That is to say that licenses are tied to individuals, rather than works. I may have a license for a tune where my neighbor may not.
The system cannot know if I have a license. Moreover, if I do put a work up for distribution, there's the problem that they have to take my word for it that I have not lied about the terms under which I am distributing it.
Also, typically licenses can also be dependent on the type of use. How are they to know how I am using something I downloaded? In many cases, it may not be immediately clear if distribution in this manner is permissible...
Sure, they are trying to cover their collective butts, but from what? There's no reason to believe that such a superficial system that doesn't mirror any material aspect of copyright law is going to be considered due diligence in policing themselves.
The RIAA is sending out these letter principally for the press it generates. Specifically, they want to create several impressions: that they are the predominant holders of copyrighted material and thus uniquely affected by exchange of same, that the efficiency of P2P methods poses a specific threat to copyright enforcement, and that the mere presence of a something constitutes inducement to use it for a particular purpose.
Well, the vast majority of copyrights (in the US) are held by individuals, not cpmpanies and especially not the RIAA. This is true if, for no other reason, than simply commiting anything marginally creative to any sort of physical medium or "performing something" generates a "work" which is automatically copyright by the author(s) on inception. Write a letter to grandma, it's copyright.
P2P methods are not really any more efficient than other methods save for the optimization of bandwidth. Other methods are amenable to indexers, crawlers, and mass distribution. P2P is not unique.
I'd also argue that mere availability of a technology does not constitute inducement to use it for a particular purpose. They sell hammers, but relatively few people use them to bash people's heads in. Likewise, miniskirts and prostitution. One might argue that publishing indices of files is inducement, but it's equally arguable that it's transparency so that copyright holders not yet hip with the times can see what's going on...
But why do people download stuff from P2P? It's cheaper, it's conveninent, they want to experiment sampling things that are unknown to them without having to pay for what theywill probably dislike and throw away, and because the amount of choice found in retail channels is rapidly declining. For the past few years, the number of new releases has dropped what, 10% per year? Back catalogs are less and less available...
Let's face it, anorexic Disney Channel graduates and the MTV flash-in-the-pan hip-hop hapless crew not withstanding, if you REALLY like music, the music industry simply doesn't publish it anymore.
They're lashing out at a public that's increasingly seeing them as irrelelvent. For those brought up with the Internet, the notion that music and video aren't stored in central databases, cross-indexed and even searchable with a few notes from the chorus, is quaint indeed. Perhaps ORACLE will buy them -- they don't know any more about music than CRM, it'll fit their business just fine.
The reason the so-called "carnivore" system was replaced so quickly was because that it was used too frequently -- just not by the US government. In fact, the very same systems that facilitate wiretaps and the like are far more often used illicitly by non-government entities than by the US government -- just ask the GAO.
That begs the question -- to what end, and for whom? The directive clearly doesn't serve the government (as we understand it) or the people. Who then, and how is it that the FCC has been caused to make such a peculiar request (beyond their mandate, no less)?
Conspiracy theories aside -- it's probably safe to say it's simply blatant stupidity.
For what it's worth, however, one should assume the Internet to be broadcast medium. It's only as secure as whatever encryption keys you use.
To be fair... The default icon set, crystal-svg, is there precisely because people liked it and said as much. You can use the GNOME icons with KDE too -- so you can have Exquisite if that's your taste. But, Exquisite isn't the default for GNOME either. The default GNOME icons are equally as chintzy as the default KDE ones...
Dunno about Amtel, but prism support has been a basic part of Mandriva for quite some time. I checked 2005LE just now and the Amtel driver's right there.
I would point out for those not familiar with Mandriva, Wi-fi support's always been in there and has been pretty decent, but for the fact that you've got both the Mandrake control panel for wi-fi and kwifimanager -- not only redundant, but the Control Center config panel has text input boxes where there should be drop-downs and check boxes...
I think you'd note that the AP owner's agreement with the ISP explicitly restricted the AP owner from reselling or allowing public access through his service.
Moreover, the owner knew: the device was broadcasting to the public, the device was configured to accept connections from the public, and the device was broadcasting that it was for public use. You extend and invitation to someone to come to your house, and call the police to report them as a tresspasser? Worse, the cops are willing to accept the dinner guests as tresspassers, even though you went to the trouble of preparing them a nice meal?
