While you think of a zillion ways to regurgitate your patented storyline, which is all you can do because your competitors have their own patented storylines which they are busy regurgitating, people will develop their own tools which they will share freely, and other people will swap these and improve these and make their own unpatented stories...
... which the morons will then use.
Remember, just because the "morons" have IP,
does not prevent them from using unencumbered materials.
One thing that comes through loud and clear when I look at this site is: shoddy.
The page looks shoddy.
The WHOIS entry is shoddy.
The name is shoddy.
Naming a site after an ethnic group is just asking for retaliation from the PC nuts.
I'm not a PC nut, but no company with the status of Amazon.com would ever do anything
like this.
It's dumb.
It's shoddy.
Amazon.com does not do things like this.
Various posters have offered evidence that this is a legitimate Amazon thing.
Well, if so, it's an independent project from someone in Amazon who has no idea
how Amazon does things and should never have been allowed to touch the web servers.
followed by a picture of the amazon web page in question with [CONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED CD] clearly visible in massive letters.
Well... there is "clear", and then there is "clear".
The page shown is extraordinarily "busy". At the top it has four tabs with nine subtabs, five account management maybe-tabs, a drop-down menu, two separate search boxes, two "Go" buttons and an "Advanced Search" button... and that's just the top of the page.
Meanwhile, over at the right is a big yellow button in a big blue box, and in the middle of the page is the cover image.
Do you read all the text on every web page you visit? (Hint: you don't.) I certainly don't. When I buy a product, I consider: Is this the product I want, how much will I have to pay, and how long will it take to arrive.
The real lesson we learn here is not that the author of the article was unobservant. On the contrary, he was just as observant as anyone could be expected to be. No, the real lesson is that we all need to make a mental note: When paying for music, check its DRM status. I appreciate Amazon making such info available in nice big letters in an easy to see location. However, that alone does not mean I will read it.
Freedom of Religion is less welcome on Slashdot than a racially mixed wedding at a Klan meeting.
You almost got it right. I don't think it's freedom of religion per se that is under attack. Rather, I see a consistent, pervasive demonization of religious people as a class. In short: prejudice, bigotry, condemnation of and hatred of people based on group affiliation.
And I find deeply disturbing some of the stuff that goes unchallenged around here.
These Earth-borne creatures are red because of the propensity of life on Earth to use iron as a key component in blood. I would expect that Martian creatures would have copper coursing through their veins.
Why would you think that? There is plenty of iron on Mars.
This is a serious question, by the way. If you have a good reason, then I'd like to know what it is.
I *do* think we will eternally regret wasting so many perfectly good names on moonlets and asteroids.
Indeed.
It is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 years in the future. The age of the galaxies has ended. The stars are naught but cinders. The joyous dance of light and gravity is coming to and end.
The universe is dying.
For the implacable Second Law of Thermodynamics has spoken, and none may gainsay its word. The terrible decree is that Entropy shall rule henceforth, for all eternity.
The great civilizations withered and fell long, long ago. For eons they strove and built and fought and loved. They wrought mighty works and created hideous evils. They spanned the stars, the galaxies, and the super-super-superclusters with their ships, their communications, and other things for which there are no words. But now they are all gone. The empires, the governments, the communities, the families, even the individuals, all are gone.
All, that is, but one. And that one has little time left.
The Last Sophont has waged a terrible battle against mortality for ages untold. It has won, and won, and won again. But at last, there is no more winning. The Second Law will not be denied. And the Last Sophont knows that it is the last. When it is gone, there will be only mindlessness for all eternity.
As the Last Sophont looks back over the trillions of millenia, it sees the good and the evil, but it also sees that the former far outweighs the latter. There have been pain and hatred and suffering and lies. But there have been so much more generosity and gentleness and goodness and truth. It has indeed been a good universe. And the Last Sophont speaks to all of creation. "Well done," it cries, "Very, very well done!" And the Last Sophont is happy.
But as the remaining wisps of consciousness begin to fade, and the long mindless eternity prepares to engulf the universe, one final regret passes through the mind of the Last Sophont: "Damn! If only they hadn't named that thing 'Vesta'!"
hint: I don't trust the CC companies. Historically, they have been completely inept when it comes to security.
I don't agree. It seems to me that CC companies have generally been quite competent at the security issues that they have put serious effort into. And they always put serious effort into protecting themselves from financial loss.
The security failures we've seen, with stolen customer data and the like, have not been due to CC companies incompetence, but rather because they really did not try to protect this data. And the reason they did not try is that they had no financial interest in keeping the data secure; when a customer's personal data is stolen, the CC company suffers no loss.
