So what you are saying is that France surrenders all intellectual property rights to the author?
It's much more complicated than that, and I lack english skills to explain it properly, but I'll try : in France, IP rights are either money-worth or moral. In the 1st category belong the rights to copy, distribute, display, etc. Among the 2nd are the rights to withdraw the work, forbid its representation, defend its integrity. Basically, the author can't give away the rights of the 2nd category, therefore anytime in the future, he can forbid any exploitation of his work without justification, provided he pays back the holders of other kinds of money-worth rights for the damage they face after that decision. But the main idea is that an author can always get back all the rights on his work, even if somebody else paid for the job.
They go to the heirs for plus/minus 70 years, then, public domain (the variation takes into account the length of wars, so a book published in 1936 gets a protection bonus of 5 years).
this is just political gaming in French government.
Maybe, but generaly speaking 'political gaming' doesn't take place in public at the parliament, more in the corridors and far away from cameras. This is a 1st in the french political life, and it shows a really deep division inside the current majority. Followups will be very interesting. For instance, a MP of the majority declared he was voting against the government because, being the father of teens, he didn't wanted to face prosecutions along with 8 million people. As far as it goes, it is a very strong point for his peers.
This could set precedent to undermine copyright as a whole.
France never had, doesn't have, and surely won't have a notion of 'copyright' in the law ; that's completely alien to us. We *do* have intellectual property, but it's absolutely not the same thing as your copyright. Main difference : an author, in France has some perpetual rights on his work that he just can't sell to anyone (producer et al.), and that he only can use anytime after the release of his work, even after selling distributions' rights. Those are called 'moral rights'.
I never said it wasn't ; at the time, I probably disliked the computer as much as the OS. The only real advantage of the PC over the concurrence was its huge base memory of 640KB (I know it was originally sold with 64, but all PC (XT) I came by had always been maxed). That's about 4 time the max mem of even the high end competition.
I certainly don't like the bathwater, but I kinda like the fact that a company is connecting people, don't you?
Ho, I sure do, except that's cisco which connects me, not microsoft ; yes, i know cisco's evil, too. Microsoft is actively trying to prevent me from connecting to my windows-equiped pals, by circumventing internet standards in really tortuous ways. But so far, the open source community has always managed to deliver the needed pieces, and I hope it'll be so in the future.
For every illegal practice Bill's company has been accused of, there are at least a few practices that have helped bring computers and the internet to the masses.
Pleaaaaase, come on ! Before the IBM PC (note, 'IBM'), there were lots of personal computers just as able, CP/M was working OK, and there were many less known OS just as able or more useful than MS-DOS ; speaking of Internet, I remember pretty well it was much easier to connect with OS/2 warp than Win 3.1 (where you had to rely on third party connectors such as trumpet winsock), and until Win95 osr/2 the connection was still a pain in the butt, while most major OSes had already seamless Internet integration (including linux, BSD, aforementionned OS/2, etc.).
Bill is a capitalist genious when it comes to steal and sell other's ideas to masses, but that's been his only contribution to mankind so far.
Honestly, this is by far the most uninteresting and useless slashdot headline I've ever seen. I'll take troll hits if necessary. For the love of god, why would I care if someone updates to service pack 2 or not? Christ!
I do ; while I personnaly use Linux on an exclusive basis, I really care about SP2 spreading because my mail boxes are constantly hammered by botnets of un-patched windows computers. The more SP2 there are out there, the less spam will hit me. So please, upgrade before I kill an innocent bunny to make my point.
I can't find it now (don't remember where I saw/heard it), but some Spanish leader (may have been Muslim) said that France needs to be more like the USA and better integrate immigrants into their culture.
He's wrong ; we do integrate immigrants in our culture, in a non spoken way. We've done it for centuries, and you'll know why the person you're citing is not very likely to appreciate it.
We french integrate immigrants by mariage. That's a slow process, but we do have the highest rate of cross-communities mariages in the western world. Last figures were around 30% of immigrants girls mary a local (figures for germany is around 2%, and in the wonderful USoA, it's between 5 and 10% if memory serves). And with the boy, they girl mary the culture. The devil lies in the immigrants boys, who are very unlikely to mary a local girl, because tradition says boys transmit the cultural values, and not many french girl dream of a secluded, miserable life under their hursband's father power.
The prospective of staying forever a bachelor is the root of today's situation : immigrant boys are trying to force coran down their sister's and cousin's throat to keep them as a genetic pool, while fighting the land to keep locals away. And that's a fight where true victims are girls.
