But you haven't committed a transgression, because no one has lost anything. Don't be absurd. Taking something without permission where permission is clearly required to do so is a transgression. So is trespassing; so is spying on someone. They're not losing anything or forced to do anything, but you'd have to be truly out of your mind to say that's not a transgression.
Loss of an item has nothing to do with it. It does not matter what you took or whether the owner was without it; it only matters that you violated their legally protected right. A transgression is quite simply the violation of a legal right. By your logic, attempted murder isn't a problem because no one was actually hurt. (You see how bad a twisted misapplication takes things? So you might want to stop.)
Wrong. Look at the "free stuff" section on craigslist - it's full of stuff that is legitimately and legally for sale elsewhere. Instead of taking that free used microwave from someone who doesn't want it anymore, you could buy a used one from someone on eBay, or a new one from the store. By your logic, taking the free one is "stealing". Quit trolling. First and foremost, the free section on Craigslist is a section where individuals with title are offering to transfer it to you for the low, low price of coming to pick it up. Individuals are free to do so with their protected works as well. Second, "taking the free one" isn't done without permission and contrary to the law, because they're offering it to you.
That's the way it works. The courts get to define what the words mean, because that's where the Constitution vested the power to interpret the law.
The courts have repeatedly held for centuries that (a) private parties aren't required to honor a free speech right and (b) free speech doesn't extend to the speech of others.
You're free to repeat the ideas you learned from books. You're free to repeat musical ideas gleaned from listening to others. You're free to repeat style and interpretation you learned from art and film. You're not free to duplicate verbatim books or anything else verbatim for (1) commercial purposes or (2) purposes that burden commerce, unless (3) the owner(s)'s rights have lapsed. You can reproduce facts (e.g. formulas in published works) to your heart's content, but you can't just appropriate someone's compilation, editing, and narration of that information.
Stealing is a verb. It is an act that involves taking something to which you're not entitled. That's it. You are, once again, conflating theft (a legal construct which involves deprivation of property) with stealing (a verb). THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING. You are also conveniently ignoring the fact that the onus under the law is on the person committing the act, not the impact on the owner.
It doesn't matter that the owner has more, even if there are infinitely many more. You aren't punished because someone has lost something; you're punished because you have committed a transgression against someone. We don't care, as a legal matter, whether you took a dollar from a dishwasher or from Donald Trump, who'd never even know it was gone. It's something that is legitimately and legally for sale, which you acquired without paying for. You have stolen. Idiotic semantic arguments (which use 'steal' and 'theft' interchangeably, but try to split hairs on fractional parts of hand-picked definitions) notwithstanding, there's no issue here.
This is worse than the utterly moronic "piracy is only on boats" horseshit that is scattered around Slashdot. Newsflash, Dexter: 'piracy' has been used in the modern sense since the 1880s. It's a word more deeply established than "computer".
Common sense. Go to the vendor's website and download it; if it's not available, send an email asking for it to review before beginning. In the alternative, open the box and review it, though you'll probably have to fight for a refund if the software package doesn't have an inner seal around the disc. Most commercial software does these days. If the box is open but the disc seal is intact, you should have no trouble getting a refund; if you do, take it up with the retailer.
The one I linked to is from the archives with info on the 2001 model. As for the price, I bought one for 900, so I guess you are calling me a liar, because you have no information on where or how I made my purchase. I bought one in 2004 at Akihabara, and it was an older model. Okay, but a 3-year old notebook is not comparable to one that has been out a few weeks. I believe that you paid that amount. I do not believe it makes for a level comparison, however, since its price as released was substantially higher and 3-year-old old stock simply isn't the same as a new machine, even if it's still in sealed packaging.
They made it 0.01" thinner than the thinnest notebook so they could brag about it They made it a good deal thinner than that in cross section, without the ordinary compromises that force such a move (a tiny 10" 64K LCD; a miniaturized keyboard; a tiny or nonexistent trackpad). The average thickness of the machine is approximately half an inch. Only the back third is thicker than that, and the front third is thinner. In the back, at its thickest, it is thinner than the thinnest section of the thinnest notebook on the market (admittedly excepting ultraportables). Absolutely it's a gimmick, but their engineers weren't sitting on their asses.
Just in comparison, it is half the cross-sectional depth of the MacBook, already one of the world's slimmest notebooks. It is about 35% of the cross-sectional thickness of the typical notebook.
