I'm sorry, but I don't buy into the idea that the majority of people use mp3's as a taster and then go and buy the product. It just doesn't, well, sit right with me.
So what? Your feelings do not define the facts. Get over it, unless you want to continue to live in fantasy-land. But don't expect rational people to take you seriously.
When are the open source zealots (I said zealots not supporters, they AREN'T the same) going to realize that 100% open source isn't truely viable, and that a BALANCE is necessary.
What "balance" is necessary if making money is orthogonal to a project's goals? What "balance" was necessary to make Apache a success?
What exactly do you mean by "balance"? It's a nice-sounding word, but I do not think you used it in any meaningful way.
Do you mean that some programs in the marketplace are GPL and some are not? That is what we have today. And if you agree, then what is your point about needing "balance"?
Or do you mean that the ideal license is somewhere in between the extremes of GPL and the most onerous Microsoft EULA? That doesn't make any sense. If the extreme EULAs did not exist, there'd be no need for the GPL. The GPL brings "balance" by providing an alternative to onerous proprietary licenses.
So what do you mean by "balance is necessary?"
Re:Open Source, GPL and Linux'll never win!
on
Responses to ADTI Paper
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
None of that matters, even if true. The only way to kill the GPL is to amend copyright law to explictly ban it. If we let that happen, well - we got what we deserved for sleeping at the wheel.
The conservatives in this country have been using fear of terrorism to push a pro-corporate and anti-democractic agenda since 9/11.
It should also be said that "conservative" here includes both members of the Democrat and Republican parties - most of them - and that they have been pushing this anti-democratic agenda long before 9/11. They are practically shitting their pants with glee since then however, as a sickening majority of Americans have agreed with their agenda out of abject... well, terror.
On a lighter note, while many open source advocates atre proponents for copyleft, they insist on trademark protection for their ideas.
You bet they do, or else commercial interests would steal their work and profit from it, without due compensation to the creator.
I hear the Red Cross and Salvation Army have trademarks as well, which they zealously protect, even though they are in the business of giving stuff away to those in need.
The Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative and a number of other organized GPL enthusiasts protect their "marks"...
Putting the word "marks" in quotes in this context seems to imply that not-for-profit trademark holders are not holding "real" trademarks, and therefore the author of the paper feels entitled to sneer at them.
...by posting notices in publications and websites that their trademarks are protected. For example, the notice on the OSI website reads, "... To identify your software distribution as OSI Certified, you must attach one of the following two notices..." The same is true for a number of prominent open source firms including VA Linux.
This is the most damning section of the entire document, im my opinion. The author betrays his contempt for the fact that open source advocates utilize the copyright system as it was intended: to control the distribution of their works. What burns this author the most however, is that he knows they are correct and the GPL succeeds at its aims, which is preventing GPL code from being hijacked by proprietary, closed source projects. This makes him very angry, and he can barely conceal it in this paragraph.
While each of these firms would insist that they are not against copyright protection, invoking the protections argues that they are against people copying their marketing documents and symbols.
He left out the crucial phrase at the end of the sentence: "without authorization." This guy is really burned that the GPL is successful. And it seems clear to me now that "this guy" is the Microsoft FUD^WMarketing department. Their past FUD releases on this topic have been infamous for conflating trademark and copyright, as well as copyright and copy-prevention.
Now I gotta go take a walk, because I am worked up. But man, this is the most blatant and desperate FUD I have read in a long, long time.
More cool stuff, affordable by mere mortals
on
Trek Prop Collecting
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· Score: 3, Informative
Looks like most of Bob Justman's collection is being auctioned off - in person, or absentee via eBay - on June 27.
Ask anyone that owns a car with expensive wheels shod with low-profile tires what they think about how the govenrment handles public roads.
Expensive wheels and low profile tires will lead to damage eventually no matter what the condition of the road. In fact, I'll wager that the probability of damage converges on 100% as the tire height approaches zero. This is the price you pay for having low profile tires. Everybody else with properly sized tires gets along on the road just fine.
Hey, if I have to take your bitching about my SUV, you have to take my bitching about your low profile tires. That's all there is to it.
