Just to nitpick, the law doesn't require that corporations monomaniacally pursue profit -- it's just that most corporations are set up in a way that compels the officers in charge of them to do so. Publicly-held corporations, anyway. There's no reason why a corporation can't have something besides profitProfitPROFIT! as its guiding principle. Unfortunately, those methods don't really appeal to our inherently greedy nature -- so few people are going to deliberately set up a corporation that spreads power around to its employees, for example, rather than a corporation whose structure is designed to consolidate power and money at the top ranks.
Not that it's at all unexpected, coming from Fortune--a bastion of support for giant corporations--but man, is that article biased. I love the photos on the right: A picture of Steve Ballmer, wearing a suit, looking harmless, and captioned "The patent owner", followed by a picture of Richard Stallman, looking like an Al Qaeda member, captioned "The patent hater". Maybe this is just a coincidence but I like how they refer to RMS specifically as "Richard Matthew Stallman," which makes him sound like a presidential assassin or serial killer. Like there's another Richard Stallman we might get him confused with if they didn't use his middle name?:)
Later the article manages to imply that there's only one license that all FOSS projects use. You get three guesses which license it is, and the first two don't count.
Does anyone know where we can find out the 235 patents that MS claims are infringed? TFA didn't give any examples.
Just like carbon dating this process assumes that the initial amount of radioactive material was equal to a certain value.
Newp, it does not. The wonderful thing about radioactive decay is that you don't need to know the "initial" amount; you can examine the remaining daughter isotopes and calculate the age of the object from there.
and work the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act back to a genuinely, realistically "limited time", like the Constitution requires?
The Constitution doesn't specify that a "limited time" be particularly short, and as you may recall, a challenge to that specific act on those grounds was already rejected by the Supreme Court a couple years ago. 95 years is a long time, but it's still finite.
What they should be attacking is the other part of the copyright clause: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". There's no way you can argue that century-long copyrights promote that progress; instead they obviously retard it.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but where do you get the idea that a C-section involves moving the intestines out of the way? My wife had a C-section when our son was born and no such thing happened -- I watched the whole procedure. Are you just talking about C-sections for removing hydroencephalic fetuses?
Unfortunately, your ideas about mysql's capabilities are based upon insufficient experience
Ok, choke on this then: I work for a company that runs exclusively MySQL. We have 1,500 tables across our *primary* DBs (that's user-facing data) containing a little over four billion rows. Most of the queries are simple because they're primary-keyed returning single rows, but our largest tables contain 100-200 million rows and are subject to several thousand queries per second.
And we have fewer problems than we did when we were using Oracle with 1% as much data a few years back. Yes, that's right: We switched from Oracle to MySQL. And it was one of the best decisions we ever made.
This does not work either, because of that other right, the one about remaining silent.
My mistake -- I didn't mean you'd have the *legal* burden of proving it, I meant that you'd get a lot of flak from the police and/or judge who will, de facto, assume it was you. You'd have to be pretty cool about the whole thing to get away with it.:)
I don't know if you've ever seen the photos taken by red-light cameras, but unless you've taken pains to obscure your face while driving (which is illegal in most places), you're pretty readily identifiable on the photo. That pretty much proves you were driving.
If you weren't, you sign the affidavit that it wasn't you, and they have to actually examine the photo and your picture to see whether you're telling the truth. If you know what you're doing and the picture isn't identifiable as you, you can make a good case that you weren't driving. Of course, you also have to explain why you didn't report your car stolen that day. Maybe someone took it for a joyride, but then they left it in the exact spot and you didn't notice anything was wrong, etc. which is pretty unlikely.
Can you elaborate on that? I've never seen any performance difference in rendering between CSS and table layouts. And I'm talking huge, monstrous, multi-dozen-column, multi-hundred row tables with weird exceptions and yadda yadda. Not piddly 5-row tables on a blog.
That's true, but arena rock also didn't exist until people had a fair amount of disposable income, and society could support big arenas -- not to mention audio technology for putting that kind of sound in a huge arena in a way people would want to hear. It'd be tough to demonstrate that it's merely because of the marketing. Also keep in mind that large theater performances of live music have been selling out for a couple of centuries, in affluent (for the time) places like the European capitals. It wasn't rock, but it was the popular music of the day.
Regardless, giant arena rock shows aren't the only kind of live music out there. Smaller venues -- theaters like the Palladium or the Palace in Los Angeles, or the Troubador) not to mention clubs, like the Whiskey and the Roxy, will easily persist. CD sales may be dying, but radio isn't going anywhere; and good (or just popular) music will still get played on a lot of stations. Things aren't a fraction as dire as you make them out to be.
