Interesting question. I'd tend to respond to the resale restrictions on software and movies with a string of profanities, but degrees are... kinda fuzzy. I mean, if you've spent ages getting the things, why shouldn't you be able to recoup that investment? Hey, maybe you could even claim VAT back!
I guess the problem is that a degree isn't really a "thing" in itself - it's a label representing your abilities. You might be able to buy a black belt, but that doesn't mean you won't get kicked about by the first bunch of thugs you meet; similarly, you can sell your degree but, until the day when you can actually sell the knowledge straight out of your head (Matrix style), "selling" that degree to someone else is just incitement to misrepresent themselves. Fundamentally, a degree is far more than the paper it comes on.
In fact, in a very real sense, such a sale is morally very similar to forgery. In the case of banknotes, the value represented by a note is considered to be transferred as the note is, and any attempt to acquire a note without acquiring the value behind it is immoral. With banknotes, the only way to do that is to forge it. With degrees, the value represented by the degree is nontransferable, so claiming you have a degree on the basis that you "bought" it from someone else would presumably also be immoral. In both cases, you're laying claim to value you don't posess on the basis of hard copy (banknote, certificate, whatever) that you *do* posess.
"Hi, my name is Sharon. I'm not trying to sell you anything, but I would like to inform you about the wonderful opportunities available to you courtesy of product X from company Y..."
Calls like this are, in some ways, even more annoying than normal telemarketers. At least the other sort *admit* what they're doing.
I suspect he's hung up on Windows, where this is in fact the case. But even on a proper operating system (ah, the joys of OS snobbery) I believe (I'm away from Linux atm) that things you download in a tar file or similar keep the permissions that the creator set them to. I could be wrong - I'll check when I get home - but, if something like this is in fact the case, I could well imagine something misrepresenting itself as a document being accidentally executed. It'd take a fairly stupid user to pull that off, but when have we ever had a shortage of those?
And yes, IAAM - I Am A Mathematician. At least that's what it says on several of my college degrees, so I guess I must be one.;-)
Bah, and I'm stuck as a student for another year or two. You don't have a spare college degree you don't need, do you?:P
That's on my company's Windows 2000 desktops, so that doesn't give me grounds to complain about XP. And I haven't used XP for about two years, since it started crashing on me. So my information may be out of date.
Just as long as Microsoft doesn't end up actually managing to kill Google. Microsoft can afford to throw far more cash at the situation than Google ever could.
... right up to the point that you find something you need to protest about. At which point, you'll probably discover that:
1) sometimes protest can be the only way to get your message heard, especially if the system you're protesting about doesn't like criticism.
2) not all, or even many, protesters are violent. They're just attempting to get a problem fixed either faster or in the longer term than the four-year cycle of democracy encourages.
3) the point isn't to be a nuisance, it's to draw attention to something you see as an issue.
4) that freedom is sometimes more important than cash, especially the freedom to draw attention to bad government.
5) that giving the government the power to create free speech zones will tend to result in said zones being created at the bottom of the Mariana trench, or some similarly inaccessible location.
6) that a "Free Speech Zone" is technically misnamed - it's actually a declaration that the rest of the area is a "No Free Speech Zone". If they were honest about their naming, I might actually support them in this cos I can see the point of, for example, not allowing protesters within 10 metres of someone under threat of assassination. However, the small size of the Free Speech Zones indicates that the No Free Speech Zones are being made excessively large.
7) "When a representitive of law enforcement makes it clear and in no uncertain terms that the gathering needs to dispurse and the protesters refuse to leave, regardless of the right to free-speech," how the hell are you supposed to exercise that *right* to free speech?
8) those that wish to here the protesters' message will only be able to if they know how to find the obscure area miles away from the action that said protesters are being corralled in. Which, again, rather defeats the point.
9) "These zones are in place for everyone's protection" unless you happen to be a protester with an allergy to razorwire. In which case, sucks to be you, and sucks to be ruled by a governmental system to which criticism can't be effectively applied.
Oh, and it's certainly not just liberals who feel the need to protest and picket.
I'd agree with most of that (pretty damn insightful post), but I don't think that running an X86 emulator on PPC that then runs Vista really counts as Vista running on PPC. I do see your point about artificiality of restrictions though.