I think the minitel comparison is completely unfair ; minitel was operated on normal telephone lines, therefore, anybody with a line and a computer could open a non-profit minitel service or a bbs, and many did. Now long forgotten french home computers made by Thomson were sharing their charset (no ascii) with minitel for exactly that purpose.
At the time it was released (begining of the 80's), minitel was probably one of the most advanced and low cost electronic net in the world, it greatly helped many people to get acquainted with technology. And it had porn too.
Lack of evolution and internet competition killed it, but for 15 years I can't think of anything more or less competing with it anywhere in the world in terms of accessibility and richness of content. And it delivered for (almost) free ! The terminal was lended by France Telecom to anybody at no cost. You paid for the service, at the price of a (sometimes premium) communication. Not really cheap, but a strong incentive for sure.
For certain services, I still use it today, because minitel warrants the user he's talking to the right person (no MIM hack), and the price has no hidden traps.
A long time ago (1996), in a country far far away... I was working on my master thesis (llm you'd call it, I think), when windows 95 gave up for the nth time and littered my disk with garbage. Positively fed up with the thing, I decided to replace it with something a friend of mine had given me : slackware 3.0. I didn't knew really what it was (thought it was a DOS of a kind, with flat mem support), and was conquered at first sight by the choice of console police [yes, that's something I always dreamed to change, and never found something correct in DOS realm - talk about eye candy !].
On the plus side, I managed to setup what I needed at the moment in a pinch, finish my thesis without a crash, and print it. That's what I'd call "desktop ready". Then, I had a hard time learning linux and slackware, mostly to do non-work related activities : music playing, networking, gaming, scanning, but that's completely different.
I'm still very found of slackware, and I use it to setup intranet servers everywhere I work (behind firewalls), because I know that they'll stand unattended for years after I'm gone (I still work mainly as a lawyer, but end up spending about 1/5 of my paid time dealing with IT problems - that's karma). The oldest surviving server I setup has 6 years of uninterrupted activity, and the boss of that office refuse to change anything on it, because he says it's been his best investement ever, repaying itself countless times. He shows it to vendors of windows-based solutions, when they try to make him upgrade, and ask them if they're ready to sign a binding contract that their solution will last at least the same time without further investments. They've always backed off.
I still use daily a slack on my personal laptop, with just OO.o and wine (for those win only CDROM databases that are my food maker). As far as desktop goes, it's plain perfect.
If EULA's were written in plain english and kept short and to the point, without "Lawyer Speak", it could benefit both the company and the User.
It wouldn't because 'law language' is a kind of 'API' between opposing interests ; write out of specs, and both editor and customer lose because nobody will be able to predict the meaning a judge will give to the words. At least, if properly written, an EULA can be submitted to a lawyer, and he'll be able to give a fair appreciation of the chances it has to be enforceable (or not). It doesn't mean that everything in an EULA is as if casted in stone, because an editor may be tempted to use legalese to scare the customer before going to a trial, but it means that legalese is a linga franca among professionals of law that help going straight to the point.
I never said all books were great or all authors knowledgeable. I said that those that (or who) are (and there are some) provide something that Wikipedia can't and likely never will. That is all. And hey, I still eat at Mickey D's sometimes.
Which bring us back to the very starting point of this topic : how do you make your choice ? If you're not already a master in the field, you're bound to choose on authority, feeling, and reputation, and that can prove to be no better than wikipedia. As in wikipedia, where you get very good articles and crap, in every field of knowledge, you've got good books and crap - and it's impossible to tell them appart unless you know already most of everyhing already published on the subject.
Lastly, wikipedia better for scholars? Now it's my turn to say "bwahahaha.":-p
Might be my bad english - I intended to speak about those who consider themselves studying a field.
People spend decades of their lives making themselves expert enough to write a book. There can be no substitute for that, and it is indisputably 'better' (by the measures of knowledge and truth) than the most diligently researched Wikipedia article.
Bwwwaaahaaahaaa. Sorry. 2 objections : how do you find a such excellent book on a subject you don't master yet, to the point of having an exhaustive bibliography ? By pointers ; for this wikipedia is generally more than apt. 2nd objection : being on the side of people who spent at least a decade to master a knowledge, I can give you insurance that it has nothing to do with publishing ; I know authors who are complete morons and can't see the right from the left of their self declared field of expertise, but they somehow managed to find an editor because they are in a powerful position. And you have would be authors, more than apt, who never find the right outlet for their work because they have not enough political sense to play rough and get at the front of the scene, or more often, think that the more they research, the less they really know what's going on, therefore see no interest in publishing. All in all, my point is that it's not because something has been printed on paper that this something is true, sometimes it's not even barely OK, and wikipedia is not generaly substandard to anything else in that respect. I shall say, to a certain extent, that wikipedia might be in fact better for students and scholars, because you soon learn to read wikipedia with a little bell ringing in your head telling you that it's dangerous to take it for true, while you might forget to be careful with a more conventional source.
