Look, I'm sick of this BS about how the internet would have gone nowhere if MS hadn't turned around and embraced it. They started getting into the net only when it became obvious that people wanted it badly enough that they would have it any which way they could, even if that meant dinking around with Trumpet Winsock. What would we have today without MS embracing the net? Simple, the same damn thing we have today, but via third-party vendors. And if you don't think it's possible for a third-party product to become a de-facto Windows standard, just look at PKZIP.
Windows embraced TCP/IP simply because the trend was already in place. First they mocked it, then they fought it (MSN, the proprietary dial-up version), then they embraced it and convinced idiots that it was their idea all along to do so.
The inclusion of web-browsers and a tcp-ip stack as "standard equipment" in an OS.
Yeah, gee, thanks MS for coming up with the idea of putting TCP/IP into the OS, I mean, wow, what an achievement! Boy, you really scooped everyone else on that one didn't you? Nope, nobody else ever did anything like that before, no sir-eee.
Just how much needs to be copied for something to be a violation of IP laws? (and I recognize the answer might be different for copyright laws vs patent laws.) With the sheer gigantic volume of stuff that's been created over the years it's pretty much a guarantee that by random chance if I generate a small sentence that it matches some portion of some IP work somewhere. If I make up a guitar 'riff' of about 6-7 notes then by random chance it's probably already been done once in some song somewhere. And your hello world program was probably already done in just that way, with just those choices of variable names, at some random point in the past by some random person who may have put it under an IP law.
How does the IP law deal with this? As time goes on, does the ideaspace of possible new texts shrink noticably, or does the near-infinite size of the space make the problem irrelevant?
Hmm - Here's two problems I notice in their blasting of forking in OSS?
- Some of the 'flaws' of forking mentioned are actually 'flaws' of having multiple choices in general, regardless of whether those choices were generated due to code forking or independant code bases competing with each other. Thus they are 'flaws' that are shared by the closed-source world as well a the open source world.
- Having many forks (or multiple product choices developed independantly) to choose from forced the UNIX world to develp things in a layered fashion, something Windows doesn't seem to do very well. Using a layered model, where each piece of the picture is an independant piece, gave us things like the Window Manager in X, and the filesystem drop-in replacements, and the standard file i/o device drivers, and so on. This layered model, which is needed to get things to interoperate well in a highly "forked" world, has design benefits outside of just being able to replace a module with a new one. This is not a flaw. It's a benefit. MS is proof that when there is no incentive to design walls between your layers, you generally don't, and you get a messy pile of software. Forking forces good design up front.
Without sharing of source, you get *more* incompatability due to the need to restart from scratch and design anew when what you really wanted was just "Something that works just like product foo, but with one or two minor changes."
This type of new product spawning will make far more incompatabilities than code forking from one
shared base will. Consider, how incompatable are the KDE and Gnome guis? It might seem like they are incompatable until you compare to how incompatable OS/2 and Windows were. KDE apps and Gnome apps can run at the same time on the same desktop screen without any problems.
Threat of use isn't the same as actual use. So I say that "using" a gun for self-defense doesn't count unless the gun got fired. That 99% figure is arrived at by the sneaky trick of counting times that the POTENTIAL to use the gun scared someone off. By that metric, The US had used thousands of nuclear missles agaisnt the USSR. Granted, none of them were actually fired, but hey, they were a deterrant, therefore they were "used".
It's a silly argument, and it's detrimental to bring it up when there are far better arguments for keeping gun ownership legal, like keeping the
government honest.
While PBS is funded in a hybrid fashion, they don't give out better service to the donators than they do to the non-payers. If I only watch PBS once a week or so, then I feel justified in not giving them donations because they already get some of my money in the form of federal funds. Now, If I was an avid viewer deeply interested in quilting, civil war re-enactments, 27 different cooking shows, and teletubbies, then I'd probably give them more money beyond just the little bit they get from taxes. PBS serves only one purpose to me - a vehicle for British humor. Since they don't do much of that on our local station anymore, I don't have a reason to give them money.
(Okay, so they do Keeping up Apperances still, but that isn't what I'd categorize as "humor".)