Owning a copy gives you an implicit right to use and even if the software does not contain an EULA you can still use it. If the software does not contain a EULA, you are bound merely by statutory requirements (i.e. copyright law). If the software contains a EULA, you are bound to all of its terms by use of the software, except those which are unenforceable. Usage is assent to terms. This isn't even on the table for discussion.
So I can be subject to a contract I have never seen with no indication that a contract exists? As to the first part, absolutely. As to the second, the indication that license terms exist is implicit in the fact that it is commercial software. Trade usage dictates that commercial software is bound by license terms. This is knowledge you are responsible for having as a functioning adult.
Or have you never used a computer where you haven't installed EVERYTHING yourself? The user is not necessarily a party to that contract. Sure. The user is responsible until and unless s/he can point to the license holder, be it an employer, a family member, or a merchant of some kind. That party is responsible for ensuring compliance, and if your misuse creates an issue, it's a foregone conclusion that the third party licensee will be coming after you. If it's your job, you'll likely be fired. If it's a merchant, you'll be sued for cost recovery. If it's a family member, it depends on your family dynamic.
Just like you're responsible when someone uses your car, your credit card, or some other instrumentality, you're generally responsible when someone uses your computer. If it's a professional relationship, that is usually enforced by separate terms (e.g. further contracts), such that your damaging acts are grounds for a separate action against you.
AFAIK EU law already requires both of these for the EULA to have any chance at enforcement. It does not. Most software does this anyway, and I have never encountered a software publisher that would not make terms available in advance, and I have quite a bit of practice in this field. You know this is the case because the number of unsuccessful EULA challenges vastly outweighs the number that go to court, which further outnumbers the number which are struck down (and those that are successfully challenged fail on other grounds, usually arbitration clauses or unlawful waivers). Again, you take a contrarian attitude to enforceability that belies an inaccurate understanding of the legal, commercial, and political situation, not to mention this study and its effects.
Well, it's principle, and you'd be faced with the same problem irrespective of DRM. I know the moderators are too dumb to stop and think about what's going on here and would rather just groupthink their way into any attack on DRM, regardless of the situation, but one can hope, can't he?
These discs are fundamentally different formats. DRM isn't what makes this not cost effective. DRM isn't the reason why your HD-DVDs don't work in a Blu-ray player.
Every time in the history of recordings that there has been a new format, it has been set up so you'll buy it again. After a few years when it becomes cheap, people can start moving over their collections from the old format. There's nothing special about that. Tape decks captured LP recordings in the 70s; CD recorders moved tapes to discs by the late 90's. DV connections moved VHS to DVD in the early 00s, DVDs can be moved to BD if you are enterprising. This has been par for the course throughout the entire past century. They don't break the old format; there's nothing forcing you to upgrade or to pay again. Consumers pay again because it offers them something they want at a price they're willing to pay. There's nothing nefarious about that--if Bob wants to buy the DVD instead of spending two hours converting his VHS, why shouldn't a retailer make a sale? The fact that vendors know they'll continue making residual sales is one of the major factors that cause prices to drop after release. It's all part of a larger system.
The fact that it's more expensive to do so than just to repurchase isn't something that's new. Even if your HD-DVD collection didn't have DRM at all, it would still be impractical and expensive to convert it to BD.
Using the software does not require a license Yes, it absolutely does, particularly in the case of the kinds of software that doesn't come in the form of a "copy" (i.e. a disc). There is no legal authority of which I'm aware that separates a license from a right to use.
Simply owning a copy doesn't make you subject to the EULA either. Again, nothing more than pure fantasy. Owning a copy doesn't make you a party, using the software does. Assent by performance is a classic form of contractual acceptance. You have sadly fallen into the exact trap that Slashdot loves to populate; nothing in the report says that EULAs aren't part of the software process, nor does it advocate or even suggest the elimination of EULAs as the specific form agreement under which a license is acquired.
The issue is that EULAs have become increasing modeled after merchant-merchant exchanges, while the consumer remains relatively unsophisticated and doesn't have an easy way to object or counter said form contract. The consumer advocacy group is pushing largely for three things: a mandated warning label on boxes or before point of purchase of online software, legally mandated prior availability of license terms (which every US company already complies with upon request) like nutrition information at fast-food restaurants, and simpler terms with more direct action in the way of outlining which specific rights the contract is not allowed to take (e.g. arbitration clauses, which courts do not like).
Taking these actions would strengthen the EULA as a device for rights transfers. It's not new; contracts have long created positions that differ from generic copyright licenses; standard form contracts have long replaced individually-negotiated contracts where volume exceeds bargaining capacity. No one has ever challenged the blanket validity of a license agreement and won.
