chaotic changes until at some time, someone does something to uninvent time travel. This will happen every time time travel is reinvented. At any given time, then, time travel is not invented because if it had been, someone would have uninvented it at some time in the past. Therefore, a universe where manipulation of the past is possible is indistinguishable from one in where it is not. We might as well treat the universe as if unrestricted time travel was not possible.
It also depends what exactly is meant by "observing" something. I may have observed my "father" just before I travelled back but for all I know, my "father" may be an impersonator. Perhaps my real father _is_ dead and this is someone in disguise taking his place.
I cannot really know that for sure before I travel back in time, because I can never be 100% certain that my senses are giving me an accurate image of the present.
Would this be enough of a loophole to be able to go back and kill my father or do the quantum fairies keep tabs of which things I observe that I come to correct conclusions about and which things I am mistaken about?
I should perhaps add that I've always favoured this way of doing time travelling role playing campaigns. The basic rule was "you cannot set into motion a chain of events the outcome of which is to change something you know about in the past or in the present". This has the interesting effect of causing people not to want to know too much because if they know about it they can't go back in time to change it.
The classical example of how to exploit this kind of time travelling is the general who is fighting a losing battle and sends back a time squad that goes about building a primitive tribe which eventually becomes a high-tech society that just happens to come charging across the hill and enter the fray one minute after the general send the squad back in time. The general had made sure not to know what was on the other side of the hill before the battle so it did not violate his knowledge for him to cause an army to have evolved over there.
I mostly use Opera, having told it to delete all cookies on program shutdown and ask me before accepting any new cookie. I routinely answer Refuse when I get those popups and if I get more than two requests from any one site it goes on my "banned" list. Only sites I know I trust get accepted. :-) ... if a site isn't usable with Lynx, it's probably a useless graphics-fest anyway. :-)
This has the main advantage of maintaining my privacy, but it has the very nice side effect of filtering out web sites written by incompetents. Whenever a web site says "you need cookies to enter this site", I hit the Back-button with a smile on my face in the knowledge that I've probably just been spared an abysmal experience
I have the same attitude towards JavaScript. If a web site absolutely requires it, it's probably written by a bells and whistles fanatic with little to no emphasis on content. Anyone with half a brain and a desire to make a site pÃoeple will actually want to visit will have made sure the site was at least visitable without scripts.
I should probably add that I am posting this from Lynx
But IÃ'm getting off topic
The point is that even if they _do_ take back a GPL license, the work will be useless now because it depends upon other GPL works that it can no longer (legally) use.
I am no expert on copyright law and licensing, but I find it plausible that a license _can_ be retracted at some point. When this happens, it might matter _when_ you obtained the work and which license was in effect at the time. I consider it unlikely that a "time-unlimited" type clause will be enough to bar the copyright holder from later retracting the license.
The problem is that this is only in effect until you die, at which point whoever inherits you gets to take the work out of the "public domain" again. If the work really were in the public domain, this wouldn't be possible as that is rather the definition of the term. :-)
You might also lose control over the copyright after a bankruptcy, but I'm not sure exactly how that would work.
This is, I might add, part of the genious of the GPL. If you have created a work that bases itself heavily on GPL (not LGPL) libraries then it is undesirable for anyone (your employer, your inheritors, anyone acquiring the legal rights) to change the license of your work. It won't work properly without being linked with GPL works and so it needs to be GPL itself. If something like this could be devised for other types of creative works, then it might become feasible to create a work that is _effectively_ public domain (ish) but until then, you only control your work so long as you remain in control of the work
I probably would not be digging ditches in the first place if there wasn't some guaranteed renumeration or other useful consequence to me from doing so.
Nevertheless, I don't think it is illegal for some random schmuck to go around claiming he dug a ditch that I actually dug. It might be frowned upon and if his lies were to be exposed, he might face some social consequences, but I don't know that there should be a law against it.
If I had an employer that behaved the way you indicate, I'd find myself a different one.
A 90nm chip fab process doesn't produce "very small things." It produces "very small patterns in pretty large things."
A lump of coal isn't particularly dangerous. Carbon nanotubes, however, very well might be _if_ they have many of the same physical properties as asbestos does (and they might).
Really small things can get everywhere, including inside organisms. It is much easier to damage an organism from the inside than from the outside. Therefore, manufacturing massive quantities of very small things that current lifeforms haven't evolved to adapt to might be a bad idea. Then again, it might not, but little if any research has been done on this and so I think the theory is "let's not do another DDT - let's research this properly before jumping in."
I didn't get into details on how to make money mostly because copyrights cover a wide range of different products and so covering the whole topic would require at least one book on the issue.
Anyway, if you write books and your books are popular, you can easily make money on preorders and on the first print run. There will be a noticable delay between your book hitting the shelves and the knockoffs doing the same and in the mean time, your more avid fans (and those for whom the purchase of one single book isn't a noticable expense) will have paid you for it. Even after the knock-offs hit the shelves, a good few will want the original rather than some cheap copy and will still be buying from your print run. This is really little other than a distributed sort of market segmentation.
