'Spoken like one of those OSS trolls that keep saying: "It's OSS, if you don't like it, fix it yourself" 'If a restaurant serves something not up to standards, most people won't go in to the restaurant kitchen and tell the chef how to fix it, nor do they start a new restaurant.'
And you've spoken line one of those proprietary trolls who doesn't grok the *actual benefit of open source. Based on the rest of your post, you're not one; but this touches a nerve with me because I feel that cooking/restaurants are a *great way to introduce the free software paradigm to people.
If I get and don't like a ham sandwich, my options are not (only) to open my own ham sandwich restaurant or fix the one I went to. There are *other restaurants. There are in fact about 150 different kinds of ham sandwich that have emerged from the various cultures and time period in human history.
If food worked the way proprietary software does, you would agree not to reverse engineer your ham sandwich, work around any limitations thereof, and so on and so forth. There would be a patent on the slicing of pork for arrangement on bread or breadlike products; as a consequence, there would be no other restaurants offering them. Furthermore, your sandwich would stop functioning if you choose iced tea and potato chips instead of Coke and french fries to go with it. It's quite ridiculous to contemplate.
The importance of free technology is not that every Dom, Hick, and Tarry can go compile a kernel or assemble a distro. It's that an *actual competitive market can emerge from the world at large being allowed to do these things. Dom, Hick, and Tarry benefit from that market.
"a hacked copy of Windows may be more secure and less malicious because it isn't "phoning home" to Microsoft."
I would actually venture a guess that in some cases it's illegal to use a non-hacked Windows. There was a case where a guy figured out that the automatic updates feature -- because it sent system information through the public *net -- could not legally be used to run the bank that he worked for.
It is true that Grokster lost that case, but not because the MPAA's argument about what constitutes "substantial non-infringing use" prevailed.
Rather, it was because there was clear evidence that Grokster *induced infringement actively.
From Phil Larson's excellent summary of Breyer's concurrence:
"the tool does not even require substantial non-infringing uses in the shortterm if it appears that there is a reasonable prospect for there to be substantial non-infringing uses in the future.,,, He argued that the "capable of" language in Sony is forward looking and doesn't confine the analysis of liability to a static interpretation of the product's existing uses" http://www.philiplarson.com/blog/?p=
"since you have no interest in posting facts to support your arguments"
I just have this; I'm not a legal expert or anything.
"the Court held that the rule in Sony does not require courts to ignore evidence of the distributor's intent. The majority opinion then applied this new inducement test to the facts in Grokster. Given that Grokster clearly distributed its product and that there was fairly substantial evidence that users used the software to commit actual infringement, the only element of the inducement rule the Court addressed at length was whether Grokster took affirmative steps to encourage its users to commit copyright infringement"
Note: in Grokster, it was the fact that Grokster actively encouraged infringement that made them hold as they did. It is probably true that TPB -- were it subject to US law -- would suffer the same fate.
But it takes close reading to see what they actually clarified: the court is not *required to *ignore "evidence of the distributor's intent" if there is some noninfringing use. They didn't say what percentage of use had to be noninfringing, etc.
What sunk Grokster was that after they started looking at the distributor's intent, they found inducement.
Under the Grokster precedent, a (hypothetical) company demonstrably *never encouraged infringement would not necessarily be culpable, even if the noninfringing use were, say, only 5% of the total use.
Since you think I don't know what I'm talking about, please share your interpretation of the Grokster holding and dicta. I can't wait.
Basically, the grokster holding did not overturn the Sony safe harbor test. SCOTUS used the fact that Grokster "induced" infringement to escape having to clarify or overturn the meaning of "substantial noninfringing use".
"What happened to the consensual transation of Jack presumably paying money for the CD in the first place? It's doubtful the authors of the CD would have sold it had they known that he'd copy it illegally....How come interfering with these social contracts is not wrong, but interfering with someone copying a CD for a friend is wrong?"
Because those other contracts you're talking about are presumed or hypothetical.
Jack and Jill's activity does no harm to anyone else. You seem to understand this fine, but fall back on the usual rebuttal:
"But in the *absence of that activity Jill would have paid _________ ($10? ($6? ($4 ($0.41)))) for the CD, therefore it does harm [hypothetical CD seller] by _______"
The blanks are the problem. You don't know what goes in there. Approx. 97% of the time the answer is zero, and the rest of the time it's close enough to zero that it's not worth spending millions a year to try and prevent this from happening.
The other fallback rebuttal is, of course, "Ye Gods! No one will make any art if people are allowed to share it with each other!" Which, to make a long story short, is bunk.
"The fact that a minority (and don't kid yourself - They are a minority) share Ubuntu, PBS programs and other free material does not justify the actions of the larger community.
Culpability and liability are real words in real world courts..."
