IANAL, but Sparc International has a legal obligation to protect its trademark, correct? They may not want to pick on SparkFun but if they don't demonstrably protect their trademark, they can lose it.
How do you protect your trademark without sending out C&Ds?
In my perfect world (I put that in because otherwise some/. smartass will tell me how things really are, thanks) you wouldn't need to "protect" your trademark against obviously non-infringing non-assaults. And also in my perfect world, you would be penalized for sending out frivolous C&Ds when you should have known better. Again, in my ideal world, a panel of people with common sense would decide when you would have known better. Furthermore, in my perfect world, you will all agree with me and get together and take up a collection to buy me a fully functional animatronic Natalie Portman.
I could buy some of the parts from SparkFun, and perhaps some of the PCBs. But that's where the "identical goods" argument ends. Has Sparc ever done a teardown of a Wii controller with analysis of the components? Do they sell solder stations? Is Sparc even around anymore? I must've forgotten about them.
Oh, and I love how the article calls the prospect of a ninja hacker hotel maid sneaking a bootloader onto your laptop and then sneaking back into your room later to retrieve the data a "likely scenario." What hotels is this guy staying at anyway?
FYI: WMI was out in 98, you should have been able to enumerate the ports. But yes, I get the point you're trying to make, sometimes you need to resort to a hack, and hacks break across versions.
I was really hoping that this had been completely solved by now -- I hadn't had to worry about it for 7 years. I'll take your word on the WMI in 98 part.
However, IEnumWbemClassObject, which seems to be what's used sometimes nowadays (from my brief web search), only became available in Win 2000, according to MSDN. There's really nice page on the serial port problem at http://www.naughter.com/enumser.html. The author states that his sample code
provides 9 different ways (yes you read that right: Nine) of enumerating serial ports: Using CreateFile, QueryDosDevice, GetDefaultCommConfig, two ways using the Setup API, EnumPorts, WMI, Com Database & enumerating the values under the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM
The sample comport enumeration code project appears to have been started in 1998 and is still under development in 2009.
The WMI version uses what I consider to be the ugly hack of comparing the names of the resources found to string "COM" followed by a numeral to get the name and port number.
This still appears to be a bit of an issue, judging by coding forums I browsed (sysinternals, msdn, etc.) To make a long story short -- too late -- it would appear that MS still doesn't have a standard (and easy) way to do this across all versions of Windows.
My involvement in this fiasco mercifully ended in 2002 when the company producing the program was subsumed into another entity and the whole project terminated.
Back in the day when I did Windows app development I found that every OS upgrade would break some code. I also found out that 100% of the code breaks were caused by a coding error on our part, not Microsoft.
I won't say that MS doesn't have a break list for their application departments, and I won't say that 100% of MS products follow the APIs exactly, but seriously, trial-and-error? If you're resorting to trial-and-error approaches, there's a major flaw in the app design . ..
What, all your stuff compiles, links, runs and tests out perfect right after you type it in? You're a better coder than I, Gunga Din. Either that or you're just not ambitious enough. I know, I know, that's not what you meant, but you knew I was being somewhat hyperbolic, too.
Case in point: we had a team that varied from 3 to 8 engineers. Out of those, one guy was pretty much dedicated to puzzling out un- or under-documented API stuff. You know, the troll the usenet archives kind of weird crap. Serial ports in Win95/98/NT4, e.g. Apparently, there was no documented API-correct way to enumerate the installed serial ports on a PC. As I recollect, we went through the registry, attempting to parse out the COM port numbers and addresses. Depending on the windows version, and also on the type of hardware used on the system, this information could be found in one or more locations in the registry. We prioritized these, so if location A contained the info, then we ignored the info in location B, only using B if A didn't exist and so on. I figured that MS just didn't care, they wanted everyone to migrate to USB. Didn't help us and our legacy hardware -- embedded stuff intended to have a lifespan of 5-10 years, maybe more.
I'm (fairly) sure the specific problems we had have been worked out now, but also (fairly) sure that something else has taken its place.
(On a side note, you put a (sic) in a Slashdot comment typo just so you could quote it? This isn't the NY Times, let it go.)
Let it go?!?!? It's the sole purpose I have real-time spell-check active!
