Just a quick note about #s 84-85 -- this isn't as much of an obvious bad idea as it might seem. In most of Asia, the swastika is more closely associated with Buddhists than with Nazis -- the Chinese Buddhists got it from the Indian ones, who used it in accord with a long tradition by which the swastika is an Indo-Aryan symbol for the sun, particularly in the context of religious worship.
So they probably weren't making light of the Holocaust so much as offering products that were received in a slightly different way than intended...
Why so much? Because that's what the market is. They're paid that much because the studios are willing to pay that much, and the studios are willing to pay that much because the filmgoing public is willing to pay what it pays. That's what our priorities are.
Some might argue that the fact of widespread movie piracy on the internet proves the filmgoing public is not willing to pay what it pays.
The copyright laws thus permit the movie industry to engage in a different form of price-fixing. People who would probably go to the movies for $5 won't for $10, so we get downloads instead, but if the MPAA were responding to market forces they'd have to lower the price.
Why so much? Because that's what the market is. They're paid that much because the studios are willing to pay that much, and the studios are willing to pay that much because the filmgoing public is willing to pay what it pays. That's what our priorities are.
Some might argue that the fact of widespread movie piracy on the internet proves the filmgoing public is not willing to pay what it pays.
The copyright laws thus permit the movie industry to engage in a different form of price-fixing. People who would probably go to the movies for $5 won't for $10, so we get downloads instead, but if the MPAA were responding to market forces they'd have to lower the price.
We have that problem where I live, and our state deficite is out of control. People vote for the "nicest" guys and then blame the national government for state problems when state officials can't get their jobs done.
Actually a lot of state deficits do come from federal problems -- when vast sums of money are spent for things like foreign wars, that same money is not available for federal aid to state governments, which has historically been a very large part of wealth transfers (which mean a whole lot more than just "entitlement programs").
I don't know what state you're from so I can't speak to your situation, but the huge rash of massive state deficits (I think it was something like 48 states in the red in '02, no doubt it's continuing) started cropping up halfway through W's term because of the cuts in federal funding for state programs. That way Bush gets the cut in social services that he wants, and people blame it on their local officials.
I would guess that the problem is not so much partisanship on behalf of the admins, as the inadvisability of switching all these systems over every couple of years when a different party controls the committee.
Yeah, Washington always has high turnover. But swapping techs every two years, times how many important committees... and how many different offices... and and and. Unbelievable mess. (Of course, that pretty much happens with the office situation as well. There's a lot of silly overhead in DC based on seniority and party rank and whatnot).
I vote, I write letters, they work for me. Anyone who believes otherwise is likely misinformed and prone to believing conspiracy theories.
Or they're someone like me, who has worked directly in a Senatorial office and knows what happens to those letters. And how little the votes from the few thinking voters matter, when elections are dominated by money and media.
I mean, seriously, I don't understand how half the people who seem to have this fucked up notion of how to treat people are created. Is it repetitive evil encountered in working environments? An "either it's you or me" mentality?
Well, there's a lot of factors. Part of it is no doubt ingrained laziness, an unwillingness to rock the boat, and a preference for someone else having to do hard and unpopular things rather than oneself. And people get on power trips, people can be vindictive and petty and greedy.
Work is just like middle school, except being unpopular has worse consequences and being insecure has worse expressions.
But then there's the issue of compensation and markets. Markets are extremely efficient, for what they try to balance -- which is money. But this tends to skew the value system, because a lot of values are simply external to the market system governed by money -- things like pollution (if someone else pays to clean it up), economic impact on labor forces (if outsourcing is cheaper), etc. And, so long as the only value is monetary value -- and having a certain monetary "score" is a requirement to continue playing the game, or making progress -- it isn't surprising that the people in charge decide someone must make sacrifices. And most people are much better at deciding other people need to make sacrifices than they are making them themselves.
