What he said was that he wouldn't object to a presence (like the one in Korea, Japan, Germany, or France), for 100 years, so long as Americans aren't being killed
That's almost as bad. Only on the order of 1e3 Americans are being killed in Iraq per year (compare that to traffic accidents, heart attacks, whatever, and it's nothing), and they're all volunteers. If someone is willing to risk their life, that's their business. The unfair part is this: It's fucking expensive, and people who are not volunteers, are required to pay for it. The expense is the problem with the occupation, not the consenting deaths. Make the tax and inflation and higher interest rates opt-in, and I'll happily consider warmongers to be serious presidential candidates. Without opt-in expenses, warmongers are just another kind of crook trying divert America's wealth to assorted private interests.
Not to put ideas in their pointed little heads, but I'm surprised that the feds don't just impose a uniform federal tax on internet, mail order, and all other non-local sales of goods or services, with some small percentage earmarked for the states based on where the federal tax dollars come from.
Because they'd need to pass a constitutional amendment first.
Heh. Just kidding. They'd only need to do that, if they wanted their tax to be legal.
As to Asimov's laws, they sound like good solid engineering principles that we should try to impliment
Engineering principles? Fine, if we're being very figurative.
But the engineering principles exist to serve the engineer's purpose. For example, you build a bridge to be strong, because a broken bridge fails to allow people to cross it. You sanitize your PHP script's inputs, because you don't want anyone on the Internet to be able to execute whatever SQL command they want to.
Asimov's robots also had a prime purpose goal: to protect human lives (and apparently all human lives). This was a primary purpose for which any other purpose (e.g. bending girders) was secondary.
If that goal is not your goal, then Asimov's rules are not a solution to your problem. The whole point of these armed robots is to kill people. Killing is their purpose. If they're not able to kill, then the taxpayers are getting ripped off. Implementing Asimov's rules would be a bad idea, not a good idea.
So, first and foremost, don't click on such links.
If clicking a link poses even the slightest risk, you need to replace your software ASAP.
Websites don't "run" malware; users download and install malware with execution privileges. Or their defective user agents do it for them. CEOs don't need defective user agents. I'm not sure who does.
It's only successful from a technical perspective. The patents keep it underground. If anyone with money tries to use Xvid, they'll either have to license the patents, or they'll be in court. Xvid is useless to Sun and their customers.
Not sure why public perception would be like that, since the vast majority would actually own a mac and upgrades truly would just work.
I wouldn't count on that. Once you start putting "deliberately fail" code in your product (to deal with the customers whose money you don't want), you risk it getting triggered for the customers you did want. Every logic bomb that Apple adds to their product with the intention of crippling it for non-Apple-hardware customers, is a logic bomb that might go off unintentionally (e.g. when the user runs MacOS on Mac hardware with a virtualizer in between the OS and hardware).
You see this with DRM systems all the time, where the user isn't doing something the attacker really wanted to prevent, but stuff fails to "just work" anyway.
The only problem is, you can't purchase OS X from a retailer, only license it.
There's a lot of loose talk here, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about buying legal copies of Mac OS X, not actually buying the source code from Apple or otherwise becoming the new copyright holder..
When you look at it that way, it makes sense. Lots of retailers sell boxes containing a OS X DVDROM. Pay your money, don't sign any contracts, and you walk out of the story owning a shrink-wrapped product. Pay cash, and neither Apple nor the retailer even knows who you are. After the transaction, there's no evidence or paperwork even suggesting that you (perhaps even anonymously) licensed anything, but you'll have a receipt showing that you bought something. No records pertaining to licenses are kept. No forms are required or explanations offered ("um, sire, you realize we don't really sell that, right?"), before you hit the cash register.
Online it's like that too, except without the anonymous aspect (it's hard to buy things online anonymously) but with even less interaction which would allow licensing. For example, Amazon.com sells Mac OS X and I know for a fact that they don't do any customer-licensing paperwork to broker agreements between Amazon customers and their suppliers (such as Apple). That would be incredibly intensive and delay shipping. Can you imagine ordering it online, and getting a form in the mail a few days later? There's no way Amazon could handle that sort of business model.
Purchasing OS X requires negotiating directly with Apple, and I don't think the price tag will be something most folks who post to these forums can afford.