Being told you "have to" let Open Source interoperate with you is merely an obvious consequence of attempting to hold onto a monopoly by means of lock-in.
I'm guessing from your comment that you know how to do this now but, for the less mathematically-literate slashdotter, here's the solution, in words of one syllable.
In vector maths, one of the most useful operators is the dot product. It is useful because it has both an algebraic and a geometric formulation. The algebraic formulation is that (a,b,c).(d,e,f) = (ad,be,cf) - this allows you to calculate the damn thing on a computer. The geometric formulation is that, for two vectors X and Y, X.Y = |X| |Y| cos theta, where |V| gives the length of a vector V and theta is the angle between X and Y.
Say you have a plane in space, passing through the origin (the zero point). Consider a vector N that's normal to the plane (at right angles to every vector that lies on the plane). From the geometric formulation of the dot product, you can see that the set of points {X such that X is in the plane} is precisely the set of points {X such that X.N = 0} because, if a point is in the plane, the vector from the origin to that point is at right angles to N.
Unfortunately, we can't assume that our plane passes through the origin, so we need to generalise this a bit. What we find is that a plane is a set {X such that X.N = k}, where k is a constant equal to the minimum distance from the plane to the origin, or minus that distance (depending on which way the normal points).
So, we can now develop a strategy. If the corners of the tetrahedron are points A, B, C, D and we're trying to determine whether point X is in the tetrahedron, we need to figure out , for each set of three corners (for example A, B, C), whether X is on the same side of the plane generated by those points as the fourth point (for example D). You'll note that three points are sufficient to determine a plane.
If we can figure out the normal to that plane, we can take any point in it (A, for example) and thus find the magic constant k representing the displacement of the plane from the origin. We can then compare that constant to the values X.N and D.N - if X.N and D.N are on different sides of the constant k then the point X is definitely outside the tetrahedron; otherwise, X may be inside.
So now all we need to figure out how to do is find a normal to the plane. Sounds easy, but I'd wager that you won't be able to easily do it without the operator I'm about to describe: the cross product.
The cross product is the other important operator in vector maths. Just as the dot product represented (broadly speaking) the extent to which two vectors point in the same direction, so the cross product represents (broadly speaking) the area mapped out by the two vectors. The difference is that the cross product returns a vector rather than a scalar, and that vector always points at right angles to the two input vectors - it's normal to them. See what I'm getting at here?
I'll forgo long discussion of what the cross product is used for; I'll just say that it's often used to find volumes and is, in fact, the easiest way to find the volume of the tetrahedron. It is calculated as follows: (a,b,c)*(d,e,f) = (bf-ce, cd-af, ae-bd). I'll leave off describing where that expression comes from - the important thing is that we now have a normal to the plane generated by two points and the origin.
So, our algorithm will look something like:
- for each corner of the tetrahedron (call it D), take N = (B-A)*(C-A). - calculate k = A.N - if X.N k > D.N then X is not in the tetrahedron. Otherwise, repeat the above, choosing a different corner to start with. - if none of the four iterations fail, the point is inside the tetrahedron.
Thanks for the correction and apologies for wasting everyone's time. I'd flipped through the spec but I missed that element, so I'd assumed that OpenDocument couldn't do weird stuff (video, audio etc).
OpenOffice format != OpenDoc format. The latter is a lot more restrictive in terms of what you can do with it (which is *good* if you want it to be a standard).
So Microsoft is right in this case - their format would do stuff that OpenDoc won't. Shame that the rest of their speech is unadulterated ***FLUSH***
From what I can tell (I have read the specification but didn't understand that much of it) OpenDoc is a fairly restrictive format in terms of what you can do with it. AFAICT it won't do video or audio. It will do charts and images, and I think there was some kind of scripting language in there.
This is perfect for the purposes of governmental organisations working with lots and lots of text. It's a *good* thing, especially if it stops MS playing the proprietary extensions card. It's just not the OO.o format, and I'm getting slightly bored of people getting the two confused.
... stick an "Exportfrom/import to OpenDoc" button somewhere in your Office product. They already do this with a bunch of other formats, including early versions of Word (which certainly don't contain VoIP, or whatever it was that MS was babbling about), so they have absolutely no excuse for not doing it with a proper standard.