You know why people don't follow the published API's? Because they're woefully inadequate, and even if you do follow the API, half the time the fucking documentation is wrong. Seriously... talk to someone who's written anything to Win32, which you pretty much have to do if you want anything more advanced that "place form X here"
Since you got called "Troll", then apparently there are mods who have never developed software for windows. That's OK, but moderators, please recuse yourselves from modding posts like this. I don't get involved in your console game flame wars
It bugs me that people are advising against upgrading who clearly haven't tried it. Of course it might go wrong. So backup your files before trying it. If it works, you've saved yourself a lot of effort.
By "advising against", do you just mean asking if you really need it now? Because if you don't need it right now, why risk busting all your apps and needing to figure out if your backup plan works perfectly? Let someone else be on the bleeding edge. Unless you don't need your computer for a while, what's the big hurry?
Microsoft follows their publised (sic) API's and published guidelines. Most other companies DO NOT. They take shortcuts to try and get things done quicker and almost always get it wrong.
Microsoft also adheres to their unpublished guidelines. They know in advance what shortcuts are gonna get broken in the next version and what new ones will appear. Everyone else has to use trial-and-error to discover what will and won't work, so of course they "almost always get it wrong" -- they get it wrong every time until it works, for now.
Back in the day I was still in the Windows software development world, we got to the point we told our customers that we wouldn't support the latest version of windows until the next version of our package came out. Our installer would balk if it saw an unknown windows version. And it could take 6 months for us to catch up. In our case, we had a low-volume product that relied on a great deal of third-party software components, so we had to wait for those pieces to get latest-windows compliant.
Were we "over-engineering" or product? God, no. I don't even think that word means what you think it means. Were we "touching things we shouldn't"? I guess so if by "shouldn't" you mean "stuff that MS could deprecate". And boy did we hear plenty of "If it runs on 95 it should run on 98, Me, NT4, 2K, etc." That was the awesomest, when the tech line would send those complaints to the software engineers like me. I'd just tell them that philosophy doesn't really apply to created objects like software. "Well, why isn't it fixed yet?" they'd ask, and I'd respond "Because I'm not working on it". "Why not?", "Because I'm on the phone telling some guy it's not fixed yet instead of working." That usually got me an angry call from some sales or marketing VP, but who was yet unable to provide me any technical assistance when I told them I need some latest-OS-version compliant widget -- something about "that's your job" would be his response, the irony that soothing customers being his job totally lost on him because he sent his shirts out for cleaning.
Every 3rd party developer has some issue or issues that's more important to them than being compatible with the next version of the OS. Perhaps compatibility with this version. Or user demands for more features. Or lack of staff. It's always something.
Want to bitch at 3rd party developers? Then please jump on the latest OS version. I know from experience that there's nothing that inspires me more than some user telling me I fucked it up. Really gets me motivated and you get to gripe, so everyone wins. But at least I was on a small user-base product, and I could move that one whiny customer's bug and feature requests lower on the fixme queue every time he pulled that.
I went from Vista to Win7 RC1 and didn't have any problems. Every time I see a comment like this, I think to myself "Why don't I ever have these problems?"
Well?
You must be one of the Windows Elect. I recommend that you start a religion. That would let you harness those thoughts most profitably.
There's a small problem with those... unstrung weight is really bad for handling, braking, and ride quality.
I don't know what unstrung weight refers to in cars....but as far as that prototype I linked about, it had a computer controlling the 4 wheel motors, which was really good for handling, braking, accelerating and ride quality.
I was imagining a girlfriend PMSing in the passenger seat. But this is/. so you could substitute "sister" or "platonic friend" instead. As for the unsprung weight, if you could do without brakes and let the motors do that -- that's a big IF -- then you could mitigate the extra weight a little. For that matter, if you could get a motor about the same weight as a half-shaft, wouldn't that also be a wash?
when a significant portion of society breaks a law, there's not something wrong with the society, but with the law
So equality between races, genders and minorities rights are wrong?
