they have no right to charge for what should otherwise be free software.
Free as in speech, not free as in beer. Anyone has the right to charge anything they like for GPL software. What they can't do is prevent other people (including you) from giving it away for free. Since NeoOffice is such a large program, it's reasonable that they try to recoup some of their bandwidth costs (if nothing else) by charging money, and while you could always pool your money with other people and only buy one copy, most people who are interested in the Intel alpha would pay for a license themselves, assuming it's not too expensive, because it's most convenient that way. (Like the online music industry is now, except that the GPL model makes free distribution legal.)
While I don't have a reference for this, I seem to recall reading that Hawking misquoted John Paul. The Pope didn't say that scientists *shouldn't* study the beginning of the Universe, but that the scientists *wouldn't* be able to explain the instant of Creation, because that came from God; it was an expression of faith, rather than an admonition.
And as far as I know, the Pope so far is right; cosmologists will talk about t=1e-12 seconds after the Big Bang, and so forth, but few talk about t=0 (or t0) in anything but completely speculative ways. The Big Bang and "Let there be light!" are perfectly compatible if you're not a literalist.
I only write single-file C programs, so I use program.c for the source code and Program for the executable.
Ah yes, and try to do "make install" on a case-insensitive filesystem (e.g. OSX) when there is a file called "INSTALL" in the directory; I always have to rename the latter INSTALLATION first.
Don't know if I've proved anything by posting this; ah well. (And no, I'm not a 133t programmer like y'all; just a fan.:)
Re:Similar to an issue I had with published music.
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New IP Treaty Looming?
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Seems to me that this is similar: Steamboat Willie (e.g.) might eventually run out of copyright,
Neither Steamboat Willie nor Mein Kampf will ever run out of copyright, so long as the interested parties can afford the lobbyists to make sure that doesn't happen.
The tobacco lobby is just as powerful as Disney, seems to me, and still I see smoking being banned in restaurants. Ken Lay just went to prison too. The powerful win a lot of battles, but they don't win all of them. Have hope.
Similar to an issue I had with published music...
on
New IP Treaty Looming?
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· Score: 1
This reminds me of when I directed a college madrigal group. Most of the music we performed was from the Renaissance (and so very public domain), and yet the publishers of said music claimed copyright on the printings of it, maybe because of a few editorial choices here or there. It seemed at the time that there was no way to get a legally copyable version of the music without going to the original source itself, which was probably in a museum in Great Britain or Italy somewhere. (There may have been caches of public-domain versions of these works, but I certainly didn't know about them at the time; and there are now web caches of those works too, but again, were these versions copied from some "copyrighted" printing of the music, and so illegal?)
Seems to me that this is similar: Steamboat Willie (e.g.) might eventually run out of copyright, but good luck getting an original copy of it that wasn't broadcast within the past 50 years. It seems like yet a new way companies can extend their copyrights indefinitely; although, it would only take one person getting a hold of the original material and releasing it into the public domain for it to be legally available.
I imagine there will be a new Creative Commons clause, stating that a work may only be broadcast if the broadcaster relinquishes these new broadcasting "rights" to the material, and similar clauses may start finding their way into traditional broadcast contracts as well; why should some broadcast company have any rights to my creation? Remember, if the material is under copyright, the broadcaster cannot claim these rights unless I allow them to broadcast in the first place.
As for public domain matter, the law as described here only applies to the particular broadcast, so it could be countered by an effort to create a large public domain broadcast library of public domain works, so that people can bypass these new protected broadcasts.
Problematic would be if web hosting outfits (or ISP providers) could twist this law somehow to give THEM rights to any material you put on the web; that's probably highly doubtful but I can't rule anything out anymore.
Actually, I have seen Consumer Reports magazine review Apple computers several times, side-by-side with PCs, in their articles (in the past couple of years). I remember being impressed about the fact. I don't know about their history of doing so or if they've changed in the last year.
Fair enough, although these pay-as-you-go systems like Urge will presumably not be ad-ridden at all (at least yet!)
Still, the radio/renting model will always have its fans: people who like to have a lot of variety in their listening, but don't want to have a large CD or MP3 collection taking up space. They may be a niche market, but niche markets aren't such a bad thing. (Although maybe to Microsoft they are.:)
I'm completely naive as far as IDEs are concerned, but is there a freeware IDE available for these languages? It won't matter while they're in school, maybe, but if they become comfortable with a program, and then leave school and find out the program runs $900, they will be in a (minor) bind if they want to do some programming on their own. (I'm thinking of the parallel case of people working with Matlab and Mathematica; yes they are great programs to work with, but as an unemployed physicist I can't afford either one.)