Your tastes and colors of choice are none of my buisness, but when it comes to fonts, I find Linux really up to the job ; not that the base package shines, but you have very decent fonts among it (URW ones are very good), and more important, linux is very flexible if not user friendly because you can deal with TT fonts, T1 fonts, bitmap fonts, and latex fonts at the same time. To produce high quality printed documents, I really can't do without linux today ; the default choice of times in word in comparison *is* ugly. Times was created to render well on low quality paper, and to save ink. Good fonts have generally a smaller "eye" and thicker lines, much like the roman default in OO.o. Don't blame on linux your perception perverted by a constant exposure to *bad* printing practices.
Wait, so a free society is a society without authority?
Nope ; it's a society where resepect is earned, not brutally enforced. Good parents never have problems setting rules, because they can explain their purposes.
No offence, but I think you're getting it backward ; instead of monitoring computer use, why not monitor schoolwork ? I've always had full latitude to do whatever I wanted with my computer, after I was through with homework. Mind you, this really increased my productivity big times !
... I can tell you that it's been over 20 years that I have to find ways to lock my own parents out of some functions of their computers at their request.
I guess I would have, as a child, been really happy to have such a program handy to accomplish that overwhelming task of securing the less knowledgeables among us from themselves.
Right, I was (just a little) kidding, but honestly, my parents have never been able to know what was going on in their computer, so mine was even more beyhond the radar, and I don't think it'll be ever different. Youths can be very dedicated at figuring ways to outperform absurd limitations.
2 years ago, I tried to buy some subway tickets from a RATP ATM in Paris. I keyed my credit card code in, and *all* ATMs in sight went down as soon as I hitted the validation key.
In fact, someone forgot to lock an inside key after collecting the previous day money (those machines accept both cards and coins for payment).
The crash was in fact a security ! But seeing about 15 screens goes blank at once is a wonderful sight, indeed (those machines have since been replaced by new, windows powered ones, which routinely go BSOD, but only one at a time)!
Please ; c'mon. All of this was in Unix / Linux for ages now. Who's copying whom ? Nay. They both shamelessy ride the F/OSS wave,denying their users the rights they awarded to themselves.
At least Jobs does recognize the parts he owes to the community. Makes him slightly less evil, in my view.
No, because Intel a sense of 'value' for this issue. In general, old science mags are considered barely good enough to light up bbq, but this one issue is now 'special' so many people will want to have one.
Slashdot Mirror
It's much more complicated than that, and I lack english skills to explain it properly, but I'll try : in France, IP rights are either money-worth or moral. In the 1st category belong the rights to copy, distribute, display, etc. Among the 2nd are the rights to withdraw the work, forbid its representation, defend its integrity. Basically, the author can't give away the rights of the 2nd category, therefore anytime in the future, he can forbid any exploitation of his work without justification, provided he pays back the holders of other kinds of money-worth rights for the damage they face after that decision. But the main idea is that an author can always get back all the rights on his work, even if somebody else paid for the job.
They go to the heirs for plus/minus 70 years, then, public domain (the variation takes into account the length of wars, so a book published in 1936 gets a protection bonus of 5 years).
Maybe, but generaly speaking 'political gaming' doesn't take place in public at the parliament, more in the corridors and far away from cameras. This is a 1st in the french political life, and it shows a really deep division inside the current majority. Followups will be very interesting. For instance, a MP of the majority declared he was voting against the government because, being the father of teens, he didn't wanted to face prosecutions along with 8 million people. As far as it goes, it is a very strong point for his peers.
France never had, doesn't have, and surely won't have a notion of 'copyright' in the law ; that's completely alien to us. We *do* have intellectual property, but it's absolutely not the same thing as your copyright. Main difference : an author, in France has some perpetual rights on his work that he just can't sell to anyone (producer et al.), and that he only can use anytime after the release of his work, even after selling distributions' rights. Those are called 'moral rights'.
