If you're talking about how Disney has extended copyright durations, then yes, I agree that it is stealing. But the fairy tales weren't stolen. You can freely make your own version of Pinocchio, Snow White, Aladdin, the Little Mermaid, etc. (assuming you make your own adaptation of the story, and don't try to copy Disney's too closely).
Knowing Disney, they'll try to sue you anyway (or at least buy you out), but it's still perfectly legal.;-)
Your first two points seem reasonable, but not the third one. I don't believe that Disney stole "most of their stuff". Most of those fairy tale stories are really old, which means they're public domain. Plus, a lot of people criticized Disney in the past for trying to monopolize the children's market by buying up as many copyrights as they can for recent stories.
public domain != stealing buying != stealing
I'm not saying they never stole anything, or that most of their stuff is original, but I don't believe most of their stuff is stolen. They're too big a target, and would be too easy to sue if they did anything blatant.
Well, you never know. He may not have had merchandising plans in the beginning, but Star Wars grew beyond anyone's initial expectations. As I begged my parents for Star Wars toys back then, I'm sure the toy companies begged Lucas and promised him billions. At that point it would've been more cruel to deny the kids from having any Star Wars toys.
Of course, after the initial burst, the marketing strategy got significantly darker.;-)
I believe he meant 6.10, as that's the behavior to expect from 6.10. The card just doesn't work at all 7.04. The thing that kills me is that the best fix seems to be to download ndiswrapper. I can't download squat because the only available network connection is dead in the water. (Some users have reported a workaround, but it doesn't work for everyone. I tried, and it doesn't work for me.)
If you're using an RT2500-based wifi card (it's a pretty common one), get the Windows driver and install it using ndiswrapper. If your wifi card is the only way your PC can access the Internet, make sure you get everything ready before you install Feisty.
My RT2500 worked fine on 6.x as long as I wasn't using WPA (which had to be set up manually and crapped out every hour), but the card won't connect at all with 7.x. From what I can tell it has something to do with Feisty using newer RT2500 drivers, which seem to be buggier than the old drivers.
Where the hell was my 28%? I graduated with a CS major from Georgia Tech in 2004. Of all the CS classes I took, I don't remember any class having more than one girl in it, and a lot of the classes didn't even have one. There was less than 1% attending the classes, and I'm not sure if a single one stuck it out to get the degree.
Hmmm, maybe they were all taking the 8:00 and 9:00 AM classes. I went to great lengths to avoid taking classes that started before 10:00 AM.;-)
I said "most", not "all", and I think my point is still valid. I'm married with kids, so I'm out of the race entirely. I just can't believe my previous post has an "Insightful" rating.
You missed my other reply. I was being silly on purpose. The point was that people shouldn't scoff at new discoveries like this. We all know solar isn't ready for slapping on top of everyone's houses yet, but every discovery like this helps make it a bit more likely to happen. So it annoys me when people say "efficiency doesn't really matter" when someone finds a way to improve it. It does matter.
There are all sorts of options with various trade-offs, and every new discovery provides more options. The sweet spot for home use isn't sweet enough yet, but no one knows yet which discovery will provide the right combination of options to make it work. Until we do, we shouldn't be scoffing at new discoveries like this.
The land cost is not factored into TCO when you're buying a PV system for a residence you already own. You're not going to buy several acres for a PV system you expect to put on your roof, and you're probably not going to bother with it if covering your roof only gives you 50 Watts (even if it's cheap). You're going to wait for something better and hope it's not more than 5 years off.
I was being obtuse and exaggerating wildly on purpose. My point was that it's stupid to claim that efficiency doesn't really matter. New discoveries that increase PV system efficiency matter. New discoveries that increase PV system durability matter. Usually in cases like this, the engineers/scientists have to figure out how to do it first, and then work on how to make it cheap. Few people are going to pay for it until they do, but the discoveries are still important.
No, $/Watt is NOT the only important measure for PV cells. Here are some cases where it is not (these examples are extreme to drive the point home):
1) What if I could sell you PV cells that cost 1% the $/Watt of traditional PV cells, but 1 acre of it only generated 100 Watts? Now you need an acre of land to power each 100 Watt light bulb.
2) What if I could sell you PV cells that cost 1% the $/Watt of traditional PV cells without taking up that much space, but they required 10 times as much maintenance after they were installed, perhaps even needing to be replaced every year or 6 months? You going to pay someone to keep reinstalling it?
