> it just doesn't occur to them that installing software could possibly > be as simple as just a few clicks
I wonder if this is partially because of the "free" == "copyright infringement" == "criminal/infection danger" propaganda the content industries have been pushing everywhere?
> WTF and HTF do you reason with these kinds of people?
You don't. No one likes evangelists, even if they are right. (You can make an exception in case there is some kind of bodily danger involved, but using Windows, at least in the home, typically doesn't fit that.)
Do you also constantly remind your acquaintances who are smokers about the dangers of smoking? I used to make that mistake but understood eventually and now limit myself to doing it about once a year, per smoker.
Just take a deep breath and think about that saying which talks about changing the things you can fix and accepting the things you can't.
The quoted result actually doesn't necessarily mean that illegal downloading doesn't hurt sales. The downloaders might be just as likely to buy some product but actually buy less than they would if they couldn't download.
Unfortunately, there is really no way to generate hard "evidence" on this topic, since that would involve comparing the real world with an alternate reality where it was somehow impossible to copy illegally and yet somehow everything not connected with this was "still the same".
This sub-thread discusses a specific business model, namely, legally running a small custom T-shirt shop which prints cinema-related images on its shirts. That is the "it" in question here. You are therefore wrong when you claim that the copyright holders did not make this impossible, as is their right.
> No one is forcing him to use copyrighted material on his product.
This is correct but a non sequitor. You might as well as said "No one is forcing him to run around wearing bermuda shorts and a bandana." The question at hand was actually if someone was forcing him to not use copyrighted material on his product, legally. This is obviously true given what has been posted.
You seem to be confused, here. "to force A to not do X" has no logical relationship to "to not force A to do X".
> My point being that some countries (in this case both > of them modern Western democracies) would have no > problem at all with doing this.
It's still a non sequitor since the reasons for the attacks have nothing to do with the particular kind of retaliation this whole discussion is about, namely, physical retaliation as a reply to cyber-attack. Your assumption that just because France was willing to sink a ship in order to be able to carry out a nuclear test this necessarily means that it would assassinate a foreign hacker who defaced some government website (or even who did actual damage to French intelligence interests) is just silly. And the same goes for the Israeli example (BTW, the fact that Israel mistakenly killed an innocent during that operation is also totally off-topic).
My understanding (from a friend who works in France) is that in France, if you fire someone, various employee protection laws make you pay a lot more severance benefits than you would in the same situation in the US. For this reason French companies are much more careful about their hiring practices, and there are some French workers who stick around as parasites, working the absolute minimum necessary, because it doesn't pay for the company to fire them.
So this guy probably will get a lot of severance pay even if he doesn't sue.
Of course, I don't live there and so this information might be out-of-date or incomplete.
It's been a long time since I learned about US history in school but I get the distinct impression you're forgetting something. What what that, again?.... April showers?
The law would still affect the ability of one-house GPL licensed software developers to sell non-GPL licenses on the side (and therefore the total funding available for FOSS development). I have no idea how significant that would be. I do know of at least one developer who has earned some money this way, but it was an insignificant amount compared to his day-job salary.
None of your examples have anything to do with the discussion in question. Or did I miss something? The acts which you link to are not retaliation for cyber-attacks. The French action wasn't even retaliation at all.
Perhaps NTFS maintains a "hidden" timestamp of the last file change activity, like Unix's ctime (which you ordinarily don't see in a directory listing unless you use a special command argument to "ls")?
Isn't there the additional complication that these corporations have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to try to implement the shareholders' wishes? (which I suppose usually equates to maximizing profit rather than ethical behavior). Not that I'm a big expert on the issue.
One has to wonder how you think anyone would be able to implement the OOXML standard, in any way which will be interoperable with Microsoft's implementation, if and when MS gets around to releasing it.
Perhaps you should have addressed the point of my post (which is that to be interoperable, you have to have that as your goal) instead of merely calling me names?
> I see.
We all see --- what we want. If you want me to change my point of view, you'll have to do a bit more work. In this case, probably a lot more work. My mind boggles at someone who thinks that Microsoft really, really wanted to implement ODF v1.1 in a way which would improve interoperability (and therefore damage Microsoft's business interests) but merely because of problems in the standard they got it wrong.
> Care to stand up for your words, and file a bug against > Firefox to add ActiveX support?
I don't need it. If your point was to show that Mozilla rejected such a bug, why didn't you just post a link? BTW, you picked a really bad example. It's obvious that the Firefox developers might understand that not having ActiveX support limits Firefox's interoperability with respect to Internet Explorer, but they might have good reasons to decide not to implement it anyway (for example: [1] ActiveX vulnerabilities have been some of the most exploited security holes in the history of the Internet; [2] there is no way to support it under non-Windows operating systems). (There is an experimental plugin which adds that, if you are really interested.)
