I heard someone else say IT stood for "Individual Transportation". If you invented a transportation device, why would you be asking Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs to comment on it? Wouldn't you go to one of the auto manufacturers first?
Re:Online intellectual property piracy is a fallac
on
Free Books Online
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· Score: 5
Bottom line is, having books and music available online has caused me to buy MORE instead of less.
Yes, but that's only because the existing technology/medium is not sufficient for your needs. Wanting to read a book at night without staring at the radiation from a CRT or handheld display and also the desire to keep a book in your bookshelf to impress the chicks; but those are the reasons you bought the book - not some moral obligation you felt to pay a usage fees.
Books will continue to hold this advantage for a while. The same is not true for CDs, etc. If you had the equipment to burn the CDs and print the labels on them (if you were so concerned about appearing cool) you would be a damn fool to pay the money for the CD.
It would be very foolish for the music industry to assume that people downloading music for free will always automatically want to buy it if it turns out to be good.
but whether this law runs afoul of the First Amendment by restricting a citizen's access to protected speech. More specifically, because this restriction of speech is not content neutral (that is, it specifically restricts certain speech based on the content of that speech
The law only restricts what you can do at work. Virginia employees are free to surf for pr0n on their free time at home, of course.
There is also a separate law that takes care of goofing off at work. Hence the law applies to the narrow classification of what employees can do as part of their job. The state has every right to tell its employees what their job is. The state also has the right to tell employees that anything involving surfing for porn is NOT part of their job unless they have specific authorization for the same from a department head.
For example, Sun could make it a policy that its employees could not use Windows machines as part of their job (say because they wanted their employees to use their own software to help provide feedback to improve it) unless their department head specifically authorized it for research use.
Yeah this isn't a real beta test but a desperate attempt to conquer the all-important Seattle/Puget Sound market!
Everyone knows that that is the market you must ultimately conquer and what better way to do this than to create a sham playtest available to people in this region only.
Their hopeless attempts at deception were made very obvious when they didn't launch it in bigger market areas like New York and LA. Everyone knows that those markets are irrelevant when it comes to creating a buzz about a product.
It's only your limited mind that cannot distinguish between something that is tangible and something that has value. ClueStick: Society has evolved beyond assigning values to physical goods only.
Capitalism is about allowing people to create wealth based on their efforts and endeavors and to have the government protect this wealth from usurpers. It was the whole basis behind allowing land claims in the old wild west. "If you took the trouble to go out there and find what you did then you have the sole right to benefit from what you found."
Yes, intellectual property enforcement is the same as enforcing a contract. If, for example, I allow you to buy my music under the contract that you will use it for yourself alone then I expect you to honor that contract and for the government to enforce it. Intellectual property is released under this implicit contract. Note that not all contracts have to have every word of the conditions stated explicitly as long as they are covered by aspects of existing law.
I'm as much for condoning honest mistakes as the next guy. However, this is not just a simple mistake. Checking a link is only the most basic thing the story submission and approval process is supposed to do! We all make mistakes doing what we do, but not doing the most basic part of your job is not a mistake!
Also, it diminishes the value of the invention. If I only expected to live 2 more years and invented something that was good for 10 years, I could sell the rights for much more money NOW. It works the same way as the bond market does.
If, presumably, the purpose of granting patents on inventions is to reward the inventors for the invention and to thus provide them with an incentive to invent, any attempt to reduce this incentive by capping the reward is against the intent of the provision.
Actually, treating intellectual property as property is definitely part of "real" capitalism. Having this enforced by the government is also part of capitalist principles.
Capitalism is based on giving people the ability to sell goods, services, whatever for money. It is also important to capitalist principles that the government should protect these properties from "theft". Capitalists are very much FOR a government role in this area - in fact that is the only area which they are for a government role in at all. Insisting that these bitstreams, which other people are willing to pay for, are not real property and therefore should be subject to a price ceiling of 0, as the previous poster mentioned, is very contrary to capitalist principles.
I don't agree with everything you said but I wish I had moderator points to mod you up.
The obvious rebuttal, of course, is that the FSF is forced to play under laws which they don't believe should exist. They believe in all code being free, including theirs. The IP-enforcement part of the GPL exists only because they live in a world where the laws don't agree with their beliefs in software being fundamentally free.
That being said, I think it would be very interesting to see the GPL actually going to court. Is the GPL a legally enforcable agreement? If so, what kinds of damages can you claim on a product that you don't make any money off giving away? Is the GPL just an agreement which people honor "on their honor" to not look bad and because of their principles or is it more than that?