I find this confusing. USB sticks have been automagically recognized and mounted for quite some time (at least in Mandrake/Mandriva, but they didn't write hotplug, so I'm sure it's true of elsewhere).
You can't pan Linux for not being ready for use as replacement for your non-Linux desktop if you can't be bothered to try a distribution that at least makes an effort to be a desktop replacement.
Religious sentiment aside, there are quite a few very pragmatic reasons why one might approach cloning with quite a bit of caution. If it were to reach the sci-fi level of cloning, there's all sorts of issues of identity management and "clone's rights" (e.g., for harvesting of organs, etc.) that are not worked out. From the immediately practical point of view, how the law treats (or should treat) embryos and the like is anything but clear and settled, and from the technical standpoint, we don't understand enough about epigenetics to haul off and start wholesale cloning for medical purposes (only to find out later that we accidentally introduce a novel autoimmune response that will not only cause harm, but billions of dollars in medical care and litigation).
I know it's vogue to lambast religion these days, but the world's religions are getting a seriously bum rap. Sure, there are people that attribute their psycopathy on their religious affiliation, but despite a fondness for giving those people a disproportionate amount of media coverage, there's no evidence that such people are anything but a small crackpot minority -- sort of like astrologers who sue NASA.
At least here in the USA, the media will present any crack-pot viewpoint in opposition to the majority viewpoint and push the impression that both are equally well subscribed to and supported. Global warming is a good example. In the scientific community, there's really no debate, but to hear the press tell it, it's a contraversial subject.
While the methodology is new, the observation is anything but. Details of how neurons conduct impulses (and the way they self-attenuate, adjust modulation and amplitude, etc.) has been understood for decades. There are no revelations here. In fact, computational neural-nets were a graph theoretical application of communication theory (very) loosely based on those observations -- hence the name. A neural network is a primitive model of a single neuron.
Re:And Paramount's response?
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 1
The choice of what to do with it is in the hands of the creator, not what the masses want.
Ahh... But there's the rub. We are talking copyright. Where neither the desire of the masses or the creator matter. Copyright is a trade-off and exists to secure transient rights to the creator of a work with the explicit requirement that in exchange that same work will ultimately be remanded to the public domain (with or without the author's consent, regardless of the difficulty of originally producing the work, and without any renumeration).
The question is pertinent. Because the government extended the protection of copyright to the work, the work is ultimately slated to become part of public domain. If an agent is afforded the protections of copyright, then, logically they must uphold the their end of the agreement. If the individual that maintains the rights to the work seeks to destroy it or prevent it from ever being released -- then it seems a reasonable argument that they are trying to subvert the contract.
I think it's a very good question to ask, actually. It touches not only on "abandoned" works (where the rights holder refuses to publish), but also "orphaned" works (where the work is protected by copyright but for which there's no clear rights holder). Obviously, refusing to publish a work is an important right granted to copyright holders -- but making sure that something NEVER gets published (e.g., doing anything that would prevent a work from entering into the public domain once the copyright expires) arguably is not.
Based on past history, what's the likelihood that this show would ever have entered the public domain?
This is one of those rulings that will have a number of unintended consequences. There are some practical ramifications of not being common carrier (mostly, it will ultimately mean a lower grade of service and high consumer costs for cable service), but the court didn't end there.
Their conclusion was that cable internet and phone service wasn't a telecommunication service under the law. Economic issues aside, this is interesting from the standpoint of taxation (the argument that a web-based site is a mail-order busines by virtue of conducting business over the phone and thus subject to state sales tax, for instance). How about E991 -- it no longer applies to cable companies because their service is not phone service or even telecommunication service. Cable companies wouldn't need to feign neutrality on site access either -- preferred content providers get bandwidth, where others get none, etc.
In the short term, I'm sure this is considered a win for the cable companies, but I suspect in the end it will sink them.
... after all, they've a full-page ad in the Wired magazine touting Windows XP for ripping music, remixing it, and sharing ti with our friends. Windows XP makes it easy, if I recall correctly.
That would seem to qualify.
The SCOTUS decision is going to open a huge can of worms. Many ISPs have, for years, sold their broadband service as something that helps you download music at blazing speeds (long before legal services were available) and they permit you to download all sorts of images and content as well as upload content without any sorts of release forms, etc.