> If, in practice, it turns out that all existing ODF solutions in fact > implement a not-quite-compatible, effectively "proprietary" dialect of > ODF, then someone has clearly failed somewhere.
Perhaps. If ODF were already perfect then they wouldn't have to work on version 1.2. The fact that it isn't perfect doesn't mean that we should laud Microsoft for intentionally implementing the imperfect standard in a way which impedes interoperability. In fact, the contrary should be obvious. But then, there will always be fanboys, eh?
What your post means is: if software supports a file format in a way which is incompatible with the the most widely used applications for that format, it is OK as long as it conforms to the published standards. Your post ignores the fact that the whole point of this kind of support is to encourage interoperability, not pedantry.
So, to turn the tables, no matter how differently FOSS software support MS proprietary formats compared to MS's applications, this is OK as long as they conform to all information which MS has published about their formats? Most FOSS developers, and even more FOSS users, disagree.
Unless there are foods which cause false increases in the BAC, what your comment means is: it's possible that they weren't drunk yet when they had the accident, but they had previously drunk enough alcohol to later be impaired if they hadn't had the accident and had continued to drive. Somehow, I'm not convinced that justice wouldn't be served anyway by overlooking this bit of pendantry.
Yes, a US company could transfer (actually, I think the more common legal language in this case is "assign") its US copyright to a company in France; but it would still have (automatically) a French copyright also. The post I replied to seemed to me to imply that there wouldn't have been any copyright on that work in France until some kind of "transfer" would occur.
And any change in US copyright law would affect that US copyright in the same way, no matter in what nation the assignee happened to be, making the post I replied to a bit, er, hard to understand.
Anyway, if the situation degenerates to the degree of the AC's GPL v.6 license, I doubt there will be much use of trying to squeeze out of it by some kind of legal side-stepping....
What you say is perfectly correct for machines which need the utmost of security. It seems to be a bit of overkill in my eyes because
Most Linux privilege escalations are quickly patched.
Most of those privilege escalations are dependent on the use of a specific buggy driver and are therefore not general to all Linux installations.
I suffice by never using the initial account, which has sudo powers, for anything but command line operations essential for the administration of the installation, and only from a (text-only) virtual console.
For all other uses I set up a second account which is as unprivileged as conveniently possible (and for sure it has no access to root via sudo).
Since the Wikipedia article is devoid of any reference to the founders of the US, I'd be curious to know on what you base your thesis. Personally, it seems to me that the founders of the US wanted the government to be weaker than the power of the masses, because of their previous experience under British rule (making them distrust government in general).
Things have been going downhill (i.e., the US government has been getting progressively stronger) ever since the founding of the US.
The government "detected child pornography steganographically concealed in those innocent images".
Actually, I, like you, think they just made a mistake. But since steganography exists, the government can justify blocking any website using the above excuse.
> Except if the original matches the one that the student turned in, > then isn't the student the one who committed copyright infringement?
Not if the original work was public domain or legally licensed to the student for that use.
He would be plagiarizing in both those cases, however, if he didn't properly attribute the source of the material he used --- understand the difference?
Anyway, my understanding of the system is that the student himself submits his work to turnitin.com via the use of a web browser. I suppose they then pass the work on to the the teacher, accompanied with the plagiarism check results.
You've been listening too much to the "IP is property" mantra. Copyright is an artificial monopoly which is granted by a national government --- you cannot transfer it to another nation. The "other nation" is often respecting the some kind of international treaty which makes it recognize the original nation's copyright status for your work, but that would be automatic, in general.
Perhaps, but a bit further down the line, there will be a time when bandwidth will be so cheap that networks of steganographically disguised friends-only darknets will totally undercut any attempts to prevent content distribution. People will also be able to "accidentally" forget stamp-sized memory chips in public places which could contain the current contents of the entire iTunes catalog.
I wonder how big media is going to prevent copyright infringement, then.
As a writer, I need to be familiar with my genre (SF).
No, you don't. Read everything else. No SF authors ever seem to do that, and it shows.
<sarcasm>You were talking about Harlequin Romances, right?</sarcasm>
Seriously, there might be quite a bit of truth in your post, but it gets a bit swamped by your generalizations: read everything else? No SF authors? I've been out-of-touch with the state of modern SF for a good while, but from what I do know about SF authors, they are a rather heterogeneous bunch. E.g., compare Delany vs. Laumer vs. Zelazny.
In addition, considering that Delany was a professor of comparative literature for 11 years, one wonders exactly what you think he should have read which he didn't read. Cereal boxes?
Slashdot Mirror
> A video can hit the internet within minutes of being shot.