I'm tired of this tirade against corporations. Corporations in themselves are not evil entities. They are run by people. It's those people that decide what does or does not get done.
It was the people that comprise the board at EBay (or whatever functionary who did it) that decided to file a patent for this. This could have been an individual running this website or it could have been a corporation - given the right circumstances they are both equally likely to do the same dumbass thing.
Stop blaming corporations for all the problems of this world and stop listening to Ralph Nader so goddamn much. Corporations in themselves are not evil or good - it's the people that run them that are. It's convenient to blame corporations because they are this nebulous faceless entity that's easy to hate. Too convenient. It's about time the blame started getting put where it belongs.
I'm not accepting any elimination of my legal rights. Did you read my post? I strongly disagree with any limitations on the right to resell any existing book. All I said was that publishers had the right to sell books with a license eliminating the right to resell. But then I would have the choice of whether or not I want to pay $35.00 for a book that I _cannot_ resell.
Quills was an excellent movie and I recommend anyone with a strong stomach/tolerance should watch it.
To get back on topic, if an author wants to write for money and make a living that way, they should have the right to. I don't like the idea of us as society telling the author "No, you can't sell this stuff to someone else who's willing to pay for it because we as a society deem that you shouldn't be doing this for money but for altruistic purposes." Something very scary about that line of thinking.
In this particular case, however, I don't side with the authors. The books were sold with the implicit understanding that they could be resold and that factored into the decisions the buyers made. I have no problem with them selling books in the future, declaring that they cannot be resold - those will succeed or fail depending on market forces. They can't impose it retroactively, though.
I'm always the one to side with the MPAA and RIAA having the right to price and sell their products exactly the way they want to because I believe that is their right as creators.
However, in this particular instance I have to disagree with what the authors are saying. It is legal to resell books/movies/CDs and has always been so. It is factored into the price of the product. If I know I'm going to be able to resell a book if I didn't really like it then that enters into my calculations of whether or not I want to pay that price for the book/movie/CD. I don't see what they are whining about here. If they want to sell new books under a license agreement making it illegal to resell them then I'm willing to accept that too - but not an imposition of a license agreement after the sale has been made.
Just replying to your title. VC++ and VB are just the language and compiler. They have nothing to do with using the hidden APIs. If I knew what the API calls were, I could use any language/compiler combo that is compatible with the Operating System to access the "hidden" APIs.
against the public good (say, raising prices to an unreasonable extent... which MS has done.)
Please. The claim that prices have been raised to an unreasonable extent is ridiculous at best. Remember who the competition was? SCO, SunOS and Apple. Windows was always MUCH cheaper than the effective cost of either of those operating systems - and still is. Oracle software sells for millions of dollars v/s the hundreds of dollars that SQL Server costs. Would you prosecute any of those companies for price gouging? Classical economics fails for software because the supply curve is essentially flat. Yes, the software probably costs more than you and I want to pay for it but so does a lot of stuff. Just because it's not tangible (just bits on a CD) doesn't inherently mean it lacks value.
MS Kerberos, while different from Kerberos to you and me, does comply with the Kerberos standard as defined. The Kerberos standard explicitly allows extensions of the nature that MS made to the Kerberos standard. Blame a poorly worded/written standard for that.
Re:.NET might be very good to us
on
Perl and .NET
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· Score: 2
Don't forget, nowadays, people think it's totally normal to reboot a server after changing it's DNS or IP address, or after enabling packet forwarding.
You don't have to do that anymore with Windows 2000
By 1984, WordStar International was the country's largest software company, but WordStar2000, released in 1985, fared poorly against rival WordPerfect, and the company fell from its lead position. (emphasis mine)
Well, maybe the world wasn't ready for WordStar2000 back then. They should try re-releasing it now but they better hurry - only 13 days left!
But it's not funny. It's a made up story - about the same maturity as a 3rd grader would find interesting. Obviously posted by someone with friends who moderate down any dissenting post too.
No, that is not the way to make progress. Consider the analogy of natural languages, for example. There was no standards body defining the English language before it came into existence. The language evolved from actually being used. It was later that standards bodies came together to formalize it. And yes, this is the cause for all the incompatibilities.
The danger with doing it the other way around is stagnation. You can spend years waiting for a standards body to come to agreement. And the agreement they come to is not necessarily the best one either. Look at CORBA, for example. A bunch of companies tried to ensure that their latest, greatest coolest features were in the standard and the end result was an ugly, unweildy and complicated standard.
As much as I hate to accept it, in the practical world the best way to evolve is a Darwinian approach where the best standard survives through the test of market approval.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard someone else say IT stood for "Individual Transportation". If you invented a transportation device, why would you be asking Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs to comment on it? Wouldn't you go to one of the auto manufacturers first?