Of course, they're still not gonna do it because that would provide people with an easy migration path away from cash-cow Office...
Any chance you could provide a reference for that? If true, you've just made me a hell of a lot happier about chip and PIN - I'd assumed that the aim was to shift responsibility off the CCs' shoulders and onto someone else's.
However, there are restrictions (see clause 13, last sentence) on the person installing the software (even if that clause wasn't there, clause 3 can be assumed to cover transfer of ownership). So the installer, by accepting the EULA, is legally required to not transfer the software to anyone who hasn't agreed to the EULA. There is no loophole here.
Although I think the original poster may have had an idea with the whole "get a minor to do it" thing - not sure how that'd work out with respect to adhesion contracts. And anyway, that's a loophole in the law not the EULA so you probably wouldn't get away with it more than once.
I don't think that'd work - in general, a court is likely to uphold the principle that you can't outsource lawbreaking (the lawbreaking in this case being the acceptance of an EULA before handing the computer over to someone who won't respect that EULA).
They didn't take someone else's software and make it open source, they reimplemented functionality. It wasn't even (as far as I can tell) patented functionality. It was good for everyone, including Blizzard, because it added to the number of ways the game that you'd just bought could be used. And they got done for it by some power-freak manager, for violating the EULA (which they couldn't avoid doing, so their use should have been legally protected).
This has nothing to do with Stallman. It has very little to do with the GPL. It has to do with our ability to behave as anything other than sheeplike "consumers". It has to do with Blizzard being very, very lame. And now it has to do with the US justice system being willing to support that sort of dictatorial crap.
The grandparent wasn't talking about free software. He was talking about the difference between "ooh, shiney software, who cares about the T&Cs" and "we're paying HOW MUCH for permission to use our own data???" In other words, exactly what you're talking about:P
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting question. I'd tend to respond to the resale restrictions on software and movies with a string of profanities, but degrees are... kinda fuzzy. I mean, if you've spent ages getting the things, why shouldn't you be able to recoup that investment? Hey, maybe you could even claim VAT back!
I guess the problem is that a degree isn't really a "thing" in itself - it's a label representing your abilities. You might be able to buy a black belt, but that doesn't mean you won't get kicked about by the first bunch of thugs you meet; similarly, you can sell your degree but, until the day when you can actually sell the knowledge straight out of your head (Matrix style), "selling" that degree to someone else is just incitement to misrepresent themselves. Fundamentally, a degree is far more than the paper it comes on.
In fact, in a very real sense, such a sale is morally very similar to forgery. In the case of banknotes, the value represented by a note is considered to be transferred as the note is, and any attempt to acquire a note without acquiring the value behind it is immoral. With banknotes, the only way to do that is to forge it. With degrees, the value represented by the degree is nontransferable, so claiming you have a degree on the basis that you "bought" it from someone else would presumably also be immoral. In both cases, you're laying claim to value you don't posess on the basis of hard copy (banknote, certificate, whatever) that you *do* posess.
Any thoughts?
"Hi, my name is Sharon. I'm not trying to sell you anything, but I would like to inform you about the wonderful opportunities available to you courtesy of product X from company Y..."
Calls like this are, in some ways, even more annoying than normal telemarketers. At least the other sort *admit* what they're doing.
I suspect he's hung up on Windows, where this is in fact the case. But even on a proper operating system (ah, the joys of OS snobbery) I believe (I'm away from Linux atm) that things you download in a tar file or similar keep the permissions that the creator set them to. I could be wrong - I'll check when I get home - but, if something like this is in fact the case, I could well imagine something misrepresenting itself as a document being accidentally executed. It'd take a fairly stupid user to pull that off, but when have we ever had a shortage of those?
;-)
:P
And yes, IAAM - I Am A Mathematician. At least that's what it says on several of my college degrees, so I guess I must be one.
Bah, and I'm stuck as a student for another year or two. You don't have a spare college degree you don't need, do you?
It seemed pretty good to me apart from point 5. But I'm only a mathematician, so I await whatever wisdom you impart.
except we're not going to have any Governers walking the plank
But it'd solve so many problems!
Friday. It crashed. Twice.