If the media companies wanted to, they've got the ammunition now to simply block public access (in the US) to the Internet until a new technology could be developed to limit data exchange to something they approve of.
The nice thing about the Microsoft "crap" about Avalanche is that it ensures press about BitTorrent. Certainly, it's inaccurate to a fault, but it will make people look it up on the web.
Obviously sharing "other-people's data" is a common use for BitTorrent, but a growning number of companies distribute their wares via BitTorrent, and I'd like to see more of that.
Specifically, I would like to see purveyors of large databases (particularly public ones like those at the NCBI) start to embrace P2P as a distribution strategy. In the case of NCBI, every biotech and pharma on the planet is grabbing copies of those huge databases on a regular basis (they change frequently). This incurs huge bandwidth on their part, and promises slow delivery for those downloading. BitTorrent could drop their bandwidth usage 10,000-fold and fantastically speed up transfer rates to the downloaders. Everybody wins!
Several web browsers already have this sort of feature built-in. Konqueror and Firefox, for example.
If you are using Konqueror, type the following into the location field and see what comes up:
wp:slashdot
... now go to yubnub.org, find the search field, type in 'wp slashdot' and click 'submit'.
Like yubnub.org, you can make your own shortcuts. I suppose the idea of yubnub is that you can share these things with friends through their site, but you could just as easily share the shortcut and it would ultimately be easier to use the second time around...
Case law in the US clearly refutes your assertions. First, the scope of "fair use" is not predifined (purposely so), but the court is not likely to differentiate soley on the basis of the medium (Internet). Specifically, if you share video or sound clips, it's likely "fair use" so long as it's a smaller portion of a whole or is required as referential material for another work (commentary, editorial, satire, etc.). The court is intended to be the final arbiter of what is "fair", and in the past has adjuicated a wide range of "uses" to be "fair use" beyond those examples that appear in the statute (the term "such as" indicating to the court that they do not represent an exhaustive list).
There's a tremendous amount of case law on the subject, but you can infer from it that posting Star Wars III torrent would be generally be infringment, but excerpting a light saber duel and sticking it in a page discussing theatrical combat choreography would probably be considered legitimate fair use (more so if bibliographic information is provided along with the clip).
Moreover, the notion that "you can do anything you want with it", referring to content, was the law until passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which introduced "digital works" as a special class with special rules and introduced the notion of "technological access control". The most interesting portion of the act is really that it expands copyright to not only cover copying, but now to also cover "access" (including limiting access to works which you've legitimately obtained a copy). This aspect of the law is the part that really seeks to invalidate all prior interpretations of fair use. It's quite clear this why the law refers to technological access controls rather than copy protection.
Incidentally, this is one reason why there are region code hacks for so many DVD players yet nobody has ever been prosecuted fo using them. The reason region codes exist is because player manufacturers are forced to license the content-scrambling algorithm and keys from the CCA and a portion of that license stipulates that vendors must implement the region code (itself meant as part of a price-fixing scheme). Yet various countries protect the consumer's right to view content from wherever they get it, and there are people that want to view content from abroad. In the US, for example, circumventing region codes to watch foreign DVDs is grudgingly understood by the media industry to be "fair-use" and they've never considered filing suit against those that do it -- nor do they need to (yet) because it's sufficiently inconvenient that few do it.
It goes without saying that Miguel Icaza will have a reference implementation of Monad written in C#, running under Mono and incorporated into the GNOME environment by 1Q2006.
In a reflection of it's GPL nature, it will be called Gonad, and the boot splash will proclaim: "Gonad: Doesn't Microsoft wish they had one?"
If you work around a problem, it hides from the user that the problem exists. The demand to have it fixed, therefore, dissipates and developers accept the onus to repeat work-arounds everytime they deploy something. Ultimately, the browser fails to improve, and the costs of errors are passed from the vendor (Microsoft) who never fixes the problem to the public (developers that waste time with work-arounds).
Anyway, if you write things specifically for IE -- then you've already got a more serious problem that you have to address first. There's no excuse for what you already know to be dismal practice.
I don't know why people pan these things as servers. Are people not aware that there's more to contemporary computing that HTTP daemons and database transactions?