Bottom line is, having books and music available online has caused me to buy MORE instead of less.
Yes, but that's only because the existing technology/medium is not sufficient for your needs. Wanting to read a book at night without staring at the radiation from a CRT or handheld display and also the desire to keep a book in your bookshelf to impress the chicks; but those are the reasons you bought the book - not some moral obligation you felt to pay a usage fees.
Books will continue to hold this advantage for a while. The same is not true for CDs, etc. If you had the equipment to burn the CDs and print the labels on them (if you were so concerned about appearing cool) you would be a damn fool to pay the money for the CD.
It would be very foolish for the music industry to assume that people downloading music for free will always automatically want to buy it if it turns out to be good.
but whether this law runs afoul of the First Amendment by restricting a citizen's access to protected speech. More specifically, because this restriction of speech is not content neutral (that is, it specifically restricts certain speech based on the content of that speech
The law only restricts what you can do at work. Virginia employees are free to surf for pr0n on their free time at home, of course.
There is also a separate law that takes care of goofing off at work. Hence the law applies to the narrow classification of what employees can do as part of their job. The state has every right to tell its employees what their job is. The state also has the right to tell employees that anything involving surfing for porn is NOT part of their job unless they have specific authorization for the same from a department head.
For example, Sun could make it a policy that its employees could not use Windows machines as part of their job (say because they wanted their employees to use their own software to help provide feedback to improve it) unless their department head specifically authorized it for research use.
The Register, UK published some secret specs on the XBox on Thursday.
According to Yahoo
My world would be complete!
Yeah this isn't a real beta test but a desperate attempt to conquer the all-important Seattle/Puget Sound market!
Everyone knows that that is the market you must ultimately conquer and what better way to do this than to create a sham playtest available to people in this region only.
Their hopeless attempts at deception were made very obvious when they didn't launch it in bigger market areas like New York and LA. Everyone knows that those markets are irrelevant when it comes to creating a buzz about a product.
It's only your limited mind that cannot distinguish between something that is tangible and something that has value. ClueStick: Society has evolved beyond assigning values to physical goods only.
Capitalism is about allowing people to create wealth based on their efforts and endeavors and to have the government protect this wealth from usurpers. It was the whole basis behind allowing land claims in the old wild west. "If you took the trouble to go out there and find what you did then you have the sole right to benefit from what you found."
Yes, intellectual property enforcement is the same as enforcing a contract. If, for example, I allow you to buy my music under the contract that you will use it for yourself alone then I expect you to honor that contract and for the government to enforce it. Intellectual property is released under this implicit contract. Note that not all contracts have to have every word of the conditions stated explicitly as long as they are covered by aspects of existing law.
I'm as much for condoning honest mistakes as the next guy. However, this is not just a simple mistake. Checking a link is only the most basic thing the story submission and approval process is supposed to do! We all make mistakes doing what we do, but not doing the most basic part of your job is not a mistake!
Also, it diminishes the value of the invention. If I only expected to live 2 more years and invented something that was good for 10 years, I could sell the rights for much more money NOW. It works the same way as the bond market does.
If, presumably, the purpose of granting patents on inventions is to reward the inventors for the invention and to thus provide them with an incentive to invent, any attempt to reduce this incentive by capping the reward is against the intent of the provision.
Actually, treating intellectual property as property is definitely part of "real" capitalism. Having this enforced by the government is also part of capitalist principles.
Capitalism is based on giving people the ability to sell goods, services, whatever for money. It is also important to capitalist principles that the government should protect these properties from "theft". Capitalists are very much FOR a government role in this area - in fact that is the only area which they are for a government role in at all. Insisting that these bitstreams, which other people are willing to pay for, are not real property and therefore should be subject to a price ceiling of 0, as the previous poster mentioned, is very contrary to capitalist principles.
I don't agree with everything you said but I wish I had moderator points to mod you up.
The obvious rebuttal, of course, is that the FSF is forced to play under laws which they don't believe should exist. They believe in all code being free, including theirs. The IP-enforcement part of the GPL exists only because they live in a world where the laws don't agree with their beliefs in software being fundamentally free.
That being said, I think it would be very interesting to see the GPL actually going to court. Is the GPL a legally enforcable agreement? If so, what kinds of damages can you claim on a product that you don't make any money off giving away? Is the GPL just an agreement which people honor "on their honor" to not look bad and because of their principles or is it more than that?
I'm tired of this tirade against corporations. Corporations in themselves are not evil entities. They are run by people. It's those people that decide what does or does not get done.