Where am I going with this? Well, CERT isn't proposing something like that. They're proposing keeping the information hidden until later unless you donate to them. But if I don't know what the
CERT is putting out, I don't know if I need it or not, so I don't know if I want to buy it or not.
The problem with selling information is that you
don't know if it's worth the price until after you have it already. You can't take it out for a test
drive. Once you give out information, you can't make someone forget it afterward.
Why Not? Because CERT aren't the ones finding
the bugs. Individuals are sending them bug reports to publish, knowing that they are
doing a service by dissemating that information.
Once CERT starts charging, their volunteer army
will dry up very fast.
Besides that, they are federally funded. Either leave it public, or stop spending my tax money on it if it wants to run itself like a private business.
Bull. He's still got them. "Take" means to REMOVE the thing in question from one place and put it elsewhere. It does not cover the act of making a SECOND thing that is identical to the first. I'm not defending pirating, but it really doesn't fit the existing terminology and trying to pigeonhole it into the crime of "theft" drags along some connotations that don't apply. We hate theft because it deprives the original owner of the thing in question. Piracy is different. It is more akin to copying the answers off of someone else's test in school.
I fear that the MPAA will do the same thing that the RIAA did to the end-users on Napster, that is they will presume users guilty with only half the necessary evidence, and paint innocent people with the same wide brush as the criminals. Here's what you need to prove that someone is trading illegally:
Prove the user is sharing something.
Prove that this something is in fact the content you think it is.
Prove that the recipient doesn't have a legal copy of the the work in some form already.
All the RIAA did was prove the first one. They failed to prove that the content was what they thought it was (Just because I share a file called "one.mp3" doesnt' mean that this is the Metallica song called "One".) They also made no attempt to prove that the recipient didn't already have a copy of the song in question. If I already own a copy of the Metallica Black album (that contains "One"), then if a friend gives me an MP3 of that song, nothing illegal has happened. It's merely a change of format, which IS protected as fair use.
The assholes at the RIAA coerced Napster into kicking people off with only the first criteria above being met. I fear the MPAA will do the same thing. They don't exactly have a great track record with being fair and understanding. And the DeCSS case has already shown that they don't mind painting everyone with the same brush just to get the few actual criminals in a group.
I'm fully in favor of MPAA and RIAA going after the actual culprits (instead of a large group that happens to include some culprits along with a bunch of innocents). Once that actually starts happening, then you can gloat if people continue to complain.
I was with you until your signature. From your sig it's clear you don't live in this universe. What is this "free tibet" type of MS software you are referring to?
Simply claiming for yourself the rights to the property/wealth/etc. of any other person is stealing. How can you
even attempt to argue this point?
Not to defend the communist idiot, but the word "stealing" also implies that you took the rights to the property/wealth/etc AWAY from the original owner, not that you merely copied them. (Stealing is like using the "mv" command, while pirating is like using the "cp" command.) This type of crime needs a brand new word to describe it, since it's a crime that only became possible in recent times (making perfect copies effortlessly
that are 100% as good as the original is something our laws and language haven't evolved to handle yet.)
Why not, seeing as how it isn't? Sure, its wrong, but stealing isn't the only kind of wrong there is, so why try to apply such an innappropriate label to the act? It's wrong because it's copying without permission. That's not stealing, it's plagerism.
I'm not trying to see guns get banned. But that *particular* argument doesn't work very well. There are better ones. I don't want to see the very valid complaint against Apple here get painted with the same brush as the gun lobby's arguments, because that will cause too many people to just throw it out. The primary purpose of a handgun is to be a weapon. They weren't invented for the sake of target practice or picking off squirrels. Those uses came to be later on. Let's not try to pretend that's not the case. Sure, you can use just about anything you want as an improvised weapon. You can run someone over with a car, you can whack someone with a wrench, but those are tools who's dangerous power is totally incedental to their primary reason to exist. Stick to the *good* arguments for gun ownership, like the fact that the government can run rampant when citizens are weak and powerless, or the fact that dependancy on the police doesn't work since they won't arrive until the deed is done, or the fact that it isn't even possible to take the criminal's guns away anyway, and the war on guns would be about as effective as the war on drugs has been (nil).
wrench: primary purpose - turning nuts.
screwdriver: primary purpose - turning screws.
theme editor: primary purpose - making own themes.
gun: primary purpose - throwing a bullet at dangerous speed through the air.