3) What if I could sell you a bunch of super-cheap reflectors to focus the sunlight onto one tiny but expensive PV cell? If my parents, or possibly even my neighbors, had one of these when I was a pre-teen, I'll bet I would've been up on the roof with a big mirror or lens playing around with my nifty "fire ray", and I would not have been alone in trying that. And what about pine trees? I wouldn't want pine needles bursting into flame as they fall through the concentrator on my roof, so the concentrators would need some sort of enclosure, which limits their size, and thus their power.
I might be able to come up with other scenarios if I give it more thought, but I think you get the point. The PV cell's $/Watt cost is not the only cost to consider.
I wanted to add one more thing to forestall a wasted argument. I am aware that a number of firewalls claim to detect and block Skype, but I tried Pix and Checkpoint a while ago, and neither worked as advertised to block Skype. I haven't tested them recently, and they may have improved their detection/blocking scheme since then. However, Skype may also change their protocol at any time, so the point is moot. It doesn't change the core argument, or the core question.
"1-3 its called a corporate firewall (or proxy or gateway)... If a company made a whole new program based just on what they can reverse engineer to fight one program, I personally would sit back and laugh at the fools."
You didn't answer the question, though the answer seems apparent, but that statement is dead wrong. To its users, the best thing about Skype is that it "just works" no matter where you install it. It doesn't matter how draconian the firewall policy is, Skype gets through in less than a second. Skype can even connect from PC's cut off from the Internet entirely, though it takes a minute or so to scan your LAN for other Skype clients to relay traffic through. See http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/skype/bloc k-skype.asp for more details.
That blog article lists 3 companies for you to laugh at (there are other companies doing it as well), along with a number of reasons you'd be the fool for laughing. This one lists even more: http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=984. EADS, a European defense agency, has reverse engineered Skype and explained a lot about it. They explained a number of ways in which Skype is a security risk. They even told hackers how to reverse engineer it, which means it could already be some hacker's faithful servant. If so, I doubt he will act like Richard Pryor in Superman 3.;-)
Thanks for clearing that up. Too bad there's not a mod for "stuck foot in mouth". There's still a good bit of gray area there (as there always seems to be with legal issues). Regarding the first case:
1) What if company A reverse engineered Joost to create a product that blocks employees from watching Internet TV at work?
2) What if company A sold it to other companies that wanted to do the same thing?
3) What if Comcast bought it and decided to use it to block their employees?
4) What if Comcast then decided to use it to block their customers? Would Comcast be the only company in trouble, or would this be a gray area that could bury company A in litigation until it went bankrupt?
5) Ok, I'm going out on a limb here just for the hell of it.;-) What if the only way to block Joost is to DoS the Joost servers when you detect a client connection (in an attempt to force the Joost servers to blacklist your IP)? It's kind of like that box that spammed the spammers. I believe that recent US insider trading laws require all publicly-traded companies to monitor or block all electronic communications made by their employees from the office. If that got shot down, assume for the sake of argument that it didn't. Kazaa, Skype, and I suspect Joost, all act like a virus on your network, going out of their way to avoid detection and circumvent blocking measures. Since the author to such lengths to make it impossible to comply with that insider trading law, what options are open to these companies that are effectively breaking the law if they don't find a way to block it?
I thought they proved that they had reverse engineered the behavior without reversing the binary code itself. Because if you have the code, it's easy to swap lines, change loops, change compiler optimizations, and otherwise obfuscate the code to make the machine code look so different that it couldn't possibly be taken for a copy. It would've been a hell of a lot easier than what I've read that they did.
I understand that they're not breaking copyright laws if they don't actually copy part of the program. Are patent laws the only laws that would protect you from someone using reverse engineering to copy functionality and make a derivative product? What about trade secret laws, or other laws I'm unaware of?
Let's say a company like Comcast reverse engineers a product like Joost so they can block or interfere with its traffic. Comcast wants to provide its own Internet TV app, and it's not hard to believe that they would want to trip up their competitors. What laws would protect companies in cases like this? Is it only laws against trusts, monopolies, and non-competetive practices?
What if someone hacked Joost to come up with their own client and made it free (or ad-free if you assume that Joost is going to be free), ant cut into Joost's revenue stream? Would the creators of Joost have no legal recourse for this without a patent of the network protocol?
You can't call me ignorant until you've won the argument. I'm not claiming I've won, but I didn't call you ignorant either.
Everything I've read and seen on the subject claimed that the developers had to treat the x86 BIOS as a black box (black box means they can't see anything going on inside it). They could only see the inputs and outputs, and had to come up with their own logic to ensure that they got the correct outputs to go with each set of inputs. This is NOT reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is opening up the box, examining the machine code inside it, and doing something with that information.