Check out this page on Apple's own website. It has a section that links to resellers, and it also has a "Buy Now" link (those are Apple's words, not mine; they actually say "Buy" on their webpage, follow the link if you don't believe me).
The resellers link will take you to places where you can actually purchase (i.e. own) a copy of Mac OS X without any licensing. I've done business with one of the entities that they point to in my location, and am sure that the store in question sells rather than licenses.
But here's where it gets interesting: the "Buy Now" link goes to page where they actually do switch wording and mention licenses for the first time. The "add to cart" part of the page doesn't say anything about licenses, though (and yet, it seems implied since there is a mention of how many users will use the software; normally when you buy software, there's no limit to how many people are allowed to use the computer you install it on, so this shouldn't even be mentioned unless the customer is about to enter into some kind of agreement to keep other people off his own computer). After that, it gets even more inconsistent; if you add it to your cart and look in your cart, there's no hint that you're actually going to end up agreeing to a license rather than buying a product.
After that, if you click "check out" it wants me to create an account, so I wasn't able to check to see if they license rather than sell. It might be interesting, for someone who obtains their OS X directly from Apple, to take a careful look at exactly what they end up agreeing to, before getting the product. I wouldn't put it past Apple to try to actually license it; but I wouldn't count on their lawyers having actually crippled the website yet, either. Anyone wanna spend $129 to find out?
But then: how do I use a robot to kill someone, or otherwise kill them without using a human operator's precious time? If I need to kill people somehow, then it seems silly and arbitrary to take robots out of the toolbox for that application. People will just work-around it somehow -- we'll just put a pig-brain inside the case so that it counts as a cyborg instead of a robot, or whatever.
the stickers on the discs claiming that they still own the CD give them a legal right to control what the recipients do with them
And the recipients signed the stickers (agreed to the terms) and sent the stickers back to Universal, right? If so, then that's pretty solid evidence of a meeting-of-the-minds. Once Universal introduces those signed stickers in court as evidence that the contract really exists, the recipients are fuc--- what? Wait, what do you mean they didn't sign 'em and mail 'em back?! And Universal sent kept sending CDs?!
I hope Universal wins. I have some contracts (that they'll agree to by default) that I want to mail to them.
I read one of Marilyn Vos Savant's books, and in it she listed 9 as a prime...
But there's a more-than-50% chance that 9 is prime!
I test primeness by dividing the test-number by all integers, from 2 through the test-number's square root, looking for a zero remainder. So, first, I divided 9 by 2. I worked on this for a while, and ended up with a nonzero remainder. So far, 9 looks prime, and I've already tested half of the potential divisors! In fact, there's just one more potential divisor to try: the number 3. I'm almost done, and everything rides on this final calculation. There's a lot of uncertainty here.
What are the chances that 9 is just going to happen to be divisible by the very last potential divisor that I try? I'll grant you that the chances are non-zero; there really are some composite numbers out there. But the chances aren't one, either. For example, when I was testing 17 for primeness, the last potential divisor I tried was 4, and it didn't work. This last calculation could go either way.
So here we are, having tested half of the possible divisors, and so far 9 is looking prime and there's just one more divisor to test against. So, I ask you: do you want to bet 9's primeness/compositeness on this last calculation? I'll make it easier for you: I tell you right now, that 9 is just like 17, in that it is not divisible by 4. And then, I'll even give you an option: we can finish the calculation by dividing 9 by 3, or you can change your candidate divisor to 5, now that you know 4 doesn't work. Well.. what'll it be?
I just can't believe a promise like that. Some of the latest bots, with their multiple Enjoyment Enhancement plug-in modules, their parallel funpath searchers, and their high-performance endorphin-receptor simulators, are able to enjoy hookers and blackjack nearly 2000 times as much as any human.
I agree that their argument is weak, but I am a computer person. A judge's eyes might gloss over and take on a zombie-like nobody-is-home deadness, as you try to explain what the law says. Or maybe they'd just declare you a trouble-maker who doesn't do what the corporate overlords want you to do.
It turns out that computers are better than humans at just about any game. Does this mean that we can no longer entertain ourselves?
Of course we can, but wouldn't it be more efficient to have a computer entertain itself, on our behalf? Your recreation could be taken care of, for you by proxy, freeing you to pursue other more fulfilling endeavors, such as laboring.