So, the answer is that you have to find a way to bring those non-quantifiable factors (working conditions, environmental impact, development of a software monoculture, chilling effect on the open source movement, whatever non-commoditized factors you want to talk about) into the scope of the market system. OSHA tries to do this, as do most types of government regulation. Unfortunately this tends to prevent people from making as much money as they could, by forcing an additional cost onto the system (that would otherwise be paid by Somebody Else). Couple that with the some-would-say-irresponsible libertarian ideas that have always existed in the US and that work in the interest of people who want to do whatever they want to get more money, and you have the anti-government-regulation attitudes that tend to dominate in today's US. (Never mind whether they are borne out by experience in any particular instance; regulation is probably a good idea in some cases and a bad one in others, but the prevailing sentiment is any government involvement in the economy -- even just to internalize market externalities -- is Communist, or Evil, or Contrary to The Interests Of Business, or Bad For The Economy, etc etc.)
But, yeah. To be brief -- the rewards structure is set up so that people are rewarded for mistreating their fellow man. People are not innately wolves, they're just good learners and perceptive of a payoff system that -- without public-minded balancing -- rewards taking advantage of the weak. When morality makes money, it'll get really really popular.
Since when does sexist tripe like this get modded '+3, informative'? This is so 1960s.
And I'm not even going to start with the hypocrisy of criticizing other people's work ethic considering how much time you probably spend reading slashdot...
(yeah, yeah, karma, whatever. much better to save my real karma and not to sit here being quiet about this.)
And this is why robots suck when it comes to exploration. They cannot react to the unexpected. The scientists didn't anticipate this, and now they're trying to figure out how to macgyver something so they can take a look at it.
With human explorers the scenario goes something like: Bob, look! Olivine! Grab me a shovel and let's see what's underneath.
Unless, of course, they neglected to bring a shovel.
I mean you said yourself, it was the scientists who didn't anticipate this, not the robots... they're equally capable of neglecting to bring valuable scientific equipment themselves as not thinking of putting it on the probe.
Diamond is actually pretty common here, DeBeers monopolies leading to artifical scarcity notwithstanding...
But I think what kills the prospect of a Martian diamond industry is probably the prospect of synthetic diamonds in the near future. If we can make them here on a large scale for not much money, well... seems the bottom will drop out of the diamond market pretty soon.
Of course that doesn't preclude us finding some other really rare and valuable ores on Mars, but if it's anything new, we probably wouldn't even know what to do with it/make from it yet, and it might not even be useable on Earth (after all, if it ever developed here, it didn't last too long, so odds are it still wouldn't like the Earth climate very much.)
Take SCO - a company I have written about for investors. Now, if SCO wins its court case, then future dividends to shareholders (and David Boies) could be huge. Assume they get $1.5bn from IBM, and then $1bn a year in licensing from Linux.
Sorry for the nit, but I hope you pointed out in your article the extreme improbability of SCO getting that Linux-licensing revenue stream -- can you really imagine Linus being willing to let them use the parts of his code that obviously aren't theirs? At the very least you'd need to factor in the cost of re-developing anything that escapes being termed a "derivative work."
i'm also going to have to disagree with you on the authority of the copyright office. like the patent office, they are merely bureaucrats who handle related paperwork (like processing applications). they do not institute or enforce copyright law, nor do they even have the final say on the copyrights they issue. don't confuse the copyright office with the legislature or the courts.
Obviously if the legislature or courts change the laws, or if the meaning of the laws is changed by a new legal precedent or interpretation, then they will dominate. But the copyright office is paid to know the state of the law right now, and the law is pretty well established.
section 401 "visually perceptible copies" disagrees with you. it clearly outlines the three parts of the copyright notice and states that someone who infringes on a work bearing that notice can't make a claim of innocent infringement. if it were an insulting anachronism then i doubt very much it would be in every book on my shelf published since the birth of copyright law in this country. precidents may or may not be on your side, but i wouldn't know that without going to a law library (which i don't plan to do, not being a lawyer and all).
