If they lose this fight, they'll singlehandedly make the "Ivy League" a thing of the past. I'm not siding with the RIAA here, but the law, unfortunately, is on their side.
The law isn't on their side when it comes to going on a fishing expedition. Also, the number of cases that the RIAA has won in court so far (that is NOT the same as people settling) isn't very high, and their cases being thrownn out isn't exactly unheard of..
I'd rather think that a law professor has some idea about this, and about the legal risks in general. I would even go as far as suggesting that he probably has a lot more of an idea then you and me together.
Are these colleges prepared to take the risk of losing everything to stand up for their students?
Is this society prepared to destoy such colleges and their future in order to protect the ill-gotten exclusive rights of an industry that is doomed to failure?
It sounds like IBM is commiting suicide by shafting all of their people who have been working with the various customers for years.
They have been there, they have done that.. repeatedly. They are at it again, and somehow they still live..
Is there a way for all of the ex-IBM employees to set themselves up as consultants for the same customers that will, no doubt, also get shafted by IBM in this insane policy? Do any of you guys have a "non-compete" with IBM? It seems to me that even if you do, the fact that you are being laid off would void the non-compete.
When you get layed off would usually void a non-compete.
It could be that the DVDs were not scrambled with CSS (most small scale and/or non-commercial releases for example) It could also be that the player you use brute-forces the disk key (ie mplayer on Unix) And of course it could be that the software you use for creating the image unscrambles it on the fly (running AnyDVD on Windows for example)
Note that the later 2 cases do involve circumventing a content access control, even if you are not aware of it.
If you want to read a technical explanation of how CSS works and why a consumer can't just make a bitwise copy of a DVD including the keys needed for descrambling it, read http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Kesden/index.html
Even if you can fool a drive into giving you a full copy of the hidden area, you still can't write it to a DVD without the proper equipment and recordable media, which aren't available to consumers.
I live in the Netherlands and I happen to have visitors from the USA on a regular basis for business reasons. The 2 things they usually want to 'see' first are the red-light district in Amsterdam, and a Dutch 'coffee-shop'.
Those are generally quite succesfull business people, and a few people working for somewhat scary government agencies that might actually be involved in the 'war on drugs'.
This all said, one of the bigger mistakes of those who propose legalizing pot is ignoring that it does have some potential dangers and problems. Ignoring those allows those who rather keep it illegal to exploit those problems and keep things as they are.
You own the DVD. You don't own the content. This is pretty clearly established, and wishing and stamping your feet won't make it go away.
You do however own a copy of the content. This is recognized in copyright law (look for example at title 117 regarding the running of computer programs, where the law clearly speaks about the owner of a copy, and gives some specific right to such an owner).
As long as there is no license I have to accept before using the content, I bought a copy of the content, no matter how much content owners would like me to believe I just licensed something from them on their conditions and with their restrictions.
The image can reproduce exact copies of the disc. Or are you unfamiliar with what an "image" is? Whether you use that image to duplicate the disc or to store it on your hard drive is unimportant. Disc-to-disc copying can be done without breaking encryption.
I believe it is you who is unfamiliar with how DVDs and HD-DVDs work, because if you did know only for a bit what you were talking about, you'd know about how making bitwise copies and images by consumers is prevented.
I suggest you leave it to those who know a bit about the technology in question to explain what can and what can't be done.
Well, if you can make a complete bitwise copy of a (HD-)DVD including the protected areas, then yes. Since equipment to do that is restricted to professional users, it is easy for commercial pirates to make such copies. The average user however cannot, and won't be able to unless: - the restrictions on sale of reproduction equipment are lifted - the encryption is broken
. That proprietary retail content is not compatible with open source is not a relevant legal question and it's not the producer's responsibility. Backup copies are just that--identical copies.
If the work will be available in the public domain after copyright expires however is a relevant question. Not being able to break the encryption and lack of laws forcing content 'owners' to ensure such availability means that the ultimate goal of copyright is corrupted while content producers still get the reward. I'd rather say that you can either have encrypted content or copyright protection, but not both at the same time.
It's not your content, plain and simple.
Not my individual content, no, but it is part of the culture I live in, and as a consequence 'owned' by the society I am a part of. That the creator of that content (or their agent) enjoys some exclusive rights for a limited time does not change that at all.
It's not your own account you're locked out of.
Ultimately it is. Encrypted content and no right to break said encryption means that works on which the copyright has expired cannot become part of the public domain, and thereby I (and with me all of society) is locked out of what is rightfully theirs.
,i>If there was a community with similar interests but widely varied products (think 10 clones of Google, all with mostly the same services, and each with its own small sub-community) it would likely be harder for all of them to survive against a common competitor than for a single Google with all of the userbase of the sub-commmunities.
Replace 'google' with search engine, and you'll find that there are in fact quite a number of them.
Google is big today, but started out as just another search engine.. Before them, Altavista was the way to search the web, they weren't the only one either.
That Google exists and had a chance to become big is the result of choice, and when you take away such choice, the result is that inovation such as Google has provided won't happen as often if at all.