Your argument does not stand up to critical review. Trying to draw an equivalence between say, one race enslaving another, and the general public participating in -- or turning a blind eye toward -- unauthorized sharing of "intellectual property" is specious reasoning. Consider the absolute worst case of zero public support for intellectual property. What would happen? Would musicians be held in bondage? Would artists be forced to paint for free? Would inventors be chained to their shops until they innovated? Of course not. No one is born into artistry the way one is born into their race or their sex. Perhaps music would be limited to barrel grinders and street musicians playing for change and courtly musicians hired to exclusively produce music for someone else. Perhaps, as pro-IP activists say, creative output would be reduced overall, or less available to the general public. Maybe fewer people would choose music performance and composition as a career. Perhaps the public would suffer from this loss. You could have made those arguments. But this has nothing to do with respecting and protecting the rights of people from oppression as a result of the circumstance of their birth. Let me say again: it is a specious argument drawn from a false equivalence.
Discriminating based on mental abilities would be just as illegal as discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or sex in many European countries.
This is nonsense, there is no legislation about discriminating on mental abilities.
Thankfully we don't live in Europe and a private business is still free to choose who they want to do business with. If you think it's "discrimination" then you are equally free not to do business with them or even to try and get people to boycott them.
This is nonsense too. You saying you can open a bar in New York and stick a 'No Blacks' sign in the window?
Troll, huh? Racist mods are sure up early. This comment follows the GP and asks a specific and relevant question. If the GP defends the right to refuse service to anyone, just how far would he go? This isn't some far-fetched scenario from another planet, but exactly the point of "public accommodation" laws in the Civil Rights Act. And it's also the reason that the Act is still relevant today.
If you don't like the idea of "public accommodation" written into law, you can choose to live somewhere that it's not.
Discriminating based on mental abilities would be just as illegal as discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or sex in many European countries.
Thankfully we don't live in Europe and a private business is still free to choose who they want to do business with.
Thankfully, indeed. Cause then you could be eating in a restaurant that serves the wrong kind of people. Lucky for us that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was just a Republican bad dream, and we're all awake now.
Are you actually unaware of the origins of the "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone" sign?
If you think it's "discrimination" then you are equally free not to do business with them or even to try and get people to boycott them.
Who do you think you're kidding here? If someone endorsed a boycott on Slashdot you'd be all over that, too. "Quit whining" or "You've got too much time on your hands", etc.
Private companies have the right to refuse service to anybody. And if you're asked to leave, you're trespassing on private property if you don't vacate immediately.
Ya, ya, ya. We know this song and all the verses, sing me something I don't already know. I've already heard this more times this week than 'Shattered' by the Rolling Stones on the oldies station.
So why don't they just publicly state that they'll boot you out if you win too much? Huh? Cause they're within their rights, right? Oh, ya, because then no one would come in. If fact, I think that's what we're here to bitch about, not the mechanics of trespassing law.
If someone's able to use their ability to their advantage, why the hell wouldn't they?
You mean like using the fact that you own the casino to your advantage by kicking people out who are counting cards?
Personally, I think the present situation is eminently fair. You are free to choose to go to Vegas and play blackjack or not, and the casino is free to provide service to you. You are free to count cards, and the casino is free to kick you out.
Put it this way: many swimming pools would probably kick you out if you were running around the deck of the pool. Because it's their ground, so they get to set the rules.
Insightful, my ass. We've already established that they can kick you out and that you can decide not to enter. That's practically stipulated in TFS and TFA, OK? What we're here to do is complain that the casinos are a bunch of whiny-butts who object to people winning under the house rules. Because, unlike your swimming pool analogy, "no card counting" is an implied rule, rather than a stated rule like "no running". Indeed, "No running" is probably posted all over the pool area, and there are a bunch of people with a future in the dermatologist's waiting room warning you not to run.
No, this would be more like the pool kicking someone out for swimming better than the lifeguard or having too good of a tan or something like that. But even then, you could still post stupid rules like that.
The Casinos' case is entirely different. They can't post the "No Skillful Players" rule. It would be bad for business. Everyone wants to think they're a little skillful, or more self-controlled, or whatever it is that makes folks want to gamble. If you've got to promise never to win, even the most cynical gambler wouldn't go in. That's the whole idea, let the gambler think he could possibly win -- and stating "No winners" up front queers the deal.
I'm surprised the sheet music industry hasn't sued the maintainers of those projects yet. Maybe in that regard they're saner than the RIAA's members.
ASCAP, and their international brethren. I've seen the guys that do MIDI transcriptions argue that they are producing "performances" of a work, not copies, but I've never heard that argument being tested in court.
"I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."
DRM!
Oh, wait...