It's not about precedents; it's about copyright legislation that was published in 1989, when we joined the Berne Convention, that removed the need for copyright notice in order to assure a work is copyrighted. So for most of the books "on [your] shelf published since the birth of copyright law in this country" it was required at their time of publication, and most likely their time of printing [and may still be required, since I think they were governed by the law under which they were copyrighted]; it is retained by convention, but isn't really needed. An argument of "inadvertent infringement" will only hold weight if the infringer could legitimately have believed that s/he was within fair use rights or was otherwise noninfringing. This is doubtful for any works published now; pretty much everyone knows that you can't just copy something you know you didn't write and use it flat out, and they'd have a hard time in court saying they seriously thought they could.
you're also reading too much into what they said about bringing suit. what they mean (and they state it explicitly in response to the "why should i register" question) is that you can't sue for MONEY if it's not registered.
From the page you cited:
"(a) Except for an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A(a), and subject to the provisions of subsection (b), no action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title." Section 106A covers the right of a copyright holder to bring action for basically defamation -- attributing a mutilated copy to an author or visual artist especially, when the mutilations were not the artist's work. They go on to specify more clearly that money will not be paid for any other suit, but the above clause clearly says that you can't bring legal action at all until the copyright is registered.
when they say there's no "poor man's copyright" they are not saying that there is no commonlaw copyright. they are saying that mailing yourself a copy does not, itself, copyright the work.
Yes, mailing a copy to yourself does not copyright a work, because writing it down copyrights the work. Establishing a date of composition is valuable only as part of a suit for damages once you've retroactively registered the copyright after seeing it infringed. It may be worth something to challenge someone else's copyright on your work, but I don't have a source for that.
We should probably give this a rest, it's pretty OT. But, look. Copyright registration is $30. If you don't want to spring for the pro
I'd imagine the WWI trench soldiers probably something along the lines of "Please, God, I don't want to die -- the newspapers were wrong, war is not a way to redeem the lost masculinity and strength of a decadent era." At least that's my impression from reading Wilfred Owen.
Most of the (Allied) soliders in WWII probably weren't too psyched about it either; they wouldn't have been there if they weren't attacked or expecting to be attacked soon.
Soldiers in Iraq? Probably thought "Wait... I'm just here because I'm a minority kid and this is the only way I'll ever be able to pay for a college education... we're actually having a war?" Though they may have thought "Hey, at least I wasn't forced by my own government to die for no reason, the way soldiers in Vietnam did."
In any event, few of these people (the ones who actually volunteered, at least) volunteered without what they perceived to be extremely pressing circumstances.
Hey, why not power your computer via a generator from a stationary bike or something?
O'course, at 11 kCals/min if you're biking at a moderate pace and weigh 200 lbs... odds are you couldn't bike fast enough to power it. But if you had a cluster of these exercisers...
Sorry, no. This is a myth. There is no such thing as an effective commonlaw copyright or poor man's copyright. (I know I've seen a better reference for this somewhere, but one source would be here; Google may have more if you're more creative with search terms & less strapped for time than I -- perhaps check some of those online law sites, nolo press or one of Harvard's law sites, etc).
Think about it. You could easily mail yourself a manila envelope with a metal tab, unsealed. Then you just stick whatever you want in later and the postmark says you "wrote" a work that hadn't even been created when the letter was mailed...
Another myth here is that you need to apply notice of copyright to a work for it to be protected. This is not true after 1986; a work is "protected" (though again, what that means when you can't sue is a mystery) as soon as it appears in fixed form. Doubly so if published. Copyright notice these days is an idiosyncracy for unpublished work and a formality for published work, and unnecessary (& somewhat insulting) when dealing with professionals who know the law. And besides, it doesn't really help prove that a work is yours; you could just as easily write "(C) ME" on your copy of someone's work as you could on your original one.
Oh, yeah, and don't forget that if we don't colonize Mars SOON the universe could be denied its most precious jewel, i.e. the continued existence of our glorious Godlike species.
Computer programs have their copyrights registered under the category of "literary work." For more information see
The US Copyright Office website.
You may be able to do a 'cease-and-desist' type thing without it (hey, under the DMCA you can probably send a CaD to anybody you want for anything, without necessarily having cause) but I don't know what sort of proof you have to have that the work was originally yours.
This is a definite warning though -- if you're developing Open Source and want to be really sure you can enforce the freedom of your code, register that copyright!