The difference i think is management, which Microsoft has, however flawed, and open source as a general rule, does not. Even within single projects there is useless argument,
That you as a customer don't get to see the useless arguments does in no way mean they don't exist. Having worked with Microsoft (on OS software no less, and worked WITH, I never was a MS employee) I am pretty sure that they have plenty of them.
and forks for ridiculous reasons. In most cases, the required action is for one party to be kicked in the ass, hard. There are RARE cases where the majority of the community sees something going wrong and forks, such is the case with X.org.
So, you ignore forks for ridiculous reasons, whats the problem there?
My example was *precisely* that of something non-obvious to someone skilled in the art; don't look now, but it's not my reasoning that's failing here.
Really?
What you said is:
Secondly, if two people skilled in the art (hereafter referred to as "geniuses") come up with the same thing independently and with no knowledge of the other's research or patents, that is proof of nothing but the fact that two geniuses independently came up with the same, or substantially the same, idea. It may, however, be useful for the patent holder to argue against obvious, on the grounds that if it took a genius to devise it, then it's not obvious.
It is your reasoning failing here. You start with suggesting that those skilled in the art are 'geniusses', and you then argue that since it took a genius, it can't be obvious. However, yor first statemnent invalidates that.
A 48K Spectrum was my second computer after a ZX81. I don't think I ever got so much pleasure out of any other possession I had as a child (and I didn't even have Sam Fox Strip Poker [props to those who actually remember her, and double to those who remember the game]).
Does having a copy of the game and working hardware to run it on count?:)
I also have a 7" vinyl record from her somewhere in my collection, I do get some bonus points now?
It may, however, be useful for the patent holder to argue against obvious, on the grounds that if it took a genius to devise it, then it's not obvious.
The requirement is to be non-obvious to someone skilled in the field, hence that reasoning ought to fail.
This all is pretty irrelevant because obviousness in patent law has little to do with the dictionary meaning of obvious anyway.
In patent law, you should read 'obvious' as a pre-existing documented motivation to combine pre-existing ideas. In other words, it is just a variation on prior art.
And no, that was not the intention of the law for all I can tell, but it is what it currently comes down to. How many people would come up with the same idea independently is of no relevance here, regardless of those people being experts or complete idiots.
The USA became the #1 country in the world due to capitalism and patents, which protect creators from getting ripped off.
Hmm.. the USA became the currently most powerfull economy in the world by ignoring patents and copyrights by others. Obviously they are trying to stop others from doing the same thing.
If I invent something, I damn well deserve to be protected for it because my invention is valuable to the country's economy. But I don't expect trendy, anti-capitalist hipsters to understand that (even as they type their posts on computers made in capitalist societies protected by patents!).
I suggest the first thing you go 'invent' is how to read a history book.
If no one is consulting these patent records for how to solve a problem, we're not achieving a lot of the intended goal.
The problem with that is that these patent records are for a substantial part about non-inventions (ie, things that are not novel, are completely obvious etc), and the part that would be usefull is filled with legalese instead of being usefull technical documentation.
Because of that it is (or maybe better, has become) more efficient to reinvent the wheel in all but a very few cases.
Also, the time for which exclusive rights are given conflicts with the rapid development of technology in more recent times (and in emerging fields of technology that has been true for much longer)
I think it's a little bit naive to expect one branch of a multi-national corporation to talk very well with another.
I think that if two branches of a multi-national corporation want to be branded together, they better make sure they play together. There is nothing naive about expecting that, it is the exact expectation created by this branding.
I'm German, so I have to type äs, ös und ßs all the time, but that's no problem at all. How do Americans type Spanish or French accents? Exactly, they can, and so do I.
And I'm Dutch, we happen to use a US keyboard layout here (eventho a Dutch one does exist, it is seldom used, and mostly differs in symbols and accents, the layout for letters/numbers is identical), and due to spending a lot of time in Germany, I also happen to use a German keyboard layout often.
Sure, you can enter virtually all accents and such, but it is a lot easier to do on a keyboard that has often used ones on easy to reach keys, Like for example the German keyboard when typing German.
I switched to US layout a few years ago, which alone was a serious improvement for programming
I bet, if only because {[]}\| are in sane and easy to reach places. The fact that this is easier however is the exact same reason why typing German on a German keyboard layout works better. Its not very important when doing it incidentely, but it becomes a big difference when it is what you do mostly.
, but then switched to Dvorak maybe a month later.
In other words, you say that Dvorak works better then qwertz (DE layout) for programming? no doubt about that, but does it work better when you type German a lot?
The only problem with Dvorak is that it takes a month of serious studying and even then you're not as fast as before. But it works,
Well, yes, you can learn to type on an alphabetical layout as well, and can become quite fast on it. That is really not the issue. The issue is if it is more efficient in speed and strain on your fingers.
and within another month you start getting faster than you were before.
I'm glad it worked for you. I'd like some properly independent research that shows this for various languages...