So the real solution to credit card security from the customer's point of view, is not to talk up all the new technologies, but simply to make the CC companies legally liable for loss of customer data. Then I guarantee you we'll see top-notch security put in place very quickly.
They don't give two shits about science and they make no bones about showing it. They just want to sell servers.
Be careful with the word "they". Of course sales rep's don't care about science. If they did, they wouldn't be sales rep's. Sales rep's, as the name suggests, are hired and paid to sell. So that's what they spend their time doing. Whether other people at IBM care about science varies a lot, I can assure you.
Actually, the real problem here is that someone is not pushing the long-term good of the company. Selling a server while giving a dozen graduate students (future high-level researchers!) the feeling "I've been snubbed by IBM" gets a sales guy a commission, but may be hurting the company, in the long run.
If all that's required is that spyware needs to pass some confusing and oblique definition of "approval", shouldn't I be able to get a bank or other business to agree to some other murky "agreement" which would give me access to THEIR systems, and hence the ability to take from them?
Certainly, if the bank agrees to it.
The real difference here is that, in practice, banks carefully read the contracts they agree to.
Could someone give me a legal definition of IP please? I believe there are patents, copyrights, and trade secrets but I am unfamiliar with Intellectual Property.
"Intellectual property" refers to patents, copyrights, and trademarks & service marks. It is also sometimes used to refer to trade secrets. Those are different, however, in that they are generally not legally recognized as "property".
... being forced to agree that your employer owns any though that pops into your head 24 hours a day is unethical and wrong.
First of all, no one says any idea that pops into your head 24 hours a day belongs to your employer (unless your contract says so, of course). Rather, as you quoted, IP generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer. The problem, of course, is figuring out when/where the idea was generated.
Second, regardless of any wrongness, the question of whether the law considers certain ideas to be owned by employers is still a very important one to the open-source & free-sofware movements. In the real world, and in the courtroom, things like the GPL have no moral force; they are valid only insofar as they are based on actual law. So if you take an idea that that law says belongs to someone else, you can try releasing it under the GPL (say), but people out there will just ignore you. Or sue you.
Intellectual Property needs a legal definition....
No it doesn't, since there aren't laws about IP, per se. The laws cover patents or copyrights, etc., or sometimes a combination thereof. The term "IP" is just a convenient way of discussing concepts that are treated very similarly in law.
Here we have the promising beginnings of a company that could revolutionize the business market with personal computers. Why, then, did it end up being someone other than Apple that did so?
You brought up three reasons: the Apple/// was a poor product, lack of backward compatibility on later products, and lack of cloning.
Concerning the first, I'll agree: Apple could have done a better job on the Apple///. To their credit, they eventually fixed the///'s troubles. But by then it was too late.
Concerning the second: remember that no one did backward compatibility back then. Every new machine had completely new hardward, peripherals, language, etc. It wasn't in the culture.
[A note: Actually, Apple did a little bit of it by introducing a disk drive for their previously tape-only machine in 1978, and (gasp!) not introducing a new language ("disk basic"?) to go with it, like everyone else did. Instead, they grafted DOS onto BASIC using the I/O hooks -- and got mercilessly kidded for it for years afterward.]
Concerning the third (cloning): Companies are trying to make money, not create standards that anyone can use. IBM ended up allowing cloning, and they lost control of the product they introducted. Today, no one buys an IBM; they by a Dell, to run Windows. Apple, on the other hand, fought cloning and similar things many times. They ended up with a lower market share, but they retain control of all their product lines to this day. Certainly, we all benefited from IBM clones and what they became, but IBM didn't.
Lastly, I'll add another reason why the Apple II didn't remain the foremost business machine: the market had a high opinion of IBM. The saying, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was taken seriously. Essentially, only IBM had "permission" to introduce a "serious" business machine. You and I look at technical spec's, but the MBAs didn't (and still don't!). Apple and the others were "toys" no matter what they could do.
Too bad their contributions to society can be measured in terms of:
Clippy
Wizards
Those are finished products. Mostly bad ones, to be sure, but products nonetheless. Microsoft Research does research. Top quality research, too (in my field anyway).
Everyone in this thread seems to want to point out what a jerk the guy is. Still, I thought your question was worth answering.
Isn't this the kind of thing Free Software was supposed to be against?
Of course it is. But legal judgements are not based on RMS's rhetoric (or anyone else's). The fact that the Free Software Movement has certain goals, does not legally prohibit someone from registering "Linux" as a trademark. And calling yourself "Linux Users Group" does not obligate you to promote anyone's philosophy.
Your goal might not be to annoy people, but that is what you are doing.
You were doing pretty good up to that point, but then you had to throw in:
The worse the advertising gets, the more ubiquitous, the more targeted -- the less I will watch, the less I will pay attention.
