A lot of linux distros distribute ISOs via bit torrent. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's legal under the GPL. As for non-GPL stuff, what about legaltorrents.com? Legal uses of bit-torrent aren't new.
In terms of media downloads, "legit" is typically a code word for "commercial". As things like Linux distributions are distributed free of charge, they wouldn't qualify under this definition. This is actually a clever bit of marketing, since it downplays the monetary aspect, appeals to people's desire to be on the up-and-up, and casts a bit of FUD on anything that's not part of a commercial download service by implying that it's shady.
The bits on those disks, whether you call the aggregate "software" or not, are still copyrighted.
While copyright law (U.S. Code Title 17, Chapter 1) covers "computer programs" (i.e., software), it does not cover "bits on a disk". A bunch of bits, in and of themselves, are not "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression" (section 102). They are just a very large number, which would be more akin to an "concept" or "idea" -- things that are explicitly not copyrightable (section 102 b).
My point is that while Microsoft declaring that software is not software until you install it might be a clever end run around the patent issues at hand, it also exempts not-yet-installed software from receiving the copyright protections that software receives.
AT&T: OMG! Microsoft copied out patented software.
Justices: Microsoft, how do you respond to these allegations?
Microsoft: Whatever. It's not like software is even patentable anyway.
Justices: You raise an important issue. Why do you feel software shouldn't be patentable?
Microsoft: Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
Justices: WTF? That's the best reason you can come up with not to uphold software patents? This court rules that software patents are legal and enforceable!
Microsoft: Oh, no! Please don't fling me in the briar patch!
"An idea or a principle [such as] two plus two equals four can't be patented," [Microsoft attorney] Olson told the Justices. "It has to be put together with a machine and made into a usable device."... [The] disk is shipped abroad to the replication service, containing the master of the Vista operating system that includes AT&T's drivers. It's not software at that point, Olson says, because no one can execute it. When it's installed onto a hard drive, then it becomes software, and it's the end customer who does that.
This seems like a dangerous position for Microsoft to take. If the BSA raids my house and finds thousands of CD-R's full of Vista and Office, can I just say "That's not pirated software. It's not software at all until somebody installs it on their computer. Microsoft says so themselves. If someone installed these discs on their computer, it would become software, possibly even illegal software, and you could get on their case, but until then this is just my perfectly legal collection of shiny five inch coasters."?
While you are correct that the situations the GP poses probably wouldn't be justified by citing free speech, the post does raise an interesting point in that "speech" in First Amendment case law has always been interpreted much more broadly than literal speech. For instance, flag-burning has been defended as "speech", as has what one wears (Tinker v. Des Moines). Freedom of speech is often read as a much more all-encompassing freedom of expression. The GP's examples are all forms of expression, though ones in which other issues supersede the First Amendment concerns -- i.e., your right not to get blown up trumps whatever political statement a terrorist is trying to make by doing it. The controversy in this case is over whether or not the same can be said about bullying speech, not whether non-verbal forms of expression are speech. That's already well established, especially in the viewpoint of the ACLU.
The part about this story that bothers me is that a theory is being advanced by subjecting opposing views to "international ridicule" and censoring away any mention of controversy. Evolution proponents should be careful using such tactics. The notion that the prevailing dogma is beyond question and that all who doubt it must be denounced for their heresy is a concept that scientists helped us move beyond in the Renaissance, but occasionally wander dangerously close to adopting themselves. By all means, teach science, but don't become what you claim to hate in the process.
...the very name of the format is a hindrance to adoption.... it doesn't seem to be related to audio, music, compression, or any other earthly topic.
The key to having a name that sounds like an audio/video format is to call it by a seemingly random string of acronyms and numbers. "AC3", "MPEG-1 Layer III", "G.729a", and "AVI H.264"... those are easy to spell, pronounce, and remember, because they sound related to "audio, music, compression, and other earthly topics". Perhaps if "Ogg Vorbis" was "0GG V0RB15" it would have caught on better by now.
(Pretty much off-topic, but my question involves buying Japanese music, so I'm asking... ignore it if you only care about discussion specific to Apple)
While J-Pop and J-Rock are nice and all, I'm interested in checking out more traditional Japanese sound, with old-school instruments. What's the Japanese counterpart to, say, classical violin concertos? Enka sounds promising, but beyond a general genre, I have no idea what to look for. Can anyone recommend some artists or albums for someone who wants to listen to Japanese musical performances with a more timeless, traditional sound and less like something out of a videogame or anime?
...but in Europe, the legislators... are rightly saying that DRM is unfair to the people.
They are? It sounds to me like they are just trying to make digital music player makers, distributors, etc. license each others' DRM schemes to increase DRM interoperability. If they were saying that "DRM is unfair to the people", they could just ban it. That would also address both of their complaints (iTunes songs don't play on non-iPods, iPods don't play DRM-encumbered songs bought elsewhere) as people would use the MP3 format for songs, and it plays on everything.