It'd be fine if they do it in accordance with the relevant license. But I'd hate to see MS flout the GPL and be rewarded with tons of developer effort & good code without giving anything in return -- that might have a chilling effect on the OS movement in general.
No, no. This is very bad for Open Source if IBM cannot be compelled to turn over AIX source.
Think about it. Party A is pretty much certain that Party B is using their code. However, for whatever reason that code is not directly visible to Party A. How will Party A prove it? Well, they must compel access to Party B's code, or else they cannot provide a specific example of infringing code, even if they are certain it is there.
Right now Party A is SCO, Party B is IBM and we're all pleased as punch when the axe falls. But what happens two years down the road when Party A is Linux and Party B is Microsoft?
Really, the best thing is for IBM to go through with discovery -- however much it costs and long it takes -- and for the examples to still not surface, or for the case to be thrown out on the ridiculous interpretation of "derivative works." To say that IBM can hide behind the closed-ness of the source, and thus prevent SCO access to proof of direct copying, is a bad omen.
Please someone [qualified] tell me I'm missing something...
Wow! I'm really glad that I logged in to Slashdot this morning -- if I hadn't, I might have missed your touching letter!
Well, I'm afraid that's all the time I have for today -- got to go scour the web for more customer reactions! Best to leave no stone unturned, you know! And this way we save so much money by not having to have a mailbox!
IWACI (I was a congressional intern) during a period of intensive discussion of AmTrak (one of the Save-Amtrak votes in '02).
The problem with Amtrak is not, as a lot of well-meaning but uninformed libertarians on/. will tell you, the unions -- the problem is two things:
1 (the main one) Congresscritters use Amtrak routes as huge pork barrel projects, so that their local region gets subsidized train service and some extra jobs for running it, even though no free-market train system would go there. Routes are governed by political laws, rather than by supply and demand, which is detrimental to the viability of the system.
2 (as a consequence of #1) Amtrak winds up being too expensive in an effort to keep afloat (because politicians from the same body that lets the pork barrel routes through also insist that Amtrak be "self-supporting" as though it could be run efficiently while political decisions muck with its business process) so it can't compete, price-wise, with airlines. To put this in context, keep in mind that planes get a lot of federal subsidies too (I think the only ones that are actually self-supporting these days are JetBlue and Southwest, though that could be a bit out of date) -- so it's not even a "glory of private airline enterprise" situation, especially when you consider the things we do to provide cheap air travel: political decisions to provide fuel (I don't even mean Iraq, there's a lot of government money that goes into geological exploration & finding oil reserves), the existence of the Air Traffic Controllers, staff to secure the Fatherland by having dogs sniff my underwear, etc.
Also, for a really long haul (like, coast-to-coast) air travel is going to be faster. For travelling to Chicago or along a sea-board, it would be pretty close, because you'd save a lot of time not having to go to and check into the airport (esp. when you consider trains can't be hijacked, plot arrangements for a Speed III notwithstanding). Plus the convenience factor!
Personally, living in NY, I'd be much more inclined to visit Philly or Boston if I knew I could get there in 45 minutes going public transit all the way. Price is a consideration (vs. the Chinatown bus or something) but if you cut out the cab/shuttle/bus fare needed to get to the airport...
Slashdot Mirror
So here's my question:
Since when do telegrams use fonts? I mean, last I heard, Morse code didn't encode letter forms...
Obligatory Cowboy Bebop refer...
oh, never mind.
Just a quick note about #s 84-85 -- this isn't as much of an obvious bad idea as it might seem. In most of Asia, the swastika is more closely associated with Buddhists than with Nazis -- the Chinese Buddhists got it from the Indian ones, who used it in accord with a long tradition by which the swastika is an Indo-Aryan symbol for the sun, particularly in the context of religious worship.
So they probably weren't making light of the Holocaust so much as offering products that were received in a slightly different way than intended...
Some might argue that the fact of widespread movie piracy on the internet proves the filmgoing public is not willing to pay what it pays.
The copyright laws thus permit the movie industry to engage in a different form of price-fixing. People who would probably go to the movies for $5 won't for $10, so we get downloads instead, but if the MPAA were responding to market forces they'd have to lower the price.