The less I will buy.
Sorry, these people may be annoying, immoral jerks, but they are intelligent annoying, immoral jerks. They know whether people buy their stuff, and they know whether advertising affects that. If you claim people are not buying, when if fact they are buying, the advertisers will just laugh at you ("all the way to the bank", as they say).
Folks, this ruling is about allowing freedom of contract.
Can businesses and workers make agreements that cover a worker's behavior when he/she is not "on the clock"? Yes.
This is not about giving businesses more power; it is about allowing businesses and workers to make any agreements they want, and they can tell the government to MYOB.
So, a business can say to a worker, "If you work for us, you cannot socialize with your coworkers off the clock." And if the worker does not like it he/she does not have to work there. Similarly, a worker can say to a business, "If I work for you, I am going to socialize with my coworkers off the clock." And if the business does not like it, they don't have to hire the worker.
I wrote a system that allows uneducated, lazy stock market traders make money despite their own incompetance.... They make several hundreds of thousands of dollars, I barely break 100K.
Maybe you should quit whining and become a trader.
Xerox management saw it and realised that it could make them rich. Xerox slapped a $50,000 price on it,... Microsoft management saw Atari's work and realised that it could make them rich. Microsoft copied it, slapped a $100 price on it... The point? Stop your management monkeys from looking at the technology world as a means to get rich....
A bit different take on this: You don't get rich by putting too high a price tag on things. I say let your management try to get rich. Just try to keep them connected with the realities of the market while they do so.
Slashdot Mirror
"Remember"?? I played around with one yesterday. They're great.
The page looks shoddy. The WHOIS entry is shoddy. The name is shoddy. Naming a site after an ethnic group is just asking for retaliation from the PC nuts. I'm not a PC nut, but no company with the status of Amazon.com would ever do anything like this. It's dumb. It's shoddy.
Amazon.com does not do things like this.
Various posters have offered evidence that this is a legitimate Amazon thing. Well, if so, it's an independent project from someone in Amazon who has no idea how Amazon does things and should never have been allowed to touch the web servers.
Well ... there is "clear", and then there is "clear".
The page shown is extraordinarily "busy". At the top it has four tabs with nine subtabs, five account management maybe-tabs, a drop-down menu, two separate search boxes, two "Go" buttons and an "Advanced Search" button ... and that's just the top of the page.
Meanwhile, over at the right is a big yellow button in a big blue box, and in the middle of the page is the cover image.
Do you read all the text on every web page you visit? (Hint: you don't.) I certainly don't. When I buy a product, I consider: Is this the product I want, how much will I have to pay, and how long will it take to arrive.
The real lesson we learn here is not that the author of the article was unobservant. On the contrary, he was just as observant as anyone could be expected to be. No, the real lesson is that we all need to make a mental note: When paying for music, check its DRM status. I appreciate Amazon making such info available in nice big letters in an easy to see location. However, that alone does not mean I will read it.
You almost got it right. I don't think it's freedom of religion per se that is under attack. Rather, I see a consistent, pervasive demonization of religious people as a class. In short: prejudice, bigotry, condemnation of and hatred of people based on group affiliation.
And I find deeply disturbing some of the stuff that goes unchallenged around here.
Why would you think that? There is plenty of iron on Mars.
This is a serious question, by the way. If you have a good reason, then I'd like to know what it is.
I suppose you have a point there.
Indeed.
I don't agree. It seems to me that CC companies have generally been quite competent at the security issues that they have put serious effort into. And they always put serious effort into protecting themselves from financial loss.
The security failures we've seen, with stolen customer data and the like, have not been due to CC companies incompetence, but rather because they really did not try to protect this data. And the reason they did not try is that they had no financial interest in keeping the data secure; when a customer's personal data is stolen, the CC company suffers no loss.
So the real solution to credit card security from the customer's point of view, is not to talk up all the new technologies, but simply to make the CC companies legally liable for loss of customer data. Then I guarantee you we'll see top-notch security put in place very quickly.
Be careful with the word "they". Of course sales rep's don't care about science. If they did, they wouldn't be sales rep's. Sales rep's, as the name suggests, are hired and paid to sell. So that's what they spend their time doing. Whether other people at IBM care about science varies a lot, I can assure you.
Actually, the real problem here is that someone is not pushing the long-term good of the company. Selling a server while giving a dozen graduate students (future high-level researchers!) the feeling "I've been snubbed by IBM" gets a sales guy a commission, but may be hurting the company, in the long run.
Certainly, if the bank agrees to it.
The real difference here is that, in practice, banks carefully read the contracts they agree to.
Ummmm ... if you don't like them, them why are you tired of them? I hate them too, but I'm not tired of them, because I don't use them.
