Microsoft should be able to say "We will not accept modified consoles on our servers." It's their server, they can accept or reject whatever they like from it. That's absolutely their right.
What is not their right, however, is to try to stop (through licensing terms, etc.), anyone from making an alternative server setup glad to accept modded consoles. That's MY server, if I run it, and I should be able to do so if I have the technical chops to make it happen.
The issue arose a long time ago with Blizzard and bnetd. Blizzard has a right of refusal on their own servers, but only if they're not going to stop others from running their own servers free from such restrictions. If they insist on everything being under their umbrella, they obligate themselves to accept and support everything. If they want to say "You want to do this, you're on your own", they need to then allow you to do it on your own. If Nintendo's got no problem with "unofficial" servers for modded consoles, I've got no problem with them banning them from the official ones. But when they're trying to crack down on manufacturers of mod chips, which do have legitimate purposes, they're over the line.
Where did you find that the students aren't allowed to take the laptops home? From what I've been reading, it appears that they certainly were. Relevant portion, from Cnet:
Students at Herriton High School in Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia are given Apple MacBook laptops to use both at school and at home.
The other stories, such as one who talked to the kid's sister, seems to confirm that use of the laptops at home was quite common practice, and I can find nothing in the school's statement indicating that they believed the laptop's use was unauthorized or that it had been reported stolen. The only thing I find is that the school accused the kid of drug possession, and that he states the "drugs" were Mike and Ike candies. I can't find a claim by either side that he had taken the machine without authorization or that there was an actual theft/loss report. One would think if someone had reported it stolen, they'd have noted that quite prominently in the letter defending themselves rather than assuring that the system is now disabled.
I doubt most people are fat by choice, if you mean that they woke up one day and said "You know what? I'd really like to be a couple hundred pounds overweight." However, though they did not plan to fail, they did fail to plan, and generally speaking are overweight due to a series of their own decisions and a failure to stop making those decisions.
As to scientific data, there has of course been a tremendous amount of scientific research done on obesity, and all of it that I've seen indicates that the overwhelming majority of the problem is from lifestyle choices, not medical conditions. We have indeed taken a trip to Unscientific Land here, but you took that road when you equated obesity to sexual orientation or skin color. Race is, obviously, a hereditary characteristic, and research suggests that sexual orientation is largely not a choice of the individual either.
My own experience bears this out. I did not choose to be white, obviously-I was born that way. I also did not wake up one day and say "You know what, I think I'd like to be straight." I was attracted to women since the age I began being attracted to anyone, I didn't make that as a conscious choice.
On the other hand, when I noticed I was starting to put on a few pounds, I changed my diet a bit and started riding a bike instead of driving a lot of the time. Result? The bit of a belly I was developing fell right off. I am by no means a health food guru or exercise junkie, I still enjoy following pizza and a beer with a good book, but I also know that this must be done with some degree of moderation and can't be every meal of every day.
There's also the very real difference that neither the race nor the sexual orientation of the person next to you affect your flight. On the other hand, if you're crunching me into a quarter of my seat because you're taking up most of it, you're depriving me of what I paid for. To equate an issue caused by lifestyle with a very real impact on neighboring passengers, to issues largely if not entirely caused by birth and having no such impact, is disingenuous at best. Unless you've got some good research to show me that obesity is not largely a result of poor dietary and exercise practices, I think you're calling the wrong person out of touch with the research in this scenario.
It doesn't appear to me to be Google who is at fault here. For them to avoid liability, they have to comply with DMCA notices even if they know they're silly or unfounded. That's how Congress wrote OCILLA, and there's our first guilty party-the ones who made the DMCA (and sent the "C" in it so far out of control) in the first place. If Congress kept copyright law reasonable, we wouldn't have this mess.
The next issue is the music industry, who apparently sends out these notices in a shotgun blast without checking even the most basic of things, like if they gave someone permission to do what they're doing. That practice is illegal under OCILLA, but unfortunately the penalties for it are so small that they do not provide a meaningful remedy, especially when it is so frequently large corporations using it against individuals.
And the third party at fault, realistically, is the blogger. They should have filed an immediate counter notice (which the notice they would have received from Google explains exactly how to do), including the correspondence from the rights holders granting them permission, and proceeded to file a false DMCA notice counterclaim (OCILLA does provide damages and consequences for knowingly filing a false notice). If easy cases like that don't even result in consequences, people will just continue to do this type of thing.