That's on my company's Windows 2000 desktops, so that doesn't give me grounds to complain about XP. And I haven't used XP for about two years, since it started crashing on me. So my information may be out of date.
Chocolate, Vanilla, Pecan, Mint, Banana and BSOD?
Quetzalcoatlus
Just as long as Microsoft doesn't end up actually managing to kill Google. Microsoft can afford to throw far more cash at the situation than Google ever could.
... right up to the point that you find something you need to protest about. At which point, you'll probably discover that:
1) sometimes protest can be the only way to get your message heard, especially if the system you're protesting about doesn't like criticism.
2) not all, or even many, protesters are violent. They're just attempting to get a problem fixed either faster or in the longer term than the four-year cycle of democracy encourages.
3) the point isn't to be a nuisance, it's to draw attention to something you see as an issue.
4) that freedom is sometimes more important than cash, especially the freedom to draw attention to bad government.
5) that giving the government the power to create free speech zones will tend to result in said zones being created at the bottom of the Mariana trench, or some similarly inaccessible location.
6) that a "Free Speech Zone" is technically misnamed - it's actually a declaration that the rest of the area is a "No Free Speech Zone". If they were honest about their naming, I might actually support them in this cos I can see the point of, for example, not allowing protesters within 10 metres of someone under threat of assassination. However, the small size of the Free Speech Zones indicates that the No Free Speech Zones are being made excessively large.
7) "When a representitive of law enforcement makes it clear and in no uncertain terms that the gathering needs to dispurse and the protesters refuse to leave, regardless of the right to free-speech," how the hell are you supposed to exercise that *right* to free speech?
8) those that wish to here the protesters' message will only be able to if they know how to find the obscure area miles away from the action that said protesters are being corralled in. Which, again, rather defeats the point.
9) "These zones are in place for everyone's protection" unless you happen to be a protester with an allergy to razorwire. In which case, sucks to be you, and sucks to be ruled by a governmental system to which criticism can't be effectively applied.
Oh, and it's certainly not just liberals who feel the need to protest and picket.
I'd agree with most of that (pretty damn insightful post), but I don't think that running an X86 emulator on PPC that then runs Vista really counts as Vista running on PPC. I do see your point about artificiality of restrictions though.
I figured I'd get something wrong, but that's just... blatant :(
Being told you "have to" let Open Source interoperate with you is merely an obvious consequence of attempting to hold onto a monopoly by means of lock-in.
I'm guessing from your comment that you know how to do this now but, for the less mathematically-literate slashdotter, here's the solution, in words of one syllable.
:)
In vector maths, one of the most useful operators is the dot product. It is useful because it has both an algebraic and a geometric formulation. The algebraic formulation is that (a,b,c).(d,e,f) = (ad,be,cf) - this allows you to calculate the damn thing on a computer. The geometric formulation is that, for two vectors X and Y, X.Y = |X| |Y| cos theta, where |V| gives the length of a vector V and theta is the angle between X and Y.
Say you have a plane in space, passing through the origin (the zero point). Consider a vector N that's normal to the plane (at right angles to every vector that lies on the plane). From the geometric formulation of the dot product, you can see that the set of points {X such that X is in the plane} is precisely the set of points {X such that X.N = 0} because, if a point is in the plane, the vector from the origin to that point is at right angles to N.
Unfortunately, we can't assume that our plane passes through the origin, so we need to generalise this a bit. What we find is that a plane is a set {X such that X.N = k}, where k is a constant equal to the minimum distance from the plane to the origin, or minus that distance (depending on which way the normal points).
So, we can now develop a strategy. If the corners of the tetrahedron are points A, B, C, D and we're trying to determine whether point X is in the tetrahedron, we need to figure out , for each set of three corners (for example A, B, C), whether X is on the same side of the plane generated by those points as the fourth point (for example D). You'll note that three points are sufficient to determine a plane.
If we can figure out the normal to that plane, we can take any point in it (A, for example) and thus find the magic constant k representing the displacement of the plane from the origin. We can then compare that constant to the values X.N and D.N - if X.N and D.N are on different sides of the constant k then the point X is definitely outside the tetrahedron; otherwise, X may be inside.