I've toyed with the idea of some form of sci-fi alien that doesn't see color the same way most terran critters do. The idea was that somehow(?), with a bit of hand-waving, these aliens still see
the same "visible" light range humans do, but within that range they take more than three datapoints (r,g,b). They have the ability to distinguish the exact spectrum at each point in their vision. Sort of a 4-dimensional set of data that reaches their brain: (A 2-d image, and at each point on the image they have a frequency/intensity 'graph' of the spectrum. Somehow this data is collected (no, I don't know how), and their brains are equipped to "feel" this data as color in a much more precise and perfect way than we mere humans can.
I was toying with the idea of writing up these aliens in some sort of roleplaying game.
Now, the interesting questions that arise are:
What would they think of human RGB video monitors? They would see a bananna rendered with a sharp spike of red and a spike of green on the spectrum, and this would look nothing like the way a real bananna looks to them. Our RGB monitors are explicitly designed to mimic the limited data our eyes are capable of measuring, NOT the real spectrum that exists when you look at the object directly.
What technologies would they have gotten a head-start on due to their senses? Some things about light that took us humans a long time to deduce would be intuatively obvious to these aliens.
What sort of bizzarre technology would be
required to make a color screen that was good enough to work for these aliens? Would it be so hard to do that they just give up and don't bother with anything other than black-and-white?
How would their art paintings look different? Would human mixed paint look wrong to them too? ("Red and blue don't make purple, you silly human! Heck, red and blue are on opposite sides of the visible spectrum, and purple is on the other side of blue from red. How do you get purple from a spike of red and blue?? That doesn't make any sense!" (I think in real life this happens because our red receptors actually get triggerred by two frequencies, red and a multiple of red that is just beyond our vision range in the ultra-violet. The UV echo of red is tickled a bit when you start going past blue into violet, so we percieve violet as red and blue, even though the tickling of the red receptor is a bit "fake".)
this is true, as long as your definition of intelligence is based around human criteria
Yeah, "human" criteria like being able to actually understand the world around you. That requires the ability to experiment with that world. You have to have hands, pseudopods, manipulating cillia, telekenisis, SOMETHING with which to 'play' with the stuff of the world. How is something supposed to become intelligent if it can't experiment?
Post or moderate? Ah, my first experience with the dilemma.
What dilemma? If you want to shoot down what he said that you DO NOT use moderation to do that. You post a reply, like you did. The sort of spiteful "I disagree therefore I will moderate you down" attittude is NOT what moderation is for. I say that comment was perfectly on-topic and valid, even though I agree with you that the poster is off his rocker. (Whales and dolphins are smarter than the average animal, but they cannot become anything close to being as smart as humans because they lack the physical ability to manipulate their environs (hands). They lack this ability to fiddle with things - a crucial ingredient for a baby learning how to think.
Apes are way smarter than whales and dolphins, because they actually have hands with which to learn things about the world around them.)
No, we don't take it into account because it's just a glorified transmitter tower. It's not much of a "building". It's more of a monument. It should be in the same category as radio towers and the Eiffel Tower. This doesn't mean it's something to be laughed at - making a spike that tall that has no wires to hold it is an amazing engineering feat. But it's not a building.
Why measure hieght above "average" terrain? that gives unfair advantage to buildings on hills, where the hill itself is above "average" terrian. What's wrong with just measuring from the land at the base of the building?
Then there's the problem of timing. Special events change traffic patterns. If you measure by numbers of planes leaving and arriving per day, then modest little Wittman Field in Oshkosh, Wisconsin becomes the world's busiest airport during the one week that the Experimental Aircraft Association holds their annual fly-in convention there. Granted, most of those places are little private planes, but again, here we get into that "depends on what you measure" problem.