I've got to agree here, even though I'm not at all a fan of Southwest after my own recent experiences with them. First off, there's no guarantees when you're flying standby that you'll get any seats. No room really to complain if you don't. In this guy's case, however, he needs two seats. I'm entirely with that, and it applies in this case-he takes up both the space and the weight of at least two passengers.
If you are severely obese, there will be certain physical limitations as to what you can do. If you would prefer not to have those limitations, your option is to lose the weight. Even those with legitimate medical conditions can do so under a doctor's supervision, and generally the "medical condition" is "Eats too much, exercises too little".
It is of course one's decision whether to continue to overeat and not exercise, but it is then one's responsibility to live with the consequences of that decision. If you don't want the limitations that come with being fat, get to work on losing the weight. If you'd rather not, then yes, you need to buy two seats if that's what it takes to accommodate you. I wish more places would work up the nerve to plainly state that you need to buy as many seats as you overflow into.
Why shouldn't we expect them to? Those who handle confidential information are expected to learn how to properly handle it, whether that means "don't leave a briefcase full of sensitive documents unattended" or "don't send same said documents in electronic form unencrypted on the Internet." If you're not concerned with how to handle confidential information, and, well, keep it confidential, you shouldn't be handling it at all. We wouldn't accept "I don't know how to use the snail mail system" for a doctor sending such information on a postcard rather than in a sealed envelope. If you're handling sensitive information, especially your customers' sensitive information, you make damn sure whatever you're planning to do with it will keep it secure. I think doctors who learn complex medical procedures can handle learning how and when to encrypt an email.
I've been in a similar situation myself, though thankfully not (as sounds possible for you) by myself, and I learned one thing above anything else.
Never, ever, trust your memory. As soon as you figure something out, write it down. Right that second, while it's still fresh in your mind exactly what you learned. It doesn't matter as much how you write it down (commenting the code, a separate text document, or for that matter keeping a notebook and pencil close to hand), just that you do. If you don't, you will run across the sinking feeling that you already figured this problem out before, and since you don't remember what the answer was, you're about to do it again. It will also help others that you work with, and even if you don't right now, it's quite possible that you will.
While you might be being facetious, generally speaking, that's a good formulation (though of course that shouldn't be the only criterion). Patents are for stuff that wouldn't be developed without them. Generally, that's because it would be cost prohibitive to do so and no return approaching the cost of development would be possible without it. It's not cost prohibitive to develop software, since the equipment on which to do it is readily and cheaply available and there is no cost per iteration, and a simple and much less restrictive copyright enables a return.
Patents are not there to "reward ingenuity", or anything like that. They're there to encourage progress. That is their one and only purpose and their one and only justification. In any case where they do not actually do that, they're unjustifiable.
I don't see any dichotomy there at all. The idea of copyrights and patents, according to the Constitutional section that authorizes them, is "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts", not "to apply patents to anything that's ingenious". Designing a mechanical, tangible device often requires a significant investment in parts and components, as well as the appropriate tools to machine and modify them, as different iterations are tried and failed. Different iterations of software have no such barrier, as the code can simply be modified and tried again, and I can do that right here on the same computer I'm typing this message on.
A patent is very strong, very wide-reaching protection, and should be applied only when it will advance progress by making those massive material investments worthwhile. In areas where material investments are unnecessary and progress will be fine without patents and likely even impeded by them, they should be denied.
No, I wouldn't see any particular difference with firmware. It would (and should) depend on the issue of tangibility. If the design of the MP3 player itself is somehow revolutionary, it would be patentable like any tangible device. If it weren't, it wouldn't be, just like any tangible device.
Firmware is in essence software. It is and should be copyrightable, but not patentable.
If you come up with a brilliant design for a guitar, that can produce unmatched tone quality or make it far easier to play or what have you, you can patent that. But you cannot patent music you play on that or any guitar, even if your technique is brilliant and no one's thought of it before. You can copyright your song, of course, but not patent it. Software (or firmware) is the music. It's "played" on the appropriate device, be it a computer or MP3 player, but it is not in itself the device. You should not be able to patent intangibles, be they business methods, genome sequences, or software.
"Non-obviousness" just means "someone else screwed this up at some point"? I've seen a lot of bad games, many of which I could probably fix the problems with if I had a mind to. Maybe I will, if that's the only standard of patentability.
That's quite aside from the issue that software should never be patentable. Software for a computer is like music for a guitar-copyright (for a genuinely limited time), yes, patent, no. Not tangible, and certainly doesn't work to "promote science and the useful arts"-allowing software patentability actually severely slows development in that field.