It may not be copyright law that protects software from reverse engineering. Perhaps it is trade secret law. I am not a lawyer, but I am a software developer, and I do know that reverse engineering software (or even hardware) can get you into big trouble.
From your link: "Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code."
Wine is an alternative implementation of the well-documented Windows API. The Wine developers should not have to reverse engineer anything. All they had to do was take the public documentation, and write their own code to implement the documented functions. It's more complicated than that, but it did not require reverse engineering.
That is exactly how the BIOS for the first x86 clone was developed. The first x86 clone was created very carefully, and the process was documented extensively to prove that no reverse engineering took place. If they hadn't documented it so well, Intel would've sued their asses off, and Intel would've won.
Although I'm positive Microsoft makes pacts with other companies to screw other companies (and consumers), that's a load of crap.
Distributing a virus is against the law, which means a virus you distribute can't be protected by law, which makes it legal to reverse engineer them (which is often necessary to fight them). It's got nothing to do with Microsoft. You can reverse engineer Unix or Mac viruses to your heart's content.
If the bot just simulates input devices (i.e. keyboard and mouse actions), then I doubt it infringes on the copyright. If they actually reverse engineered it to the point where they can make calls to functions inside the application itself, then they have broken the law. Remember all the crap the creators of the first x86 clone had to go through to prove that they hadn't reverse engineered it?
Anti-virus software is a special case. It has always been against the law to reverse engineer software protected by copyrights. Yet anti-virus writers are allowed to reverse engineer viruses and malware. Why? Because viruses themselves are illegal, and therefore can't be defended in court by a copyright. That would be like person A calling the police because person B stole his crack.
If these bots are accessing memory inside WoW while it is running, then someone has reverse engineered WoW, and that is against the law. WoW is not a virus, and it is protected by copyright laws. This isn't about expanding copyright law. This has been illegal since before many Slashdot readers were born.
After poking around, it looks like they're short-changing me. I'm paying for 256Kbps upload speed, which means it shouldn't choke until it gets close to 32KBps. If it chokes at 15KBps, then I'm probably limited to 128Kbps. Damn, now I have to call them. I hate it when I have to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're talking about how Disney has extended copyright durations, then yes, I agree that it is stealing. But the fairy tales weren't stolen. You can freely make your own version of Pinocchio, Snow White, Aladdin, the Little Mermaid, etc. (assuming you make your own adaptation of the story, and don't try to copy Disney's too closely).
;-)
Knowing Disney, they'll try to sue you anyway (or at least buy you out), but it's still perfectly legal.
Your first two points seem reasonable, but not the third one. I don't believe that Disney stole "most of their stuff". Most of those fairy tale stories are really old, which means they're public domain. Plus, a lot of people criticized Disney in the past for trying to monopolize the children's market by buying up as many copyrights as they can for recent stories.
public domain != stealing
buying != stealing
I'm not saying they never stole anything, or that most of their stuff is original, but I don't believe most of their stuff is stolen. They're too big a target, and would be too easy to sue if they did anything blatant.
I keep having this recurring dream. It's about seeing this post over and over and over again.
Well, you never know. He may not have had merchandising plans in the beginning, but Star Wars grew beyond anyone's initial expectations. As I begged my parents for Star Wars toys back then, I'm sure the toy companies begged Lucas and promised him billions. At that point it would've been more cruel to deny the kids from having any Star Wars toys.
;-)
Of course, after the initial burst, the marketing strategy got significantly darker.
The last free radio station in the US disappeared a long time ago.
I believe he meant 6.10, as that's the behavior to expect from 6.10. The card just doesn't work at all 7.04. The thing that kills me is that the best fix seems to be to download ndiswrapper. I can't download squat because the only available network connection is dead in the water. (Some users have reported a workaround, but it doesn't work for everyone. I tried, and it doesn't work for me.)
If you're using an RT2500-based wifi card (it's a pretty common one), get the Windows driver and install it using ndiswrapper. If your wifi card is the only way your PC can access the Internet, make sure you get everything ready before you install Feisty.
My RT2500 worked fine on 6.x as long as I wasn't using WPA (which had to be set up manually and crapped out every hour), but the card won't connect at all with 7.x. From what I can tell it has something to do with Feisty using newer RT2500 drivers, which seem to be buggier than the old drivers.
Where the hell was my 28%? I graduated with a CS major from Georgia Tech in 2004. Of all the CS classes I took, I don't remember any class having more than one girl in it, and a lot of the classes didn't even have one. There was less than 1% attending the classes, and I'm not sure if a single one stuck it out to get the degree.