EU directives curtail the acceptable terms for non-negotiated contracts Yes, they do. That doesn't get you anywhere, except to strike out terms which are unenforceable anyway. It doesn't abrogate the entire agreement.
Since when do you need permission to run software that you've legally obtained? The answer's in the question. Legal acquisition is permissive. By releasing the software, the owner(s) are granting permission for you to use it as you see fit, because in doing so, they've protected what they themselves deem valuable (distribution and derivative works) with the GPL.
They've waived their claims to another distribution vehicle at that point.
Simply put, if you don't have permission, you can't have legal acquisition.
I'm not sure how this got modded insightful, but it's not true.
This in many case nullify the contract utterly. No, with the exception of particularly egregious contracts, it nullifies the invalid term, not the contract itself. This is also true in the United States, though US courts are less inclined to interfere with terms and there are overall fewer objectionable contract terms.
for example in saying they are not liable for any damage occasioned by the software They're not. This is a standard disclaimer on consumer products. All liability is specifically disclaimed, except that covered by the limited warranty and that which is not waived under the law (e.g. if it causes bodily injury through defect or negligence). I don't believe there is any significant case awarding damage for defective software.
Such shenanigan would not happen with a real signed contract. Clearly you don't have a lot of experience with contracts, then, because those shenanigans are the only reason that contract attorneys have jobs. What you do with the text box is just as irrelevant as what you do with your copy of the written terms. You can fire up Word and mess around with it all you like. The process is simple: did you buy the copy of the software? Are you the registered owner of the software? Do you represent yourself as the owner of the license to the software? If yes, it doesn't matter if your two year old clicked "next". There aren't many instances in which you'd have an opportunity or a reason in court to use that particular out. If you're challenging the terms in court, you have to be a party to them. If you decide you don't like the terms, you can always back out by uninstalling the software. Quite simply, it's not as though you had no access to the terms before purchase; on the contrary, EULAs are available quickly and easily in advance for anyone who wants to review them. This is the big weakness in the report and it's a major consideration when attempting to litigate in this field.
There are certainly issues that need to be worked out (e.g. some fairly ridiculous and one-sided provisions are common; if the terms are rejected, getting a refund for open software generally requires you to send a letter threatening to sue before they offer to take care of it), but similar devices are and have been a commonly used tool and will remain so.
And once again, the report, like Netscape and the other seminal cases people like to point to, don't go as far as people commonly believe they do. This report says that EULAs are unfair and overly complex. That is true; it doesn't mean they're saying EULAs themselves are wrong. As a consumer advocacy group, their job is to simplify and re-balance the terms. This is a great thing, but it's not an incrimination of the agreement as a tool, so don't lose sight of that.
if a user values privacy, and it's profitable to sell/market users' data (as is generally the case now), then there's a fundamental opposition here. At minimum, it is not in most companys' interest to invest large sums of money protecting users' data... On the contrary, if information gleaned from personal data has a commercial value (i.e. generates revenue), there is an inherent interest in keeping it secure. There's not an interest in keeping it private, but that is a wholly separate issue.
Controlling the flow of data and making sure that your investment and your proprietary information doesn't give a free ride to your competitors sits at the very heart of an information-based economy.
They will invest a considerable amount of money protecting access to data, because if you make money from selling something, it doesn't do well not to build any fences or locks. Why would anyone enter into a financial partnership with, say, Facebook, if they could access that same information without doing so? You can bet they'll go to the mat for your privacy from unauthorized parties. The only conflict arises from who has the power to authorize.
That's why CPUs have heat spreaders. No kidding! Why else would I be talking about them?
Electric resistive elements heat up uniformly Precisely the point. You apply input at one end (in the case of a stove element, electricity), and the medium conducts it throughout. It's called choosing the right material for the right job.
You don't put electricity in at one end, have the voltage abruptly drop to 0, and then conduct the heat through the rest of the coil I didn't suggest that the heat was only produced at the end. I suggested that if engineers designing systems were as incompetent as the parent post to my comment implied, they wouldn't be able to pick the right material for the right job. If a material required even heat application, it wouldn't make a suitable heat distribution medium for a CPU cooler in the first place.
I don't believe that is this case. He was suggesting that a four-core setup can be configured so that one is idle to moderate heat buildup. This was a direct response indicating that with such a configuration, heat production is uneven even if there are four good cores. The post further states that the conductive medium would distribute heat throughout, which is correct.