I work in the biotech industry and we use computer farms and grids for all sorts of computationally intensive tasks: biopolymer sequence alignments, docking simulations, protein modeling, high-throughout 3D mass spectral analysis, etc.
A server with cell-blades and some minor tweaks to our software would generate a tremendous "bang-for-the-buck".
I looked into the Maui X stuff and checked, and yes, they are very cleraly violating the GPL. It strikes me, however, that by making it impossible to obtain the source code, they are circumventing the technological measure of access control (namely, the source code in ASCII form).
The DMCA doesn't necessarily require an access control measure to lock someone out of access to a work (how it is typically employed). Specifically, a technical measure is:
(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
I'd argue that distributing source code so as to grant access to the work is an effective measure to do so, and that in the normal course of it's operation (communicating the structure of an application) that it requires the application of information (headers, expert knowledge, software analysis tools), a process or treatment (at the very least, a system tath can decode ASCII and render it as glyphs on a display or printed page), and the authority of the copyright owner (a license; namely the GPL).
It seems to mee that if you contact their ISP you can have their site shut down. Further, you can complain to the FBI since it's now a federal criminal complaint:
(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter.
There are a wide range of factors that effect performance. I've got a Honda Civic Hybrid and the factors that seem to have notable effects on performance are: ambient temperature (I live in New England, so this varies quite a bit), tire pressure (obviously), average speed, variance of speed, and texture of the road surface (which seems to have a more pronounced effect on mileage in a hybrid than other cars).
Moderate to moderately agressive driving seems to eke out the best performance.
Mileage varies from about 42 mpg during the winter months while commuting, to about 58 mpg (summer months, weekend trips). During the winter I average 44 mpg and during the summer I average about 52 mpg.
I find that it's pretty tricky to consciously boost the performance figures... So, I don't bother trying.
Slashdot Mirror
That is to say that licenses are tied to individuals, rather than works. I may have a license for a tune where my neighbor may not.
The system cannot know if I have a license. Moreover, if I do put a work up for distribution, there's the problem that they have to take my word for it that I have not lied about the terms under which I am distributing it.
Also, typically licenses can also be dependent on the type of use. How are they to know how I am using something I downloaded? In many cases, it may not be immediately clear if distribution in this manner is permissible...
Sure, they are trying to cover their collective butts, but from what? There's no reason to believe that such a superficial system that doesn't mirror any material aspect of copyright law is going to be considered due diligence in policing themselves.
To be precise, copyright infringement is not even a crime, it's a tort.
The only exception is the explicit case of a DMCA violation -- which is, in fact, a crime rather than a tort.
The RIAA is sending out these letter principally for the press it generates. Specifically, they want to create several impressions: that they are the predominant holders of copyrighted material and thus uniquely affected by exchange of same, that the efficiency of P2P methods poses a specific threat to copyright enforcement, and that the mere presence of a something constitutes inducement to use it for a particular purpose.
Well, the vast majority of copyrights (in the US) are held by individuals, not cpmpanies and especially not the RIAA. This is true if, for no other reason, than simply commiting anything marginally creative to any sort of physical medium or "performing something" generates a "work" which is automatically copyright by the author(s) on inception. Write a letter to grandma, it's copyright.
P2P methods are not really any more efficient than other methods save for the optimization of bandwidth. Other methods are amenable to indexers, crawlers, and mass distribution. P2P is not unique.
I'd also argue that mere availability of a technology does not constitute inducement to use it for a particular purpose. They sell hammers, but relatively few people use them to bash people's heads in. Likewise, miniskirts and prostitution. One might argue that publishing indices of files is inducement, but it's equally arguable that it's transparency so that copyright holders not yet hip with the times can see what's going on...
But why do people download stuff from P2P? It's cheaper, it's conveninent, they want to experiment sampling things that are unknown to them without having to pay for what theywill probably dislike and throw away, and because the amount of choice found in retail channels is rapidly declining. For the past few years, the number of new releases has dropped what, 10% per year? Back catalogs are less and less available...
Let's face it, anorexic Disney Channel graduates and the MTV flash-in-the-pan hip-hop hapless crew not withstanding, if you REALLY like music, the music industry simply doesn't publish it anymore.