Anyone who uses a computer is a "consumer" of operating systems. May be you meant "operating systems oriented toward those consumers who don't realize they have a choice?"
Yeah, I'm not skeptical that people --executive or otherwise -- can get paid that much "on the open market". I'm skeptical that these salaries arise from actual value generated.
"how about they just fucking reposition the window properly"
Because "properly" is context-dependent, and can mean one of approximately 975 things depending on the context.
The positioning of GP's window is perfect for a certain situation. The fact that heshe instructed X to position it that way, when heshe is not in that situation, is not a problem with Linux.
I wonder about this sometimes: Manual laborers can probably generate 20-50k a year in value without much in the way of special skills. People with special technical knowledge, skills, and/or talent can likely generate 50-200k a year in value. But 3 million? 8 mllion? Really?
I suspect that the huge increases in balance-sheet values of companies depend on circumstances, luck, in short: a lot of factors totally independent of the CEO and hisher labor.
A problem I see is that the experiment that might verify this would never be carried out: replace a few hundred CEOs with random reasonably-intelligent but otherwise ordinary people. See what percentage of the companies thrive/perish, and compare to the general corporate population.
"is market share the goal? If not then don't begrudge windows for providing an end user experience that is preferred. "
meh. if windows did that i wouldn't begrudge them. In my experience, though, windows market share is not built on direct competition on experience but on:
-Your data will disappear into a black hole if you use components from any other platform -The protocols (i.e. communication *rules) that windows uses are property, and if you try to figure them out you'll go to jail.
"If you choose the wrong can of peaches, it's another.79 to pick a different one next time. If you choose the wrong OS, it could be 5 days of work to reconfigure everything, assuming you even know what you're doing."
I like this analogy, and the point is insightful. However:
If one brand of peaches made it such that when you buy them, your strawberries and pancackes no longer work, you'd probably go wtf?!?
Or maybe it's like this: suppose your cookbook indicates "one 20-oz. can peaches" and you go to the store and only one brand has the 20-oz. can...
Just thinking aloud here. FOSS is the bulk produce section maybe: you have to retrain a bit to find out how many peaches is 20 ounces, but there are some rewards:
You can see the fruit before you buy it.
You don't have to worry about whether, due to some arcane behind-the-scenes rules (code), "0g trans fat" actually means ".49g trans fat"
You can buy tons of peaches and use some in the pie, freeze some, make juice from others, etc. You get the raw material rather than a product geared for one use.
You have to learn a bit about how peaches work, but if you end up at a friend's house and they don't have the 20 oz. can, you can often make something tasty using something else...
"Microsoft would be up shit creek without new sales of Windows - and the easiest way to do that is to make people think their current version is out of date. People want the latest and greatest."
True, but if those don't coincide they want the greatest more. Cf. their aversion to the "latest and crappiest" Vista.
"I called for help and they said "We only support Windows and Mac," and then hung-up on me. Nice."
Sorry, did you say this was a flaw with *Linux?
smartassery aside, I urge you to stick with it a little more. The ubuntu forums are great -- and most of the people there are not as snarky as my above comment, which i couldn't resist and for which i apologize.
There are snags, of course, but there are also sweet rewards.
"Apple provides the product and they should be able to tell you how you are allowed to use it."
Exactly. Read your EULA, or whatever the iPhone's equivalent is. You were pitched a locked-down device with a closed software stack, and you went "fine, whatever, as long as it Just Works(TM) you can do what you want."
Now they're doing what they want -- leveraging the closed platform to shut out competition. And you're bitching.
Eldred v Ashcroft holding was that a copyright law (in that example the one that extended Mickey's copyright protection) is presumed constitutional if it doesn't explicitly say it's for "infinite length" and if it maintains the distinction between idea and expression.
Although your reading -- that a copyright law is unconstitutional if it does not promote Science and the Useful Arts -- makes a lot of common sense, it just isn't the case.
Capitalism (apparently): 1. Govt. uses public money to fund research & development. 2. Govt. hands output of said R&D to corps, to patent, productize, and profit!
Communism (I guess): 1. Govt uses public money to fund software development. 2. Govt gives output of said development to the public at no charge.
I know that when I come to/. on April 1, what I'm looking for is an even-handed, discerning discussion of the ethics of comedy, with due attention to qualifications and ramifications.
Slashdot Mirror
'Spoken like one of those OSS trolls that keep saying: "It's OSS, if you don't like it, fix it yourself"
'If a restaurant serves something not up to standards, most people won't go in to the restaurant kitchen and tell the chef how to fix it, nor do they start a new restaurant.'
And you've spoken line one of those proprietary trolls who doesn't grok the *actual benefit of open source. Based on the rest of your post, you're not one; but this touches a nerve with me because I feel that cooking/restaurants are a *great way to introduce the free software paradigm to people.