The day I notice a product placement on Sopranos or Chris Isaac or any other HBO/Showtime production is the day I cancel my subscription to those channels. I pay a monthly fee for those shows, and expect them to be commercial-free. If I don't notice the product placement, well fine.
As for network ad-supported shows, who cares? I just told you I have HBO and Showtime, so why do I need Friends when I have Sopranos to watch? "EFF" that crap! (pun intended:)
When an advertiser buys time on a network program, they're trying to "buy eyeballs". The networks charge a rate based on the ratings, which is a statistic of approximately how many people are watching.
Perhaps they are really afraid that advertisers will discover that the networks have been selling them something that they don't actually own and therefore cannot legally sell.
I can see someone deciding to make all TV shows, as presented by the networks, complete with commercials, as a separate copyrightable object. This would mean that no one could skip the commercials.
Oh yeah? If a book is copyrighted, am I required by law to read every chapter, in the order presented? If I buy a magazine, am I required to read all the ads? The entire magazine issue is copyrighted as work unto itself. How is this any different if the entire half-hour of a sitcom including all commercials, is copyrighted as a unit?
Holding a copyright has never given the author the right to dictate to me how and in what order I consume his work, or what portions of it I choose to experience.
Seems to me that a PC's fans are a good candidate for active noise cancellation. Basically you hook up a microphone and speaker at the same location as the noise source, and playback a 1/2-cycle-delayed recording of the noise. Timed correctly, the sound waves interfere and cancel each other out.
I am guessing that if someone researched this carefully, they'd find a handful of frequencies that contribute the most to fan noise, and a small electronic device could be designed to counter just those major harmonics in the fan noise.
OK, it seems you know NOTHING about the Tivo, having passed by all the previous articles posted here about the device and all the things it can do (documented and un-). So let me tell you this:
Because of pressure from broadcasters, TiVo hides the commercial skip function from Joe Enduser. It can be activated by pressing a sequence of keys on the remote. There are numerous other backdoors that can change how the TiVo works. Because they do things that advertisers and media owners might find actionable, TiVo doesn't publicize them, but they also do not block efforts by people to discover the backdoors. In fact, they tacitly support such efforts if it makes their customers happy.
You can easily find this stuff if you are interested. It's all over Google. Search for "Tivo hack" and you'll find it.
Dude, I've owned a DirecTivo for going on two years now. The warranty expired months ago, so I went ahead and did the hard drive upgrade. I've long since made up for the $149 lifetime subscription, vs. the monthly fee.
I read your essay, and while you make some good points about the retailers not having a working product for display, you also implied that you couldn't care less about the "many months hearing friends and colleagues boast". I guess you aren't swayed by your friend's recommendations, word of mouth is not good enough for you? The lame salesman was more convicing? Whatever dude.
I bought mine at Good Guys, a Philips DirecTiVo unit, the first day it arrived. Several other people were there to snatch them off the palette too. I couldn't be happier with my purchase. Of course, word of mouth means nothing to you, so never mind...
According to TiVo's telephone support staff, the TiVo unit doesn't offer any kind of "commercial skip" or even a "fast-fast-forward" mode, so it offers few benefits compared to a traditional VCR (in a later call, a TiVo supervisor claimed that TiVo has 15x, 30x, and 60x fast-forward speeds -- a contradiction that made me wish I could see an actual working TiVo unit).
Now I am beginning to wonder if you, or the TiVo rep you talked to, have English comprehension difficulties. Did you not see the FF and RW buttons on the remote control at the store display? I think it is rather funny that for a time, you thought the TiVo could not FF or RW. That's rich.
Lastly, did you spend this much time and angst trying to buy a dishwasher? Did they let you try a load of dirty dishes in it before taking it home? Some of your expectations are unreasonable.
There is SO much information about the TiVo on the web, I find your ignorance of the device and its capabilities to be incongruous. I mean, who calls 800 numbers to get product info from live humans anymore? Did you do NO research at all on the web? Your essay didn't mention it...
Islamic terrorists are a group of people who commits acts of terror in the name of Islam. True, they have the support of some members of the clergy but that doesn't make the religion itself evil.
What would it take to convince you that the religion itself was evil? How many clergy must endorse bin Laden, how many lay people must stand by and remain silent or stand up and cheer in the streets, before you consider that maybe, just maybe, the religion itself is evil?