I guess it did provide some jobs to develop, e.g., HDCP. I'd be hanging my head in shame if it were me, though. ("My children were starving, their clothes threadbare") And its various ancestors, like error tracks, serial port dongles, little slide-rule-like spinny code-wheel things. I guess the spinny-wheel was pretty cool compared to the rest of the examples.
Then add in the number of guitars, bass buitars, synth's, horns, every kind of drum; we have more musicians alive now than have lived before, PERIOD.
I think you are making a mistake in this analysis. There are probably more musicians alive now then ever before. There are also more men, women, Chinese men, English women, etc. But unlike commonality of men (still about 1 to 1 w.r.t. women), the commonality of musicians playing live in small venues has decreased. And you know that the practice of gathering around the piano (or its modern equivalent, the "buitar") to sing with family or friends has receded. Do you do it at your house? If you do, I bet you would be considered unusual (not necessarily in a bad way) in your neighborhood. We do have more access to more musicians through recordings, and even more through broadcast recordings. But they're not friends and family like Sousa meant.
As to the shrinking of the chest, we can only thank our lucky stars that Sousa was just blowing smoke, whistling in the wind (insert your Ecclesiastical metaphor here). Naturally he couldn't have predicted changes in nutrition and availability of breast augmentation.
Sheet music is possibly the most *highly* guarded copyright work that I've ever had to deal with. It's unbelievable, the licensing behind it.
Ya, but that may be due to the fact that it's so easily reproducible. You can actually copy it with pencil and paper. I remember that days of "unlicensed" fake books. Sure they were a violation of copyright, you couldn't be considered a "real" musician without a few.
Slashdot Mirror
in my perfect world, you will all agree with me and get together and take up a collection to buy me a fully functional animatronic Natalie Portman.
Dude, it's your perfect world.. why not just go for the gusto and wish for the actual Natalie Portman?
Well that would just be greedy.
IANAL, but Sparc International has a legal obligation to protect its trademark, correct? They may not want to pick on SparkFun but if they don't demonstrably protect their trademark, they can lose it.
How do you protect your trademark without sending out C&Ds?
In my perfect world (I put that in because otherwise some /. smartass will tell me how things really are, thanks) you wouldn't need to "protect" your trademark against obviously non-infringing non-assaults. And also in my perfect world, you would be penalized for sending out frivolous C&Ds when you should have known better. Again, in my ideal world, a panel of people with common sense would decide when you would have known better. Furthermore, in my perfect world, you will all agree with me and get together and take up a collection to buy me a fully functional animatronic Natalie Portman.
guess who won't be buying any more sparc servers?
Unless you mean on eBay, I'd say: "Everyone".
I could buy some of the parts from SparkFun, and perhaps some of the PCBs. But that's where the "identical goods" argument ends. Has Sparc ever done a teardown of a Wii controller with analysis of the components? Do they sell solder stations? Is Sparc even around anymore? I must've forgotten about them.
Oh, and I love how the article calls the prospect of a ninja hacker hotel maid sneaking a bootloader onto your laptop and then sneaking back into your room later to retrieve the data a "likely scenario." What hotels is this guy staying at anyway?
French hotels. Never seen "Nikita", have you?
FYI: WMI was out in 98, you should have been able to enumerate the ports. But yes, I get the point you're trying to make, sometimes you need to resort to a hack, and hacks break across versions.
I was really hoping that this had been completely solved by now -- I hadn't had to worry about it for 7 years. I'll take your word on the WMI in 98 part.
However, IEnumWbemClassObject, which seems to be what's used sometimes nowadays (from my brief web search), only became available in Win 2000, according to MSDN. There's really nice page on the serial port problem at http://www.naughter.com/enumser.html. The author states that his sample code
provides 9 different ways (yes you read that right: Nine) of enumerating serial ports: Using CreateFile, QueryDosDevice, GetDefaultCommConfig, two ways using the Setup API, EnumPorts, WMI, Com Database & enumerating the values under the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM
The sample comport enumeration code project appears to have been started in 1998 and is still under development in 2009.
The WMI version uses what I consider to be the ugly hack of comparing the names of the resources found to string "COM" followed by a numeral to get the name and port number.
This still appears to be a bit of an issue, judging by coding forums I browsed (sysinternals, msdn, etc.) To make a long story short -- too late -- it would appear that MS still doesn't have a standard (and easy) way to do this across all versions of Windows.