;-)
Hmmm, maybe they were all taking the 8:00 and 9:00 AM classes. I went to great lengths to avoid taking classes that started before 10:00 AM.
Now that was insightful. ;-) I've seen it happen on plenty of other posts, but that 's the first time I've noticed it on one of my own.
I said "most", not "all", and I think my point is still valid. I'm married with kids, so I'm out of the race entirely. I just can't believe my previous post has an "Insightful" rating.
What site do you think you're on? This is Slashdot, where most of the submitters can't even get a girl to accept a drink. ;-)
You missed my other reply. I was being silly on purpose. The point was that people shouldn't scoff at new discoveries like this. We all know solar isn't ready for slapping on top of everyone's houses yet, but every discovery like this helps make it a bit more likely to happen. So it annoys me when people say "efficiency doesn't really matter" when someone finds a way to improve it. It does matter.
There are all sorts of options with various trade-offs, and every new discovery provides more options. The sweet spot for home use isn't sweet enough yet, but no one knows yet which discovery will provide the right combination of options to make it work. Until we do, we shouldn't be scoffing at new discoveries like this.
The land cost is not factored into TCO when you're buying a PV system for a residence you already own. You're not going to buy several acres for a PV system you expect to put on your roof, and you're probably not going to bother with it if covering your roof only gives you 50 Watts (even if it's cheap). You're going to wait for something better and hope it's not more than 5 years off.
I was being obtuse and exaggerating wildly on purpose. My point was that it's stupid to claim that efficiency doesn't really matter. New discoveries that increase PV system efficiency matter. New discoveries that increase PV system durability matter. Usually in cases like this, the engineers/scientists have to figure out how to do it first, and then work on how to make it cheap. Few people are going to pay for it until they do, but the discoveries are still important.
No, $/Watt is NOT the only important measure for PV cells. Here are some cases where it is not (these examples are extreme to drive the point home):
1) What if I could sell you PV cells that cost 1% the $/Watt of traditional PV cells, but 1 acre of it only generated 100 Watts? Now you need an acre of land to power each 100 Watt light bulb.
2) What if I could sell you PV cells that cost 1% the $/Watt of traditional PV cells without taking up that much space, but they required 10 times as much maintenance after they were installed, perhaps even needing to be replaced every year or 6 months? You going to pay someone to keep reinstalling it?
3) What if I could sell you a bunch of super-cheap reflectors to focus the sunlight onto one tiny but expensive PV cell? If my parents, or possibly even my neighbors, had one of these when I was a pre-teen, I'll bet I would've been up on the roof with a big mirror or lens playing around with my nifty "fire ray", and I would not have been alone in trying that. And what about pine trees? I wouldn't want pine needles bursting into flame as they fall through the concentrator on my roof, so the concentrators would need some sort of enclosure, which limits their size, and thus their power.
I might be able to come up with other scenarios if I give it more thought, but I think you get the point. The PV cell's $/Watt cost is not the only cost to consider.
I wanted to add one more thing to forestall a wasted argument. I am aware that a number of firewalls claim to detect and block Skype, but I tried Pix and Checkpoint a while ago, and neither worked as advertised to block Skype. I haven't tested them recently, and they may have improved their detection/blocking scheme since then. However, Skype may also change their protocol at any time, so the point is moot. It doesn't change the core argument, or the core question.
"1-3 its called a corporate firewall (or proxy or gateway) ... If a company made a whole new program based just on what they can reverse engineer to fight one program, I personally would sit back and laugh at the fools."
c k-skype.asp for more details.
;-)
You didn't answer the question, though the answer seems apparent, but that statement is dead wrong. To its users, the best thing about Skype is that it "just works" no matter where you install it. It doesn't matter how draconian the firewall policy is, Skype gets through in less than a second. Skype can even connect from PC's cut off from the Internet entirely, though it takes a minute or so to scan your LAN for other Skype clients to relay traffic through. See http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/skype/blo
That blog article lists 3 companies for you to laugh at (there are other companies doing it as well), along with a number of reasons you'd be the fool for laughing. This one lists even more: http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=984. EADS, a European defense agency, has reverse engineered Skype and explained a lot about it. They explained a number of ways in which Skype is a security risk. They even told hackers how to reverse engineer it, which means it could already be some hacker's faithful servant. If so, I doubt he will act like Richard Pryor in Superman 3.