I keep seeing people posting "I am not Muslim, but..." and then proceeding to defend a religion about which they know very little.
Let me ask you: Is the Church of Scientology an evil religion? If so, why? Is it because of the action of the members overall, or because of the actions of a few leaders? How is this any different than the situation with Islam and the fatwas and jihads issued by the leaders that call for the murder of Salmon Rushdie, or the death of any American, wherever they are found?
I don't see much difference at all. If Scientology is evil, so is Islam.
It is one thing for an individual to use his own money to buy porn, but quite another for a library to use my tax dollars to not only buy it, but offer it to my children against my wishes.
No library has done that. "Making available" and "offering" are two distinctly different acts. No one who enters a library is accosted with an offer to view porn. "Offering" is an active pursuit, "making available" is quite passive.
An individual's supposed "right" to view pornography does not override my right to protect my children from things that I judge to be harmful.
You have no such right. It is not even reasonable to expect such a thing. If your child is injured and requires a blood transfusion, the child should receive one, whether or not your family observes religious prohibitions against transfusions.
A rather infamous mother in Texas was recently sentenced for killing her children to protect them from Satanic harm. She had no right to do that, even though in her judgement she was protecting her children from harm.
My tax dollars should not be used to harm my children.
"Personal judgment" is NOT a community standard of any sort, and has NO application to whether pornography is obscene or harmful to children. If it were, then I could judge my children to have been harmed by censorship, and can argue just as credibly as you can, that my tax dollars should not be used to harm my children. Your "personal judgment" argument holds no water, because it just as easily supports any viewpoint at all, which makes it effectively no argument at all.
I got a funnier idea: go ahead and put up some copyrighted material. Configure the webserver to ONLY offer the material to the Cyveillance netblocks. When they send you the DMCA takedown notice, compose your response and deny that the material exists. Only Cyveillance will see it. Everyone else - including your ISP - will agree with you that the material does not seem to exist, despite Cyveillance's claims.
Could be fun if repeated over and over!
RIAA dude: Hey, Cyveillance guy, why are you billing us for all these takedown notices where the material never actually existed? I went to look at some of these sites myself and despite my fervent wish to nail somebody for something, nothing was there.
I don't understand why quality is tied to fair use. If I own a copy of a copyrighted book, and offer a poor-quality OCR scan of it on a website, I am infringing the copyright on the work, despite the OCR errors that make it a low-fidelity, inexact copy. However if I read my OCR version on my PDA, I haven't infringed a thing. What does fidelity to the original have to do with whether infringement has occurred? I am sure that the digital copies of AOTC that were shot with a haldheld camera are considered to be infringing copies, even though the fidelity is quite poor. Can anyone explain this, even if it is a lame explanation?
People who need it pay for support contracts. No one with a Sun support contract is going to be hassled over OS licenses. This only affects people who eschew support contracts, and then only if someone at Sun cares enough to proceed with a lawsuit. I have never known Sun to bring in the BSA or anything like that to enforce licence compliance. If Sun uses the license as legal leverage at all, it is to encourage you to buy a support contract, which is where they make a lot of their money.
...but I can't help feeling that our legal system just missed an opportunity to reign in patent abuse.
Michael, you are as yet insufficiently cynical. No one passed up any opportunities here. Patent interests want patents to become more broad and less specific, so long as all the vague patents are held by corporations that support expansive patent rights. That people who don't hold those views can still obtain patents is the kind of "reigning in" they are interested in pursuing, and in that context, this ruling makes sense (it protects patent holders from having their own poorly written patents used against them). But reigning in what you and I call "patent abuse" was never on the table, and isn't likely to ever be.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Could BNetD have even technically included CD key-checking and otherwise verifying that the users had legit copies?
No, they could not. Blizzard refused to provide the details of the CD-key checking algorithms when the Bnetd project asked.
No one has ever claimed your #3. That is an idiotic strawman.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy into the idea that the majority of people use mp3's as a taster and then go and buy the product. It just doesn't, well, sit right with me.
So what? Your feelings do not define the facts. Get over it, unless you want to continue to live in fantasy-land. But don't expect rational people to take you seriously.