No, didn't you know? Only those who actually work should have to continue to work in order to continue to make money. Copyright, on the other hand, should extend for not only your entire life, but 70 years past your life. You should be able to continue getting a paycheck at 90 for work at 20.
I sure wish I could get paid for my entire life and then some for work I did years ago. And yes, "artists" ought to have to keep up the work to keep up the cash flow, just like the rest of us. No more work, no more pay.
So the law stays, and we just hope everyone goes to jail before anyone gets hurt.
Ah, there's the rub, to give us our bit of Shakespeare for the day. For the record, my kids aren't hypothetical. And while I absolutely hope they are never hurt by a pedophile, there are only certain lengths I'm willing to go to in order to reduce that risk, because to go to greater lengths means almost certain harm from greater risks.
Consider the risk of them being injured in a car accident. I'll use carseats for the ones whose age necessitates it, I'll drive very carefully and defensively while they're in the car, and I wouldn't let them ride with anyone else I didn't know or trust to keep them similarly safe. Those are all reasonable measures. What I wouldn't do is forbid them to ever ride in a car and force them to walk everywhere. That's unreasonable and may in fact make them less safe, and regardless would be an extreme reaction to a risk which is already well mitigated by more reasonable measures. Not eliminated, mind you, and no risk is ever truly eliminated even by the most draconian measures.
The same is true here. I'm far more afraid of my children growing up in a society where the attitude is "Throw the deviant in jail before someone gets hurt!" than I am actually afraid of said deviant. A free society means we must tolerate people who think and want some pretty disgusting things. We can certainly punish those who act on such urges, be they to murder people of a certain race or sexually abuse children. But we cross a line when we imprison someone simply for what they think, like, have urges to do, say, advocate, or anything of the sort. Freedom means tolerating things you find revolting, if no one is actually being injured.
Why? Because someone else probably finds you or me revolting. Someone probably thinks it's unconscionable that I have children and yet don't support the "Lock 'em all up! Think of the CHILDREN!" mentality. Someone else may strongly disagree with other political beliefs I hold. Someone else yet may just not like the color of my shirt.
Freedom of speech, and expression, and thought means that I may think, say, and express these things whether those people like it or not, and that, in turn, they may do the same. That's the only way that system works. Starting to say "Well...all speech is free speech except THAT!" is the true slippery slope. I'd much rather take my chances and let someone watch Simpsons porn, if they really feel the need.
It is not my understanding that he was on parole when he committed this "offense". You are correct that quite often parole comes with limitations on rights one would otherwise have. This makes sense-after all, if you had not been granted parole, you'd still be in jail with even more severely limited rights. Restraining orders are a civil action, so are in a bit different category-they're basically a type of injunction, punishable by contempt if violated just like any injunction. Many injunctions prohibit things that aren't actually crimes.
However, the fact that this is within the "letter of the law" is the problem. Australia is supposedly a free, liberal democracy. Thought crime laws are incompatible with a liberal democracy. From my read of this (and if I'm wrong, please point me to the correct information), even someone who previously had not so much as had a traffic ticket could be convicted under this law. That is unacceptable in a country which claims it supports basic rights such as freedom of speech and expression.
That's a strangely shaped slippery slope, if his first offense was images of actual children, and the second was of imaginary ones.
One can at least make a case that prohibiting child porn depicting real, actual children prevents real, actual harm. That still comes a little close to thought crime for my liking, and I'd much prefer to see them focusing on the person who commits the crime rather than those who view the lurid video of it, but at least I understand where the position comes from. We don't prosecute those who view other types of lurid crime videos or images, we prosecute the criminals they depict. But even if I disagree with the position, I can comprehend it and the reasoning behind it.
But this? This is absolutely thought crime. The Simpsons are not real people. They have no right to be free from harm, because they cannot be harmed. They're a figment of Matt Groening's imagination. A very famous figment, perhaps, but no less imaginary for it. There's no argument to "protect" someone who does not really exist. It's as silly as prosecuting Dad for assault when he taps the broom on the closet wall and tells his child he just drove the monster in the closet away.
His prior conviction has no bearing here. It's like saying someone previously convicted of a computer crime charge should be prosecuted again simply for reading an exploit site. That's thought crime, and it's not a valid reason to prosecute someone in the first place. There should be no question of "repeat offender" sentencing when the action in question shouldn't be a crime to start with.
Sure. And downloading an IDE you have no idea how to use doesn't make you a programmer, either. But it can certainly be a good first step in that direction. Knowing how to use those tools properly is part of what a (molecular biologist|mechanical engineer|electrical engineer) does, so if you're interested in doing that, you'll want to learn. The way to learn something complex is to see it, fumble around with it, make some mistakes, figure out what caused them, take a look at the documentation, mess up again, take another look, and so on. How will you ever start that process without first getting your hands on the tool?