On the first claim, that other races were narrower, I refer you to Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, and New Hampshire.
As for the most irregularities, there were, sadly, problems all over the country. Long lines in urban areas, lost absentee ballots, a nasty tire-slashing incident perpetrated by workers for one of the campaigns, voting machine problems, provisional ballots that were tossed that should have been counted, ones that should have been tossed but were counted (I recall hearing of people being allowed to vote who may have been ineligible to vote or casting votes in multiple precincts, though I don't recall details since it's been a while), and so on.
My point is, rather than the myopic fixation on Ohio, we should be looking at things that went wrong in the electoral process anywhere in the country and addressing them. Yet, it seems that a greatly disproportionate emphasis is placed on what happened in a single state.
While it's good to scrutinize problems with our electoral system, I think there's too much of an obsession with Ohio. It wasn't the narrowest race, nor was it the one with the most irregularities, but it's where all the hindsight gets focused. It's easy to see why... Ohio was the state that came closest to swinging the election the other way, and thus becomes the center of all the "OMG Bush stoled teh election AGAIN!" rhetoric. However, this emphasis exclusively on Ohio (and Florida in the previous election) overlooks the issues everywhere else. It effectively says, who cares if there were problems in Michigan (or wherever), Kerry won that state so let's not worry about the election there. Electoral problems should be scrutinized and fixed based on their severity and merits, not how well they play into some "what if the other guy had won?" scenario.
I'm wondering how many Slashdotters who complained about Microsoft's trusted computing / Palladium / signed binaries fiasco (WTF I can only run software the OS publisher has approved on my computing device?) will somehow rationalize and buy one of these, with Apple pulling the same stupid stunt.
Jobs comments are also absurd:
"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them."
So by Jobs' definition Macs, which let you load any software you want on them, don't work.
"Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."
Either Cingular has some massive problems with the security and stability of their network, to the point it would be trivial for a hacker to bring down vast portions of it (apparently without even trying), or Jobs is just spewing FUD here.
It sounds like what the poster you are replying to is getting at is the relative amount of embarrassment of revealing private information to one random stranger vs. having it revealed to ALL random strangers. One's wife, however, is generally privvy to a bit more private information than "some completely random member of the general public" is, so your analogy in rebuttal doesn't quite fit.
While the pr0n crowd gets its own category, it would seem those who use the Internet to illicitly acquire copyrighted materials would simply fall into a subcategory of the Obsessive, and not an important enough one to be mentioned in the article. What of those brave souls who search for cracks, keygens, nocd patches, torrents, dvd rippers, and the like? Are they less prevalant than some would have us believe, or perhaps because AOL appeals to a less tech-savvy demographic, its searches might underrepresent them.
Really, how can you have a roundup of CF cards without any from SanDisk? They're only what, the biggest company in that market? And they just released a new line of CF cards that they're touting as "the world's fastest cards" so this would have been a good time to see how good the performance of their products really is. Maybe instead of picking four random CF cards, Trusted Reviews should have just stuck to the SD card side of things this review, and then they could have done a more comprehensive CF card review in a future article. That way, they could have hit people with twice as many ads.
"The first markets for MRAM chips are likely to be in automotive and industrial settings, where durability is critical. Tehrani said they would also be suited for data-logging devices, such as airline black boxes that store data on aircraft performance and must be recoverable after a crash."
Tell this to 40,000 iraqi civilians, and uncounted number of iraqi soldiers that were killed as a result of his actions. Tell this to 2700 american and coalition soldiers dead, to 1000 dead in New Orleans, and to the families of those who died.
I can see where you're going with the Iraq thing, but New Orleans? People died from a natural disaster. Is this one of those "Bush controls teh weather!" conspiracy theories? Or an implication that a category 5 storm slamming into a major coastal city would have turned out okay had it not been for Bush's response to the situation? Bush's handling of the aftermath wasn't perfect, but he certainly did a better job of things than Mayor Nagin.
Wow, quality shots from a hole thats.8mm wide? Now I've heard everything.
In photographic terms, a "hole thats.8mm wide" is an f/22 aperture, and can definitely produce quality shots. You do need a lot of light however, about 1/30 to properly expose ISO 100 under sunny conditions, so most photography with such an aperture would be done using a tripod.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of linux distros distribute ISOs via bit torrent. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's legal under the GPL. As for non-GPL stuff, what about legaltorrents.com? Legal uses of bit-torrent aren't new.
In terms of media downloads, "legit" is typically a code word for "commercial". As things like Linux distributions are distributed free of charge, they wouldn't qualify under this definition. This is actually a clever bit of marketing, since it downplays the monetary aspect, appeals to people's desire to be on the up-and-up, and casts a bit of FUD on anything that's not part of a commercial download service by implying that it's shady.