They're lashing out at a public that's increasingly seeing them as irrelelvent. For those brought up with the Internet, the notion that music and video aren't stored in central databases, cross-indexed and even searchable with a few notes from the chorus, is quaint indeed. Perhaps ORACLE will buy them -- they don't know any more about music than CRM, it'll fit their business just fine.
The reason the so-called "carnivore" system was replaced so quickly was because that it was used too frequently -- just not by the US government. In fact, the very same systems that facilitate wiretaps and the like are far more often used illicitly by non-government entities than by the US government -- just ask the GAO.
That begs the question -- to what end, and for whom? The directive clearly doesn't serve the government (as we understand it) or the people. Who then, and how is it that the FCC has been caused to make such a peculiar request (beyond their mandate, no less)?
Conspiracy theories aside -- it's probably safe to say it's simply blatant stupidity.
For what it's worth, however, one should assume the Internet to be broadcast medium. It's only as secure as whatever encryption keys you use.
To be fair... The default icon set, crystal-svg, is there precisely because people liked it and said as much. You can use the GNOME icons with KDE too -- so you can have Exquisite if that's your taste. But, Exquisite isn't the default for GNOME either. The default GNOME icons are equally as chintzy as the default KDE ones...
Dunno about Amtel, but prism support has been a basic part of Mandriva for quite some time. I checked 2005LE just now and the Amtel driver's right there.
I would point out for those not familiar with Mandriva, Wi-fi support's always been in there and has been pretty decent, but for the fact that you've got both the Mandrake control panel for wi-fi and kwifimanager -- not only redundant, but the Control Center config panel has text input boxes where there should be drop-downs and check boxes...
The initial stage of the anti-piracy campaign will be broken down into several simple goals:
If that doesn't stop piracy, nothing will. Er, I guess nothing will... nevermind.
I think you'd note that the AP owner's agreement with the ISP explicitly restricted the AP owner from reselling or allowing public access through his service.
Moreover, the owner knew: the device was broadcasting to the public, the device was configured to accept connections from the public, and the device was broadcasting that it was for public use. You extend and invitation to someone to come to your house, and call the police to report them as a tresspasser? Worse, the cops are willing to accept the dinner guests as tresspassers, even though you went to the trouble of preparing them a nice meal?
Dumb.
I find this confusing. USB sticks have been automagically recognized and mounted for quite some time (at least in Mandrake/Mandriva, but they didn't write hotplug, so I'm sure it's true of elsewhere).
You can't pan Linux for not being ready for use as replacement for your non-Linux desktop if you can't be bothered to try a distribution that at least makes an effort to be a desktop replacement.
Religious sentiment aside, there are quite a few very pragmatic reasons why one might approach cloning with quite a bit of caution. If it were to reach the sci-fi level of cloning, there's all sorts of issues of identity management and "clone's rights" (e.g., for harvesting of organs, etc.) that are not worked out. From the immediately practical point of view, how the law treats (or should treat) embryos and the like is anything but clear and settled, and from the technical standpoint, we don't understand enough about epigenetics to haul off and start wholesale cloning for medical purposes (only to find out later that we accidentally introduce a novel autoimmune response that will not only cause harm, but billions of dollars in medical care and litigation).
I know it's vogue to lambast religion these days, but the world's religions are getting a seriously bum rap. Sure, there are people that attribute their psycopathy on their religious affiliation, but despite a fondness for giving those people a disproportionate amount of media coverage, there's no evidence that such people are anything but a small crackpot minority -- sort of like astrologers who sue NASA.
At least here in the USA, the media will present any crack-pot viewpoint in opposition to the majority viewpoint and push the impression that both are equally well subscribed to and supported. Global warming is a good example. In the scientific community, there's really no debate, but to hear the press tell it, it's a contraversial subject.
While the methodology is new, the observation is anything but. Details of how neurons conduct impulses (and the way they self-attenuate, adjust modulation and amplitude, etc.) has been understood for decades. There are no revelations here. In fact, computational neural-nets were a graph theoretical application of communication theory (very) loosely based on those observations -- hence the name. A neural network is a primitive model of a single neuron.