I never said it wasn't ; at the time, I probably disliked the computer as much as the OS. The only real advantage of the PC over the concurrence was its huge base memory of 640KB (I know it was originally sold with 64, but all PC (XT) I came by had always been maxed). That's about 4 time the max mem of even the high end competition.
I certainly don't like the bathwater, but I kinda like the fact that a company is connecting people, don't you?
Ho, I sure do, except that's cisco which connects me, not microsoft ; yes, i know cisco's evil, too. Microsoft is actively trying to prevent me from connecting to my windows-equiped pals, by circumventing internet standards in really tortuous ways. But so far, the open source community has always managed to deliver the needed pieces, and I hope it'll be so in the future.
Pleaaaaase, come on ! Before the IBM PC (note, 'IBM'), there were lots of personal computers just as able, CP/M was working OK, and there were many less known OS just as able or more useful than MS-DOS ; speaking of Internet, I remember pretty well it was much easier to connect with OS/2 warp than Win 3.1 (where you had to rely on third party connectors such as trumpet winsock), and until Win95 osr/2 the connection was still a pain in the butt, while most major OSes had already seamless Internet integration (including linux, BSD, aforementionned OS/2, etc.).
Bill is a capitalist genious when it comes to steal and sell other's ideas to masses, but that's been his only contribution to mankind so far.
I do ; while I personnaly use Linux on an exclusive basis, I really care about SP2 spreading because my mail boxes are constantly hammered by botnets of un-patched windows computers. The more SP2 there are out there, the less spam will hit me. So please, upgrade before I kill an innocent bunny to make my point.
He's wrong ; we do integrate immigrants in our culture, in a non spoken way. We've done it for centuries, and you'll know why the person you're citing is not very likely to appreciate it.
We french integrate immigrants by mariage. That's a slow process, but we do have the highest rate of cross-communities mariages in the western world. Last figures were around 30% of immigrants girls mary a local (figures for germany is around 2%, and in the wonderful USoA, it's between 5 and 10% if memory serves). And with the boy, they girl mary the culture. The devil lies in the immigrants boys, who are very unlikely to mary a local girl, because tradition says boys transmit the cultural values, and not many french girl dream of a secluded, miserable life under their hursband's father power.
The prospective of staying forever a bachelor is the root of today's situation : immigrant boys are trying to force coran down their sister's and cousin's throat to keep them as a genetic pool, while fighting the land to keep locals away. And that's a fight where true victims are girls.
At the time it was released (begining of the 80's), minitel was probably one of the most advanced and low cost electronic net in the world, it greatly helped many people to get acquainted with technology. And it had porn too.
Lack of evolution and internet competition killed it, but for 15 years I can't think of anything more or less competing with it anywhere in the world in terms of accessibility and richness of content. And it delivered for (almost) free ! The terminal was lended by France Telecom to anybody at no cost. You paid for the service, at the price of a (sometimes premium) communication. Not really cheap, but a strong incentive for sure.
For certain services, I still use it today, because minitel warrants the user he's talking to the right person (no MIM hack), and the price has no hidden traps.
A long time ago (1996), in a country far far away... I was working on my master thesis (llm you'd call it, I think), when windows 95 gave up for the nth time and littered my disk with garbage. Positively fed up with the thing, I decided to replace it with something a friend of mine had given me : slackware 3.0. I didn't knew really what it was (thought it was a DOS of a kind, with flat mem support), and was conquered at first sight by the choice of console police [yes, that's something I always dreamed to change, and never found something correct in DOS realm - talk about eye candy !].
On the plus side, I managed to setup what I needed at the moment in a pinch, finish my thesis without a crash, and print it. That's what I'd call "desktop ready". Then, I had a hard time learning linux and slackware, mostly to do non-work related activities : music playing, networking, gaming, scanning, but that's completely different.
I'm still very found of slackware, and I use it to setup intranet servers everywhere I work (behind firewalls), because I know that they'll stand unattended for years after I'm gone (I still work mainly as a lawyer, but end up spending about 1/5 of my paid time dealing with IT problems - that's karma). The oldest surviving server I setup has 6 years of uninterrupted activity, and the boss of that office refuse to change anything on it, because he says it's been his best investement ever, repaying itself countless times. He shows it to vendors of windows-based solutions, when they try to make him upgrade, and ask them if they're ready to sign a binding contract that their solution will last at least the same time without further investments. They've always backed off.
I still use daily a slack on my personal laptop, with just OO.o and wine (for those win only CDROM databases that are my food maker). As far as desktop goes, it's plain perfect.