In this world gone mad, we won't spank the monkey- the monkey will spank us.
I hear it already works that way, at least among the monkeys in Soviet Russia.
The bits on those disks, whether you call the aggregate "software" or not, are still copyrighted.
While copyright law (U.S. Code Title 17, Chapter 1) covers "computer programs" (i.e., software), it does not cover "bits on a disk". A bunch of bits, in and of themselves, are not "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression" (section 102). They are just a very large number, which would be more akin to an "concept" or "idea" -- things that are explicitly not copyrightable (section 102 b).
My point is that while Microsoft declaring that software is not software until you install it might be a clever end run around the patent issues at hand, it also exempts not-yet-installed software from receiving the copyright protections that software receives.
AT&T: OMG! Microsoft copied out patented software.
Justices: Microsoft, how do you respond to these allegations?
Microsoft: Whatever. It's not like software is even patentable anyway.
Justices: You raise an important issue. Why do you feel software shouldn't be patentable?
Microsoft: Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
Justices: WTF? That's the best reason you can come up with not to uphold software patents? This court rules that software patents are legal and enforceable!
Microsoft: Oh, no! Please don't fling me in the briar patch!
"An idea or a principle [such as] two plus two equals four can't be patented," [Microsoft attorney] Olson told the Justices. "It has to be put together with a machine and made into a usable device." ... [The] disk is shipped abroad to the replication service, containing the master of the Vista operating system that includes AT&T's drivers. It's not software at that point, Olson says, because no one can execute it. When it's installed onto a hard drive, then it becomes software, and it's the end customer who does that.
This seems like a dangerous position for Microsoft to take. If the BSA raids my house and finds thousands of CD-R's full of Vista and Office, can I just say "That's not pirated software. It's not software at all until somebody installs it on their computer. Microsoft says so themselves. If someone installed these discs on their computer, it would become software, possibly even illegal software, and you could get on their case, but until then this is just my perfectly legal collection of shiny five inch coasters."?
smoking isn't speech. physical assault isn't speech. blowing up buildings isn't speech.
While you are correct that the situations the GP poses probably wouldn't be justified by citing free speech, the post does raise an interesting point in that "speech" in First Amendment case law has always been interpreted much more broadly than literal speech. For instance, flag-burning has been defended as "speech", as has what one wears (Tinker v. Des Moines). Freedom of speech is often read as a much more all-encompassing freedom of expression. The GP's examples are all forms of expression, though ones in which other issues supersede the First Amendment concerns -- i.e., your right not to get blown up trumps whatever political statement a terrorist is trying to make by doing it. The controversy in this case is over whether or not the same can be said about bullying speech, not whether non-verbal forms of expression are speech. That's already well established, especially in the viewpoint of the ACLU.
The part about this story that bothers me is that a theory is being advanced by subjecting opposing views to "international ridicule" and censoring away any mention of controversy. Evolution proponents should be careful using such tactics. The notion that the prevailing dogma is beyond question and that all who doubt it must be denounced for their heresy is a concept that scientists helped us move beyond in the Renaissance, but occasionally wander dangerously close to adopting themselves. By all means, teach science, but don't become what you claim to hate in the process.
thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group that defends bloggers.
What do you expect from Forbes, a New York newsletter that prints stock tips?
The open letter from Jobs was covered in previous stories, and can be read at Apple's site
The key to having a name that sounds like an audio/video format is to call it by a seemingly random string of acronyms and numbers. "AC3", "MPEG-1 Layer III", "G.729a", and "AVI H.264"... those are easy to spell, pronounce, and remember, because they sound related to "audio, music, compression, and other earthly topics". Perhaps if "Ogg Vorbis" was "0GG V0RB15" it would have caught on better by now.
That sounds like just the sort of thing I had in mind, and at a bargain price too. Thanks for the tip.
(Pretty much off-topic, but my question involves buying Japanese music, so I'm asking... ignore it if you only care about discussion specific to Apple)
While J-Pop and J-Rock are nice and all, I'm interested in checking out more traditional Japanese sound, with old-school instruments. What's the Japanese counterpart to, say, classical violin concertos? Enka sounds promising, but beyond a general genre, I have no idea what to look for. Can anyone recommend some artists or albums for someone who wants to listen to Japanese musical performances with a more timeless, traditional sound and less like something out of a videogame or anime?
They are? It sounds to me like they are just trying to make digital music player makers, distributors, etc. license each others' DRM schemes to increase DRM interoperability. If they were saying that "DRM is unfair to the people", they could just ban it. That would also address both of their complaints (iTunes songs don't play on non-iPods, iPods don't play DRM-encumbered songs bought elsewhere) as people would use the MP3 format for songs, and it plays on everything.