If I get and don't like a ham sandwich, my options are not (only) to open my own ham sandwich restaurant or fix the one I went to. There are *other restaurants. There are in fact about 150 different kinds of ham sandwich that have emerged from the various cultures and time period in human history.
If food worked the way proprietary software does, you would agree not to reverse engineer your ham sandwich, work around any limitations thereof, and so on and so forth. There would be a patent on the slicing of pork for arrangement on bread or breadlike products; as a consequence, there would be no other restaurants offering them. Furthermore, your sandwich would stop functioning if you choose iced tea and potato chips instead of Coke and french fries to go with it. It's quite ridiculous to contemplate.
The importance of free technology is not that every Dom, Hick, and Tarry can go compile a kernel or assemble a distro. It's that an *actual competitive market can emerge from the world at large being allowed to do these things. Dom, Hick, and Tarry benefit from that market.
"a hacked copy of Windows may be more secure and less malicious because it isn't "phoning home" to Microsoft."
I would actually venture a guess that in some cases it's illegal to use a non-hacked Windows. There was a case where a guy figured out that the automatic updates feature -- because it sent system information through the public *net -- could not legally be used to run the bank that he worked for.
Glad to see you're joining the "I'm never installing Windows again" club.
.. it wasn't actually the decision.
It is true that Grokster lost that case, but not because the MPAA's argument about what constitutes "substantial non-infringing use" prevailed.
Rather, it was because there was clear evidence that Grokster *induced infringement actively.
From Phil Larson's excellent summary of Breyer's concurrence:
"the tool does not even require substantial non-infringing uses in the shortterm if it appears that there is a reasonable prospect for there to be substantial non-infringing uses in the future.,,,
He argued that the "capable of" language in Sony is forward looking and doesn't confine the analysis of liability to a static interpretation of the product's existing uses"
http://www.philiplarson.com/blog/?p=
"since you have no interest in posting facts to support your arguments"
I just have this; I'm not a legal expert or anything.
"the Court held that the rule in Sony does not require courts to ignore evidence of the distributor's intent. The majority opinion then applied this new inducement test to the facts in Grokster. Given that Grokster clearly distributed its product and that there was fairly substantial evidence that users used the software to commit actual infringement, the only element of the inducement rule the Court addressed at length was whether Grokster took affirmative steps to encourage its users to commit copyright infringement"
Note: in Grokster, it was the fact that Grokster actively encouraged infringement that made them hold as they did. It is probably true that TPB -- were it subject to US law -- would suffer the same fate.
But it takes close reading to see what they actually clarified: the court is not *required to *ignore "evidence of the distributor's intent" if there is some noninfringing use. They didn't say what percentage of use had to be noninfringing, etc.
What sunk Grokster was that after they started looking at the distributor's intent, they found inducement.
Under the Grokster precedent, a (hypothetical) company demonstrably *never encouraged infringement would not necessarily be culpable, even if the noninfringing use were, say, only 5% of the total use.
Since you think I don't know what I'm talking about, please share your interpretation of the Grokster holding and dicta. I can't wait.
I was just reading up on this, since I referred to grokster in other posts. You might like:
http://www.philiplarson.com/blog/?p=5
Basically, the grokster holding did not overturn the Sony safe harbor test. SCOTUS used the fact that Grokster "induced" infringement to escape having to clarify or overturn the meaning of "substantial noninfringing use".
Oh, I see. You think they're bad people. Feel free; I could care less what outrages you morally.
I was talking about the United States's legal standard for controlling technologies that are capable of being used for copyright infringement.
"What happened to the consensual transation of Jack presumably paying money for the CD in the first place? It's doubtful the authors of the CD would have sold it had they known that he'd copy it illegally. ...How come interfering with these social contracts is not wrong, but interfering with someone copying a CD for a friend is wrong?"
Because those other contracts you're talking about are presumed or hypothetical.
Jack and Jill's activity does no harm to anyone else. You seem to understand this fine, but fall back on the usual rebuttal:
"But in the *absence of that activity Jill would have paid _________ ($10? ($6? ($4 ($0.41)))) for the CD, therefore it does harm [hypothetical CD seller] by _______"
The blanks are the problem. You don't know what goes in there. Approx. 97% of the time the answer is zero, and the rest of the time it's close enough to zero that it's not worth spending millions a year to try and prevent this from happening.
The other fallback rebuttal is, of course, "Ye Gods! No one will make any art if people are allowed to share it with each other!" Which, to make a long story short, is bunk.
"The fact that a minority (and don't kid yourself - They are a minority) share Ubuntu, PBS programs and other free material does not justify the actions of the larger community.