This is just a step toward the ideals mankind has dreamt of for ages. Someday, computers will be able to drink beer for us, have sex for us, and enjoy books,music, and movies for us. Perhaps they could even sleep for us. This would make us free to perform menial tasks.
I agree that their argument is weak, but I am a computer person. A judge's eyes might gloss over and take on a zombie-like nobody-is-home deadness, as you try to explain how a CD player works. Or maybe they'd just declare that all CD players are copyright infringement devices.
How on earth do you load the program into memory (and once again into CPU cache) to run it if you can't???
The pro-EULA faction's argument works like this:
Under copyright law alone, you don't have the right to make the copy(*). You don't have the right to run the software that they sell you.
In order to make their software usable (so that someone would have incentive to buy it), the copyright holder extends additional rights to its customer, rights that copyright law does not grant. One of the additional rights, is the right to copy the software to your hard disk and RAM.
These additional rights are given by a license: the EULA. If you accept the EULA, you gain the right to use the software. If you accept the EULA, you also give up some rights that you otherwise would have had, so read all the fine print. It can get very specific about under what circumstances that you are allowed to copy the program into RAM, and for what purposes. Copying their work to RAM for execution purposes would be something they grant, and copying to RAM to serve checksums to defeat bot detection would be something not granted.
(*) The catch: their claim that you don't have the right (without the EULA) to run the software, is questionable. Since 1) the purpose of the copying is noncommercial 2) the nature of the copyrighted work makes it useless unless copied to RAM, and 4) the effect of the copying has no impact on the market for the copyrighted work, it is arguably Fair Use. (Note I left out the number 3 in the above list.)
Who the hell is going to contribute to a Congresscritter's reelection campaign, if the critters only give out contracts for paper? Especially if you say it doesn't have to be nice paper. At least with "nice" paper, you can set the specs such that it matches only one company's product.
It needs to be computers instead of paper, so that it costs enough to be worth someone's while to bid for the contract, so that they'll have reason to reward you in the next years' campaign.
I don't see why they can't just write a law establishing that you own your ideas
I don't see why they can't just write a law establishing that pi is 3.
But seriously, you own your ideas as long as you keep them a secret. Once you reveal your idea (copying it into other peoples' brains) you can't own it. I don't mean it's not just or not desirable; I mean that it's not possible. You just transmitted it to someone, so you don't exclusively have it anymore, unless you're going to cut open other peoples' skulls.
There's also this problem: what if two different people, who own their own ideas, happen to have the same idea? That doesn't (statistically speaking) happen with copyright, but it happens thousands of times per day with more general ideas (the kind of stuff that patents cover).
Slashdot Mirror
That's almost as bad. Only on the order of 1e3 Americans are being killed in Iraq per year (compare that to traffic accidents, heart attacks, whatever, and it's nothing), and they're all volunteers. If someone is willing to risk their life, that's their business. The unfair part is this: It's fucking expensive, and people who are not volunteers, are required to pay for it. The expense is the problem with the occupation, not the consenting deaths. Make the tax and inflation and higher interest rates opt-in, and I'll happily consider warmongers to be serious presidential candidates. Without opt-in expenses, warmongers are just another kind of crook trying divert America's wealth to assorted private interests.
Because they'd need to pass a constitutional amendment first.
Heh. Just kidding. They'd only need to do that, if they wanted their tax to be legal.
So that people have the freedom to maintain the software that they use. If you don't see a need for GPL, then I bet you've never been orphaned.
Engineering principles? Fine, if we're being very figurative.
But the engineering principles exist to serve the engineer's purpose. For example, you build a bridge to be strong, because a broken bridge fails to allow people to cross it. You sanitize your PHP script's inputs, because you don't want anyone on the Internet to be able to execute whatever SQL command they want to.
Asimov's robots also had a prime purpose goal: to protect human lives (and apparently all human lives). This was a primary purpose for which any other purpose (e.g. bending girders) was secondary.
If that goal is not your goal, then Asimov's rules are not a solution to your problem. The whole point of these armed robots is to kill people. Killing is their purpose. If they're not able to kill, then the taxpayers are getting ripped off. Implementing Asimov's rules would be a bad idea, not a good idea.
If clicking a link poses even the slightest risk, you need to replace your software ASAP.
Websites don't "run" malware; users download and install malware with execution privileges. Or their defective user agents do it for them. CEOs don't need defective user agents. I'm not sure who does.