One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch.
...girl.
When are the open source zealots (I said zealots not supporters, they AREN'T the same) going to realize that 100% open source isn't truely viable, and that a BALANCE is necessary.
What "balance" is necessary if making money is orthogonal to a project's goals? What "balance" was necessary to make Apache a success?
What exactly do you mean by "balance"? It's a nice-sounding word, but I do not think you used it in any meaningful way.
Do you mean that some programs in the marketplace are GPL and some are not? That is what we have today. And if you agree, then what is your point about needing "balance"?
Or do you mean that the ideal license is somewhere in between the extremes of GPL and the most onerous Microsoft EULA? That doesn't make any sense. If the extreme EULAs did not exist, there'd be no need for the GPL. The GPL brings "balance" by providing an alternative to onerous proprietary licenses.
So what do you mean by "balance is necessary?"
None of that matters, even if true. The only way to kill the GPL is to amend copyright law to explictly ban it. If we let that happen, well - we got what we deserved for sleeping at the wheel.
The conservatives in this country have been using fear of terrorism to push a pro-corporate and anti-democractic agenda since 9/11.
It should also be said that "conservative" here includes both members of the Democrat and Republican parties - most of them - and that they have been pushing this anti-democratic agenda long before 9/11. They are practically shitting their pants with glee since then however, as a sickening majority of Americans have agreed with their agenda out of abject... well, terror.
On a lighter note, while many open source advocates atre proponents for copyleft, they insist on trademark protection for their ideas.
...by posting notices in publications and websites that their trademarks are protected. For example, the notice on the OSI website reads, "... To identify your software distribution as OSI Certified, you must attach one of the following two notices..." The same is true for a number of prominent open source firms including VA Linux.
You bet they do, or else commercial interests would steal their work and profit from it, without due compensation to the creator.
I hear the Red Cross and Salvation Army have trademarks as well, which they zealously protect, even though they are in the business of giving stuff away to those in need.
The Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative and a number of other organized GPL enthusiasts protect their "marks"...
Putting the word "marks" in quotes in this context seems to imply that not-for-profit trademark holders are not holding "real" trademarks, and therefore the author of the paper feels entitled to sneer at them.
This is the most damning section of the entire document, im my opinion. The author betrays his contempt for the fact that open source advocates utilize the copyright system as it was intended: to control the distribution of their works. What burns this author the most however, is that he knows they are correct and the GPL succeeds at its aims, which is preventing GPL code from being hijacked by proprietary, closed source projects. This makes him very angry, and he can barely conceal it in this paragraph.
While each of these firms would insist that they are not against copyright protection, invoking the protections argues that they are against people copying their marketing documents and symbols.
He left out the crucial phrase at the end of the sentence: "without authorization." This guy is really burned that the GPL is successful. And it seems clear to me now that "this guy" is the Microsoft FUD^WMarketing department. Their past FUD releases on this topic have been infamous for conflating trademark and copyright, as well as copyright and copy-prevention.
Now I gotta go take a walk, because I am worked up. But man, this is the most blatant and desperate FUD I have read in a long, long time.
The list of items on the block is here. It includes such things as:
- Star Trek - "Mirror Mirror" crewman sash - $400.00
- Star Trek - Amok Time - Vulcan wristbands - $400.00
- Prop tribble from Star Trek - $475.00
- "Star Trek" playback disc of the song "Hey Out There" from the episode "The Way to Eden". - $400.00
- Star Trek - Frank Gorshin pants ("Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". ) - $400.00
I think I might bid on this one: Gorn head mask - Star Trek - Arena - $1000.00Yeah!
Ask anyone that owns a car with expensive wheels shod with low-profile tires what they think about how the govenrment handles public roads.
Expensive wheels and low profile tires will lead to damage eventually no matter what the condition of the road. In fact, I'll wager that the probability of damage converges on 100% as the tire height approaches zero. This is the price you pay for having low profile tires. Everybody else with properly sized tires gets along on the road just fine.
Hey, if I have to take your bitching about my SUV, you have to take my bitching about your low profile tires. That's all there is to it.
John Walker Lindh?