It wouldn't because 'law language' is a kind of 'API' between opposing interests ; write out of specs, and both editor and customer lose because nobody will be able to predict the meaning a judge will give to the words. At least, if properly written, an EULA can be submitted to a lawyer, and he'll be able to give a fair appreciation of the chances it has to be enforceable (or not). It doesn't mean that everything in an EULA is as if casted in stone, because an editor may be tempted to use legalese to scare the customer before going to a trial, but it means that legalese is a linga franca among professionals of law that help going straight to the point.
Which bring us back to the very starting point of this topic : how do you make your choice ? If you're not already a master in the field, you're bound to choose on authority, feeling, and reputation, and that can prove to be no better than wikipedia. As in wikipedia, where you get very good articles and crap, in every field of knowledge, you've got good books and crap - and it's impossible to tell them appart unless you know already most of everyhing already published on the subject.
Lastly, wikipedia better for scholars? Now it's my turn to say "bwahahaha." :-p
Might be my bad english - I intended to speak about those who consider themselves studying a field.
Bwwwaaahaaahaaa. Sorry. 2 objections : how do you find a such excellent book on a subject you don't master yet, to the point of having an exhaustive bibliography ? By pointers ; for this wikipedia is generally more than apt. 2nd objection : being on the side of people who spent at least a decade to master a knowledge, I can give you insurance that it has nothing to do with publishing ; I know authors who are complete morons and can't see the right from the left of their self declared field of expertise, but they somehow managed to find an editor because they are in a powerful position. And you have would be authors, more than apt, who never find the right outlet for their work because they have not enough political sense to play rough and get at the front of the scene, or more often, think that the more they research, the less they really know what's going on, therefore see no interest in publishing. All in all, my point is that it's not because something has been printed on paper that this something is true, sometimes it's not even barely OK, and wikipedia is not generaly substandard to anything else in that respect. I shall say, to a certain extent, that wikipedia might be in fact better for students and scholars, because you soon learn to read wikipedia with a little bell ringing in your head telling you that it's dangerous to take it for true, while you might forget to be careful with a more conventional source.
Well, they tend to be pretty similar, except for this typical Brit' habit of naming their train stations after defeats instead of victories as we do.
By putting randomly a "brought to you by google ©" picture as a 10% black backplane through all the documents. At least 5 time per page.
Your tastes and colors of choice are none of my buisness, but when it comes to fonts, I find Linux really up to the job ; not that the base package shines, but you have very decent fonts among it (URW ones are very good), and more important, linux is very flexible if not user friendly because you can deal with TT fonts, T1 fonts, bitmap fonts, and latex fonts at the same time. To produce high quality printed documents, I really can't do without linux today ; the default choice of times in word in comparison *is* ugly. Times was created to render well on low quality paper, and to save ink. Good fonts have generally a smaller "eye" and thicker lines, much like the roman default in OO.o. Don't blame on linux your perception perverted by a constant exposure to *bad* printing practices.
Nope ; it's a society where resepect is earned, not brutally enforced. Good parents never have problems setting rules, because they can explain their purposes.
No offence, but I think you're getting it backward ; instead of monitoring computer use, why not monitor schoolwork ? I've always had full latitude to do whatever I wanted with my computer, after I was through with homework. Mind you, this really increased my productivity big times !
I guess I would have, as a child, been really happy to have such a program handy to accomplish that overwhelming task of securing the less knowledgeables among us from themselves.
Right, I was (just a little) kidding, but honestly, my parents have never been able to know what was going on in their computer, so mine was even more beyhond the radar, and I don't think it'll be ever different. Youths can be very dedicated at figuring ways to outperform absurd limitations.
In fact, someone forgot to lock an inside key after collecting the previous day money (those machines accept both cards and coins for payment).
The crash was in fact a security ! But seeing about 15 screens goes blank at once is a wonderful sight, indeed (those machines have since been replaced by new, windows powered ones, which routinely go BSOD, but only one at a time)!
At least Jobs does recognize the parts he owes to the community. Makes him slightly less evil, in my view.
That's a very cunning thing, really - and I'm no Microsoft fan, but I must admit that's really good R&D. I'd use their system anyday if I could.
Insert "created" where appropriate in the first sentence of my previous post. I was *so* sure I had proofread it...
No, because Intel a sense of 'value' for this issue. In general, old science mags are considered barely good enough to light up bbq, but this one issue is now 'special' so many people will want to have one.
2 words : Novell ZENwork.