False optimization is not learning a new keyboard layout that improves your speed (and strain on your hand;
Of course DVORAK is 'optimized' for English, which may at times be helpfull when entering code, but often is not, not to mention that a substantial part of the world doesn't speak English.
There is the problem of having to switch all the time when using someone elses computer, or as in my case, working from some random computer at the office. (having to switch between a US querty and a German qwertz layout is already trouble enough for me, and not so much for letters and numbers, but for all the symbols and shortcuts)
Hence, this optimization is more then a bit relative. That said, when it does apply to your situation, it can be a good argument.
haven't had anything like RSI since I switched; before I could only type a few hours and felt a bit of pain), because, OMG, it takes a month to get up to speed again.
Interesting.
I happen to be typing English most of the time on a querty keyboard, and I regularely manage 8+ hours/day. I have been doing this for the last 20 or so years, and no RSI here. If it helps you, good, but that might well be due to finally having learned to type correctly in the first place, and less with the actual layout that you are using.
Switching layouts in an investment FOR LIFE, so spending a month relearning ain't bad at all.
Maybe it is for you, but untill the day everyone speaks English most of the time, we write software in English, and DVORAK keyboards are the norm, it won't be better for the majority of the people (YMMV)
And the Byzantines have built some amazingly earthquake resistent and very large building some 1600 years ago or thereabout. Despite some large earthquakes hiting what we now know as Istambul, their building is still standing. The question is.. was this the result of (educated) guessing or actual knowledge.
Clearly not. Voting for the Nazi party was, in many ways, a vote of no-confidence in what had become (for various reasons) a paralytic democratic process.
It was for many a vote for what they saw as the only viable way to keep the communists out of government. You are also correct however that for many it was a vote of no-confidence.
That doesn't change the point that a democratic society can decide to do very bad things.
In fact, Hitler's entire platform was that he would dissolve the legislature once in power, and that's exactly what he did. Germany, after the takeover of the Nazi regime was about as far from a democratic nation as it could be. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a historian prepared to call it a democratic state at the point you're discussing.
That was the case after they won for the second time.
As much as I loathe the term "axis of evil", I think you're missing the important point of my post. The important metric is how legitimate and responsible a government is, but that's not to say that the only legitimate countries are democratic or that all (pseudo-)democratic governments are responsible.
No, it is to say that while democracy may provide legitimacy, it is not a guarantee for a responsible government, neither does it have a monopoly on responsible government.
Palestine may be a legitimate democracy and maybe it is true that Hamas adequately represents the will of the Palestinian people, but that's where any academically honest comparisons end.
It is similar to the earlier Nazi Germany example.
How many Western countries can you name whose official government platform is the stated destruction of another state or whose major political party is, by most definitions, a terrorist organization?
I believe the USA has at the very least destroyed or attempted to destroy a number of foreign governments and states. Currently, Cuba is the easy example of one of its targets. That it uses economic warfare instead of an invasion (oh wait, they tried that as well) does not change this at all. It is stated policy, and not a unique example of it either.
And don't get me started on Iran, agent-provocateur of the Apocalypse. They've been about as responsible as a smoker near a powder keg in the past few years with their insistence on obtaining nuclear weapons, promotion of instability and terrorism within Iraq, and outrageously provacative statements from their figurehead, President Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad is a clown, but I don't think Iran has a momopoly on having a clown as figurehead and president. I, and with me quite a large number of people, believe the same is true for the current president of the USA for example.
Not to mention that the USA is a substantial part of the cause of Iran being what it is.
Forgot about western support of the tyran that came before the Islamic revolution there?
How about western support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war? This despite the knowledge that Iraq used chemical weapons.
Don't get me wrong, I think Iran is currently on a bad path, but forgetting how they got there to begin with is a very good way of repeating the same mistakes over and over.
Why shouldn't the severity or context be relevant?
What should be relevant is if international law explicitly forbids it, and to some extent, if the country in question is a party to the treaties that established that international law.
Those conditions are true in both cases, so both cases should be dealt with.
The Sudanese government is committing ethnic genocide! Why should the third world's hatred of the Jewish people and--by proxy Israel--effectively mean that civilized people can't condemn even the most egregious of atrocities like what's going on in Sudan?
I never said they can't or shouldn't.
Your statement concerning hatred of the jews is often used as soon as anyone has any critical comments on Israel, but guess
I like your reasoning. It certainly worries me that a case like this could introduce a precedent that a company could ban me from executing software I purchased what should be a perpetual license to run.
I'm afraid most such licenses allow termination of the license, something you supposedly agreed with by agreeing with the license.
Software companies actively encourage you to not read the license by filling it with pages and pages of legalese that few people can read even if they wanted to and the result is that most people just accept whatever license is presented to them.
It would be so helpfull if people refused licenses that contain such conditions, but most will never be aware of them.
That said, I doubt Blizzard forbids you from running their software, but they can quite well ban you from their network.