I do imagine I can be facetious to make a point, though. And the real point is, yes, one certainly can argue it would be wrong for the EFF to claim inflated costs, and Universal would be well within its rights to ask them to substantiate those costs. But why wouldn't the same be true when Universal is claiming an outrageous, unrealistic damages amount in the next case? Why shouldn't they have to substantiate that?
Then again, if a single song download can be worth $10,000 or $80,000 or what have you, why shouldn't we let the EFF make up arbitrary figures as well? Universal doesn't seem to mind arbitrary dollar amounts rather than something based on an actual calculation of actual costs when that's in their favor.
no, the proper analogy would be to telephone, where the information travel on infrastructure owned by a third party. They also have the technological mean to listen to your conversations, but elect not to. Your isp could (technologically) read your e-mails, but he elects not to.
There is also no technological means to keep a postal employee from opening an envelope and examining its contents, as it is a trivially simple task. The restriction is a legal one, not a technological one, but despite that, senders of mail in sealed envelopes have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
So why have they saddled them with massive amounts of debt that they can never hope to pay off? Why does the suicide rate continue to rise? These things to don't seem like fair trade-offs.
Yes, good thing that the US doesn't have a huge amount of debt! We'll show them!
I would not agree. The rights to speak freely and to seek information are absolutely fundamental human rights, recognized by the Constitution of effectively every liberal democracy. To take away one of the most powerful and useful tools for both sending and receiving information that the individual has is a serious abrogation of that right, and should not be taken away for something so trivial as a civil complaint.
To say "Sure, we'll let you say and read whatever you want, but we won't let you speak above a whisper or visit any libraries or bookstores" is not allowing freedom to speak and read in any meaningful sense of the term.
It already has. It's called rent seeking, and there's no shortage of examples. Certainly, overzealous copyright enforcement, patent trolling, and the like are examples we commonly see here, but they're by no means the only ones. Look at the ISPs that have crushed proposed municipal wifi plans before they could even get started, by bribing^Wencouraging lawmakers to pass laws against it the moment it was proposed. Another example is the desire of ISPs to charge for "all you can eat" plans while then throttling what you can actually do with them. That's the same type of behavior we're seeing here.
There are plenty of examples outside the tech sector as well. We had an article a few days ago about predatory student loan practices, and that's been studied quite a bit already. Telecom/cable companies' frequent monopoly/duopoly structure in most areas. The inability to become certified in many areas without a college degree even if you can prove your competence (benefitting, of course, colleges). The list goes on and on.
I'm not honestly sure that's not a consequence of trying to apply capitalism to a resource (information) which is naturally not scarce, and can only be made so through draconian rules and enforcement. With computers, it's not difficult at all to perfectly and quickly replicate most types of information, there's no real scarcity of it at all, only artificial, legally enforced scarcity. If I were in the business of selling nothing dressed up as something, and the only way people paid me was when they were forced to, I guess I might be tempted to overuse force too.
(I also disagree that I presented it as the norm, but whatever.)
It wasn't you, actually. Someone above you presented that with the "Granny Test" scenario, and I got the two posts run together in my head. I apologize for that, that's what I get for posting at night with insufficient coffee.
If you don't have root, why not just ask the admin to install something for you through the package manager if you need it? Most will. Doesn't hurt to at least ask, you may be putting yourself through the frustration for nothing.
That asde, to use that as an example is a bit disingenuous. You're presenting a serious edge case as the norm. "Granny" will have the root password to the computer in her bedroom or living room, and will be able to use the normal Ubuntu add/remove program menu just fine. More advanced users may use Synaptic or apt-get. She won't be trying to do custom, non-root compilations, and for her use case, she doesn't have to. Granny's not going to be asking for a shell account on someone else's machine.
Well, you've got a point, and admittedly my bank is excellent about that. I've never that I recall gotten a link in an email from them, they're all to the effect of "You have a new statement for your account ******1234. Please log in to your account to view it." If more banks would do that, I think it would help the problem quite a bit.
But that doesn't negate the fact that the guy supposed to be responsible for busting fraudsters and complex crime rings *almost*, as you say, fell for a common, well-known scam. He was obviously close enough to it that it scared him (or his wife) off using it at all. I do still find that troubling. This is a guy that should know better, even if his bank doesn't.