It was the people that comprise the board at EBay (or whatever functionary who did it) that decided to file a patent for this. This could have been an individual running this website or it could have been a corporation - given the right circumstances they are both equally likely to do the same dumbass thing.
Stop blaming corporations for all the problems of this world and stop listening to Ralph Nader so goddamn much. Corporations in themselves are not evil or good - it's the people that run them that are. It's convenient to blame corporations because they are this nebulous faceless entity that's easy to hate. Too convenient. It's about time the blame started getting put where it belongs.
I'm not accepting any elimination of my legal rights. Did you read my post? I strongly disagree with any limitations on the right to resell any existing book. All I said was that publishers had the right to sell books with a license eliminating the right to resell. But then I would have the choice of whether or not I want to pay $35.00 for a book that I _cannot_ resell.
Quills was an excellent movie and I recommend anyone with a strong stomach/tolerance should watch it.
To get back on topic, if an author wants to write for money and make a living that way, they should have the right to. I don't like the idea of us as society telling the author "No, you can't sell this stuff to someone else who's willing to pay for it because we as a society deem that you shouldn't be doing this for money but for altruistic purposes." Something very scary about that line of thinking.
In this particular case, however, I don't side with the authors. The books were sold with the implicit understanding that they could be resold and that factored into the decisions the buyers made. I have no problem with them selling books in the future, declaring that they cannot be resold - those will succeed or fail depending on market forces. They can't impose it retroactively, though.
I'm always the one to side with the MPAA and RIAA having the right to price and sell their products exactly the way they want to because I believe that is their right as creators.
However, in this particular instance I have to disagree with what the authors are saying. It is legal to resell books/movies/CDs and has always been so. It is factored into the price of the product. If I know I'm going to be able to resell a book if I didn't really like it then that enters into my calculations of whether or not I want to pay that price for the book/movie/CD. I don't see what they are whining about here. If they want to sell new books under a license agreement making it illegal to resell them then I'm willing to accept that too - but not an imposition of a license agreement after the sale has been made.
Umm.. the last split in MSFTs stock was in April 1999. Not exactly recent.
Just replying to your title. VC++ and VB are just the language and compiler. They have nothing to do with using the hidden APIs. If I knew what the API calls were, I could use any language/compiler combo that is compatible with the Operating System to access the "hidden" APIs.
Look up public records of campaign contributions. Microsoft has given very little money (in the greater scheme of things) to the Bush campaign.
against the public good (say, raising prices to an unreasonable extent ... which MS has done.)
Please. The claim that prices have been raised to an unreasonable extent is ridiculous at best. Remember who the competition was? SCO, SunOS and Apple. Windows was always MUCH cheaper than the effective cost of either of those operating systems - and still is. Oracle software sells for millions of dollars v/s the hundreds of dollars that SQL Server costs. Would you prosecute any of those companies for price gouging? Classical economics fails for software because the supply curve is essentially flat. Yes, the software probably costs more than you and I want to pay for it but so does a lot of stuff. Just because it's not tangible (just bits on a CD) doesn't inherently mean it lacks value.
MS Kerberos, while different from Kerberos to you and me, does comply with the Kerberos standard as defined. The Kerberos standard explicitly allows extensions of the nature that MS made to the Kerberos standard. Blame a poorly worded/written standard for that.
Don't forget, nowadays, people think it's totally normal to reboot a server after changing it's DNS or IP address, or after enabling packet forwarding.
You don't have to do that anymore with Windows 2000
By 1984, WordStar International was the country's largest software company, but WordStar2000, released in 1985, fared poorly against rival WordPerfect, and the company fell from its lead position. (emphasis mine)
Well, maybe the world wasn't ready for WordStar2000 back then. They should try re-releasing it now but they better hurry - only 13 days left!
But it's not funny. It's a made up story - about the same maturity as a 3rd grader would find interesting. Obviously posted by someone with friends who moderate down any dissenting post too.
No, that is not the way to make progress. Consider the analogy of natural languages, for example. There was no standards body defining the English language before it came into existence. The language evolved from actually being used. It was later that standards bodies came together to formalize it. And yes, this is the cause for all the incompatibilities.
The danger with doing it the other way around is stagnation. You can spend years waiting for a standards body to come to agreement. And the agreement they come to is not necessarily the best one either. Look at CORBA, for example. A bunch of companies tried to ensure that their latest, greatest coolest features were in the standard and the end result was an ugly, unweildy and complicated standard.
As much as I hate to accept it, in the practical world the best way to evolve is a Darwinian approach where the best standard survives through the test of market approval.