Ahh... But there's the rub. We are talking copyright. Where neither the desire of the masses or the creator matter. Copyright is a trade-off and exists to secure transient rights to the creator of a work with the explicit requirement that in exchange that same work will ultimately be remanded to the public domain (with or without the author's consent, regardless of the difficulty of originally producing the work, and without any renumeration).
The question is pertinent. Because the government extended the protection of copyright to the work, the work is ultimately slated to become part of public domain. If an agent is afforded the protections of copyright, then, logically they must uphold the their end of the agreement. If the individual that maintains the rights to the work seeks to destroy it or prevent it from ever being released -- then it seems a reasonable argument that they are trying to subvert the contract.
I think it's a very good question to ask, actually. It touches not only on "abandoned" works (where the rights holder refuses to publish), but also "orphaned" works (where the work is protected by copyright but for which there's no clear rights holder). Obviously, refusing to publish a work is an important right granted to copyright holders -- but making sure that something NEVER gets published (e.g., doing anything that would prevent a work from entering into the public domain once the copyright expires) arguably is not.
Based on past history, what's the likelihood that this show would ever have entered the public domain?
This is one of those rulings that will have a number of unintended consequences. There are some practical ramifications of not being common carrier (mostly, it will ultimately mean a lower grade of service and high consumer costs for cable service), but the court didn't end there.
Their conclusion was that cable internet and phone service wasn't a telecommunication service under the law. Economic issues aside, this is interesting from the standpoint of taxation (the argument that a web-based site is a mail-order busines by virtue of conducting business over the phone and thus subject to state sales tax, for instance). How about E991 -- it no longer applies to cable companies because their service is not phone service or even telecommunication service. Cable companies wouldn't need to feign neutrality on site access either -- preferred content providers get bandwidth, where others get none, etc.
In the short term, I'm sure this is considered a win for the cable companies, but I suspect in the end it will sink them.
... after all, they've a full-page ad in the Wired magazine touting Windows XP for ripping music, remixing it, and sharing ti with our friends. Windows XP makes it easy, if I recall correctly.
That would seem to qualify.
The SCOTUS decision is going to open a huge can of worms. Many ISPs have, for years, sold their broadband service as something that helps you download music at blazing speeds (long before legal services were available) and they permit you to download all sorts of images and content as well as upload content without any sorts of release forms, etc.
If the media companies wanted to, they've got the ammunition now to simply block public access (in the US) to the Internet until a new technology could be developed to limit data exchange to something they approve of.
The nice thing about the Microsoft "crap" about Avalanche is that it ensures press about BitTorrent. Certainly, it's inaccurate to a fault, but it will make people look it up on the web.
Obviously sharing "other-people's data" is a common use for BitTorrent, but a growning number of companies distribute their wares via BitTorrent, and I'd like to see more of that.
Specifically, I would like to see purveyors of large databases (particularly public ones like those at the NCBI) start to embrace P2P as a distribution strategy. In the case of NCBI, every biotech and pharma on the planet is grabbing copies of those huge databases on a regular basis (they change frequently). This incurs huge bandwidth on their part, and promises slow delivery for those downloading. BitTorrent could drop their bandwidth usage 10,000-fold and fantastically speed up transfer rates to the downloaders. Everybody wins!
Well, it's the prefferred method of distribution for certain software vendors.
Besides that, I typically use it for distributing home videos to family that are scattered around the globe...
Several web browsers already have this sort of feature built-in. Konqueror and Firefox, for example.
If you are using Konqueror, type the following into the location field and see what comes up:
... now go to yubnub.org, find the search field, type in 'wp slashdot' and click 'submit'.
Like yubnub.org, you can make your own shortcuts. I suppose the idea of yubnub is that you can share these things with friends through their site, but you could just as easily share the shortcut and it would ultimately be easier to use the second time around...
Case law in the US clearly refutes your assertions. First, the scope of "fair use" is not predifined (purposely so), but the court is not likely to differentiate soley on the basis of the medium (Internet). Specifically, if you share video or sound clips, it's likely "fair use" so long as it's a smaller portion of a whole or is required as referential material for another work (commentary, editorial, satire, etc.). The court is intended to be the final arbiter of what is "fair", and in the past has adjuicated a wide range of "uses" to be "fair use" beyond those examples that appear in the statute (the term "such as" indicating to the court that they do not represent an exhaustive list).
