I would think that the usefulness of this paradigm decreases greatly at great distances from the Sun. The linked article states that for the chips here on Earth it is already a challenge to receive and identify the radio "chirps". Considering that the inverse-square law would decrease both the strength of the transmitted signal, and at the same time decrease the energy which can be collected by the chip's solar cells, this doesn't seem to be a good fit for distant missions like Jupiter, Titan, or Europa. Might be OK for the upper atmosphere of Venus, although it's still very much further away than low earth orbit with respect to the radio emission intensity.
My impression was that BitDefender was the only free live-CD commercial scanner, the other commercial A/V live-CD's are available only for paying customers.
If I were to upgrade from using only free A/V on my Windows boxes, I would consider paying BitDefender, if only because they are providing such a useful free service to everyone (disclosure: I've paid for Kaspersky in the past).
> Any printer that does not come with vista/7 drivers.. DOES NOT WORK in vista or 7.
One could run Win XP in a VM which allows access to peripherals, and use print-to-PDF on Vista/7 to make the printout available to the VM.
I laugh, though, since this is approximately what I had to do once in order to print to a Windows-shared printer from my Linux installation. Now that the printer is shared via CUPS on Linux, though, I have no problem printing from either Windows or Linux.
> They seem to be throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.
This, as far as I know, is standard legal practice. It is perfectly accepted for a legal brief to have 10's of arguments, where some of the arguments assume things which other arguments claim are invalid. For example:
Law X doesn't apply because of Y.
Assuming that Law X applies to the situation, that means that Law Z requires filing document W which the plaintiff didn't do.
...
There's a certain interesting parallel to programming which covers all the corner cases.
> What exactly does the european patent office have to do with a US patent suit?
Do you actually believe that European witnesses shouldn't be allowed to testify in US court cases? Because that's approximately what you're saying. The EU patent office found what they believe was prior art and brought this to MS's attention. MS failed to address this in their US patent application.
No problem, just explain to her that diamond is thermodynamically unstable and will decompose into graphite anyway within a few billion years.... dramatic pause... "and I'm sure our love will last much longer than that!".
Or maybe, tell her that it quickly converts to graphite at temperatures greater than 1700 degrees C... dramatic pause... "and our passion is much hotter than that!".
Or... dramatic pause... just tell her you're broke.
Want to read the EULAs of every EA game? Wow, someone should invent a new classification in the DSM for that compulsion, maybe we should call it "eulamania"?
Thanks for the smile, I always love to meet another as pedantic as I am.
Do you play a lot of games with no graphical or musical content? I don't (and even if I did, I wouldn't consider this mainstream). That's why I consider them an integral part of the game, and therefore "full source code but no content" is still only partial open-sourcing, to me.
Or, perhaps, your reaction is based on your assuming that open-sourcing is inherently limited to source code, only? That hasn't been true for ages, check out Creative Commons or the various FSF documentation licenses.
> It looks like many of the games from the first bundle were open sourced.
If I understood correctly, most (all?) of those games were partially open-sourced: the source code was released under open-source licenses, but the graphics and music weren't. My understanding is that the bigger obstacle to obtaining top-level totally open-source games is the artwork, rather than the programming (easiest) or music (harder, but less so than graphics). This may change when the first generation of professional digital artists gets closer to retirement age.
> People question the ability of enterprise and government to *manage* such incredible (and potentially destructive) power.
Governments have nuclear weapons. More and more of them will have them as time goes on.
As Stephen J. Gould said:
"People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along."
Nuclear power generation, however, at least has immense benefits. No one is sure if they outweigh the disadvantages, yet. Freezing research and development in this field is not going to help us find out.
I can think of at least another whole round of warfare which you've forgotten. Once the media groups have a large computerized database of music which is effectively under permanent copyright, they can easily take any independent musician's music and run automated matching. Chances are that they will find a match good enough to take said musician to court, even if their chances of winning are small. Result? Said independent musician either folds and signs, or quits making music. I find it unlikely that, at least for the first 15-20 years of this strategy, that the courts would catch on to what was going on, and start to sanction the media groups for abusing the court system. Even with the strategy of spam-suing the consumer infringers (where there are orders of magnitude more of them than successful, creative, independent musicians), it's taking ages for the the US courts to figure out what is going on.