Agreed, we should not end up discussing the semantics or meaning of the worlds, but what I feel is important as I mentioned above is to note that the copyright law completely lists what the COPYRIGHT HOLDER has when it comes to rights. It is a complete list of their rights (sometimes expressed as exceptions or rights of the users to restrict).
I agree that 'the people' have all those rights that are not explicitly taken away by law as a general principe.
That however isn't the full picture I believe.
For example, copyright holders have an obligation to society in exchage for the protection they receive. That is, society as a whole, and with that the users of the copyrighted work, have a right to use the work as part of the public domain after a certain amount of time when the copyright expired.
It is very important to regard this as a right because if we do not do so, we get to the situation where copyright holders try to not pay that price.
If not listed, the copyright hodler doesn't have control or exclusivness in it. It does however not have any completel lists of what "rights" users have or what users can do. It is the other way arround, if not listed as a right of the copyright holder, then a user can do it. Hence why I objected to your statement that "but not to the rights that users have.".
The bill of rights does not claim to be complete, yet it is an explicit list of rights of citizens of the USA. The fact that a right is not listed does in no way imply it doesn't exist, rather, the rights that are listed are considered so important that they have to be made explicit.
An explicit list of rights does not mean that your rights are limited to that what is listed, rather, as you suggest yourself, unless stated otherwise, you normally have a right. This applies to everyone, including copyright holders.
Hence I believe it is a lot better to regard copyright law as a list of restrictions and some explicit rights for the user of a copyrighted work, incidentely also resulting in a list of rights for the copyright holder.
My personal prediction: right now, someone at Faroudja is hard at work developing a way to take 1080p60 content and transmit it as slightly-overcompressed 1080i60, with a second datastream using the freed-up bandwidth to transmit meta-information to tell a Faroudja-licensed chip in a high-end TV how to de-interlace the 1080i60 video stream using data from the previous field and additional data sent as part of the second stream. The result: a signal that naive 1080i60 sets can display (possibly with a bit of interline twitter if they cut back on the kell-filtering), but a higher-end 1080p60 set can reconstruct as a 1080p60 signal without many of the artifacts caused by conventional "black-box" deinterlacing strategies.
Deinterlacing could have been trivial with the addition of p24 modes. I suspect this didn't happen for reasons of cost again, tho seeing the relative complexity and problems of blackbox deinterlacers, I somewhat wonder if the current path isn't more expensive in the end.
The easy case is of course anything originally recorded as 30 frames/sec progressive and then distributed as 60 fields/sec interlaced. In this case it is a matter of knowing which pair of fields belong together and which one is the top field. In this case i60 and p30 are simply equivalent (tho not identical), and the same applies when looking at i50 and p25.
The currently problematic case is 24fps movie material, but this would be a non issue if that was transmitted as a p24 signal and it was left to the decoder to do a pull-down and interlace the signal if needed (which can be perfected by using control flags for field duplication as is done in mpeg streams). This saves a substantial amount of bandwidth and circumvents the entire problem of deinterlacing for TV sets that support progressive mode video. If the material must be transmitted as an i60 format for compatibility reasons, the information needed for restoring the original p24 version of it is in the order of a few bits/field, so it should be really trivial to add this to the signal, possibly hidden in the LSBs of a few pixels if theres really no other place.
The current deinterlacing artifacts are simply the result of having to guess at if a pull-down was done and if so, predicting which fields will be duplicates.
Also note that for us living in PAL countries this problem is non existant, tho we get a nasty 4% speedup of sound and video in return..
This leaves us with native p60 video, in which case you'd need something like the idea you just described or more bandwidth. I wonder tho, is there really any point in going beyond 30frames/sec? (not talking about refresh rate here, going to an arbitrary high refresh rate is trivial as long as it is an integer multiple of the framerate)
I remember having long discussions with a Pixelworks engineer about how a PC with a decent display (size + quality) that natively supports 60 and 72hz refresh rates can do a much better job at displaying DVDs then a TV set with DVD appliance because of being able to skip field duplication alltogether, and having knowledge about how the signal is interlaced (if at all). This of course provided that the DVD is actually encoded as p24 or is an i60 encoding of p30 material.
I'm left with the question why we should bother with p60 to begin with. At least to me there seems to be virtually no perceivable improvement in motion quality over p30 or even p24, and as long as it is an integer multiple of the framerate, its trivial to increase the refresh rate to prevent flicker.
Of course this all assumes that the material is edited in progressive mode or if edited in interlaced mode, by an engineer who knows what she is doing and has the proper tools for it. As you say, editing interlaced video is far from trivial, tho there exists free (as in beer and speech) software that can do the job pretty well since as long as you have all the information, de/reinterlacing is pretty trivial.
I have this mental image of a guy in overalls hauling boxes and boxes of patched DVDs out to the truck, looking up at the news-monitor in the shipping yard, and just a single tear falling.
Hmm.. I'd think he'd smile tho. nice job security for a while.
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Funny, where I live (the Netherlands), almost every DSL provider allows running a server, whereas most cable providers do not.
It probably suggests something about why competition is such a good idea..