Why so much? Because that's what the market is. They're paid that much because the studios are willing to pay that much, and the studios are willing to pay that much because the filmgoing public is willing to pay what it pays. That's what our priorities are. Some might argue that the fact of widespread movie piracy on the internet proves the filmgoing public is not willing to pay what it pays.
The copyright laws thus permit the movie industry to engage in a different form of price-fixing. People who would probably go to the movies for $5 won't for $10, so we get downloads instead, but if the MPAA were responding to market forces they'd have to lower the price.
I don't know what state you're from so I can't speak to your situation, but the huge rash of massive state deficits (I think it was something like 48 states in the red in '02, no doubt it's continuing) started cropping up halfway through W's term because of the cuts in federal funding for state programs. That way Bush gets the cut in social services that he wants, and people blame it on their local officials.
I would guess that the problem is not so much partisanship on behalf of the admins, as the inadvisability of switching all these systems over every couple of years when a different party controls the committee.
Yeah, Washington always has high turnover. But swapping techs every two years, times how many important committees... and how many different offices... and and and. Unbelievable mess. (Of course, that pretty much happens with the office situation as well. There's a lot of silly overhead in DC based on seniority and party rank and whatnot).
Work is just like middle school, except being unpopular has worse consequences and being insecure has worse expressions.
But then there's the issue of compensation and markets. Markets are extremely efficient, for what they try to balance -- which is money. But this tends to skew the value system, because a lot of values are simply external to the market system governed by money -- things like pollution (if someone else pays to clean it up), economic impact on labor forces (if outsourcing is cheaper), etc. And, so long as the only value is monetary value -- and having a certain monetary "score" is a requirement to continue playing the game, or making progress -- it isn't surprising that the people in charge decide someone must make sacrifices. And most people are much better at deciding other people need to make sacrifices than they are making them themselves.
So, the answer is that you have to find a way to bring those non-quantifiable factors (working conditions, environmental impact, development of a software monoculture, chilling effect on the open source movement, whatever non-commoditized factors you want to talk about) into the scope of the market system. OSHA tries to do this, as do most types of government regulation. Unfortunately this tends to prevent people from making as much money as they could, by forcing an additional cost onto the system (that would otherwise be paid by Somebody Else). Couple that with the some-would-say-irresponsible libertarian ideas that have always existed in the US and that work in the interest of people who want to do whatever they want to get more money, and you have the anti-government-regulation attitudes that tend to dominate in today's US. (Never mind whether they are borne out by experience in any particular instance; regulation is probably a good idea in some cases and a bad one in others, but the prevailing sentiment is any government involvement in the economy -- even just to internalize market externalities -- is Communist, or Evil, or Contrary to The Interests Of Business, or Bad For The Economy, etc etc.)
But, yeah. To be brief -- the rewards structure is set up so that people are rewarded for mistreating their fellow man. People are not innately wolves, they're just good learners and perceptive of a payoff system that -- without public-minded balancing -- rewards taking advantage of the weak. When morality makes money, it'll get really really popular.
Since when does sexist tripe like this get modded '+3, informative'? This is so 1960s.
And I'm not even going to start with the hypocrisy of criticizing other people's work ethic considering how much time you probably spend reading slashdot...
(yeah, yeah, karma, whatever. much better to save my real karma and not to sit here being quiet about this.)
I mean you said yourself, it was the scientists who didn't anticipate this, not the robots... they're equally capable of neglecting to bring valuable scientific equipment themselves as not thinking of putting it on the probe.
Diamond is actually pretty common here, DeBeers monopolies leading to artifical scarcity notwithstanding...
But I think what kills the prospect of a Martian diamond industry is probably the prospect of synthetic diamonds in the near future. If we can make them here on a large scale for not much money, well... seems the bottom will drop out of the diamond market pretty soon.
Of course that doesn't preclude us finding some other really rare and valuable ores on Mars, but if it's anything new, we probably wouldn't even know what to do with it/make from it yet, and it might not even be useable on Earth (after all, if it ever developed here, it didn't last too long, so odds are it still wouldn't like the Earth climate very much.)