If Oshkosh gets to be the "busiest" airport for one week, then can I temporarily build the "tallest man-made structure" by tying a long cable to a big rocket and firing it upward? Granted,
it doesn't last long, but for a few brief seconds I've got the tallest "free standing" structure. It's made of one cable and a rocket, and it won't last more than a few seconds, but still...
I don't consider the caveats put on the Sears Tower by Chicago to be "cheating". The spire of the tower in Toronto is just for show, as is the decrative structure at the top of the one in Malasyia. The Sears Tower actually has real, honest to goodness EMPLOYEES using those floors all the way up to the top. The reason the observation deck isn't at the top is because the top actually has offices in it.
The Sears Tower has the highest floors that are actually USED by people for something.
The problem with that reasoning is that if you are going to measure starting from the sea floor, then what's to stop you from calling an entire continent a "mountain"? Then Everest is the "peak" of a very wide mountain known as "Asia".
You misunderstood the logic. The court is drawing a line between TELLING someone to commit a crime and merely providing information that was then later used to commit a crime. If the website in question had ever said "Go kill these guys" THEN it would be in the same class as Charles Manson.
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Windows embraced TCP/IP simply because the trend was already in place. First they mocked it, then they fought it (MSN, the proprietary dial-up version), then they embraced it and convinced idiots that it was their idea all along to do so.
Just how much needs to be copied for something to be a violation of IP laws? (and I recognize the answer might be different for copyright laws vs patent laws.) With the sheer gigantic volume of stuff that's been created over the years it's pretty much a guarantee that by random chance if I generate a small sentence that it matches some portion of some IP work somewhere. If I make up a guitar 'riff' of about 6-7 notes then by random chance it's probably already been done once in some song somewhere. And your hello world program was probably already done in just that way, with just those choices of variable names, at some random point in the past by some random person who may have put it under an IP law.
How does the IP law deal with this? As time goes on, does the ideaspace of possible new texts shrink noticably, or does the near-infinite size of the space make the problem irrelevant?
I'm perfectly willing to say that guns not fired were "used" in self defence if you are willing to say that the US used its nukes against the USSR.
It's a silly argument, and it's detrimental to bring it up when there are far better arguments for keeping gun ownership legal, like keeping the government honest.
Where am I going with this? Well, CERT isn't proposing something like that. They're proposing keeping the information hidden until later unless you donate to them. But if I don't know what the CERT is putting out, I don't know if I need it or not, so I don't know if I want to buy it or not.
The problem with selling information is that you don't know if it's worth the price until after you have it already. You can't take it out for a test drive. Once you give out information, you can't make someone forget it afterward.
Besides that, they are federally funded. Either leave it public, or stop spending my tax money on it if it wants to run itself like a private business.
Bull. He's still got them. "Take" means to REMOVE the thing in question from one place and put it elsewhere. It does not cover the act of making a SECOND thing that is identical to the first. I'm not defending pirating, but it really doesn't fit the existing terminology and trying to pigeonhole it into the crime of "theft" drags along some connotations that don't apply. We hate theft because it deprives the original owner of the thing in question. Piracy is different. It is more akin to copying the answers off of someone else's test in school.
All the RIAA did was prove the first one. They failed to prove that the content was what they thought it was (Just because I share a file called "one.mp3" doesnt' mean that this is the Metallica song called "One".) They also made no attempt to prove that the recipient didn't already have a copy of the song in question. If I already own a copy of the Metallica Black album (that contains "One"), then if a friend gives me an MP3 of that song, nothing illegal has happened. It's merely a change of format, which IS protected as fair use.
The assholes at the RIAA coerced Napster into kicking people off with only the first criteria above being met. I fear the MPAA will do the same thing. They don't exactly have a great track record with being fair and understanding. And the DeCSS case has already shown that they don't mind painting everyone with the same brush just to get the few actual criminals in a group.
I'm fully in favor of MPAA and RIAA going after the actual culprits (instead of a large group that happens to include some culprits along with a bunch of innocents). Once that actually starts happening, then you can gloat if people continue to complain.