Your posts show a distinct lack of understanding of the legal (or even social, or philosophical) issues involved. Perhaps you should try to learn about them before spouting off? Take your time, I've been doing this for, what, over seven years now (as a hobby), and I still don't have simple answers to many fundamental questions about copyright.
> I would say that Google simply doesn't respect copyright.
And I would say: you don't respect copyright, since fair use is an integral part of it (well to be more generous, what's probably true is that you just don't understand copyright). When Google sells your photos to newspapers, or uses them to create their own news media, rather than using them in what seems to be a valid, legal, way, let me know so I can get angry at them.
Tritium doesn't have a massive enough nucleus to emit alpha particles. It transforms to Helium-3 via beta decay. It's pitiful that even on Slashdot, the thread could get to this depth (and even deeper) without someone noticing this.
> So you think Charles Manson is a good analogy for industry-backed enforcement against casual piracy?
That all depends what kind of mechanisms and punishments this "enforcement" is going to depend on, doesn't it?
If the penalty for minor infringement was raised to imprisonment "as a deterrent", then I'd guess that the overall damage to the quality of life of the general public would be greater overall than that caused by Manson, no matter how horrific his relatively few murders were. I'd even dare to say that this might be true even if we're not talking about imprisonment, but rather, extreme financial hardship, like imposing bankruptcy. And perhaps it might be comparable even if we'd only be talking about outlawing anonymity, because of it's chilling effects on self-expression.
And before you accuse me of putting up strawmen, think about this: you yourself emphasized casual, and the more casual an infringement is, the more relatively draconian and invasive are the measures which would be needed to effectively stamp it out.
No? You missed this in your false-dichotomy-fantasy-world? Try to see things in shades of gray, it's much more entertaining. You can then see that nuclear power has both advantages and disadvantages, just like everything else (like geothermal), and pretty soon you might even hit the eureka that there's even more than one way to generate nuclear power and each specific reactor design has its own specific advantages and disadvantages!
Excuse me while I'm off to investigate whether there's been new advances in geothermal power which I missed. And whether geothermal power, which is based on long underground tunnels, would be as devastated as I think it would by a nearby major seismic event.
IIRC, this is not a valid defense against the tort of copyright infringement. Neither is not knowing the true copyright status of the work.
Perhaps this was somewhat defensible in an era where distribution was for all practical purposes always funded by having to pay for works under restrictive copyrights. However, even since television began, long before the net, other models of distribution have become widespread. To me it's pretty amazing that this is still the law in the current reality.
I just couldn't get the image of some suit having to say "SABAM!" in order to turn into a super-copyright-dues-collector in red tights with a yellow lightning bolt.
Oooops, I guess now I have to go pay DC Comics their pound of flesh.... will it never stop?
How exactly using open source helps? If you have to trust your foreign partner that they use *only* OS (and don't have even single computer with copy of XP somewhere), then you can as well trust them that all their copies of Windows/Office/whatever are licensed.
As I stated at the beginning of my post, it all depends upon on how the damages are computed. If the damages from one illegal copy of XP somewhere in the basement are the same as running the whole business on pirated MS products, then you are certainly correct. The way the use of open-source would help is in the case where the damages have to do with the extent of the infringement. In that case, if all of the visible functions of the company are being run using open-source, the remaining fringe cases of piracy which might be invisible would be much less of a risk.
None of this would help if the US company would be liable for copyright infringement not connected with the running of the foreign company: even under Linux, it's certainly possible that some employee has a few torrents running of the latest **AA products or even MS products and that the system administrator is an idiot and isn't blocking it properly. Or maybe he's not an idiot, and this is happening in some remote one-man marketing branch office, for example, via leeching WiFi from some third party.
> this prevents even more work force and money going out of the country to cheap countries like China
I totally agree, in fact, I think the chilling effects might be so vast as to prevent US companies from even daring to do business with any foreign companies. This of course depends upon how the damages will be computed: will they be like the $75 trillion Livewire damages proposal, in the case where the foreign company actually shared Microsoft products via P2P?
> and puts US companies to a better position again
Well, if you think that a total mutual embargo (because, face it, the other countries of the world aren't idiots, when the US stops doing business with them, they will do the same) between the US and the rest of the world would be good for US companies, you would be right. I think that most people wouldn't agree with you.