>>The only problem with the system you suggest is that it favors the incumbents. Without cold, hard cash there is no way an unknown, but otherwise intelligent and capable person can run for a government office.
>No it doesn't because the incumbancy advantage is removed. I think you misunderstood my idea. >Say the race is for president and the pool of money is $100m. There are three candidates...All three get 1/3 of $100m to spend on their campaign - no private money [including their own] is allowed.
But suppose the two challengers are unknown outside of their hometown; they have a natural disadvantage over the incumbent, who is presumably fairly well-known by his/her constituents. If I personally had run for President against Dubya, for instance, I would have needed to spend most of my funding just to make people aware of my existence, while Dubya, already well-known, could have used his funding to attack me, etc.
It just seems to me that there is no simple solution to the campaign finance issue. Rather than trying to keep money out of campaigns, there's something we can do to make money less influential in campaigns, where spending more money would not automatically give a candidate an edge. If our culture saw excessive expenditures on the part of a candidate as trying to "buy the election", then spending might have a detrimental effect. But it doesn't seem to work that way, alas.
the obvious difference is that something that's primarily performed live (the concert and theater performances that you cite) aren't remakes-- they're performances
That's true. And yet, there are about 15 versions of Mozart's 40th symphony just on iTunes. Why (to choose a random example) did Radio Luxembourg bother making their recording in 1999, when the Prague Chamber Orchestra had already made theirs in 1987?
In general, the originals being remade fall into two categories:
- really good movies, where there's no real chance that a remake will improve it (e.g. Pink Panther) and it's far more likely that a remake will be total crap ...but why "Pink Panther"? It would have been obvious on day 1 that you can't hope to top the original scripts, and Steve Martin wasn't going to top Peter Sellers as Clouseau.
I was thinking about this: remakes are common in all fields of performance, but nowhere is it as reviled as in movies. For example, we have recordings of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chichester Psalms; why should anyone else bother performing it? Because it's interesting to see how a different conductor and a different orchestra interpret the piece; because they can contribute something new to it. (And after all, the programs of most orchestras are almost entirely "remakes"; premieres are a small percentage of the output of most musical ensembles.) Same goes for theatre: why do we keep seeing new performances of Hamlet? Partly for the live performance aspect, but partly because 1) a number of actors want the chance to play the role themselves, and 2) audiences appreciate a different spin on an old favorite.
So why not do it in movies? Peter Jackson made "King Kong" because he thought, "I like that movie, I'd like to put my own spin on it." If someone really liked the Pink Panther and wanted to do the same thing, I have no problem with that. It could be interesting, if done well. Even if Steve Martin couldn't possibly "top" Peter Sellers, he could still be good, and do something interesting and unique.
The real problem is not that movies are remade, but that they aren't remade well. But a lot of movies aren't being made well, whether remake or not.
>The alphabet is so small though. Short and long beats and short, long, and zero rests. That's 4 characters. If it can be assumed that no one will use consecutive rests, there is still limited number of passwords.
From the article: "The knock code is the combination of the time intervals between knocks produced by the 'KnocKey'"
So depending on the accuracy of the timing, the door could make the distinction between a 250ms interval and a 255ms interval, for instance, thus providing many more possible codes than something like Morse code can provide. What their accuracy is, one can't say, but they claim "billions" of possible codes.
It reminds me of the idea that one could encode an entire Encyclopedia with a single mark on a metal bar: translate the book into ASCII and smush the numbers together into one large number, put a decimal point in front of it, multiply it by the length of the bar, and make a mark at exactly that distance from one end of the bar. In reality, the storage capacity of such a mark is limited by the precision of one's measuring instruments, but it is still higher than just the one bit that a single mark may suggest.
>What this means is AOL can look for any large volume of nearly identical messages and move them straight to the spam bucket. That means not-for-profit mailing lists. Think the linux kernel mailing list, mysql-users and hundreds or thousands of other lists, large and small. >Sure, spam volume for AOL users will decrease dramatically, but at what cost?