Not to defend the communist idiot, but the word "stealing" also implies that you took the rights to the property/wealth/etc AWAY from the original owner, not that you merely copied them. (Stealing is like using the "mv" command, while pirating is like using the "cp" command.) This type of crime needs a brand new word to describe it, since it's a crime that only became possible in recent times (making perfect copies effortlessly that are 100% as good as the original is something our laws and language haven't evolved to handle yet.)
Why not, seeing as how it isn't? Sure, its wrong, but stealing isn't the only kind of wrong there is, so why try to apply such an innappropriate label to the act? It's wrong because it's copying without permission. That's not stealing, it's plagerism.
I'm not trying to see guns get banned. But that *particular* argument doesn't work very well. There are better ones. I don't want to see the very valid complaint against Apple here get painted with the same brush as the gun lobby's arguments, because that will cause too many people to just throw it out. The primary purpose of a handgun is to be a weapon. They weren't invented for the sake of target practice or picking off squirrels. Those uses came to be later on. Let's not try to pretend that's not the case. Sure, you can use just about anything you want as an improvised weapon. You can run someone over with a car, you can whack someone with a wrench, but those are tools who's dangerous power is totally incedental to their primary reason to exist. Stick to the *good* arguments for gun ownership, like the fact that the government can run rampant when citizens are weak and powerless, or the fact that dependancy on the police doesn't work since they won't arrive until the deed is done, or the fact that it isn't even possible to take the criminal's guns away anyway, and the war on guns would be about as effective as the war on drugs has been (nil).
screwdriver: primary purpose - turning screws.
theme editor: primary purpose - making own themes.
gun: primary purpose - throwing a bullet at dangerous speed through the air.
See the difference?
I was toying with the idea of writing up these aliens in some sort of roleplaying game.
Now, the interesting questions that arise are:
What dilemma? If you want to shoot down what he said that you DO NOT use moderation to do that. You post a reply, like you did. The sort of spiteful "I disagree therefore I will moderate you down" attittude is NOT what moderation is for. I say that comment was perfectly on-topic and valid, even though I agree with you that the poster is off his rocker. (Whales and dolphins are smarter than the average animal, but they cannot become anything close to being as smart as humans because they lack the physical ability to manipulate their environs (hands). They lack this ability to fiddle with things - a crucial ingredient for a baby learning how to think. Apes are way smarter than whales and dolphins, because they actually have hands with which to learn things about the world around them.)
Not if you actually read the instructions, that started with the phrase "in vi...."
No, we don't take it into account because it's just a glorified transmitter tower. It's not much of a "building". It's more of a monument. It should be in the same category as radio towers and the Eiffel Tower. This doesn't mean it's something to be laughed at - making a spike that tall that has no wires to hold it is an amazing engineering feat. But it's not a building.
Having spirituality isn't something to be proud of.
Why measure hieght above "average" terrain? that gives unfair advantage to buildings on hills, where the hill itself is above "average" terrian. What's wrong with just measuring from the land at the base of the building?
If Oshkosh gets to be the "busiest" airport for one week, then can I temporarily build the "tallest man-made structure" by tying a long cable to a big rocket and firing it upward? Granted, it doesn't last long, but for a few brief seconds I've got the tallest "free standing" structure. It's made of one cable and a rocket, and it won't last more than a few seconds, but still...
I don't consider the caveats put on the Sears Tower by Chicago to be "cheating". The spire of the tower in Toronto is just for show, as is the decrative structure at the top of the one in Malasyia. The Sears Tower actually has real, honest to goodness EMPLOYEES using those floors all the way up to the top. The reason the observation deck isn't at the top is because the top actually has offices in it.
The Sears Tower has the highest floors that are actually USED by people for something.
The problem with that reasoning is that if you are going to measure starting from the sea floor, then what's to stop you from calling an entire continent a "mountain"? Then Everest is the "peak" of a very wide mountain known as "Asia".
You misunderstood the logic. The court is drawing a line between TELLING someone to commit a crime and merely providing information that was then later used to commit a crime. If the website in question had ever said "Go kill these guys" THEN it would be in the same class as Charles Manson.