OTOH, I would think this might give a big push for foreign companies to move to dropping Microsoft totally and using open-source instead. In fact, if I were a US company in the position where they had no choice but to deal with a foreign company, I'd be feeling much, much, more comfortable if the company were using open-source and not Microsoft. How on earth could I even audit that foreign company for compliance if it were using Microsoft products? OTOH, even if they would be using open-source, my company would still be opening itself to being sued in the case where some "mole" introduced illegal copyrighted code into the project, something which is trivial to do since computer code doesn't come magically labeled with indelible copyright notices.
The kinds of physical processes which drive these kinds of biological solutions are good at arriving at local optima, but are unlikely to find the global optimum which is considered to be the exact solution to the problem, as soon as the size of the problem outstrips the scale of the physical processes used to solve it. OTOH, when porting the physical paradigm to the (virtual) world of computing, it is much easier to scale the now-virtual solution processes than it would be for nature to solve the larger problem. So it still could very well lead to an interesting heuristic for arriving at good approximations to the global optimum.
And it, like everything else, is vulnerable to the "analog hole". Yes, I know that at high security installations people are searched upon entry for cameras and audio recording devices, but unfortunately, the advance of technology makes it likely that it will eventually be trivial to conceal such devices from most kinds of search equipment (in general, the smaller something is, the easier it is to conceal it).
> you lack the slightest understanding of how the world works
Assuming that you weren't talking about the disconnection between political rhetoric, politics, and the public welfare, I'm kind of interested in this world you live in where everyone has an infinite amount of time and resources to do anything they want --- in the world I'm familiar with, it is most likely that trying to solve Problem X uses resources which could have been dedicated, instead, to solving Problem Y.
Besides this small issue, your post was really insightful, though....;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that the usefulness of this paradigm decreases greatly at great distances from the Sun. The linked article states that for the chips here on Earth it is already a challenge to receive and identify the radio "chirps". Considering that the inverse-square law would decrease both the strength of the transmitted signal, and at the same time decrease the energy which can be collected by the chip's solar cells, this doesn't seem to be a good fit for distant missions like Jupiter, Titan, or Europa. Might be OK for the upper atmosphere of Venus, although it's still very much further away than low earth orbit with respect to the radio emission intensity.
Wow, a grandmother who uses Flash CS5? (I thought they only programmed in C --- the young ones, anyway.)
Egads, couldn't you have found something a bit more logical, like her grandchildren want to play a specific Windows-only game?
My impression was that BitDefender was the only free live-CD commercial scanner, the other commercial A/V live-CD's are available only for paying customers.
If I were to upgrade from using only free A/V on my Windows boxes, I would consider paying BitDefender, if only because they are providing such a useful free service to everyone (disclosure: I've paid for Kaspersky in the past).
> Any printer that does not come with vista/7 drivers.. DOES NOT WORK in vista or 7.
One could run Win XP in a VM which allows access to peripherals, and use print-to-PDF on Vista/7 to make the printout available to the VM.
I laugh, though, since this is approximately what I had to do once in order to print to a Windows-shared printer from my Linux installation. Now that the printer is shared via CUPS on Linux, though, I have no problem printing from either Windows or Linux.
> Am I the only one that's starting to get creeped out by the persistent quote at the bottom of /.?
At least it's not a comment. Considering that the quote is (currently)
> Are Linux users lemmings collectively jumping off of the cliff of reliable, well-engineered commercial software? -- Matt Welsh
you know that if it was a post there'd be a slew of "I am" and "Me too" replies, all moderated to +5 Funny...
(ducks)
> They seem to be throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.
This, as far as I know, is standard legal practice. It is perfectly accepted for a legal brief to have 10's of arguments, where some of the arguments assume things which other arguments claim are invalid. For example:
There's a certain interesting parallel to programming which covers all the corner cases.
> What exactly does the european patent office have to do with a US patent suit?
Do you actually believe that European witnesses shouldn't be allowed to testify in US court cases? Because that's approximately what you're saying. The EU patent office found what they believe was prior art and brought this to MS's attention. MS failed to address this in their US patent application.