Sure, I can elaborate on that.
On the first claim, that other races were narrower, I refer you to Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, and New Hampshire.
As for the most irregularities, there were, sadly, problems all over the country. Long lines in urban areas, lost absentee ballots, a nasty tire-slashing incident perpetrated by workers for one of the campaigns, voting machine problems, provisional ballots that were tossed that should have been counted, ones that should have been tossed but were counted (I recall hearing of people being allowed to vote who may have been ineligible to vote or casting votes in multiple precincts, though I don't recall details since it's been a while), and so on.
My point is, rather than the myopic fixation on Ohio, we should be looking at things that went wrong in the electoral process anywhere in the country and addressing them. Yet, it seems that a greatly disproportionate emphasis is placed on what happened in a single state.
While it's good to scrutinize problems with our electoral system, I think there's too much of an obsession with Ohio. It wasn't the narrowest race, nor was it the one with the most irregularities, but it's where all the hindsight gets focused. It's easy to see why... Ohio was the state that came closest to swinging the election the other way, and thus becomes the center of all the "OMG Bush stoled teh election AGAIN!" rhetoric. However, this emphasis exclusively on Ohio (and Florida in the previous election) overlooks the issues everywhere else. It effectively says, who cares if there were problems in Michigan (or wherever), Kerry won that state so let's not worry about the election there. Electoral problems should be scrutinized and fixed based on their severity and merits, not how well they play into some "what if the other guy had won?" scenario.
A smart theft is not even discovered. Like stealing one cent from a lot of people and nobody relizes he is missing a cent.
Good plan, Richard Pryor. Just make sure Superman doesn't catch on to your brilliant scheme.
If I were a sniper, my first shot... would be the robot.
Hopefully the enemy agrees. I'd much rather a piece of machinery get damaged than a soldier get killed.
I'm wondering how many Slashdotters who complained about Microsoft's trusted computing / Palladium / signed binaries fiasco (WTF I can only run software the OS publisher has approved on my computing device?) will somehow rationalize and buy one of these, with Apple pulling the same stupid stunt.
Jobs comments are also absurd:
"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them."
So by Jobs' definition Macs, which let you load any software you want on them, don't work.
"Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."
Either Cingular has some massive problems with the security and stability of their network, to the point it would be trivial for a hacker to bring down vast portions of it (apparently without even trying), or Jobs is just spewing FUD here.
I'm holding out for the kills small children and eats them for lunch license.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/eula.mspx
It sounds like what the poster you are replying to is getting at is the relative amount of embarrassment of revealing private information to one random stranger vs. having it revealed to ALL random strangers. One's wife, however, is generally privvy to a bit more private information than "some completely random member of the general public" is, so your analogy in rebuttal doesn't quite fit.
While the pr0n crowd gets its own category, it would seem those who use the Internet to illicitly acquire copyrighted materials would simply fall into a subcategory of the Obsessive, and not an important enough one to be mentioned in the article. What of those brave souls who search for cracks, keygens, nocd patches, torrents, dvd rippers, and the like? Are they less prevalant than some would have us believe, or perhaps because AOL appeals to a less tech-savvy demographic, its searches might underrepresent them.
Really, how can you have a roundup of CF cards without any from SanDisk? They're only what, the biggest company in that market? And they just released a new line of CF cards that they're touting as "the world's fastest cards" so this would have been a good time to see how good the performance of their products really is. Maybe instead of picking four random CF cards, Trusted Reviews should have just stuck to the SD card side of things this review, and then they could have done a more comprehensive CF card review in a future article. That way, they could have hit people with twice as many ads.
"The first markets for MRAM chips are likely to be in automotive and industrial settings, where durability is critical. Tehrani said they would also be suited for data-logging devices, such as airline black boxes that store data on aircraft performance and must be recoverable after a crash."
CNN.com article
Because we all know that the best way to test out new and unproven technologies is in critical applications where lives are on the line.
Tell this to 40,000 iraqi civilians, and uncounted number of iraqi soldiers that were killed as a result of his actions. Tell this to 2700 american and coalition soldiers dead, to 1000 dead in New Orleans, and to the families of those who died.
I can see where you're going with the Iraq thing, but New Orleans? People died from a natural disaster. Is this one of those "Bush controls teh weather!" conspiracy theories? Or an implication that a category 5 storm slamming into a major coastal city would have turned out okay had it not been for Bush's response to the situation? Bush's handling of the aftermath wasn't perfect, but he certainly did a better job of things than Mayor Nagin.
Wow, quality shots from a hole thats .8mm wide? Now I've heard everything.
In photographic terms, a "hole thats .8mm wide" is an f/22 aperture, and can definitely produce quality shots. You do need a lot of light however, about 1/30 to properly expose ISO 100 under sunny conditions, so most photography with such an aperture would be done using a tripod.