Obviously if the legislature or courts change the laws, or if the meaning of the laws is changed by a new legal precedent or interpretation, then they will dominate. But the copyright office is paid to know the state of the law right now, and the law is pretty well established.
It's not about precedents; it's about copyright legislation that was published in 1989, when we joined the Berne Convention, that removed the need for copyright notice in order to assure a work is copyrighted. So for most of the books "on [your] shelf published since the birth of copyright law in this country" it was required at their time of publication, and most likely their time of printing [and may still be required, since I think they were governed by the law under which they were copyrighted]; it is retained by convention, but isn't really needed. An argument of "inadvertent infringement" will only hold weight if the infringer could legitimately have believed that s/he was within fair use rights or was otherwise noninfringing. This is doubtful for any works published now; pretty much everyone knows that you can't just copy something you know you didn't write and use it flat out, and they'd have a hard time in court saying they seriously thought they could.
From the page you cited: "(a) Except for an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A(a), and subject to the provisions of subsection (b), no action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title." Section 106A covers the right of a copyright holder to bring action for basically defamation -- attributing a mutilated copy to an author or visual artist especially, when the mutilations were not the artist's work. They go on to specify more clearly that money will not be paid for any other suit, but the above clause clearly says that you can't bring legal action at all until the copyright is registered.
Yes, mailing a copy to yourself does not copyright a work, because writing it down copyrights the work. Establishing a date of composition is valuable only as part of a suit for damages once you've retroactively registered the copyright after seeing it infringed. It may be worth something to challenge someone else's copyright on your work, but I don't have a source for that.
We should probably give this a rest, it's pretty OT. But, look. Copyright registration is $30. If you don't want to spring for the pro
I'd imagine the WWI trench soldiers probably something along the lines of "Please, God, I don't want to die -- the newspapers were wrong, war is not a way to redeem the lost masculinity and strength of a decadent era." At least that's my impression from reading Wilfred Owen.
Most of the (Allied) soliders in WWII probably weren't too psyched about it either; they wouldn't have been there if they weren't attacked or expecting to be attacked soon.
Soldiers in Iraq? Probably thought "Wait... I'm just here because I'm a minority kid and this is the only way I'll ever be able to pay for a college education... we're actually having a war?" Though they may have thought "Hey, at least I wasn't forced by my own government to die for no reason, the way soldiers in Vietnam did."
In any event, few of these people (the ones who actually volunteered, at least) volunteered without what they perceived to be extremely pressing circumstances.
Uhh. The picture of the guy in the article doesn't encourage my hopes for this thing's prospects...
...Oh wait. I'm the only one who actually read the article.
Hey, why not power your computer via a generator from a stationary bike or something?
O'course, at 11 kCals/min if you're biking at a moderate pace and weigh 200 lbs... odds are you couldn't bike fast enough to power it.
But if you had a cluster of these exercisers...
Sorry, no. This is a myth. There is no such thing as an effective commonlaw copyright or poor man's copyright. (I know I've seen a better reference for this somewhere, but one source would be here; Google may have more if you're more creative with search terms & less strapped for time than I -- perhaps check some of those online law sites, nolo press or one of Harvard's law sites, etc).
Think about it. You could easily mail yourself a manila envelope with a metal tab, unsealed. Then you just stick whatever you want in later and the postmark says you "wrote" a work that hadn't even been created when the letter was mailed...
But in any event, in the US, the US Copyright Office is correct about what copyright law is. They say there is no such thing as a "poor man's copyright." They say you need a registration to pursue legal action. They are right.
Another myth here is that you need to apply notice of copyright to a work for it to be protected. This is not true after 1986; a work is "protected" (though again, what that means when you can't sue is a mystery) as soon as it appears in fixed form. Doubly so if published. Copyright notice these days is an idiosyncracy for unpublished work and a formality for published work, and unnecessary (& somewhat insulting) when dealing with professionals who know the law. And besides, it doesn't really help prove that a work is yours; you could just as easily write "(C) ME" on your copy of someone's work as you could on your original one.
...this pretty well sums it up.
Oh, yeah, and don't forget that if we don't colonize Mars SOON the universe could be denied its most precious jewel, i.e. the continued existence of our glorious Godlike species.