No problem, just explain to her that diamond is thermodynamically unstable and will decompose into graphite anyway within a few billion years.... dramatic pause... "and I'm sure our love will last much longer than that!".
Or maybe, tell her that it quickly converts to graphite at temperatures greater than 1700 degrees C... dramatic pause... "and our passion is much hotter than that!".
Or... dramatic pause... just tell her you're broke.
> if you really wanted to. Now did you?
Want to read the EULAs of every EA game? Wow, someone should invent a new classification in the DSM for that compulsion, maybe we should call it "eulamania"?
Thanks for the smile, I always love to meet another as pedantic as I am.
Do you play a lot of games with no graphical or musical content? I don't (and even if I did, I wouldn't consider this mainstream). That's why I consider them an integral part of the game, and therefore "full source code but no content" is still only partial open-sourcing, to me.
Or, perhaps, your reaction is based on your assuming that open-sourcing is inherently limited to source code, only? That hasn't been true for ages, check out Creative Commons or the various FSF documentation licenses.
> It looks like many of the games from the first bundle were open sourced.
If I understood correctly, most (all?) of those games were partially open-sourced: the source code was released under open-source licenses, but the graphics and music weren't. My understanding is that the bigger obstacle to obtaining top-level totally open-source games is the artwork, rather than the programming (easiest) or music (harder, but less so than graphics). This may change when the first generation of professional digital artists gets closer to retirement age.
> People question the ability of enterprise and government to *manage* such incredible (and potentially destructive) power.
Governments have nuclear weapons. More and more of them will have them as time goes on.
As Stephen J. Gould said:
Nuclear power generation, however, at least has immense benefits. No one is sure if they outweigh the disadvantages, yet. Freezing research and development in this field is not going to help us find out.
I can think of at least another whole round of warfare which you've forgotten. Once the media groups have a large computerized database of music which is effectively under permanent copyright, they can easily take any independent musician's music and run automated matching. Chances are that they will find a match good enough to take said musician to court, even if their chances of winning are small. Result? Said independent musician either folds and signs, or quits making music. I find it unlikely that, at least for the first 15-20 years of this strategy, that the courts would catch on to what was going on, and start to sanction the media groups for abusing the court system. Even with the strategy of spam-suing the consumer infringers (where there are orders of magnitude more of them than successful, creative, independent musicians), it's taking ages for the the US courts to figure out what is going on.
Your posts show a distinct lack of understanding of the legal (or even social, or philosophical) issues involved. Perhaps you should try to learn about them before spouting off? Take your time, I've been doing this for, what, over seven years now (as a hobby), and I still don't have simple answers to many fundamental questions about copyright.
> I would say that Google simply doesn't respect copyright.
And I would say: you don't respect copyright, since fair use is an integral part of it (well to be more generous, what's probably true is that you just don't understand copyright). When Google sells your photos to newspapers, or uses them to create their own news media, rather than using them in what seems to be a valid, legal, way, let me know so I can get angry at them.
Tritium doesn't have a massive enough nucleus to emit alpha particles. It transforms to Helium-3 via beta decay. It's pitiful that even on Slashdot, the thread could get to this depth (and even deeper) without someone noticing this.
> So you think Charles Manson is a good analogy for industry-backed enforcement against casual piracy?
That all depends what kind of mechanisms and punishments this "enforcement" is going to depend on, doesn't it?
If the penalty for minor infringement was raised to imprisonment "as a deterrent", then I'd guess that the overall damage to the quality of life of the general public would be greater overall than that caused by Manson, no matter how horrific his relatively few murders were. I'd even dare to say that this might be true even if we're not talking about imprisonment, but rather, extreme financial hardship, like imposing bankruptcy. And perhaps it might be comparable even if we'd only be talking about outlawing anonymity, because of it's chilling effects on self-expression.
And before you accuse me of putting up strawmen, think about this: you yourself emphasized casual, and the more casual an infringement is, the more relatively draconian and invasive are the measures which would be needed to effectively stamp it out.
You do realize that drilling for geothermal power is one of the few human interventions which are actually believed to possibly trigger earthquakes, right? (If this wasn't the specific type of geothermal you meant, you should be more specific.)