If that pun was intentional, you get the prize for making it look unintentional....
> it just doesn't occur to them that installing software could possibly
> be as simple as just a few clicks
I wonder if this is partially because of the "free" == "copyright infringement" == "criminal/infection danger" propaganda the content industries have been pushing everywhere?
> WTF and HTF do you reason with these kinds of people?
You don't. No one likes evangelists, even if they are right. (You can make an exception in case there is some kind of bodily danger involved, but using Windows, at least in the home, typically doesn't fit that.)
Do you also constantly remind your acquaintances who are smokers about the dangers of smoking? I used to make that mistake but understood eventually and now limit myself to doing it about once a year, per smoker.
Just take a deep breath and think about that saying which talks about changing the things you can fix and accepting the things you can't.
"Among downloaders of music and movies, the percentage of buyers is as high as among non-downloaders and with games the percentage of buyers is even higher"
The quoted result actually doesn't necessarily mean that illegal downloading doesn't hurt sales. The downloaders might be just as likely to buy some product but actually buy less than they would if they couldn't download.
Unfortunately, there is really no way to generate hard "evidence" on this topic, since that would involve comparing the real world with an alternate reality where it was somehow impossible to copy illegally and yet somehow everything not connected with this was "still the same".
> They goddamned well did not make it impossible.
This sub-thread discusses a specific business model, namely, legally running a small custom T-shirt shop which prints cinema-related images on its shirts. That is the "it" in question here. You are therefore wrong when you claim that the copyright holders did not make this impossible, as is their right.
> No one is forcing him to use copyrighted material on his product.
This is correct but a non sequitor. You might as well as said "No one is forcing him to run around wearing bermuda shorts and a bandana." The question at hand was actually if someone was forcing him to not use copyrighted material on his product, legally. This is obviously true given what has been posted.
You seem to be confused, here. "to force A to not do X" has no logical relationship to "to not force A to do X".
> My point being that some countries (in this case both
> of them modern Western democracies) would have no
> problem at all with doing this.
It's still a non sequitor since the reasons for the attacks have nothing to do with the particular kind of retaliation this whole discussion is about, namely, physical retaliation as a reply to cyber-attack. Your assumption that just because France was willing to sink a ship in order to be able to carry out a nuclear test this necessarily means that it would assassinate a foreign hacker who defaced some government website (or even who did actual damage to French intelligence interests) is just silly. And the same goes for the Israeli example (BTW, the fact that Israel mistakenly killed an innocent during that operation is also totally off-topic).
My understanding (from a friend who works in France) is that in France, if you fire someone, various employee protection laws make you pay a lot more severance benefits than you would in the same situation in the US. For this reason French companies are much more careful about their hiring practices, and there are some French workers who stick around as parasites, working the absolute minimum necessary, because it doesn't pay for the company to fire them.
So this guy probably will get a lot of severance pay even if he doesn't sue.
Of course, I don't live there and so this information might be out-of-date or incomplete.
It's been a long time since I learned about US history in school but I get the distinct impression you're forgetting something. What what that, again? .... April showers?
The law would still affect the ability of one-house GPL licensed software developers to sell non-GPL licenses on the side (and therefore the total funding available for FOSS development). I have no idea how significant that would be. I do know of at least one developer who has earned some money this way, but it was an insignificant amount compared to his day-job salary.
None of your examples have anything to do with the discussion in question. Or did I miss something? The acts which you link to are not retaliation for cyber-attacks. The French action wasn't even retaliation at all.
Perhaps NTFS maintains a "hidden" timestamp of the last file change activity, like Unix's ctime (which you ordinarily don't see in a directory listing unless you use a special command argument to "ls")?
Isn't there the additional complication that these corporations have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to try to implement the shareholders' wishes? (which I suppose usually equates to maximizing profit rather than ethical behavior). Not that I'm a big expert on the issue.
One has to wonder how you think anyone would be able to implement the OOXML standard, in any way which will be interoperable with Microsoft's implementation, if and when MS gets around to releasing it.
Perhaps you should have addressed the point of my post (which is that to be interoperable, you have to have that as your goal) instead of merely calling me names?
> I see.
We all see --- what we want. If you want me to change my point of view, you'll have to do a bit more work. In this case, probably a lot more work. My mind boggles at someone who thinks that Microsoft really, really wanted to implement ODF v1.1 in a way which would improve interoperability (and therefore damage Microsoft's business interests) but merely because of problems in the standard they got it wrong.
> Care to stand up for your words, and file a bug against
> Firefox to add ActiveX support?