If they lose this fight, they'll singlehandedly make the "Ivy League" a thing of the past. I'm not siding with the RIAA here, but the law, unfortunately, is on their side.
The law isn't on their side when it comes to going on a fishing expedition. Also, the number of cases that the RIAA has won in court so far (that is NOT the same as people settling) isn't very high, and their cases being thrownn out isn't exactly unheard of..
I'd rather think that a law professor has some idea about this, and about the legal risks in general. I would even go as far as suggesting that he probably has a lot more of an idea then you and me together.
Are these colleges prepared to take the risk of losing everything to stand up for their students?
Is this society prepared to destoy such colleges and their future in order to protect the ill-gotten exclusive rights of an industry that is doomed to failure?
It sounds like IBM is commiting suicide by shafting all of their people who have been working with the various customers for years.
They have been there, they have done that.. repeatedly. They are at it again, and somehow they still live..
Is there a way for all of the ex-IBM employees to set themselves up as consultants for the same customers that will, no doubt, also get shafted by IBM in this insane policy? Do any of you guys have a "non-compete" with IBM? It seems to me that even if you do, the fact that you are being laid off would void the non-compete.
When you get layed off would usually void a non-compete.
There are a few possibilities there..
l
It could be that the DVDs were not scrambled with CSS (most small scale and/or non-commercial releases for example)
It could also be that the player you use brute-forces the disk key (ie mplayer on Unix)
And of course it could be that the software you use for creating the image unscrambles it on the fly (running AnyDVD on Windows for example)
Note that the later 2 cases do involve circumventing a content access control, even if you are not aware of it.
If you want to read a technical explanation of how CSS works and why a consumer can't just make a bitwise copy of a DVD including the keys needed for descrambling it, read http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Kesden/index.htm
Even if you can fool a drive into giving you a full copy of the hidden area, you still can't write it to a DVD without the proper equipment and recordable media, which aren't available to consumers.
I live in the Netherlands and I happen to have visitors from the USA on a regular basis for business reasons. The 2 things they usually want to 'see' first are the red-light district in Amsterdam, and a Dutch 'coffee-shop'.
Those are generally quite succesfull business people, and a few people working for somewhat scary government agencies that might actually be involved in the 'war on drugs'.
This all said, one of the bigger mistakes of those who propose legalizing pot is ignoring that it does have some potential dangers and problems. Ignoring those allows those who rather keep it illegal to exploit those problems and keep things as they are.
You own the DVD. You don't own the content. This is pretty clearly established, and wishing and stamping your feet won't make it go away.
You do however own a copy of the content. This is recognized in copyright law (look for example at title 117 regarding the running of computer programs, where the law clearly speaks about the owner of a copy, and gives some specific right to such an owner).
As long as there is no license I have to accept before using the content, I bought a copy of the content, no matter how much content owners would like me to believe I just licensed something from them on their conditions and with their restrictions.
The image can reproduce exact copies of the disc. Or are you unfamiliar with what an "image" is? Whether you use that image to duplicate the disc or to store it on your hard drive is unimportant. Disc-to-disc copying can be done without breaking encryption.
I believe it is you who is unfamiliar with how DVDs and HD-DVDs work, because if you did know only for a bit what you were talking about, you'd know about how making bitwise copies and images by consumers is prevented.
I suggest you leave it to those who know a bit about the technology in question to explain what can and what can't be done.
Copying does NOT require breaking encryption
Well, if you can make a complete bitwise copy of a (HD-)DVD including the protected areas, then yes. Since equipment to do that is restricted to professional users, it is easy for commercial pirates to make such copies. The average user however cannot, and won't be able to unless:
- the restrictions on sale of reproduction equipment are lifted
- the encryption is broken
. That proprietary retail content is not compatible with open source is not a relevant legal question and it's not the producer's responsibility. Backup copies are just that--identical copies.
If the work will be available in the public domain after copyright expires however is a relevant question. Not being able to break the encryption and lack of laws forcing content 'owners' to ensure such availability means that the ultimate goal of copyright is corrupted while content producers still get the reward. I'd rather say that you can either have encrypted content or copyright protection, but not both at the same time.
It's not your content, plain and simple.
Not my individual content, no, but it is part of the culture I live in, and as a consequence 'owned' by the society I am a part of. That the creator of that content (or their agent) enjoys some exclusive rights for a limited time does not change that at all.
It's not your own account you're locked out of.
Ultimately it is. Encrypted content and no right to break said encryption means that works on which the copyright has expired cannot become part of the public domain, and thereby I (and with me all of society) is locked out of what is rightfully theirs.
,i>If there was a community with similar interests but widely varied products (think 10 clones of Google, all with mostly the same services, and each with its own small sub-community) it would likely be harder for all of them to survive against a common competitor than for a single Google with all of the userbase of the sub-commmunities.
Replace 'google' with search engine, and you'll find that there are in fact quite a number of them.
Google is big today, but started out as just another search engine.. Before them, Altavista was the way to search the web, they weren't the only one either.