My involvement in this fiasco mercifully ended in 2002 when the company producing the program was subsumed into another entity and the whole project terminated.
Back in the day when I did Windows app development I found that every OS upgrade would break some code. I also found out that 100% of the code breaks were caused by a coding error on our part, not Microsoft.
I won't say that MS doesn't have a break list for their application departments, and I won't say that 100% of MS products follow the APIs exactly, but seriously, trial-and-error? If you're resorting to trial-and-error approaches, there's a major flaw in the app design . . .
What, all your stuff compiles, links, runs and tests out perfect right after you type it in? You're a better coder than I, Gunga Din. Either that or you're just not ambitious enough. I know, I know, that's not what you meant, but you knew I was being somewhat hyperbolic, too.
Case in point: we had a team that varied from 3 to 8 engineers. Out of those, one guy was pretty much dedicated to puzzling out un- or under-documented API stuff. You know, the troll the usenet archives kind of weird crap. Serial ports in Win95/98/NT4, e.g. Apparently, there was no documented API-correct way to enumerate the installed serial ports on a PC. As I recollect, we went through the registry, attempting to parse out the COM port numbers and addresses. Depending on the windows version, and also on the type of hardware used on the system, this information could be found in one or more locations in the registry. We prioritized these, so if location A contained the info, then we ignored the info in location B, only using B if A didn't exist and so on. I figured that MS just didn't care, they wanted everyone to migrate to USB. Didn't help us and our legacy hardware -- embedded stuff intended to have a lifespan of 5-10 years, maybe more.
I'm (fairly) sure the specific problems we had have been worked out now, but also (fairly) sure that something else has taken its place.
(On a side note, you put a (sic) in a Slashdot comment typo just so you could quote it? This isn't the NY Times, let it go.)
Let it go?!?!? It's the sole purpose I have real-time spell-check active!
You know why people don't follow the published API's? Because they're woefully inadequate, and even if you do follow the API, half the time the fucking documentation is wrong. Seriously... talk to someone who's written anything to Win32, which you pretty much have to do if you want anything more advanced that "place form X here"
Since you got called "Troll", then apparently there are mods who have never developed software for windows. That's OK, but moderators, please recuse yourselves from modding posts like this. I don't get involved in your console game flame wars
It bugs me that people are advising against upgrading who clearly haven't tried it. Of course it might go wrong. So backup your files before trying it. If it works, you've saved yourself a lot of effort.
By "advising against", do you just mean asking if you really need it now? Because if you don't need it right now, why risk busting all your apps and needing to figure out if your backup plan works perfectly? Let someone else be on the bleeding edge. Unless you don't need your computer for a while, what's the big hurry?
Exactly, and you want to know why?
Microsoft follows their publised (sic) API's and published guidelines. Most other companies DO NOT. They take shortcuts to try and get things done quicker and almost always get it wrong.
Microsoft also adheres to their unpublished guidelines. They know in advance what shortcuts are gonna get broken in the next version and what new ones will appear. Everyone else has to use trial-and-error to discover what will and won't work, so of course they "almost always get it wrong" -- they get it wrong every time until it works, for now.
Back in the day I was still in the Windows software development world, we got to the point we told our customers that we wouldn't support the latest version of windows until the next version of our package came out. Our installer would balk if it saw an unknown windows version. And it could take 6 months for us to catch up. In our case, we had a low-volume product that relied on a great deal of third-party software components, so we had to wait for those pieces to get latest-windows compliant.
Were we "over-engineering" or product? God, no. I don't even think that word means what you think it means. Were we "touching things we shouldn't"? I guess so if by "shouldn't" you mean "stuff that MS could deprecate". And boy did we hear plenty of "If it runs on 95 it should run on 98, Me, NT4, 2K, etc." That was the awesomest, when the tech line would send those complaints to the software engineers like me. I'd just tell them that philosophy doesn't really apply to created objects like software. "Well, why isn't it fixed yet?" they'd ask, and I'd respond "Because I'm not working on it". "Why not?", "Because I'm on the phone telling some guy it's not fixed yet instead of working." That usually got me an angry call from some sales or marketing VP, but who was yet unable to provide me any technical assistance when I told them I need some latest-OS-version compliant widget -- something about "that's your job" would be his response, the irony that soothing customers being his job totally lost on him because he sent his shirts out for cleaning.