Am I mistaken in remembering that AOL will pass through any email sent from people in the user's address book? If so, when users sign up for a mailing list, have a little notice telling them to add the list's address to their address book if they subscribe to AOL (which will be obvious from their email address). This is a bit of a hassle, but it doesn't seem to be a catastrophe to me unless such a whitelist doesn't exist.
The problem I see with this scheme is not what it will keep out of the users' mailboxes, but what it will allow in. If my spam filter started "failing" because senders decide to pony up some cash, I'd be rather pissed.
>> most U.S. science graduate programs in my experience waive their students' tuition
>That was true at one time. It's becoming increasingly more rare and typically only at larger universities.
Well, either it's changed that much in the past decade (I was in grad school 1997-2002), or I'm only familiar with graduate departments at large and/or top schools. Either is possible.:)
Particularly since most U.S. science graduate programs in my experience waive their students' tuition, and pay a small stipend, in exchange for their working as teaching or research assistants. That doesn't exactly help undergrads, who certainly outnumber grad students.
I was comparing scientists to other college graduates who would have the same difficulties. Hadn't been thinking of high-school graduates who go right into the workforce.
It's not a lot of money to live on, but my wife and I lived comfortably enough on our graduate stipends in Chicago for five years.
Hmm... just out of curiosity, what school was that?
University of Chicago for me, Northwestern University for her. Granted, big schools. Then again, that's where the science graduate programs tend to be, in big schools. Or am I being woefully naive?:)
You do realize that it's perfectly possible to get an engineering or science degree without borrowing money, don't you?
Particularly since most U.S. science graduate programs in my experience waive their students' tuition, and pay a small stipend, in exchange for their working as teaching or research assistants. It's not a lot of money to live on, but my wife and I lived comfortably enough on our graduate stipends in Chicago for five years. (It helped that we didn't own a car and don't drink.) And we only have student loans from college (which you'd presumably have even in real estate, no?)
..and also why I hate html email and use pine as my mail client.
When I started college (mid-90's), most people used MH to check their email. After a couple of years, most people started switching to pine, and I thought the same thing about pine: that it was a dumbed-down "graphical" interface.
This could be a story about tolerance I suppose, but heck, I still think that about pine.:) And I still prefer to use MH when I can.
I think it's a bit different between college and high school, though - in high school, you don't have a choice of what you're going to learn. They tell you, and you comply. If you couldn't care less about history (as much of a shame as it is), you're not going to do the work.
Most colleges have divisional requirements, though, if not core classes, so college students still have to take courses which they might not be interested in.
I have a mental image of how long a Slashdot story is. Many submissions are to long or to short.
...how the most terrible thing in the history of Slashdot is the fact that the 4th story down contains the word 'to' when it ought to contain the word 'too'. That missing 'o' is the greatest travesty on-line today!
So would you say that the current situation in Iraq is the lesser of two evils, vis a vis the situation in Iraq under Saddam Hussein?
This is a non sequitur, as my previous post did not mention Iraq at all. Whether invading Iraq was the right thing to do has nothing to do with political corruption in the United States, except that some of the corruption accompanied the war.
Slashdot Mirror
Free as in speech, not free as in beer. Anyone has the right to charge anything they like for GPL software. What they can't do is prevent other people (including you) from giving it away for free. Since NeoOffice is such a large program, it's reasonable that they try to recoup some of their bandwidth costs (if nothing else) by charging money, and while you could always pool your money with other people and only buy one copy, most people who are interested in the Intel alpha would pay for a license themselves, assuming it's not too expensive, because it's most convenient that way. (Like the online music industry is now, except that the GPL model makes free distribution legal.)
While I don't have a reference for this, I seem to recall reading that Hawking misquoted John Paul. The Pope didn't say that scientists *shouldn't* study the beginning of the Universe, but that the scientists *wouldn't* be able to explain the instant of Creation, because that came from God; it was an expression of faith, rather than an admonition.
And as far as I know, the Pope so far is right; cosmologists will talk about t=1e-12 seconds after the Big Bang, and so forth, but few talk about t=0 (or t0) in anything but completely speculative ways. The Big Bang and "Let there be light!" are perfectly compatible if you're not a literalist.
I only write single-file C programs, so I use program.c for the source code and Program for the executable.
:)
Ah yes, and try to do "make install" on a case-insensitive filesystem (e.g. OSX) when there is a file called "INSTALL" in the directory; I always have to rename the latter INSTALLATION first.