That Google exists and had a chance to become big is the result of choice, and when you take away such choice, the result is that inovation such as Google has provided won't happen as often if at all.
The difference i think is management, which Microsoft has, however flawed, and open source as a general rule, does not. Even within single projects there is useless argument,
That you as a customer don't get to see the useless arguments does in no way mean they don't exist. Having worked with Microsoft (on OS software no less, and worked WITH, I never was a MS employee) I am pretty sure that they have plenty of them.
and forks for ridiculous reasons. In most cases, the required action is for one party to be kicked in the ass, hard. There are RARE cases where the majority of the community sees something going wrong and forks, such is the case with X.org.
So, you ignore forks for ridiculous reasons, whats the problem there?
My example was *precisely* that of something non-obvious to someone skilled in the art; don't look now, but it's not my reasoning that's failing here.
Really?
What you said is:
Secondly, if two people skilled in the art (hereafter referred to as "geniuses") come up with the same thing independently and with no knowledge of the other's research or patents, that is proof of nothing but the fact that two geniuses independently came up with the same, or substantially the same, idea. It may, however, be useful for the patent holder to argue against obvious, on the grounds that if it took a genius to devise it, then it's not obvious.
It is your reasoning failing here. You start with suggesting that those skilled in the art are 'geniusses', and you then argue that since it took a genius, it can't be obvious. However, yor first statemnent invalidates that.
A 48K Spectrum was my second computer after a ZX81. I don't think I ever got so much pleasure out of any other possession I had as a child (and I didn't even have Sam Fox Strip Poker [props to those who actually remember her, and double to those who remember the game]).
:)
Does having a copy of the game and working hardware to run it on count?
I also have a 7" vinyl record from her somewhere in my collection, I do get some bonus points now?
It may, however, be useful for the patent holder to argue against obvious, on the grounds that if it took a genius to devise it, then it's not obvious.
The requirement is to be non-obvious to someone skilled in the field, hence that reasoning ought to fail.
This all is pretty irrelevant because obviousness in patent law has little to do with the dictionary meaning of obvious anyway.
In patent law, you should read 'obvious' as a pre-existing documented motivation to combine pre-existing ideas. In other words, it is just a variation on prior art.
And no, that was not the intention of the law for all I can tell, but it is what it currently comes down to. How many people would come up with the same idea independently is of no relevance here, regardless of those people being experts or complete idiots.
The USA became the #1 country in the world due to capitalism and patents, which protect creators from getting ripped off.
Hmm.. the USA became the currently most powerfull economy in the world by ignoring patents and copyrights by others. Obviously they are trying to stop others from doing the same thing.
If I invent something, I damn well deserve to be protected for it because my invention is valuable to the country's economy. But I don't expect trendy, anti-capitalist hipsters to understand that (even as they type their posts on computers made in capitalist societies protected by patents!).
I suggest the first thing you go 'invent' is how to read a history book.
If no one is consulting these patent records for how to solve a problem, we're not achieving a lot of the intended goal.
The problem with that is that these patent records are for a substantial part about non-inventions (ie, things that are not novel, are completely obvious etc), and the part that would be usefull is filled with legalese instead of being usefull technical documentation.
Because of that it is (or maybe better, has become) more efficient to reinvent the wheel in all but a very few cases.
Also, the time for which exclusive rights are given conflicts with the rapid development of technology in more recent times (and in emerging fields of technology that has been true for much longer)
I think it's a little bit naive to expect one branch of a multi-national corporation to talk very well with another.
I think that if two branches of a multi-national corporation want to be branded together, they better make sure they play together. There is nothing naive about expecting that, it is the exact expectation created by this branding.
I'm German, so I have to type äs, ös und ßs all the time, but that's no problem at all. How do Americans type Spanish or French accents? Exactly, they can, and so do I.
And I'm Dutch, we happen to use a US keyboard layout here (eventho a Dutch one does exist, it is seldom used, and mostly differs in symbols and accents, the layout for letters/numbers is identical), and due to spending a lot of time in Germany, I also happen to use a German keyboard layout often.
Sure, you can enter virtually all accents and such, but it is a lot easier to do on a keyboard that has often used ones on easy to reach keys, Like for example the German keyboard when typing German.
I switched to US layout a few years ago, which alone was a serious improvement for programming
I bet, if only because {[]}\| are in sane and easy to reach places. The fact that this is easier however is the exact same reason why typing German on a German keyboard layout works better. Its not very important when doing it incidentely, but it becomes a big difference when it is what you do mostly.
, but then switched to Dvorak maybe a month later.
In other words, you say that Dvorak works better then qwertz (DE layout) for programming? no doubt about that, but does it work better when you type German a lot?
The only problem with Dvorak is that it takes a month of serious studying and even then you're not as fast as before. But it works,
Well, yes, you can learn to type on an alphabetical layout as well, and can become quite fast on it. That is really not the issue. The issue is if it is more efficient in speed and strain on your fingers.
and within another month you start getting faster than you were before.