Besides, minstrels and other musicians have been able to make a living for thousands of years -- why should that change just because an artificially inflated 20th-century monopoly finally came crashing down?:)
This is the same issue that the Luddites could not come to terms with. Greater efficiency means less work to be done. Less work necessitates fewer employees and/or smaller wages.
While I generally agree with you, something just occurred to me when I read your post.
Imagine a situation where, say, 5% of the population is involved in some occupation. Then some technological improvement is made such that only one person now performs that occupation. This is an improvement, economically, because the people who were involved in that occupation can now do something else -- the average amount of wealth created per person has increased, benefiting society in general (although individually, some more than others).
But what happens if that one person is killed by accident? And the thing they provided was actually rather important? Suddenly we're SOL. It can put us in a risky position to reduce the prevalence of a certain occupation. I'm not saying this is the case with record store owners; but a general variety of occupations (and the associated experiences those people have) is, at least theoretically, healthy for society. We might want to examine if there are implications to getting rid of any occupation we can, just because it's more economically efficient.
To put it another way: economic efficiency is not the goal, a healthy society is the goal. Economic efficiency can contribute toward a healthy society, but so can many other factors, and we might want to make sure we're not ignoring one.
Your subway analogy is bunk. Music can be duplicated at essentially zero cost and with no specific loss to the producer (they still possess all the same objects and money they did before you made your illegal copy). Subway service is a limited resource; everyone who hops a turnstile to ride the subway is taking up space that could have been used by a paying customer.
This says nothing about whether any of these activities are right or wrong, merely that your analogy is bogus. When will people like you learn to distinguish information from services and physical property?
The recording industry will soon die, and eventually the only survivors will be the indie bands singing for the love of music. They'll end up as 21st century minstrels wandering from pub to pub, settling for a meager income and drinks on the house, regardless of their talent.
You really think that all the big concert venues (e.g. Universal Amphitheatre) are going to close because the record companies can't sell CDs due to piracy? I don't follow your logic here. People will still be able to find music and get excited about bands and want to see them play live, even if they find the music for free and not because record companies are pimping it. And there'll still be a huge demand for live music, and people will still pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to nitpick, the law doesn't require that corporations monomaniacally pursue profit -- it's just that most corporations are set up in a way that compels the officers in charge of them to do so. Publicly-held corporations, anyway. There's no reason why a corporation can't have something besides profitProfitPROFIT! as its guiding principle. Unfortunately, those methods don't really appeal to our inherently greedy nature -- so few people are going to deliberately set up a corporation that spreads power around to its employees, for example, rather than a corporation whose structure is designed to consolidate power and money at the top ranks.
Not that it's at all unexpected, coming from Fortune--a bastion of support for giant corporations--but man, is that article biased. I love the photos on the right: A picture of Steve Ballmer, wearing a suit, looking harmless, and captioned "The patent owner", followed by a picture of Richard Stallman, looking like an Al Qaeda member, captioned "The patent hater". Maybe this is just a coincidence but I like how they refer to RMS specifically as "Richard Matthew Stallman," which makes him sound like a presidential assassin or serial killer. Like there's another Richard Stallman we might get him confused with if they didn't use his middle name? :)
Later the article manages to imply that there's only one license that all FOSS projects use. You get three guesses which license it is, and the first two don't count.
Does anyone know where we can find out the 235 patents that MS claims are infringed? TFA didn't give any examples.
Newp, it does not. The wonderful thing about radioactive decay is that you don't need to know the "initial" amount; you can examine the remaining daughter isotopes and calculate the age of the object from there.
Oh, great, another metric unit we have to memorize: Moon-Earth distance nickel thicknesses. How many Libraries of Congress is that?
What song was it? "My Heart Will Go On"?
In this case you're wrong; anything published before 1923 is now in the public domain, regardless of when the author died. Source: Cornell
Mike Gravel? Sounds like someone who ends up fighting an epic battle against Doctor Doom.
Death yoga? I didn't read TFA, is Dhalsim involved somehow?
Except the cat is now forty feet tall, weighs six tons, and is made of lava.
The Constitution doesn't specify that a "limited time" be particularly short, and as you may recall, a challenge to that specific act on those grounds was already rejected by the Supreme Court a couple years ago. 95 years is a long time, but it's still finite.
What they should be attacking is the other part of the copyright clause: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". There's no way you can argue that century-long copyrights promote that progress; instead they obviously retard it.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but where do you get the idea that a C-section involves moving the intestines out of the way? My wife had a C-section when our son was born and no such thing happened -- I watched the whole procedure. Are you just talking about C-sections for removing hydroencephalic fetuses?