"Intellectual property" refers to patents, copyrights, and trademarks & service marks. It is also sometimes used to refer to trade secrets. Those are different, however, in that they are generally not legally recognized as "property".
First of all, no one says any idea that pops into your head 24 hours a day belongs to your employer (unless your contract says so, of course). Rather, as you quoted, IP generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer. The problem, of course, is figuring out when/where the idea was generated.
Second, regardless of any wrongness, the question of whether the law considers certain ideas to be owned by employers is still a very important one to the open-source & free-sofware movements. In the real world, and in the courtroom, things like the GPL have no moral force; they are valid only insofar as they are based on actual law. So if you take an idea that that law says belongs to someone else, you can try releasing it under the GPL (say), but people out there will just ignore you. Or sue you.
Intellectual Property needs a legal definition ....
No it doesn't, since there aren't laws about IP, per se. The laws cover patents or copyrights, etc., or sometimes a combination thereof. The term "IP" is just a convenient way of discussing concepts that are treated very similarly in law.
what he meant was that they wanted to sell people the tools to organise the information.
Wow. Thanks for writing about that. If I had mod points today I'd mod you way up instead of replying.
You brought up three reasons: the Apple /// was a poor product, lack of backward compatibility on later products, and lack of cloning.
Concerning the first, I'll agree: Apple could have done a better job on the Apple ///. To their credit, they eventually fixed the ///'s troubles. But by then it was too late.
Concerning the second: remember that no one did backward compatibility back then. Every new machine had completely new hardward, peripherals, language, etc. It wasn't in the culture.
[A note: Actually, Apple did a little bit of it by introducing a disk drive for their previously tape-only machine in 1978, and (gasp!) not introducing a new language ("disk basic"?) to go with it, like everyone else did. Instead, they grafted DOS onto BASIC using the I/O hooks -- and got mercilessly kidded for it for years afterward.]
Concerning the third (cloning): Companies are trying to make money, not create standards that anyone can use. IBM ended up allowing cloning, and they lost control of the product they introducted. Today, no one buys an IBM; they by a Dell, to run Windows. Apple, on the other hand, fought cloning and similar things many times. They ended up with a lower market share, but they retain control of all their product lines to this day. Certainly, we all benefited from IBM clones and what they became, but IBM didn't.
Lastly, I'll add another reason why the Apple II didn't remain the foremost business machine: the market had a high opinion of IBM. The saying, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was taken seriously. Essentially, only IBM had "permission" to introduce a "serious" business machine. You and I look at technical spec's, but the MBAs didn't (and still don't!). Apple and the others were "toys" no matter what they could do.
Clippy
Wizards
Those are finished products. Mostly bad ones, to be sure, but products nonetheless. Microsoft Research does research. Top quality research, too (in my field anyway).
Isn't this the kind of thing Free Software was supposed to be against?
Of course it is. But legal judgements are not based on RMS's rhetoric (or anyone else's). The fact that the Free Software Movement has certain goals, does not legally prohibit someone from registering "Linux" as a trademark. And calling yourself "Linux Users Group" does not obligate you to promote anyone's philosophy.
Yeah, there's this thing out there called "the Sun". I'd take it into account.
Sarcasm aside, though, I salute your quest for knowledge. This sort of thing ought to be better understood by the reasonably intelligent public.
You were doing pretty good up to that point, but then you had to throw in:
The worse the advertising gets, the more ubiquitous, the more targeted -- the less I will watch, the less I will pay attention.
The less I will buy.
Sorry, these people may be annoying, immoral jerks, but they are intelligent annoying, immoral jerks. They know whether people buy their stuff, and they know whether advertising affects that. If you claim people are not buying, when if fact they are buying, the advertisers will just laugh at you ("all the way to the bank", as they say).
Can businesses and workers make agreements that cover a worker's behavior when he/she is not "on the clock"? Yes.
This is not about giving businesses more power; it is about allowing businesses and workers to make any agreements they want, and they can tell the government to MYOB.
So, a business can say to a worker, "If you work for us, you cannot socialize with your coworkers off the clock." And if the worker does not like it he/she does not have to work there. Similarly, a worker can say to a business, "If I work for you, I am going to socialize with my coworkers off the clock." And if the business does not like it, they don't have to hire the worker.
By singing. Despite all the bad press Ms. Spears gets, she is certainly a better singer than I am.
Two of those "apostrophes" were quotes.
-- Your friendly neighborhood pedant
Maybe you should quit whining and become a trader.
A bit different take on this: You don't get rich by putting too high a price tag on things. I say let your management try to get rich. Just try to keep them connected with the realities of the market while they do so.