Don't know if I've proved anything by posting this; ah well. (And no, I'm not a 133t programmer like y'all; just a fan.
This reminds me of when I directed a college madrigal group. Most of the music we performed was from the Renaissance (and so very public domain), and yet the publishers of said music claimed copyright on the printings of it, maybe because of a few editorial choices here or there. It seemed at the time that there was no way to get a legally copyable version of the music without going to the original source itself, which was probably in a museum in Great Britain or Italy somewhere. (There may have been caches of public-domain versions of these works, but I certainly didn't know about them at the time; and there are now web caches of those works too, but again, were these versions copied from some "copyrighted" printing of the music, and so illegal?)
Seems to me that this is similar: Steamboat Willie (e.g.) might eventually run out of copyright, but good luck getting an original copy of it that wasn't broadcast within the past 50 years. It seems like yet a new way companies can extend their copyrights indefinitely; although, it would only take one person getting a hold of the original material and releasing it into the public domain for it to be legally available.
I imagine there will be a new Creative Commons clause, stating that a work may only be broadcast if the broadcaster relinquishes these new broadcasting "rights" to the material, and similar clauses may start finding their way into traditional broadcast contracts as well; why should some broadcast company have any rights to my creation? Remember, if the material is under copyright, the broadcaster cannot claim these rights unless I allow them to broadcast in the first place.
As for public domain matter, the law as described here only applies to the particular broadcast, so it could be countered by an effort to create a large public domain broadcast library of public domain works, so that people can bypass these new protected broadcasts.
Problematic would be if web hosting outfits (or ISP providers) could twist this law somehow to give THEM rights to any material you put on the web; that's probably highly doubtful but I can't rule anything out anymore.
Actually, I have seen Consumer Reports magazine review Apple computers several times, side-by-side with PCs, in their articles (in the past couple of years). I remember being impressed about the fact. I don't know about their history of doing so or if they've changed in the last year.
Perhaps "unintentionally hilarious" was meant?
Fair enough, although these pay-as-you-go systems like Urge will presumably not be ad-ridden at all (at least yet!)
:)
Still, the radio/renting model will always have its fans: people who like to have a lot of variety in their listening, but don't want to have a large CD or MP3 collection taking up space. They may be a niche market, but niche markets aren't such a bad thing. (Although maybe to Microsoft they are.
I'm completely naive as far as IDEs are concerned, but is there a freeware IDE available for these languages? It won't matter while they're in school, maybe, but if they become comfortable with a program, and then leave school and find out the program runs $900, they will be in a (minor) bind if they want to do some programming on their own. (I'm thinking of the parallel case of people working with Matlab and Mathematica; yes they are great programs to work with, but as an unemployed physicist I can't afford either one.)
>>The only problem with the system you suggest is that it favors the incumbents. Without cold, hard cash there is no way an unknown, but otherwise intelligent and capable person can run for a government office.
>No it doesn't because the incumbancy advantage is removed. I think you misunderstood my idea.
>Say the race is for president and the pool of money is $100m. There are three candidates...All three get 1/3 of $100m to spend on their campaign - no private money [including their own] is allowed.
But suppose the two challengers are unknown outside of their hometown; they have a natural disadvantage over the incumbent, who is presumably fairly well-known by his/her constituents. If I personally had run for President against Dubya, for instance, I would have needed to spend most of my funding just to make people aware of my existence, while Dubya, already well-known, could have used his funding to attack me, etc.
It just seems to me that there is no simple solution to the campaign finance issue. Rather than trying to keep money out of campaigns, there's something we can do to make money less influential in campaigns, where spending more money would not automatically give a candidate an edge. If our culture saw excessive expenditures on the part of a candidate as trying to "buy the election", then spending might have a detrimental effect. But it doesn't seem to work that way, alas.
That's true. And yet, there are about 15 versions of Mozart's 40th symphony just on iTunes. Why (to choose a random example) did Radio Luxembourg bother making their recording in 1999, when the Prague Chamber Orchestra had already made theirs in 1987?
- really good movies, where there's no real chance that a remake will improve it (e.g. Pink Panther) and it's far more likely that a remake will be total crap
I was thinking about this: remakes are common in all fields of performance, but nowhere is it as reviled as in movies. For example, we have recordings of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chichester Psalms; why should anyone else bother performing it? Because it's interesting to see how a different conductor and a different orchestra interpret the piece; because they can contribute something new to it. (And after all, the programs of most orchestras are almost entirely "remakes"; premieres are a small percentage of the output of most musical ensembles.) Same goes for theatre: why do we keep seeing new performances of Hamlet? Partly for the live performance aspect, but partly because 1) a number of actors want the chance to play the role themselves, and 2) audiences appreciate a different spin on an old favorite.