Every 3rd party developer has some issue or issues that's more important to them than being compatible with the next version of the OS. Perhaps compatibility with this version. Or user demands for more features. Or lack of staff. It's always something.
Want to bitch at 3rd party developers? Then please jump on the latest OS version. I know from experience that there's nothing that inspires me more than some user telling me I fucked it up. Really gets me motivated and you get to gripe, so everyone wins. But at least I was on a small user-base product, and I could move that one whiny customer's bug and feature requests lower on the fixme queue every time he pulled that.
I went from Vista to Win7 RC1 and didn't have any problems. Every time I see a comment like this, I think to myself "Why don't I ever have these problems?" Well?
You must be one of the Windows Elect. I recommend that you start a religion. That would let you harness those thoughts most profitably.
There's a small problem with those... unstrung weight is really bad for handling, braking, and ride quality.
I don't know what unstrung weight refers to in cars....but as far as that prototype I linked about, it had a computer controlling the 4 wheel motors, which was really good for handling, braking, accelerating and ride quality.
I was imagining a girlfriend PMSing in the passenger seat. But this is /. so you could substitute "sister" or "platonic friend" instead. As for the unsprung weight, if you could do without brakes and let the motors do that -- that's a big IF -- then you could mitigate the extra weight a little. For that matter, if you could get a motor about the same weight as a half-shaft, wouldn't that also be a wash?
Never owned an Oldsmobile then? Many of them have the FM antenna embedded in the windshield glass.
It seemed downright futuristic in my grandparents '75 LeSabre. That and the power locks.
You were making a good point until you resorted to profanity, which shot you right down from the sky. Such a shame.
I think you accidentally switched on the grown-up internets today. Sometimes the people use the bad words there. It'll be OK.
when a significant portion of society breaks a law, there's not something wrong with the society, but with the law
So equality between races, genders and minorities rights are wrong?
Your argument does not stand up to critical review. Trying to draw an equivalence between say, one race enslaving another, and the general public participating in -- or turning a blind eye toward -- unauthorized sharing of "intellectual property" is specious reasoning. Consider the absolute worst case of zero public support for intellectual property. What would happen? Would musicians be held in bondage? Would artists be forced to paint for free? Would inventors be chained to their shops until they innovated? Of course not. No one is born into artistry the way one is born into their race or their sex. Perhaps music would be limited to barrel grinders and street musicians playing for change and courtly musicians hired to exclusively produce music for someone else. Perhaps, as pro-IP activists say, creative output would be reduced overall, or less available to the general public. Maybe fewer people would choose music performance and composition as a career. Perhaps the public would suffer from this loss. You could have made those arguments. But this has nothing to do with respecting and protecting the rights of people from oppression as a result of the circumstance of their birth. Let me say again: it is a specious argument drawn from a false equivalence.
Discriminating based on mental abilities would be just as illegal as discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or sex in many European countries.
This is nonsense, there is no legislation about discriminating on mental abilities.
Thankfully we don't live in Europe and a private business is still free to choose who they want to do business with. If you think it's "discrimination" then you are equally free not to do business with them or even to try and get people to boycott them.
This is nonsense too. You saying you can open a bar in New York and stick a 'No Blacks' sign in the window?
Troll, huh? Racist mods are sure up early. This comment follows the GP and asks a specific and relevant question. If the GP defends the right to refuse service to anyone, just how far would he go? This isn't some far-fetched scenario from another planet, but exactly the point of "public accommodation" laws in the Civil Rights Act. And it's also the reason that the Act is still relevant today.
If you don't like the idea of "public accommodation" written into law, you can choose to live somewhere that it's not.
Discriminating based on mental abilities would be just as illegal as discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or sex in many European countries.
Thankfully we don't live in Europe and a private business is still free to choose who they want to do business with.
Thankfully, indeed. Cause then you could be eating in a restaurant that serves the wrong kind of people. Lucky for us that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was just a Republican bad dream, and we're all awake now.
Are you actually unaware of the origins of the "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone" sign?
If you think it's "discrimination" then you are equally free not to do business with them or even to try and get people to boycott them.
Who do you think you're kidding here? If someone endorsed a boycott on Slashdot you'd be all over that, too. "Quit whining" or "You've got too much time on your hands", etc.