(I love the smell of karma in the morning...)
I dunno. Mankind's home planet has been pretty nice to it so far -- "escape" seems a little harsh, eh?
Unless, of course, you mean that the home planet needs to figure out how to escape mankind...
In terms of copyright protection, in order to bring suit your copyright must be registered with the US Copyright Office.
Computer programs have their copyrights registered under the category of "literary work." For more information see The US Copyright Office website.
You may be able to do a 'cease-and-desist' type thing without it (hey, under the DMCA you can probably send a CaD to anybody you want for anything, without necessarily having cause) but I don't know what sort of proof you have to have that the work was originally yours.
This is a definite warning though -- if you're developing Open Source and want to be really sure you can enforce the freedom of your code, register that copyright!
It'd be fine if they do it in accordance with the relevant license. But I'd hate to see MS flout the GPL and be rewarded with tons of developer effort & good code without giving anything in return -- that might have a chilling effect on the OS movement in general.
No, no. This is very bad for Open Source if IBM cannot be compelled to turn over AIX source.
Think about it. Party A is pretty much certain that Party B is using their code. However, for whatever reason that code is not directly visible to Party A. How will Party A prove it? Well, they must compel access to Party B's code, or else they cannot provide a specific example of infringing code, even if they are certain it is there.
Right now Party A is SCO, Party B is IBM and we're all pleased as punch when the axe falls. But what happens two years down the road when Party A is Linux and Party B is Microsoft?
Really, the best thing is for IBM to go through with discovery -- however much it costs and long it takes -- and for the examples to still not surface, or for the case to be thrown out on the ridiculous interpretation of "derivative works." To say that IBM can hide behind the closed-ness of the source, and thus prevent SCO access to proof of direct copying, is a bad omen.
Please someone [qualified] tell me I'm missing something...
Dear Angry of Sydney,
Wow! I'm really glad that I logged in to Slashdot this morning -- if I hadn't, I might have missed your touching letter!
Well, I'm afraid that's all the time I have for today -- got to go scour the web for more customer reactions! Best to leave no stone unturned, you know! And this way we save so much money by not having to have a mailbox!
Very Truly Yours,
The Music Industry
IWACI (I was a congressional intern) during a period of intensive discussion of AmTrak (one of the Save-Amtrak votes in '02). /. will tell you, the unions -- the problem is two things:
The problem with Amtrak is not, as a lot of well-meaning but uninformed libertarians on
1 (the main one) Congresscritters use Amtrak routes as huge pork barrel projects, so that their local region gets subsidized train service and some extra jobs for running it, even though no free-market train system would go there. Routes are governed by political laws, rather than by supply and demand, which is detrimental to the viability of the system.
2 (as a consequence of #1) Amtrak winds up being too expensive in an effort to keep afloat (because politicians from the same body that lets the pork barrel routes through also insist that Amtrak be "self-supporting" as though it could be run efficiently while political decisions muck with its business process) so it can't compete, price-wise, with airlines. To put this in context, keep in mind that planes get a lot of federal subsidies too (I think the only ones that are actually self-supporting these days are JetBlue and Southwest, though that could be a bit out of date) -- so it's not even a "glory of private airline enterprise" situation, especially when you consider the things we do to provide cheap air travel: political decisions to provide fuel (I don't even mean Iraq, there's a lot of government money that goes into geological exploration & finding oil reserves), the existence of the Air Traffic Controllers, staff to secure the Fatherland by having dogs sniff my underwear, etc.
Also, for a really long haul (like, coast-to-coast) air travel is going to be faster. For travelling to Chicago or along a sea-board, it would be pretty close, because you'd save a lot of time not having to go to and check into the airport (esp. when you consider trains can't be hijacked, plot arrangements for a Speed III notwithstanding). Plus the convenience factor!
Personally, living in NY, I'd be much more inclined to visit Philly or Boston if I knew I could get there in 45 minutes going public transit all the way. Price is a consideration (vs. the Chinatown bus or something) but if you cut out the cab/shuttle/bus fare needed to get to the airport...