As to fraudulent emails posing as my bank, I have received them, and they got forwarded right along to my bank. I've also, of course, gotten the ones for banks I've never had a thing to do with, and usually forward those along as well.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, but only to a degree.
Microsoft should be able to say "We will not accept modified consoles on our servers." It's their server, they can accept or reject whatever they like from it. That's absolutely their right.
What is not their right, however, is to try to stop (through licensing terms, etc.), anyone from making an alternative server setup glad to accept modded consoles. That's MY server, if I run it, and I should be able to do so if I have the technical chops to make it happen.
The issue arose a long time ago with Blizzard and bnetd. Blizzard has a right of refusal on their own servers, but only if they're not going to stop others from running their own servers free from such restrictions. If they insist on everything being under their umbrella, they obligate themselves to accept and support everything. If they want to say "You want to do this, you're on your own", they need to then allow you to do it on your own. If Nintendo's got no problem with "unofficial" servers for modded consoles, I've got no problem with them banning them from the official ones. But when they're trying to crack down on manufacturers of mod chips, which do have legitimate purposes, they're over the line.
Where did you find that the students aren't allowed to take the laptops home? From what I've been reading, it appears that they certainly were. Relevant portion, from Cnet:
The other stories, such as one who talked to the kid's sister, seems to confirm that use of the laptops at home was quite common practice, and I can find nothing in the school's statement indicating that they believed the laptop's use was unauthorized or that it had been reported stolen. The only thing I find is that the school accused the kid of drug possession, and that he states the "drugs" were Mike and Ike candies. I can't find a claim by either side that he had taken the machine without authorization or that there was an actual theft/loss report. One would think if someone had reported it stolen, they'd have noted that quite prominently in the letter defending themselves rather than assuring that the system is now disabled.
I doubt most people are fat by choice, if you mean that they woke up one day and said "You know what? I'd really like to be a couple hundred pounds overweight." However, though they did not plan to fail, they did fail to plan, and generally speaking are overweight due to a series of their own decisions and a failure to stop making those decisions.
As to scientific data, there has of course been a tremendous amount of scientific research done on obesity, and all of it that I've seen indicates that the overwhelming majority of the problem is from lifestyle choices, not medical conditions. We have indeed taken a trip to Unscientific Land here, but you took that road when you equated obesity to sexual orientation or skin color. Race is, obviously, a hereditary characteristic, and research suggests that sexual orientation is largely not a choice of the individual either.
My own experience bears this out. I did not choose to be white, obviously-I was born that way. I also did not wake up one day and say "You know what, I think I'd like to be straight." I was attracted to women since the age I began being attracted to anyone, I didn't make that as a conscious choice.
On the other hand, when I noticed I was starting to put on a few pounds, I changed my diet a bit and started riding a bike instead of driving a lot of the time. Result? The bit of a belly I was developing fell right off. I am by no means a health food guru or exercise junkie, I still enjoy following pizza and a beer with a good book, but I also know that this must be done with some degree of moderation and can't be every meal of every day.
There's also the very real difference that neither the race nor the sexual orientation of the person next to you affect your flight. On the other hand, if you're crunching me into a quarter of my seat because you're taking up most of it, you're depriving me of what I paid for. To equate an issue caused by lifestyle with a very real impact on neighboring passengers, to issues largely if not entirely caused by birth and having no such impact, is disingenuous at best. Unless you've got some good research to show me that obesity is not largely a result of poor dietary and exercise practices, I think you're calling the wrong person out of touch with the research in this scenario.
It doesn't appear to me to be Google who is at fault here. For them to avoid liability, they have to comply with DMCA notices even if they know they're silly or unfounded. That's how Congress wrote OCILLA, and there's our first guilty party-the ones who made the DMCA (and sent the "C" in it so far out of control) in the first place. If Congress kept copyright law reasonable, we wouldn't have this mess.
The next issue is the music industry, who apparently sends out these notices in a shotgun blast without checking even the most basic of things, like if they gave someone permission to do what they're doing. That practice is illegal under OCILLA, but unfortunately the penalties for it are so small that they do not provide a meaningful remedy, especially when it is so frequently large corporations using it against individuals.
And the third party at fault, realistically, is the blogger. They should have filed an immediate counter notice (which the notice they would have received from Google explains exactly how to do), including the correspondence from the rights holders granting them permission, and proceeded to file a false DMCA notice counterclaim (OCILLA does provide damages and consequences for knowingly filing a false notice). If easy cases like that don't even result in consequences, people will just continue to do this type of thing.