CEO? I thought Steve was the chairman.
I don't think the postings on 4chan qualify as "expression". ;)
Ok, choke on this then: I work for a company that runs exclusively MySQL. We have 1,500 tables across our *primary* DBs (that's user-facing data) containing a little over four billion rows. Most of the queries are simple because they're primary-keyed returning single rows, but our largest tables contain 100-200 million rows and are subject to several thousand queries per second.
And we have fewer problems than we did when we were using Oracle with 1% as much data a few years back. Yes, that's right: We switched from Oracle to MySQL. And it was one of the best decisions we ever made.
My mistake -- I didn't mean you'd have the *legal* burden of proving it, I meant that you'd get a lot of flak from the police and/or judge who will, de facto, assume it was you. You'd have to be pretty cool about the whole thing to get away with it.
I don't know if you've ever seen the photos taken by red-light cameras, but unless you've taken pains to obscure your face while driving (which is illegal in most places), you're pretty readily identifiable on the photo. That pretty much proves you were driving.
If you weren't, you sign the affidavit that it wasn't you, and they have to actually examine the photo and your picture to see whether you're telling the truth. If you know what you're doing and the picture isn't identifiable as you, you can make a good case that you weren't driving. Of course, you also have to explain why you didn't report your car stolen that day. Maybe someone took it for a joyride, but then they left it in the exact spot and you didn't notice anything was wrong, etc. which is pretty unlikely.
Can you elaborate on that? I've never seen any performance difference in rendering between CSS and table layouts. And I'm talking huge, monstrous, multi-dozen-column, multi-hundred row tables with weird exceptions and yadda yadda. Not piddly 5-row tables on a blog.
They do have one -- click on "Print this story" and it gives you a single page with the entire article... unfortunately, it uses a popup to do so ;)
Maybe it should, maybe not, but whether subways should be free is not really relevant to the topic ;)
That's true, but arena rock also didn't exist until people had a fair amount of disposable income, and society could support big arenas -- not to mention audio technology for putting that kind of sound in a huge arena in a way people would want to hear. It'd be tough to demonstrate that it's merely because of the marketing. Also keep in mind that large theater performances of live music have been selling out for a couple of centuries, in affluent (for the time) places like the European capitals. It wasn't rock, but it was the popular music of the day.
:)
Regardless, giant arena rock shows aren't the only kind of live music out there. Smaller venues -- theaters like the Palladium or the Palace in Los Angeles, or the Troubador) not to mention clubs, like the Whiskey and the Roxy, will easily persist. CD sales may be dying, but radio isn't going anywhere; and good (or just popular) music will still get played on a lot of stations. Things aren't a fraction as dire as you make them out to be.
Besides, minstrels and other musicians have been able to make a living for thousands of years -- why should that change just because an artificially inflated 20th-century monopoly finally came crashing down?
2001 called. They want their rant back. :)
While I generally agree with you, something just occurred to me when I read your post.
Imagine a situation where, say, 5% of the population is involved in some occupation. Then some technological improvement is made such that only one person now performs that occupation. This is an improvement, economically, because the people who were involved in that occupation can now do something else -- the average amount of wealth created per person has increased, benefiting society in general (although individually, some more than others).
But what happens if that one person is killed by accident? And the thing they provided was actually rather important? Suddenly we're SOL. It can put us in a risky position to reduce the prevalence of a certain occupation. I'm not saying this is the case with record store owners; but a general variety of occupations (and the associated experiences those people have) is, at least theoretically, healthy for society. We might want to examine if there are implications to getting rid of any occupation we can, just because it's more economically efficient.
To put it another way: economic efficiency is not the goal, a healthy society is the goal. Economic efficiency can contribute toward a healthy society, but so can many other factors, and we might want to make sure we're not ignoring one.
Your subway analogy is bunk. Music can be duplicated at essentially zero cost and with no specific loss to the producer (they still possess all the same objects and money they did before you made your illegal copy). Subway service is a limited resource; everyone who hops a turnstile to ride the subway is taking up space that could have been used by a paying customer.
This says nothing about whether any of these activities are right or wrong, merely that your analogy is bogus. When will people like you learn to distinguish information from services and physical property?
You really think that all the big concert venues (e.g. Universal Amphitheatre) are going to close because the record companies can't sell CDs due to piracy? I don't follow your logic here. People will still be able to find music and get excited about bands and want to see them play live, even if they find the music for free and not because record companies are pimping it. And there'll still be a huge demand for live music, and people will still pay for it.
So in the little box, it says "slashdottit!".
/. turning into a porn site for AFD? Let the mammary-related jokes begin!
Let me break that up a little:
"slashdot tit!"
So is