Private companies have the right to refuse service to anybody. And if you're asked to leave, you're trespassing on private property if you don't vacate immediately.
Ya, ya, ya. We know this song and all the verses, sing me something I don't already know. I've already heard this more times this week than 'Shattered' by the Rolling Stones on the oldies station.
So why don't they just publicly state that they'll boot you out if you win too much? Huh? Cause they're within their rights, right? Oh, ya, because then no one would come in. If fact, I think that's what we're here to bitch about, not the mechanics of trespassing law.
It's not a morality issue. They just try to spin it that way. It's a business decision.
Like Intellectual Property "awareness" campaigns.
I absolutely love this story. It's been years since I've seen the word 'lose' spelled correctly so many times in a row.
Who are you people, and what have you done with the regular Slashdot "loosers"?
If someone's able to use their ability to their advantage, why the hell wouldn't they?
You mean like using the fact that you own the casino to your advantage by kicking people out who are counting cards?
Personally, I think the present situation is eminently fair. You are free to choose to go to Vegas and play blackjack or not, and the casino is free to provide service to you. You are free to count cards, and the casino is free to kick you out.
Put it this way: many swimming pools would probably kick you out if you were running around the deck of the pool. Because it's their ground, so they get to set the rules.
Insightful, my ass. We've already established that they can kick you out and that you can decide not to enter. That's practically stipulated in TFS and TFA, OK? What we're here to do is complain that the casinos are a bunch of whiny-butts who object to people winning under the house rules. Because, unlike your swimming pool analogy, "no card counting" is an implied rule, rather than a stated rule like "no running". Indeed, "No running" is probably posted all over the pool area, and there are a bunch of people with a future in the dermatologist's waiting room warning you not to run.
No, this would be more like the pool kicking someone out for swimming better than the lifeguard or having too good of a tan or something like that. But even then, you could still post stupid rules like that.
The Casinos' case is entirely different. They can't post the "No Skillful Players" rule. It would be bad for business. Everyone wants to think they're a little skillful, or more self-controlled, or whatever it is that makes folks want to gamble. If you've got to promise never to win, even the most cynical gambler wouldn't go in. That's the whole idea, let the gambler think he could possibly win -- and stating "No winners" up front queers the deal.
I'm surprised the sheet music industry hasn't sued the maintainers of those projects yet. Maybe in that regard they're saner than the RIAA's members.
ASCAP, and their international brethren. I've seen the guys that do MIDI transcriptions argue that they are producing "performances" of a work, not copies, but I've never heard that argument being tested in court.
"I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."
DRM!
Oh, wait...
I guess it did provide some jobs to develop, e.g., HDCP. I'd be hanging my head in shame if it were me, though. ("My children were starving, their clothes threadbare") And its various ancestors, like error tracks, serial port dongles, little slide-rule-like spinny code-wheel things. I guess the spinny-wheel was pretty cool compared to the rest of the examples.
Consider the number of pianos then and now.
Then add in the number of guitars, bass buitars, synth's, horns, every kind of drum; we have more musicians alive now than have lived before, PERIOD.
I think you are making a mistake in this analysis. There are probably more musicians alive now then ever before. There are also more men, women, Chinese men, English women, etc. But unlike commonality of men (still about 1 to 1 w.r.t. women), the commonality of musicians playing live in small venues has decreased. And you know that the practice of gathering around the piano (or its modern equivalent, the "buitar") to sing with family or friends has receded. Do you do it at your house? If you do, I bet you would be considered unusual (not necessarily in a bad way) in your neighborhood. We do have more access to more musicians through recordings, and even more through broadcast recordings. But they're not friends and family like Sousa meant.
As to the shrinking of the chest, we can only thank our lucky stars that Sousa was just blowing smoke, whistling in the wind (insert your Ecclesiastical metaphor here). Naturally he couldn't have predicted changes in nutrition and availability of breast augmentation.
Oops. Almost forgot. P-E-R-I-O-D !!!1!
Sheet music is possibly the most *highly* guarded copyright work that I've ever had to deal with. It's unbelievable, the licensing behind it.
Ya, but that may be due to the fact that it's so easily reproducible. You can actually copy it with pencil and paper. I remember that days of "unlicensed" fake books. Sure they were a violation of copyright, you couldn't be considered a "real" musician without a few.