I don't need it. If your point was to show that Mozilla rejected such a bug, why didn't you just post a link? BTW, you picked a really bad example. It's obvious that the Firefox developers might understand that not having ActiveX support limits Firefox's interoperability with respect to Internet Explorer, but they might have good reasons to decide not to implement it anyway (for example: [1] ActiveX vulnerabilities have been some of the most exploited security holes in the history of the Internet; [2] there is no way to support it under non-Windows operating systems). (There is an experimental plugin which adds that, if you are really interested.)
> If, in practice, it turns out that all existing ODF solutions in fact
> implement a not-quite-compatible, effectively "proprietary" dialect of
> ODF, then someone has clearly failed somewhere.
Perhaps. If ODF were already perfect then they wouldn't have to work on version 1.2. The fact that it isn't perfect doesn't mean that we should laud Microsoft for intentionally implementing the imperfect standard in a way which impedes interoperability. In fact, the contrary should be obvious. But then, there will always be fanboys, eh?
What your post means is: if software supports a file format in a way which is incompatible with the the most widely used applications for that format, it is OK as long as it conforms to the published standards. Your post ignores the fact that the whole point of this kind of support is to encourage interoperability, not pedantry.
So, to turn the tables, no matter how differently FOSS software support MS proprietary formats compared to MS's applications, this is OK as long as they conform to all information which MS has published about their formats? Most FOSS developers, and even more FOSS users, disagree.
Unless there are foods which cause false increases in the BAC, what your comment means is: it's possible that they weren't drunk yet when they had the accident, but they had previously drunk enough alcohol to later be impaired if they hadn't had the accident and had continued to drive. Somehow, I'm not convinced that justice wouldn't be served anyway by overlooking this bit of pendantry.
Yes, a US company could transfer (actually, I think the more common legal language in this case is "assign") its US copyright to a company in France; but it would still have (automatically) a French copyright also. The post I replied to seemed to me to imply that there wouldn't have been any copyright on that work in France until some kind of "transfer" would occur.
And any change in US copyright law would affect that US copyright in the same way, no matter in what nation the assignee happened to be, making the post I replied to a bit, er, hard to understand.
Anyway, if the situation degenerates to the degree of the AC's GPL v.6 license, I doubt there will be much use of trying to squeeze out of it by some kind of legal side-stepping....
What you say is perfectly correct for machines which need the utmost of security. It seems to be a bit of overkill in my eyes because
I suffice by never using the initial account, which has sudo powers, for anything but command line operations essential for the administration of the installation, and only from a (text-only) virtual console.
For all other uses I set up a second account which is as unprivileged as conveniently possible (and for sure it has no access to root via sudo).
Since the Wikipedia article is devoid of any reference to the founders of the US, I'd be curious to know on what you base your thesis. Personally, it seems to me that the founders of the US wanted the government to be weaker than the power of the masses, because of their previous experience under British rule (making them distrust government in general).
Things have been going downhill (i.e., the US government has been getting progressively stronger) ever since the founding of the US.
The government "detected child pornography steganographically concealed in those innocent images".
Actually, I, like you, think they just made a mistake. But since steganography exists, the government can justify blocking any website using the above excuse.
One more reason this is a very, very bad idea.
> Except if the original matches the one that the student turned in,
> then isn't the student the one who committed copyright infringement?
Not if the original work was public domain or legally licensed to the student for that use.
He would be plagiarizing in both those cases, however, if he didn't properly attribute the source of the material he used --- understand the difference?
Anyway, my understanding of the system is that the student himself submits his work to turnitin.com via the use of a web browser. I suppose they then pass the work on to the the teacher, accompanied with the plagiarism check results.
You've been listening too much to the "IP is property" mantra. Copyright is an artificial monopoly which is granted by a national government --- you cannot transfer it to another nation. The "other nation" is often respecting the some kind of international treaty which makes it recognize the original nation's copyright status for your work, but that would be automatic, in general.
Perhaps, but a bit further down the line, there will be a time when bandwidth will be so cheap that networks of steganographically disguised friends-only darknets will totally undercut any attempts to prevent content distribution. People will also be able to "accidentally" forget stamp-sized memory chips in public places which could contain the current contents of the entire iTunes catalog.
I wonder how big media is going to prevent copyright infringement, then.
<sarcasm>You were talking about Harlequin Romances, right?</sarcasm>
Seriously, there might be quite a bit of truth in your post, but it gets a bit swamped by your generalizations: read everything else? No SF authors? I've been out-of-touch with the state of modern SF for a good while, but from what I do know about SF authors, they are a rather heterogeneous bunch. E.g., compare Delany vs. Laumer vs. Zelazny.
In addition, considering that Delany was a professor of comparative literature for 11 years, one wonders exactly what you think he should have read which he didn't read. Cereal boxes?
YMMV. Widely. Depends on where you are.
This includes many things besides downloading, including spitting on the ground.