I'm glad it worked for you. I'd like some properly independent research that shows this for various languages...
Dude, how the hell can you misspell "qwerty"? :p
LOL
False optimization is not learning a new keyboard layout that improves your speed (and strain on your hand;
Of course DVORAK is 'optimized' for English, which may at times be helpfull when entering code, but often is not, not to mention that a substantial part of the world doesn't speak English.
There is the problem of having to switch all the time when using someone elses computer, or as in my case, working from some random computer at the office. (having to switch between a US querty and a German qwertz layout is already trouble enough for me, and not so much for letters and numbers, but for all the symbols and shortcuts)
Hence, this optimization is more then a bit relative. That said, when it does apply to your situation, it can be a good argument.
haven't had anything like RSI since I switched; before I could only type a few hours and felt a bit of pain), because, OMG, it takes a month to get up to speed again.
Interesting.
I happen to be typing English most of the time on a querty keyboard, and I regularely manage 8+ hours/day. I have been doing this for the last 20 or so years, and no RSI here. If it helps you, good, but that might well be due to finally having learned to type correctly in the first place, and less with the actual layout that you are using.
Switching layouts in an investment FOR LIFE, so spending a month relearning ain't bad at all.
Maybe it is for you, but untill the day everyone speaks English most of the time, we write software in English, and DVORAK keyboards are the norm, it won't be better for the majority of the people (YMMV)
And the Byzantines have built some amazingly earthquake resistent and very large building some 1600 years ago or thereabout. Despite some large earthquakes hiting what we now know as Istambul, their building is still standing. The question is.. was this the result of (educated) guessing or actual knowledge.
Clearly not. Voting for the Nazi party was, in many ways, a vote of no-confidence in what had become (for various reasons) a paralytic democratic process.
It was for many a vote for what they saw as the only viable way to keep the communists out of government. You are also correct however that for many it was a vote of no-confidence.
That doesn't change the point that a democratic society can decide to do very bad things.
In fact, Hitler's entire platform was that he would dissolve the legislature once in power, and that's exactly what he did. Germany, after the takeover of the Nazi regime was about as far from a democratic nation as it could be. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a historian prepared to call it a democratic state at the point you're discussing.
That was the case after they won for the second time.
As much as I loathe the term "axis of evil", I think you're missing the important point of my post. The important metric is how legitimate and responsible a government is, but that's not to say that the only legitimate countries are democratic or that all (pseudo-)democratic governments are responsible.
No, it is to say that while democracy may provide legitimacy, it is not a guarantee for a responsible government, neither does it have a monopoly on responsible government.
Palestine may be a legitimate democracy and maybe it is true that Hamas adequately represents the will of the Palestinian people, but that's where any academically honest comparisons end.
It is similar to the earlier Nazi Germany example.
How many Western countries can you name whose official government platform is the stated destruction of another state or whose major political party is, by most definitions, a terrorist organization?
I believe the USA has at the very least destroyed or attempted to destroy a number of foreign governments and states. Currently, Cuba is the easy example of one of its targets. That it uses economic warfare instead of an invasion (oh wait, they tried that as well) does not change this at all. It is stated policy, and not a unique example of it either.
And don't get me started on Iran, agent-provocateur of the Apocalypse. They've been about as responsible as a smoker near a powder keg in the past few years with their insistence on obtaining nuclear weapons, promotion of instability and terrorism within Iraq, and outrageously provacative statements from their figurehead, President Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad is a clown, but I don't think Iran has a momopoly on having a clown as figurehead and president. I, and with me quite a large number of people, believe the same is true for the current president of the USA for example.
Not to mention that the USA is a substantial part of the cause of Iran being what it is.
Forgot about western support of the tyran that came before the Islamic revolution there?
How about western support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war? This despite the knowledge that Iraq used chemical weapons.
Don't get me wrong, I think Iran is currently on a bad path, but forgetting how they got there to begin with is a very good way of repeating the same mistakes over and over.
Why shouldn't the severity or context be relevant?
What should be relevant is if international law explicitly forbids it, and to some extent, if the country in question is a party to the treaties that established that international law.
Those conditions are true in both cases, so both cases should be dealt with.
The Sudanese government is committing ethnic genocide! Why should the third world's hatred of the Jewish people and--by proxy Israel--effectively mean that civilized people can't condemn even the most egregious of atrocities like what's going on in Sudan?
I never said they can't or shouldn't.
Your statement concerning hatred of the jews is often used as soon as anyone has any critical comments on Israel, but guess
I like your reasoning. It certainly worries me that a case like this could introduce a precedent that a company could ban me from executing software I purchased what should be a perpetual license to run.
I'm afraid most such licenses allow termination of the license, something you supposedly agreed with by agreeing with the license.
Software companies actively encourage you to not read the license by filling it with pages and pages of legalese that few people can read even if they wanted to and the result is that most people just accept whatever license is presented to them.
It would be so helpfull if people refused licenses that contain such conditions, but most will never be aware of them.