I've got to agree here, even though I'm not at all a fan of Southwest after my own recent experiences with them. First off, there's no guarantees when you're flying standby that you'll get any seats. No room really to complain if you don't. In this guy's case, however, he needs two seats. I'm entirely with that, and it applies in this case-he takes up both the space and the weight of at least two passengers.
If you are severely obese, there will be certain physical limitations as to what you can do. If you would prefer not to have those limitations, your option is to lose the weight. Even those with legitimate medical conditions can do so under a doctor's supervision, and generally the "medical condition" is "Eats too much, exercises too little".
It is of course one's decision whether to continue to overeat and not exercise, but it is then one's responsibility to live with the consequences of that decision. If you don't want the limitations that come with being fat, get to work on losing the weight. If you'd rather not, then yes, you need to buy two seats if that's what it takes to accommodate you. I wish more places would work up the nerve to plainly state that you need to buy as many seats as you overflow into.
Why shouldn't we expect them to? Those who handle confidential information are expected to learn how to properly handle it, whether that means "don't leave a briefcase full of sensitive documents unattended" or "don't send same said documents in electronic form unencrypted on the Internet." If you're not concerned with how to handle confidential information, and, well, keep it confidential, you shouldn't be handling it at all. We wouldn't accept "I don't know how to use the snail mail system" for a doctor sending such information on a postcard rather than in a sealed envelope. If you're handling sensitive information, especially your customers' sensitive information, you make damn sure whatever you're planning to do with it will keep it secure. I think doctors who learn complex medical procedures can handle learning how and when to encrypt an email.
I've been in a similar situation myself, though thankfully not (as sounds possible for you) by myself, and I learned one thing above anything else.
Never, ever, trust your memory. As soon as you figure something out, write it down. Right that second, while it's still fresh in your mind exactly what you learned. It doesn't matter as much how you write it down (commenting the code, a separate text document, or for that matter keeping a notebook and pencil close to hand), just that you do. If you don't, you will run across the sinking feeling that you already figured this problem out before, and since you don't remember what the answer was, you're about to do it again. It will also help others that you work with, and even if you don't right now, it's quite possible that you will.
While you might be being facetious, generally speaking, that's a good formulation (though of course that shouldn't be the only criterion). Patents are for stuff that wouldn't be developed without them. Generally, that's because it would be cost prohibitive to do so and no return approaching the cost of development would be possible without it. It's not cost prohibitive to develop software, since the equipment on which to do it is readily and cheaply available and there is no cost per iteration, and a simple and much less restrictive copyright enables a return.
Patents are not there to "reward ingenuity", or anything like that. They're there to encourage progress. That is their one and only purpose and their one and only justification. In any case where they do not actually do that, they're unjustifiable.
I don't see any dichotomy there at all. The idea of copyrights and patents, according to the Constitutional section that authorizes them, is "to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts", not "to apply patents to anything that's ingenious". Designing a mechanical, tangible device often requires a significant investment in parts and components, as well as the appropriate tools to machine and modify them, as different iterations are tried and failed. Different iterations of software have no such barrier, as the code can simply be modified and tried again, and I can do that right here on the same computer I'm typing this message on.
A patent is very strong, very wide-reaching protection, and should be applied only when it will advance progress by making those massive material investments worthwhile. In areas where material investments are unnecessary and progress will be fine without patents and likely even impeded by them, they should be denied.
No, I wouldn't see any particular difference with firmware. It would (and should) depend on the issue of tangibility. If the design of the MP3 player itself is somehow revolutionary, it would be patentable like any tangible device. If it weren't, it wouldn't be, just like any tangible device.
Firmware is in essence software. It is and should be copyrightable, but not patentable.
If you come up with a brilliant design for a guitar, that can produce unmatched tone quality or make it far easier to play or what have you, you can patent that. But you cannot patent music you play on that or any guitar, even if your technique is brilliant and no one's thought of it before. You can copyright your song, of course, but not patent it. Software (or firmware) is the music. It's "played" on the appropriate device, be it a computer or MP3 player, but it is not in itself the device. You should not be able to patent intangibles, be they business methods, genome sequences, or software.
"Non-obviousness" just means "someone else screwed this up at some point"? I've seen a lot of bad games, many of which I could probably fix the problems with if I had a mind to. Maybe I will, if that's the only standard of patentability.
That's quite aside from the issue that software should never be patentable. Software for a computer is like music for a guitar-copyright (for a genuinely limited time), yes, patent, no. Not tangible, and certainly doesn't work to "promote science and the useful arts"-allowing software patentability actually severely slows development in that field.