Additionally, if your books are indeed good, then you will be able to profit from personal appearances, works for hire, pre-release donations as well as spin-off merchandise and derived works in other formats (movies, games, etc.) Moreover, by maintaining a constant presence on-line, you will be able to take in revenue from any web-based services you care to provide and advertising revenue.
The revenue from your spin-offs is likely to increase the more people know and love your works, so the people selling copies of your books are in fact doing you the service of increasing your fan base and therefore increasing your profits.
If there is one thing that can be learned from modern media, it is that "if you're popular, money will just come pouring in." If people like or respect you, they need only very little encouragement before they will give you money.
Stripping away your strawmen, I will respond to what is left.
Tell me, how do you make a living?
I am a programmer. I get monthly wages for improving our product.
How would you feel if some random schlub got paid for the work YOU did?
That really depends how the schlub went about it. If he misrepresented who produced a piece of code in a way that somehow inconvenienced me, I would take it up with him or with management.
Technically, such a license might not even be legal. In Norway, there is a small set of privileges granted by copyright law that the copyright holder simply cannot sign away. Even if he tries, such a clause would be invalid. ...
Anyway, as a matter of philosophy, we are here talking about the difference between a license that gives freedom in the present (BSD) vs one that guarantees the persistence of freedom into the future (GPL). I think it all boils down to the difference between those with a philosophical viewpoint (GNU/FSF) and those with a purely technical/practical viewpoint (OSS). Both camps will be able to produce decent points in their own favour and it really comes down to what you think the word "free" should mean in this context.
Personally, I am happy to adopt the OSS take on "free" when talking to OSS people and the GNU variant when talking to GNU people
I don't know that it is actually possible to put one's own works into the public domain. I have read Norwegian copyright law and while it acknowledges the existence of the public domain, it does not make provisions for actively putting a work into it. Therefore, phrases along the lines of "this work is donated to the public domain" might not hold any legal water at all...
This is incorrect. Licenses exist in order to grant a privilege that would normally not be allowed to you. In this case, a software package that does not come bundled with a license is protected by a very stringent set of copyright restrictions. The exact nature of these restrictions will vary from one country to the next, but most countries will have them.
The license is what frees you (to varying extents) from these copyright restrictions.
It is neither good nor bad - it just is. We cannot have an all-encompassing progress-repressing system in place only so that you can be free from experiencing a set of irrational feelings when someone else decides to distribute a text you wrote. The negative effects of such a system are just too immense.
If your book is so incredible, it is inconceivable that you are not already profiting from having written it. It is unclear why others should not also be permitted to profit from involving themselves with it.
What are EU patent holders to do?
Consider patenting and marketing their product in the US as well. They don't have to leave the EU in order to do this.
This is a bogus argument. Any artist that is good enough that he finds himself a sizeable audience will have no trouble generating an income - copyright or no copyright. It may have been an issue 200 years ago when communication and distribution was an actual problem. Today, distribution is easy and so building a fan base is easy (if you're good) and once the fans are there, you'll be able to extract money from them whether you sell your product or give it away.
Copyright is only necessary for the copyright holders, not for the artists. If you're an artist and a copyright holder, you don't really need the copyright. If you're _only_ a copyright holder, however (also known as a leech), then you need the strongest copyright protection money can buy or your entire business model is in danger.
It is not clear why we need copyright holders that are not artists.
It really is a bad idea to base copyright duration on the life of the artist. This would create a very real economic incentive for knocking off artists.
Given that the only interesting sounds within a space fighter are your own engine hum and weapons discharging, it seems plausible that the UI designers will be looking to add sounds for external events. Modern aircraft tend to have really annoying bleeping sounds to denote hostile targeting or missiles tracking you. This seems a crude approach that makes little use of the brain's ability to take in and analyze a complete soundscape and then extract the most vital portions of it. While a computer can certainly make some overall judgements as to which activities are relevant and which are not, it will likely fail a lot if depended on to make very fine-grained judgements. Therefore, if the computer can produce a complete composite soundscape that includes everything the computer considers "relevant", it leaves the detailed decision to the pilot. :-)
This might be more desirable than the current situation, and as our understanding of the brain and its ability to distinguish and categorize sound improves, it may very well be where we are headed in the future.
In Luke's case, if he can keep his eyes on space in front of him and have a good surround-sound system that tells him exactly where the "laser" bolt behind him is going, that might enable him to both evade enemy fire _and_ keep the enemy in his sights at the same time, rather then just concentrating on a single one.
I tend to find this a whole lot more believable than the alternative suggestion that "space fighter pilots would not get any audio feedback from their craft at all." Even if the Star Wars audio feedback is a bit on the cinematic side
Well, it _could_ be seen as a good thing in that it makes the students aware of the possible negative (i.e., military or violent) consequences of their inventions. This might make them more conscious to the possible abuses of their technology when they grow older and start building stuff that actually has real potential. :-)
Or it could be a conspiracy of the military-industrial complex, of course
Maybe you should rewrite it to prevent such abuses in the future
The problem with the US constitution isn't that it's poorly written, it is that it's being poorly interpreted. No amount of rewriting is going to remedy that.
It is not buying or selling non-free software that is unethical. It is non-free software in itself that is unethical. You could give it away - hell, you could pay people money to accept it - and it would still be unethical because it's non-free. Price has absolutely nothing to do with it.