The day I notice a product placement on Sopranos or Chris Isaac or any other HBO/Showtime production is the day I cancel my subscription to those channels. I pay a monthly fee for those shows, and expect them to be commercial-free. If I don't notice the product placement, well fine.
:)
As for network ad-supported shows, who cares? I just told you I have HBO and Showtime, so why do I need Friends when I have Sopranos to watch? "EFF" that crap! (pun intended
When an advertiser buys time on a network program, they're trying to "buy eyeballs". The networks charge a rate based on the ratings, which is a statistic of approximately how many people are watching.
Perhaps they are really afraid that advertisers will discover that the networks have been selling them something that they don't actually own and therefore cannot legally sell.
Publicity for this issue is not a bad thing. That is a major purpose of the EFF, and is part of their mission statements.
You have to admit, the line about "we have a certain tolerance for bathroom breaks" is rather damning and needs to be played up.
I can see someone deciding to make all TV shows, as presented by the networks, complete with commercials, as a separate copyrightable object. This would mean that no one could skip the commercials.
Oh yeah? If a book is copyrighted, am I required by law to read every chapter, in the order presented? If I buy a magazine, am I required to read all the ads? The entire magazine issue is copyrighted as work unto itself. How is this any different if the entire half-hour of a sitcom including all commercials, is copyrighted as a unit?
Holding a copyright has never given the author the right to dictate to me how and in what order I consume his work, or what portions of it I choose to experience.
Seems to me that a PC's fans are a good candidate for active noise cancellation. Basically you hook up a microphone and speaker at the same location as the noise source, and playback a 1/2-cycle-delayed recording of the noise. Timed correctly, the sound waves interfere and cancel each other out.
I am guessing that if someone researched this carefully, they'd find a handful of frequencies that contribute the most to fan noise, and a small electronic device could be designed to counter just those major harmonics in the fan noise.
Or I could be talking out my ass, who knows?
OK, it seems you know NOTHING about the Tivo, having passed by all the previous articles posted here about the device and all the things it can do (documented and un-). So let me tell you this:
Because of pressure from broadcasters, TiVo hides the commercial skip function from Joe Enduser. It can be activated by pressing a sequence of keys on the remote. There are numerous other backdoors that can change how the TiVo works. Because they do things that advertisers and media owners might find actionable, TiVo doesn't publicize them, but they also do not block efforts by people to discover the backdoors. In fact, they tacitly support such efforts if it makes their customers happy.
You can easily find this stuff if you are interested. It's all over Google. Search for "Tivo hack" and you'll find it.
Dude, I've owned a DirecTivo for going on two years now. The warranty expired months ago, so I went ahead and did the hard drive upgrade. I've long since made up for the $149 lifetime subscription, vs. the monthly fee.
I read your essay, and while you make some good points about the retailers not having a working product for display, you also implied that you couldn't care less about the "many months hearing friends and colleagues boast". I guess you aren't swayed by your friend's recommendations, word of mouth is not good enough for you? The lame salesman was more convicing? Whatever dude.
I bought mine at Good Guys, a Philips DirecTiVo unit, the first day it arrived. Several other people were there to snatch them off the palette too. I couldn't be happier with my purchase. Of course, word of mouth means nothing to you, so never mind...
According to TiVo's telephone support staff, the TiVo unit doesn't offer any kind of "commercial skip" or even a "fast-fast-forward" mode, so it offers few benefits compared to a traditional VCR (in a later call, a TiVo supervisor claimed that TiVo has 15x, 30x, and 60x fast-forward speeds -- a contradiction that made me wish I could see an actual working TiVo unit).
Now I am beginning to wonder if you, or the TiVo rep you talked to, have English comprehension difficulties. Did you not see the FF and RW buttons on the remote control at the store display? I think it is rather funny that for a time, you thought the TiVo could not FF or RW. That's rich.
Lastly, did you spend this much time and angst trying to buy a dishwasher? Did they let you try a load of dirty dishes in it before taking it home? Some of your expectations are unreasonable.
There is SO much information about the TiVo on the web, I find your ignorance of the device and its capabilities to be incongruous. I mean, who calls 800 numbers to get product info from live humans anymore? Did you do NO research at all on the web? Your essay didn't mention it...