No? You missed this in your false-dichotomy-fantasy-world? Try to see things in shades of gray, it's much more entertaining. You can then see that nuclear power has both advantages and disadvantages, just like everything else (like geothermal), and pretty soon you might even hit the eureka that there's even more than one way to generate nuclear power and each specific reactor design has its own specific advantages and disadvantages!
Excuse me while I'm off to investigate whether there's been new advances in geothermal power which I missed. And whether geothermal power, which is based on long underground tunnels, would be as devastated as I think it would by a nearby major seismic event.
> or that you initiated the act knowingly
IIRC, this is not a valid defense against the tort of copyright infringement. Neither is not knowing the true copyright status of the work.
Perhaps this was somewhat defensible in an era where distribution was for all practical purposes always funded by having to pay for works under restrictive copyrights. However, even since television began, long before the net, other models of distribution have become widespread. To me it's pretty amazing that this is still the law in the current reality.
I just couldn't get the image of some suit having to say "SABAM!" in order to turn into a super-copyright-dues-collector in red tights with a yellow lightning bolt.
Oooops, I guess now I have to go pay DC Comics their pound of flesh.... will it never stop?
As I stated at the beginning of my post, it all depends upon on how the damages are computed. If the damages from one illegal copy of XP somewhere in the basement are the same as running the whole business on pirated MS products, then you are certainly correct. The way the use of open-source would help is in the case where the damages have to do with the extent of the infringement. In that case, if all of the visible functions of the company are being run using open-source, the remaining fringe cases of piracy which might be invisible would be much less of a risk.
None of this would help if the US company would be liable for copyright infringement not connected with the running of the foreign company: even under Linux, it's certainly possible that some employee has a few torrents running of the latest **AA products or even MS products and that the system administrator is an idiot and isn't blocking it properly. Or maybe he's not an idiot, and this is happening in some remote one-man marketing branch office, for example, via leeching WiFi from some third party.
> this prevents even more work force and money going out of the country to cheap countries like China
I totally agree, in fact, I think the chilling effects might be so vast as to prevent US companies from even daring to do business with any foreign companies. This of course depends upon how the damages will be computed: will they be like the $75 trillion Livewire damages proposal, in the case where the foreign company actually shared Microsoft products via P2P?
> and puts US companies to a better position again
Well, if you think that a total mutual embargo (because, face it, the other countries of the world aren't idiots, when the US stops doing business with them, they will do the same) between the US and the rest of the world would be good for US companies, you would be right. I think that most people wouldn't agree with you.
OTOH, I would think this might give a big push for foreign companies to move to dropping Microsoft totally and using open-source instead. In fact, if I were a US company in the position where they had no choice but to deal with a foreign company, I'd be feeling much, much, more comfortable if the company were using open-source and not Microsoft. How on earth could I even audit that foreign company for compliance if it were using Microsoft products? OTOH, even if they would be using open-source, my company would still be opening itself to being sued in the case where some "mole" introduced illegal copyrighted code into the project, something which is trivial to do since computer code doesn't come magically labeled with indelible copyright notices.
The kinds of physical processes which drive these kinds of biological solutions are good at arriving at local optima, but are unlikely to find the global optimum which is considered to be the exact solution to the problem, as soon as the size of the problem outstrips the scale of the physical processes used to solve it. OTOH, when porting the physical paradigm to the (virtual) world of computing, it is much easier to scale the now-virtual solution processes than it would be for nature to solve the larger problem. So it still could very well lead to an interesting heuristic for arriving at good approximations to the global optimum.
And it, like everything else, is vulnerable to the "analog hole". Yes, I know that at high security installations people are searched upon entry for cameras and audio recording devices, but unfortunately, the advance of technology makes it likely that it will eventually be trivial to conceal such devices from most kinds of search equipment (in general, the smaller something is, the easier it is to conceal it).
> you lack the slightest understanding of how the world works
Assuming that you weren't talking about the disconnection between political rhetoric, politics, and the public welfare, I'm kind of interested in this world you live in where everyone has an infinite amount of time and resources to do anything they want --- in the world I'm familiar with, it is most likely that trying to solve Problem X uses resources which could have been dedicated, instead, to solving Problem Y.
Besides this small issue, your post was really insightful, though.... ;-)