That said, I doubt Blizzard forbids you from running their software, but they can quite well ban you from their network.
Agreed, we should not end up discussing the semantics or meaning of the worlds, but what I feel is important as I mentioned above is to note that the copyright law completely lists what the COPYRIGHT HOLDER has when it comes to rights. It is a complete list of their rights (sometimes expressed as exceptions or rights of the users to restrict).
I agree that 'the people' have all those rights that are not explicitly taken away by law as a general principe.
That however isn't the full picture I believe.
For example, copyright holders have an obligation to society in exchage for the protection they receive. That is, society as a whole, and with that the users of the copyrighted work, have a right to use the work as part of the public domain after a certain amount of time when the copyright expired.
It is very important to regard this as a right because if we do not do so, we get to the situation where copyright holders try to not pay that price.
If not listed, the copyright hodler doesn't have control or exclusivness in it. It does however not have any completel lists of what "rights" users have or what users can do. It is the other way arround, if not listed as a right of the copyright holder, then a user can do it. Hence why I objected to your statement that "but not to
the rights that users have.".
The bill of rights does not claim to be complete, yet it is an explicit list of rights of citizens of the USA. The fact that a right is not listed does in no way imply it doesn't exist, rather, the rights that are listed are considered so important that they have to be made explicit.
An explicit list of rights does not mean that your rights are limited to that what is listed, rather, as you suggest yourself, unless stated otherwise, you normally have a right. This applies to everyone, including copyright holders.
Hence I believe it is a lot better to regard copyright law as a list of restrictions and some explicit rights for the user of a copyrighted work, incidentely also resulting in a list of rights for the copyright holder.
My personal prediction: right now, someone at Faroudja is hard at work developing a way to take 1080p60 content and transmit it as slightly-overcompressed 1080i60, with a second datastream using the freed-up bandwidth to transmit meta-information to tell a Faroudja-licensed chip in a high-end TV how to de-interlace the 1080i60 video stream using data from the previous field and additional data sent as part of the second stream. The result: a signal that naive 1080i60 sets can display (possibly with a bit of interline twitter if they cut back on the kell-filtering), but a higher-end 1080p60 set can reconstruct as a 1080p60 signal without many of the artifacts caused by conventional "black-box" deinterlacing strategies.
Deinterlacing could have been trivial with the addition of p24 modes. I suspect this didn't happen for reasons of cost again, tho seeing the relative complexity and problems of blackbox deinterlacers, I somewhat wonder if the current path isn't more expensive in the end.
The easy case is of course anything originally recorded as 30 frames/sec progressive and then distributed as 60 fields/sec interlaced. In this case it is a matter of knowing which pair of fields belong together and which one is the top field. In this case i60 and p30 are simply equivalent (tho not identical), and the same applies when looking at i50 and p25.
The currently problematic case is 24fps movie material, but this would be a non issue if that was transmitted as a p24 signal and it was left to the decoder to do a pull-down and interlace the signal if needed (which can be perfected by using control flags for field duplication as is done in mpeg streams). This saves a substantial amount of bandwidth and circumvents the entire problem of deinterlacing for TV sets that support progressive mode video. If the material must be transmitted as an i60 format for compatibility reasons, the information needed for restoring the original p24 version of it is in the order of a few bits/field, so it should be really trivial to add this to the signal, possibly hidden in the LSBs of a few pixels if theres really no other place.
The current deinterlacing artifacts are simply the result of having to guess at if a pull-down was done and if so, predicting which fields will be duplicates.
Also note that for us living in PAL countries this problem is non existant, tho we get a nasty 4% speedup of sound and video in return..
This leaves us with native p60 video, in which case you'd need something like the idea you just described or more bandwidth. I wonder tho, is there really any point in going beyond 30frames/sec? (not talking about refresh rate here, going to an arbitrary high refresh rate is trivial as long as it is an integer multiple of the framerate)
I remember having long discussions with a Pixelworks engineer about how a PC with a decent display (size + quality) that natively supports 60 and 72hz refresh rates can do a much better job at displaying DVDs then a TV set with DVD appliance because of being able to skip field duplication alltogether, and having knowledge about how the signal is interlaced (if at all). This of course provided that the DVD is actually encoded as p24 or is an i60 encoding of p30 material.
I'm left with the question why we should bother with p60 to begin with. At least to me there seems to be virtually no perceivable improvement in motion quality over p30 or even p24, and as long as it is an integer multiple of the framerate, its trivial to increase the refresh rate to prevent flicker.
Of course this all assumes that the material is edited in progressive mode or if edited in interlaced mode, by an engineer who knows what she is doing and has the proper tools for it. As you say, editing interlaced video is far from trivial, tho there exists free (as in beer and speech) software that can do the job pretty well since as long as you have all the information, de/reinterlacing is pretty trivial.
I have this mental image of a guy in overalls hauling boxes and boxes of patched DVDs out to the truck, looking up at the news-monitor in the shipping yard, and just a single tear falling.
Hmm.. I'd think he'd smile tho. nice job security for a while.