Thanks for clearing that up. Too bad there's not a mod for "stuck foot in mouth". There's still a good bit of gray area there (as there always seems to be with legal issues). Regarding the first case:
;-) What if the only way to block Joost is to DoS the Joost servers when you detect a client connection (in an attempt to force the Joost servers to blacklist your IP)? It's kind of like that box that spammed the spammers. I believe that recent US insider trading laws require all publicly-traded companies to monitor or block all electronic communications made by their employees from the office. If that got shot down, assume for the sake of argument that it didn't. Kazaa, Skype, and I suspect Joost, all act like a virus on your network, going out of their way to avoid detection and circumvent blocking measures. Since the author to such lengths to make it impossible to comply with that insider trading law, what options are open to these companies that are effectively breaking the law if they don't find a way to block it?
1) What if company A reverse engineered Joost to create a product that blocks employees from watching Internet TV at work?
2) What if company A sold it to other companies that wanted to do the same thing?
3) What if Comcast bought it and decided to use it to block their employees?
4) What if Comcast then decided to use it to block their customers? Would Comcast be the only company in trouble, or would this be a gray area that could bury company A in litigation until it went bankrupt?
5) Ok, I'm going out on a limb here just for the hell of it.
I thought they proved that they had reverse engineered the behavior without reversing the binary code itself. Because if you have the code, it's easy to swap lines, change loops, change compiler optimizations, and otherwise obfuscate the code to make the machine code look so different that it couldn't possibly be taken for a copy. It would've been a hell of a lot easier than what I've read that they did.
I understand that they're not breaking copyright laws if they don't actually copy part of the program. Are patent laws the only laws that would protect you from someone using reverse engineering to copy functionality and make a derivative product? What about trade secret laws, or other laws I'm unaware of?
Let's say a company like Comcast reverse engineers a product like Joost so they can block or interfere with its traffic. Comcast wants to provide its own Internet TV app, and it's not hard to believe that they would want to trip up their competitors. What laws would protect companies in cases like this? Is it only laws against trusts, monopolies, and non-competetive practices?
What if someone hacked Joost to come up with their own client and made it free (or ad-free if you assume that Joost is going to be free), ant cut into Joost's revenue stream? Would the creators of Joost have no legal recourse for this without a patent of the network protocol?
You can't call me ignorant until you've won the argument. I'm not claiming I've won, but I didn't call you ignorant either.
Everything I've read and seen on the subject claimed that the developers had to treat the x86 BIOS as a black box (black box means they can't see anything going on inside it). They could only see the inputs and outputs, and had to come up with their own logic to ensure that they got the correct outputs to go with each set of inputs. This is NOT reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is opening up the box, examining the machine code inside it, and doing something with that information.
It may not be copyright law that protects software from reverse engineering. Perhaps it is trade secret law. I am not a lawyer, but I am a software developer, and I do know that reverse engineering software (or even hardware) can get you into big trouble.
From your link: "Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code."
Wine is an alternative implementation of the well-documented Windows API. The Wine developers should not have to reverse engineer anything. All they had to do was take the public documentation, and write their own code to implement the documented functions. It's more complicated than that, but it did not require reverse engineering.
That is exactly how the BIOS for the first x86 clone was developed. The first x86 clone was created very carefully, and the process was documented extensively to prove that no reverse engineering took place. If they hadn't documented it so well, Intel would've sued their asses off, and Intel would've won.
Although I'm positive Microsoft makes pacts with other companies to screw other companies (and consumers), that's a load of crap.
Distributing a virus is against the law, which means a virus you distribute can't be protected by law, which makes it legal to reverse engineer them (which is often necessary to fight them). It's got nothing to do with Microsoft. You can reverse engineer Unix or Mac viruses to your heart's content.
If the bot just simulates input devices (i.e. keyboard and mouse actions), then I doubt it infringes on the copyright. If they actually reverse engineered it to the point where they can make calls to functions inside the application itself, then they have broken the law. Remember all the crap the creators of the first x86 clone had to go through to prove that they hadn't reverse engineered it?
Anti-virus software is a special case. It has always been against the law to reverse engineer software protected by copyrights. Yet anti-virus writers are allowed to reverse engineer viruses and malware. Why? Because viruses themselves are illegal, and therefore can't be defended in court by a copyright. That would be like person A calling the police because person B stole his crack.
If these bots are accessing memory inside WoW while it is running, then someone has reverse engineered WoW, and that is against the law. WoW is not a virus, and it is protected by copyright laws. This isn't about expanding copyright law. This has been illegal since before many Slashdot readers were born.
After poking around, it looks like they're short-changing me. I'm paying for 256Kbps upload speed, which means it shouldn't choke until it gets close to 32KBps. If it chokes at 15KBps, then I'm probably limited to 128Kbps. Damn, now I have to call them. I hate it when I have to do that.