Culpability and liability are real words in real world courts ..."
So is "substantial noninfringing use"
Anyone who uses a computer is a "consumer" of operating systems.
May be you meant "operating systems oriented toward those consumers who don't realize they have a choice?"
Yeah, I'm not skeptical that people --executive or otherwise -- can get paid that much "on the open market". I'm skeptical that these salaries arise from actual value generated.
"how about they just fucking reposition the window properly"
Because "properly" is context-dependent, and can mean one of approximately 975 things depending on the context.
The positioning of GP's window is perfect for a certain situation. The fact that heshe instructed X to position it that way, when heshe is not in that situation, is not a problem with Linux.
I wonder about this sometimes:
Manual laborers can probably generate 20-50k a year in value without much in the way of special skills.
People with special technical knowledge, skills, and/or talent can likely generate 50-200k a year in value.
But 3 million? 8 mllion? Really?
I suspect that the huge increases in balance-sheet values of companies depend on circumstances, luck, in short: a lot of factors totally independent of the CEO and hisher labor.
A problem I see is that the experiment that might verify this would never be carried out: replace a few hundred CEOs with random reasonably-intelligent but otherwise ordinary people. See what percentage of the companies thrive/perish, and compare to the general corporate population.
Geez, the article headline has the words "Swedish" *and "strippers" in it, and you guys are spending the whole thread talking about government bonds.
"is market share the goal? If not then don't begrudge windows for providing an end user experience that is preferred. "
meh. if windows did that i wouldn't begrudge them. In my experience, though, windows market share is not built on direct competition on experience but on:
-Your data will disappear into a black hole if you use components from any other platform
-The protocols (i.e. communication *rules) that windows uses are property, and if you try to figure them out you'll go to jail.
"If you choose the wrong can of peaches, it's another .79 to pick a different one next time. If you choose the wrong OS, it could be 5 days of work to reconfigure everything, assuming you even know what you're doing."
I like this analogy, and the point is insightful. However:
If one brand of peaches made it such that when you buy them, your strawberries and pancackes no longer work, you'd probably go wtf?!?
Or maybe it's like this: suppose your cookbook indicates "one 20-oz. can peaches" and you go to the store and only one brand has the 20-oz. can...
Just thinking aloud here. FOSS is the bulk produce section maybe: you have to retrain a bit to find out how many peaches is 20 ounces, but there are some rewards:
You can see the fruit before you buy it.
You don't have to worry about whether, due to some arcane behind-the-scenes rules (code), "0g trans fat" actually means ".49g trans fat"
You can buy tons of peaches and use some in the pie, freeze some, make juice from others, etc. You get the raw material rather than a product geared for one use.
You have to learn a bit about how peaches work, but if you end up at a friend's house and they don't have the 20 oz. can, you can often make something tasty using something else...
"Microsoft would be up shit creek without new sales of Windows - and the easiest way to do that is to make people think their current version is out of date. People want the latest and greatest."
True, but if those don't coincide they want the greatest more. Cf. their aversion to the "latest and crappiest" Vista.
um.. you're not my cuistopemr
"I called for help and they said "We only support Windows and Mac," and then hung-up on me. Nice."
Sorry, did you say this was a flaw with *Linux?
smartassery aside, I urge you to stick with it a little more. The ubuntu forums are great -- and most of the people there are not as snarky as my above comment, which i couldn't resist and for which i apologize.
There are snags, of course, but there are also sweet rewards.
then right click it and unmaximize it if necessary, then resize.
"Apple provides the product and they should be able to tell you how you are allowed to use it."
Exactly. Read your EULA, or whatever the iPhone's equivalent is. You were pitched a locked-down device with a closed software stack, and you went "fine, whatever, as long as it Just Works(TM) you can do what you want."
Now they're doing what they want -- leveraging the closed platform to shut out competition. And you're bitching.
Eldred v Ashcroft holding was that a copyright law (in that example the one that extended Mickey's copyright protection) is presumed constitutional if it doesn't explicitly say it's for "infinite length" and if it maintains the distinction between idea and expression.
Although your reading -- that a copyright law is unconstitutional if it does not promote Science and the Useful Arts -- makes a lot of common sense, it just isn't the case.
In America, I mean. As presently Constituted.
"Oh wait, that would be communism... "
Capitalism (apparently):
1. Govt. uses public money to fund research & development.
2. Govt. hands output of said R&D to corps, to patent, productize, and profit!
Communism (I guess):
1. Govt uses public money to fund software development.
2. Govt gives output of said development to the public at no charge.
Man, it's so hard to choose..
I know that when I come to /. on April 1, what I'm looking for is an even-handed, discerning discussion of the ethics of comedy, with due attention to qualifications and ramifications.
My face is melted off, you insensitive clod!