There's a tremendous amount of case law on the subject, but you can infer from it that posting Star Wars III torrent would be generally be infringment, but excerpting a light saber duel and sticking it in a page discussing theatrical combat choreography would probably be considered legitimate fair use (more so if bibliographic information is provided along with the clip).
Moreover, the notion that "you can do anything you want with it", referring to content, was the law until passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which introduced "digital works" as a special class with special rules and introduced the notion of "technological access control". The most interesting portion of the act is really that it expands copyright to not only cover copying, but now to also cover "access" (including limiting access to works which you've legitimately obtained a copy). This aspect of the law is the part that really seeks to invalidate all prior interpretations of fair use. It's quite clear this why the law refers to technological access controls rather than copy protection.
Incidentally, this is one reason why there are region code hacks for so many DVD players yet nobody has ever been prosecuted fo using them. The reason region codes exist is because player manufacturers are forced to license the content-scrambling algorithm and keys from the CCA and a portion of that license stipulates that vendors must implement the region code (itself meant as part of a price-fixing scheme). Yet various countries protect the consumer's right to view content from wherever they get it, and there are people that want to view content from abroad. In the US, for example, circumventing region codes to watch foreign DVDs is grudgingly understood by the media industry to be "fair-use" and they've never considered filing suit against those that do it -- nor do they need to (yet) because it's sufficiently inconvenient that few do it.
It goes without saying that Miguel Icaza will have a reference implementation of Monad written in C#, running under Mono and incorporated into the GNOME environment by 1Q2006.
In a reflection of it's GPL nature, it will be called Gonad, and the boot splash will proclaim: "Gonad: Doesn't Microsoft wish they had one?"
If you work around a problem, it hides from the user that the problem exists. The demand to have it fixed, therefore, dissipates and developers accept the onus to repeat work-arounds everytime they deploy something. Ultimately, the browser fails to improve, and the costs of errors are passed from the vendor (Microsoft) who never fixes the problem to the public (developers that waste time with work-arounds).
Anyway, if you write things specifically for IE -- then you've already got a more serious problem that you have to address first. There's no excuse for what you already know to be dismal practice.
I don't know why people pan these things as servers. Are people not aware that there's more to contemporary computing that HTTP daemons and database transactions?
I work in the biotech industry and we use computer farms and grids for all sorts of computationally intensive tasks: biopolymer sequence alignments, docking simulations, protein modeling, high-throughout 3D mass spectral analysis, etc.
A server with cell-blades and some minor tweaks to our software would generate a tremendous "bang-for-the-buck".
I looked into the Maui X stuff and checked, and yes, they are very cleraly violating the GPL. It strikes me, however, that by making it impossible to obtain the source code, they are circumventing the technological measure of access control (namely, the source code in ASCII form).
The DMCA doesn't necessarily require an access control measure to lock someone out of access to a work (how it is typically employed). Specifically, a technical measure is:
I'd argue that distributing source code so as to grant access to the work is an effective measure to do so, and that in the normal course of it's operation (communicating the structure of an application) that it requires the application of information (headers, expert knowledge, software analysis tools), a process or treatment (at the very least, a system tath can decode ASCII and render it as glyphs on a display or printed page), and the authority of the copyright owner (a license; namely the GPL).
It seems to mee that if you contact their ISP you can have their site shut down. Further, you can complain to the FBI since it's now a federal criminal complaint:
Every time I see SCOX, I think "scrumpox". My jewels itch just thinking about it...
If you took time to look up HR1268 on thomas.loc.gov, you'll note that the bill, as passed, has the Real ID text struck out.
There are a wide range of factors that effect performance. I've got a Honda Civic Hybrid and the factors that seem to have notable effects on performance are: ambient temperature (I live in New England, so this varies quite a bit), tire pressure (obviously), average speed, variance of speed, and texture of the road surface (which seems to have a more pronounced effect on mileage in a hybrid than other cars). Moderate to moderately agressive driving seems to eke out the best performance. Mileage varies from about 42 mpg during the winter months while commuting, to about 58 mpg (summer months, weekend trips). During the winter I average 44 mpg and during the summer I average about 52 mpg. I find that it's pretty tricky to consciously boost the performance figures... So, I don't bother trying.