No, didn't you know? Only those who actually work should have to continue to work in order to continue to make money. Copyright, on the other hand, should extend for not only your entire life, but 70 years past your life. You should be able to continue getting a paycheck at 90 for work at 20.
I sure wish I could get paid for my entire life and then some for work I did years ago. And yes, "artists" ought to have to keep up the work to keep up the cash flow, just like the rest of us. No more work, no more pay.
Ah, there's the rub, to give us our bit of Shakespeare for the day. For the record, my kids aren't hypothetical. And while I absolutely hope they are never hurt by a pedophile, there are only certain lengths I'm willing to go to in order to reduce that risk, because to go to greater lengths means almost certain harm from greater risks.
Consider the risk of them being injured in a car accident. I'll use carseats for the ones whose age necessitates it, I'll drive very carefully and defensively while they're in the car, and I wouldn't let them ride with anyone else I didn't know or trust to keep them similarly safe. Those are all reasonable measures. What I wouldn't do is forbid them to ever ride in a car and force them to walk everywhere. That's unreasonable and may in fact make them less safe, and regardless would be an extreme reaction to a risk which is already well mitigated by more reasonable measures. Not eliminated, mind you, and no risk is ever truly eliminated even by the most draconian measures.
The same is true here. I'm far more afraid of my children growing up in a society where the attitude is "Throw the deviant in jail before someone gets hurt!" than I am actually afraid of said deviant. A free society means we must tolerate people who think and want some pretty disgusting things. We can certainly punish those who act on such urges, be they to murder people of a certain race or sexually abuse children. But we cross a line when we imprison someone simply for what they think, like, have urges to do, say, advocate, or anything of the sort. Freedom means tolerating things you find revolting, if no one is actually being injured.
Why? Because someone else probably finds you or me revolting. Someone probably thinks it's unconscionable that I have children and yet don't support the "Lock 'em all up! Think of the CHILDREN!" mentality. Someone else may strongly disagree with other political beliefs I hold. Someone else yet may just not like the color of my shirt.
Freedom of speech, and expression, and thought means that I may think, say, and express these things whether those people like it or not, and that, in turn, they may do the same. That's the only way that system works. Starting to say "Well...all speech is free speech except THAT!" is the true slippery slope. I'd much rather take my chances and let someone watch Simpsons porn, if they really feel the need.
It is not my understanding that he was on parole when he committed this "offense". You are correct that quite often parole comes with limitations on rights one would otherwise have. This makes sense-after all, if you had not been granted parole, you'd still be in jail with even more severely limited rights. Restraining orders are a civil action, so are in a bit different category-they're basically a type of injunction, punishable by contempt if violated just like any injunction. Many injunctions prohibit things that aren't actually crimes.
However, the fact that this is within the "letter of the law" is the problem. Australia is supposedly a free, liberal democracy. Thought crime laws are incompatible with a liberal democracy. From my read of this (and if I'm wrong, please point me to the correct information), even someone who previously had not so much as had a traffic ticket could be convicted under this law. That is unacceptable in a country which claims it supports basic rights such as freedom of speech and expression.
That's a strangely shaped slippery slope, if his first offense was images of actual children, and the second was of imaginary ones.
One can at least make a case that prohibiting child porn depicting real, actual children prevents real, actual harm. That still comes a little close to thought crime for my liking, and I'd much prefer to see them focusing on the person who commits the crime rather than those who view the lurid video of it, but at least I understand where the position comes from. We don't prosecute those who view other types of lurid crime videos or images, we prosecute the criminals they depict. But even if I disagree with the position, I can comprehend it and the reasoning behind it.
But this? This is absolutely thought crime. The Simpsons are not real people. They have no right to be free from harm, because they cannot be harmed. They're a figment of Matt Groening's imagination. A very famous figment, perhaps, but no less imaginary for it. There's no argument to "protect" someone who does not really exist. It's as silly as prosecuting Dad for assault when he taps the broom on the closet wall and tells his child he just drove the monster in the closet away.
His prior conviction has no bearing here. It's like saying someone previously convicted of a computer crime charge should be prosecuted again simply for reading an exploit site. That's thought crime, and it's not a valid reason to prosecute someone in the first place. There should be no question of "repeat offender" sentencing when the action in question shouldn't be a crime to start with.
Sure. And downloading an IDE you have no idea how to use doesn't make you a programmer, either. But it can certainly be a good first step in that direction. Knowing how to use those tools properly is part of what a (molecular biologist|mechanical engineer|electrical engineer) does, so if you're interested in doing that, you'll want to learn. The way to learn something complex is to see it, fumble around with it, make some mistakes, figure out what caused them, take a look at the documentation, mess up again, take another look, and so on. How will you ever start that process without first getting your hands on the tool?