It's only successful from a technical perspective. The patents keep it underground. If anyone with money tries to use Xvid, they'll either have to license the patents, or they'll be in court. Xvid is useless to Sun and their customers.
I wouldn't count on that. Once you start putting "deliberately fail" code in your product (to deal with the customers whose money you don't want), you risk it getting triggered for the customers you did want. Every logic bomb that Apple adds to their product with the intention of crippling it for non-Apple-hardware customers, is a logic bomb that might go off unintentionally (e.g. when the user runs MacOS on Mac hardware with a virtualizer in between the OS and hardware).
You see this with DRM systems all the time, where the user isn't doing something the attacker really wanted to prevent, but stuff fails to "just work" anyway.
Apple might pull it off, but it's nontrivial.
There's a lot of loose talk here, but I'm pretty sure he was talking about buying legal copies of Mac OS X, not actually buying the source code from Apple or otherwise becoming the new copyright holder..
When you look at it that way, it makes sense. Lots of retailers sell boxes containing a OS X DVDROM. Pay your money, don't sign any contracts, and you walk out of the story owning a shrink-wrapped product. Pay cash, and neither Apple nor the retailer even knows who you are. After the transaction, there's no evidence or paperwork even suggesting that you (perhaps even anonymously) licensed anything, but you'll have a receipt showing that you bought something. No records pertaining to licenses are kept. No forms are required or explanations offered ("um, sire, you realize we don't really sell that, right?"), before you hit the cash register.
Online it's like that too, except without the anonymous aspect (it's hard to buy things online anonymously) but with even less interaction which would allow licensing. For example, Amazon.com sells Mac OS X and I know for a fact that they don't do any customer-licensing paperwork to broker agreements between Amazon customers and their suppliers (such as Apple). That would be incredibly intensive and delay shipping. Can you imagine ordering it online, and getting a form in the mail a few days later? There's no way Amazon could handle that sort of business model.
Check out this page on Apple's own website. It has a section that links to resellers, and it also has a "Buy Now" link (those are Apple's words, not mine; they actually say "Buy" on their webpage, follow the link if you don't believe me).
The resellers link will take you to places where you can actually purchase (i.e. own) a copy of Mac OS X without any licensing. I've done business with one of the entities that they point to in my location, and am sure that the store in question sells rather than licenses.
But here's where it gets interesting: the "Buy Now" link goes to page where they actually do switch wording and mention licenses for the first time. The "add to cart" part of the page doesn't say anything about licenses, though (and yet, it seems implied since there is a mention of how many users will use the software; normally when you buy software, there's no limit to how many people are allowed to use the computer you install it on, so this shouldn't even be mentioned unless the customer is about to enter into some kind of agreement to keep other people off his own computer). After that, it gets even more inconsistent; if you add it to your cart and look in your cart, there's no hint that you're actually going to end up agreeing to a license rather than buying a product.
After that, if you click "check out" it wants me to create an account, so I wasn't able to check to see if they license rather than sell. It might be interesting, for someone who obtains their OS X directly from Apple, to take a careful look at exactly what they end up agreeing to, before getting the product. I wouldn't put it past Apple to try to actually license it; but I wouldn't count on their lawyers having actually crippled the website yet, either. Anyone wanna spend $129 to find out?
But then: how do I use a robot to kill someone, or otherwise kill them without using a human operator's precious time? If I need to kill people somehow, then it seems silly and arbitrary to take robots out of the toolbox for that application. People will just work-around it somehow -- we'll just put a pig-brain inside the case so that it counts as a cyborg instead of a robot, or whatever.
Keep your cork off my genie bottle!
And the recipients signed the stickers (agreed to the terms) and sent the stickers back to Universal, right? If so, then that's pretty solid evidence of a meeting-of-the-minds. Once Universal introduces those signed stickers in court as evidence that the contract really exists, the recipients are fuc--- what? Wait, what do you mean they didn't sign 'em and mail 'em back?! And Universal sent kept sending CDs?!
I hope Universal wins. I have some contracts (that they'll agree to by default) that I want to mail to them.
Unsigned 32-bit wrap-around.
But there's a more-than-50% chance that 9 is prime!
I test primeness by dividing the test-number by all integers, from 2 through the test-number's square root, looking for a zero remainder. So, first, I divided 9 by 2. I worked on this for a while, and ended up with a nonzero remainder. So far, 9 looks prime, and I've already tested half of the potential divisors! In fact, there's just one more potential divisor to try: the number 3. I'm almost done, and everything rides on this final calculation. There's a lot of uncertainty here.