Brings a whole new meaning to "I'll show you mine if you show me yours."...2....3....4
Islamic terrorists are a group of people who commits acts of terror in the name of Islam. True, they have the support of some members of the clergy but that doesn't make the religion itself evil.
What would it take to convince you that the religion itself was evil? How many clergy must endorse bin Laden, how many lay people must stand by and remain silent or stand up and cheer in the streets, before you consider that maybe, just maybe, the religion itself is evil?
I keep seeing people posting "I am not Muslim, but..." and then proceeding to defend a religion about which they know very little.
Let me ask you: Is the Church of Scientology an evil religion? If so, why? Is it because of the action of the members overall, or because of the actions of a few leaders? How is this any different than the situation with Islam and the fatwas and jihads issued by the leaders that call for the murder of Salmon Rushdie, or the death of any American, wherever they are found?
I don't see much difference at all. If Scientology is evil, so is Islam.
It is one thing for an individual to use his own money to buy porn, but quite another for a library to use my tax dollars to not only buy it, but offer it to my children against my wishes.
No library has done that. "Making available" and "offering" are two distinctly different acts. No one who enters a library is accosted with an offer to view porn. "Offering" is an active pursuit, "making available" is quite passive.
An individual's supposed "right" to view pornography does not override my right to protect my children from things that I judge to be harmful.
You have no such right. It is not even reasonable to expect such a thing. If your child is injured and requires a blood transfusion, the child should receive one, whether or not your family observes religious prohibitions against transfusions.
A rather infamous mother in Texas was recently sentenced for killing her children to protect them from Satanic harm. She had no right to do that, even though in her judgement she was protecting her children from harm.
My tax dollars should not be used to harm my children.
"Personal judgment" is NOT a community standard of any sort, and has NO application to whether pornography is obscene or harmful to children. If it were, then I could judge my children to have been harmed by censorship, and can argue just as credibly as you can, that my tax dollars should not be used to harm my children. Your "personal judgment" argument holds no water, because it just as easily supports any viewpoint at all, which makes it effectively no argument at all.
I got a funnier idea: go ahead and put up some copyrighted material. Configure the webserver to ONLY offer the material to the Cyveillance netblocks. When they send you the DMCA takedown notice, compose your response and deny that the material exists. Only Cyveillance will see it. Everyone else - including your ISP - will agree with you that the material does not seem to exist, despite Cyveillance's claims.
Could be fun if repeated over and over!
RIAA dude: Hey, Cyveillance guy, why are you billing us for all these takedown notices where the material never actually existed? I went to look at some of these sites myself and despite my fervent wish to nail somebody for something, nothing was there.
Cyveillance guy: TILT
I don't understand why quality is tied to fair use. If I own a copy of a copyrighted book, and offer a poor-quality OCR scan of it on a website, I am infringing the copyright on the work, despite the OCR errors that make it a low-fidelity, inexact copy. However if I read my OCR version on my PDA, I haven't infringed a thing. What does fidelity to the original have to do with whether infringement has occurred? I am sure that the digital copies of AOTC that were shot with a haldheld camera are considered to be infringing copies, even though the fidelity is quite poor. Can anyone explain this, even if it is a lame explanation?
There is no license enforcement code in Solaris 8 whatsoever. YOu can install and run it on both CPUs with no (technical) trouble.
People who need it pay for support contracts. No one with a Sun support contract is going to be hassled over OS licenses. This only affects people who eschew support contracts, and then only if someone at Sun cares enough to proceed with a lawsuit. I have never known Sun to bring in the BSA or anything like that to enforce licence compliance. If Sun uses the license as legal leverage at all, it is to encourage you to buy a support contract, which is where they make a lot of their money.
...but I can't help feeling that our legal system just missed an opportunity to reign in patent abuse.
Michael, you are as yet insufficiently cynical. No one passed up any opportunities here. Patent interests want patents to become more broad and less specific, so long as all the vague patents are held by corporations that support expansive patent rights. That people who don't hold those views can still obtain patents is the kind of "reigning in" they are interested in pursuing, and in that context, this ruling makes sense (it protects patent holders from having their own poorly written patents used against them). But reigning in what you and I call "patent abuse" was never on the table, and isn't likely to ever be.