So why not do it in movies? Peter Jackson made "King Kong" because he thought, "I like that movie, I'd like to put my own spin on it." If someone really liked the Pink Panther and wanted to do the same thing, I have no problem with that. It could be interesting, if done well. Even if Steve Martin couldn't possibly "top" Peter Sellers, he could still be good, and do something interesting and unique.
The real problem is not that movies are remade, but that they aren't remade well. But a lot of movies aren't being made well, whether remake or not.
Just a thought.
>The alphabet is so small though. Short and long beats and short, long, and zero rests. That's 4 characters. If it can be assumed that no one will use consecutive rests, there is still limited number of passwords.
From the article:
"The knock code is the combination of the time intervals between knocks produced by the 'KnocKey'"
So depending on the accuracy of the timing, the door could make the distinction between a 250ms interval and a 255ms interval, for instance, thus providing many more possible codes than something like Morse code can provide. What their accuracy is, one can't say, but they claim "billions" of possible codes.
It reminds me of the idea that one could encode an entire Encyclopedia with a single mark on a metal bar: translate the book into ASCII and smush the numbers together into one large number, put a decimal point in front of it, multiply it by the length of the bar, and make a mark at exactly that distance from one end of the bar. In reality, the storage capacity of such a mark is limited by the precision of one's measuring instruments, but it is still higher than just the one bit that a single mark may suggest.
>What this means is AOL can look for any large volume of nearly identical messages and move them straight to the spam bucket. That means not-for-profit mailing lists. Think the linux kernel mailing list, mysql-users and hundreds or thousands of other lists, large and small.
>Sure, spam volume for AOL users will decrease dramatically, but at what cost?
Am I mistaken in remembering that AOL will pass through any email sent from people in the user's address book? If so, when users sign up for a mailing list, have a little notice telling them to add the list's address to their address book if they subscribe to AOL (which will be obvious from their email address). This is a bit of a hassle, but it doesn't seem to be a catastrophe to me unless such a whitelist doesn't exist.
The problem I see with this scheme is not what it will keep out of the users' mailboxes, but what it will allow in. If my spam filter started "failing" because senders decide to pony up some cash, I'd be rather pissed.
>> most U.S. science graduate programs in my experience waive their students' tuition
:)
>That was true at one time. It's becoming increasingly more rare and typically only at larger universities.
Well, either it's changed that much in the past decade (I was in grad school 1997-2002), or I'm only familiar with graduate departments at large and/or top schools. Either is possible.
That doesn't exactly help undergrads, who certainly outnumber grad students.
I was comparing scientists to other college graduates who would have the same difficulties. Hadn't been thinking of high-school graduates who go right into the workforce.
It's not a lot of money to live on, but my wife and I lived comfortably enough on our graduate stipends in Chicago for five years. :)
Hmm... just out of curiosity, what school was that?
University of Chicago for me, Northwestern University for her. Granted, big schools. Then again, that's where the science graduate programs tend to be, in big schools. Or am I being woefully naive?
Particularly since most U.S. science graduate programs in my experience waive their students' tuition, and pay a small stipend, in exchange for their working as teaching or research assistants. It's not a lot of money to live on, but my wife and I lived comfortably enough on our graduate stipends in Chicago for five years. (It helped that we didn't own a car and don't drink.) And we only have student loans from college (which you'd presumably have even in real estate, no?)
"Evolving has become such a hassle; let's get those small rodents to do it for us."
When I started college (mid-90's), most people used MH to check their email. After a couple of years, most people started switching to pine, and I thought the same thing about pine: that it was a dumbed-down "graphical" interface.
This could be a story about tolerance I suppose, but heck, I still think that about pine. :) And I still prefer to use MH when I can.
Most colleges have divisional requirements, though, if not core classes, so college students still have to take courses which they might not be interested in.
Just sayin'.
This is a non sequitur, as my previous post did not mention Iraq at all. Whether invading Iraq was the right thing to do has nothing to do with political corruption in the United States, except that some of the corruption accompanied the war.