What are the chances that 9 is just going to happen to be divisible by the very last potential divisor that I try? I'll grant you that the chances are non-zero; there really are some composite numbers out there. But the chances aren't one, either. For example, when I was testing 17 for primeness, the last potential divisor I tried was 4, and it didn't work. This last calculation could go either way.
So here we are, having tested half of the possible divisors, and so far 9 is looking prime and there's just one more divisor to test against. So, I ask you: do you want to bet 9's primeness/compositeness on this last calculation? I'll make it easier for you: I tell you right now, that 9 is just like 17, in that it is not divisible by 4. And then, I'll even give you an option: we can finish the calculation by dividing 9 by 3, or you can change your candidate divisor to 5, now that you know 4 doesn't work. Well.. what'll it be?
It's a shame Apple did this. Bricking your phone is the kind of thing a hacker would do!
I just can't believe a promise like that. Some of the latest bots, with their multiple Enjoyment Enhancement plug-in modules, their parallel funpath searchers, and their high-performance endorphin-receptor simulators, are able to enjoy hookers and blackjack nearly 2000 times as much as any human.
I agree that their argument is weak, but I am a computer person. A judge's eyes might gloss over and take on a zombie-like nobody-is-home deadness, as you try to explain what the law says. Or maybe they'd just declare you a trouble-maker who doesn't do what the corporate overlords want you to do.
Of course we can, but wouldn't it be more efficient to have a computer entertain itself, on our behalf? Your recreation could be taken care of, for you by proxy, freeing you to pursue other more fulfilling endeavors, such as laboring.
This is just a step toward the ideals mankind has dreamt of for ages. Someday, computers will be able to drink beer for us, have sex for us, and enjoy books,music, and movies for us. Perhaps they could even sleep for us. This would make us free to perform menial tasks.
I agree that their argument is weak, but I am a computer person. A judge's eyes might gloss over and take on a zombie-like nobody-is-home deadness, as you try to explain how a CD player works. Or maybe they'd just declare that all CD players are copyright infringement devices.
On some MUDs, if a player was suspected of botting, other players would give them an on-the-spot Turing test. Those who failed would be attacked.
The pro-EULA faction's argument works like this:
Under copyright law alone, you don't have the right to make the copy(*). You don't have the right to run the software that they sell you.
In order to make their software usable (so that someone would have incentive to buy it), the copyright holder extends additional rights to its customer, rights that copyright law does not grant. One of the additional rights, is the right to copy the software to your hard disk and RAM.
These additional rights are given by a license: the EULA. If you accept the EULA, you gain the right to use the software. If you accept the EULA, you also give up some rights that you otherwise would have had, so read all the fine print. It can get very specific about under what circumstances that you are allowed to copy the program into RAM, and for what purposes. Copying their work to RAM for execution purposes would be something they grant, and copying to RAM to serve checksums to defeat bot detection would be something not granted.
(*) The catch: their claim that you don't have the right (without the EULA) to run the software, is questionable. Since 1) the purpose of the copying is noncommercial 2) the nature of the copyrighted work makes it useless unless copied to RAM, and 4) the effect of the copying has no impact on the market for the copyrighted work, it is arguably Fair Use. (Note I left out the number 3 in the above list.)
Who the hell is going to contribute to a Congresscritter's reelection campaign, if the critters only give out contracts for paper? Especially if you say it doesn't have to be nice paper. At least with "nice" paper, you can set the specs such that it matches only one company's product.
It needs to be computers instead of paper, so that it costs enough to be worth someone's while to bid for the contract, so that they'll have reason to reward you in the next years' campaign.
I don't see why they can't just write a law establishing that pi is 3.
But seriously, you own your ideas as long as you keep them a secret. Once you reveal your idea (copying it into other peoples' brains) you can't own it. I don't mean it's not just or not desirable; I mean that it's not possible. You just transmitted it to someone, so you don't exclusively have it anymore, unless you're going to cut open other peoples' skulls.
There's also this problem: what if two different people, who own their own ideas, happen to have the same idea? That doesn't (statistically speaking) happen with copyright, but it happens thousands of times per day with more general ideas (the kind of stuff that patents cover).
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.