So now all we need to figure out how to do is find a normal to the plane. Sounds easy, but I'd wager that you won't be able to easily do it without the operator I'm about to describe: the cross product.
The cross product is the other important operator in vector maths. Just as the dot product represented (broadly speaking) the extent to which two vectors point in the same direction, so the cross product represents (broadly speaking) the area mapped out by the two vectors. The difference is that the cross product returns a vector rather than a scalar, and that vector always points at right angles to the two input vectors - it's normal to them. See what I'm getting at here?
I'll forgo long discussion of what the cross product is used for; I'll just say that it's often used to find volumes and is, in fact, the easiest way to find the volume of the tetrahedron. It is calculated as follows: (a,b,c)*(d,e,f) = (bf-ce, cd-af, ae-bd). I'll leave off describing where that expression comes from - the important thing is that we now have a normal to the plane generated by two points and the origin.
So, our algorithm will look something like:
- for each corner of the tetrahedron (call it D), take N = (B-A)*(C-A).
- calculate k = A.N
- if X.N k > D.N then X is not in the tetrahedron. Otherwise, repeat the above, choosing a different corner to start with.
- if none of the four iterations fail, the point is inside the tetrahedron.
And we're done
Try reading the Windows EULA some time...
Thanks for the correction and apologies for wasting everyone's time. I'd flipped through the spec but I missed that element, so I'd assumed that OpenDocument couldn't do weird stuff (video, audio etc).
OpenOffice format != OpenDoc format. The latter is a lot more restrictive in terms of what you can do with it (which is *good* if you want it to be a standard).
So Microsoft is right in this case - their format would do stuff that OpenDoc won't. Shame that the rest of their speech is unadulterated ***FLUSH***
From what I can tell (I have read the specification but didn't understand that much of it) OpenDoc is a fairly restrictive format in terms of what you can do with it. AFAICT it won't do video or audio. It will do charts and images, and I think there was some kind of scripting language in there.
This is perfect for the purposes of governmental organisations working with lots and lots of text. It's a *good* thing, especially if it stops MS playing the proprietary extensions card. It's just not the OO.o format, and I'm getting slightly bored of people getting the two confused.
... stick an "Exportfrom/import to OpenDoc" button somewhere in your Office product. They already do this with a bunch of other formats, including early versions of Word (which certainly don't contain VoIP, or whatever it was that MS was babbling about), so they have absolutely no excuse for not doing it with a proper standard.
Of course, they're still not gonna do it because that would provide people with an easy migration path away from cash-cow Office...
After clicking through into a few related sites and forums, I am having some trouble getting to sleep...
Any chance you could provide a reference for that? If true, you've just made me a hell of a lot happier about chip and PIN - I'd assumed that the aim was to shift responsibility off the CCs' shoulders and onto someone else's.
However, there are restrictions (see clause 13, last sentence) on the person installing the software (even if that clause wasn't there, clause 3 can be assumed to cover transfer of ownership). So the installer, by accepting the EULA, is legally required to not transfer the software to anyone who hasn't agreed to the EULA. There is no loophole here.
Although I think the original poster may have had an idea with the whole "get a minor to do it" thing - not sure how that'd work out with respect to adhesion contracts. And anyway, that's a loophole in the law not the EULA so you probably wouldn't get away with it more than once.
I don't think that'd work - in general, a court is likely to uphold the principle that you can't outsource lawbreaking (the lawbreaking in this case being the acceptance of an EULA before handing the computer over to someone who won't respect that EULA).
They didn't take someone else's software and make it open source, they reimplemented functionality. It wasn't even (as far as I can tell) patented functionality. It was good for everyone, including Blizzard, because it added to the number of ways the game that you'd just bought could be used. And they got done for it by some power-freak manager, for violating the EULA (which they couldn't avoid doing, so their use should have been legally protected).
This has nothing to do with Stallman. It has very little to do with the GPL. It has to do with our ability to behave as anything other than sheeplike "consumers". It has to do with Blizzard being very, very lame. And now it has to do with the US justice system being willing to support that sort of dictatorial crap.
The grandparent wasn't talking about free software. He was talking about the difference between "ooh, shiney software, who cares about the T&Cs" and "we're paying HOW MUCH for permission to use our own data???" In other words, exactly what you're talking about :P