I do imagine I can be facetious to make a point, though. And the real point is, yes, one certainly can argue it would be wrong for the EFF to claim inflated costs, and Universal would be well within its rights to ask them to substantiate those costs. But why wouldn't the same be true when Universal is claiming an outrageous, unrealistic damages amount in the next case? Why shouldn't they have to substantiate that?
Then again, if a single song download can be worth $10,000 or $80,000 or what have you, why shouldn't we let the EFF make up arbitrary figures as well? Universal doesn't seem to mind arbitrary dollar amounts rather than something based on an actual calculation of actual costs when that's in their favor.
no, the proper analogy would be to telephone, where the information travel on infrastructure owned by a third party. They also have the technological mean to listen to your conversations, but elect not to. Your isp could (technologically) read your e-mails, but he elects not to.
There is also no technological means to keep a postal employee from opening an envelope and examining its contents, as it is a trivially simple task. The restriction is a legal one, not a technological one, but despite that, senders of mail in sealed envelopes have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
So why have they saddled them with massive amounts of debt that they can never hope to pay off? Why does the suicide rate continue to rise? These things to don't seem like fair trade-offs.
Yes, good thing that the US doesn't have a huge amount of debt! We'll show them!
I would not agree. The rights to speak freely and to seek information are absolutely fundamental human rights, recognized by the Constitution of effectively every liberal democracy. To take away one of the most powerful and useful tools for both sending and receiving information that the individual has is a serious abrogation of that right, and should not be taken away for something so trivial as a civil complaint.
To say "Sure, we'll let you say and read whatever you want, but we won't let you speak above a whisper or visit any libraries or bookstores" is not allowing freedom to speak and read in any meaningful sense of the term.
It already has. It's called rent seeking, and there's no shortage of examples. Certainly, overzealous copyright enforcement, patent trolling, and the like are examples we commonly see here, but they're by no means the only ones. Look at the ISPs that have crushed proposed municipal wifi plans before they could even get started, by bribing^Wencouraging lawmakers to pass laws against it the moment it was proposed. Another example is the desire of ISPs to charge for "all you can eat" plans while then throttling what you can actually do with them. That's the same type of behavior we're seeing here.
There are plenty of examples outside the tech sector as well. We had an article a few days ago about predatory student loan practices, and that's been studied quite a bit already. Telecom/cable companies' frequent monopoly/duopoly structure in most areas. The inability to become certified in many areas without a college degree even if you can prove your competence (benefitting, of course, colleges). The list goes on and on.
I'm not honestly sure that's not a consequence of trying to apply capitalism to a resource (information) which is naturally not scarce, and can only be made so through draconian rules and enforcement. With computers, it's not difficult at all to perfectly and quickly replicate most types of information, there's no real scarcity of it at all, only artificial, legally enforced scarcity. If I were in the business of selling nothing dressed up as something, and the only way people paid me was when they were forced to, I guess I might be tempted to overuse force too.
It wasn't you, actually. Someone above you presented that with the "Granny Test" scenario, and I got the two posts run together in my head. I apologize for that, that's what I get for posting at night with insufficient coffee.
If you don't have root, why not just ask the admin to install something for you through the package manager if you need it? Most will. Doesn't hurt to at least ask, you may be putting yourself through the frustration for nothing.
That asde, to use that as an example is a bit disingenuous. You're presenting a serious edge case as the norm. "Granny" will have the root password to the computer in her bedroom or living room, and will be able to use the normal Ubuntu add/remove program menu just fine. More advanced users may use Synaptic or apt-get. She won't be trying to do custom, non-root compilations, and for her use case, she doesn't have to. Granny's not going to be asking for a shell account on someone else's machine.
Well, you've got a point, and admittedly my bank is excellent about that. I've never that I recall gotten a link in an email from them, they're all to the effect of "You have a new statement for your account ******1234. Please log in to your account to view it." If more banks would do that, I think it would help the problem quite a bit.
But that doesn't negate the fact that the guy supposed to be responsible for busting fraudsters and complex crime rings *almost*, as you say, fell for a common, well-known scam. He was obviously close enough to it that it scared him (or his wife) off using it at all. I do still find that troubling. This is a guy that should know better, even if his bank doesn't.
As to fraudulent emails posing as my bank, I have received them, and they got forwarded right along to my bank. I've also, of course, gotten the ones for banks I've never had a thing to do with, and usually forward those along as well.