The reply to that states that "one core is defective, so it can't cycle through them." That doesn't make any sense.
In a three-core system, the unevenness is not a problem, because heat production is uneven in a fully-function four core system, too.
If one is disabled, it would cycle 1,2,4,1,2,4 (assuming #3 is the bad one).
Moreover, if one of the cores isn't running, and you have a cooling system designed for four cores, it really doesn't matter. If it can handle four full-tilt cores, it can handle three. The zero heat production is a bigger benefit than a slightly uneven distribution. If it's truly a suitable medium, the heat generated will be spread throughout pretty well, even if the heat-production is only on one edge of the medium. Think of an electric stove burner--it only has heat applied at one end, but the opposite end heats up pretty well. Obviously it's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be.
Choosing the answer you want and then altering reality to ensure that it's at least somewhat true is not the same as discovering the answer to the question.
That's not to mention the sheer irresponsibility of intentionally manipulating whatever ecosystem might (but probably doesn't) exist on Mars. Accidental contamination is one thing, but haven't we learned by now that we can't just impetuously troll the galaxy doing whatever we want? It's certainly caused us all sorts of problems down here.
It is.39 inches thick!!! Look at the diagram. Only the hinge is thick. The entire notebook is about half the thickness of the MacBook Air. No, it's not. Look at the diagram, indeed! It is.39 inches thick at the front. It is approximately.55" thick throughout the middle (the hinge is not double the thickness of the rest of the machine).
Further, the MBA is an average of a half-inch thick. Compare the profiles of the machines. The MBA starts out a hair thinner, and it tapers faster. The average depth of the MBA is approximately.51"--beating, again, by a hair, the Sony.
With that said, at the time, I got myself a Muramasa, which was Sharp's thin notebook. It had a 12" screen, full keyboard, a touchpad, and even a cradle that would charge it and transform it into an external hdd. I paid about 900 dollars. This first came out in 2001. In late 2004, the Muramasa was $1900, not 900. It was launched in mid-2004, which you reference by the same "at the time" comment as the Sony, and not in 2001. It is also not thinner than the MBA, have a constant depth of 0.65" throughout, except for the thicker portions near the rear, hitting 19.4mm (again, a hair thicker than the MBA).
It makes significant tradeoffs itself--namely with a weak CPU, 2.5 hour battery life, and 64K color TFT. It also, interestingly enough, comes with a sealed-in battery as well.
The problem I have is with those who believe Apple is always the first to break new ground or innovate. I don't believe anyone said Apple was always first. You'd be more credible if you didn't overstate your case dramatically, while simultaneously comparing the thinnest measures of your chosen PC with the thickest measurement of the MBA.
Yes, it is true that there have been other thin notebooks. No, there has never been a thinner machine with a display above 11" (again, the Sharp compromised with a 64K TFT). There has never been a thinner notebook at a lower price ($1799 vs. your best, the Sharp at $2171 ($1900 adjusted for inflation)). As is often the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle between your hypothetical "Apple innovated first" and your argument. In many ways, it truly is a first. In some, it is an also-ran.
No, it's not. Look at the diagram, indeed! It is.39 inches thick at the front. It is approximately.55" thick throughout the middle (the hinge is not double the thickness of the rest of the machine).
Further, the MBA is an average of a half-inch thick. Compare the profiles of the machine. The MBA starts out a hair thinner, and it tapers faster. The average depth of the MBA is approximately.51"--beating, again, by a hair, the Sony.
With that said, at the time, I got myself a Muramasa, which was Sharp's thin notebook. It had a 12" screen, full keyboard, a touchpad, and even a cradle that would charge it and transform it into an external hdd. I paid about 900 dollars. This first came out in 2001. In late 2004, the Muramasa was $1900, not 900. It was launched in mid-2004, which you reference by the same "at the time" comment as the Sony, and not in 2001. It is also not thinner than the MBA, have a constant depth of 0.65" throughout, except for the thicker portions near the rear, hitting 19.4mm (again, a hair thicker than the MBA).
It makes significant tradeoffs itself--namely with a weak CPU, 2.5 hour battery life, and 64K color TFT. It also, interestingly enough, comes with a sealed-in battery as well.
The problem I have is with those who believe Apple is always the first to break new ground or innovate. I don't believe anyone said Apple was always first. You'd be more credible if you didn't overstate your case dramatically, while simultaneously comparing the thinnest measures of your chosen PC with the thickest measurement of the MBA.
Yes, it is true that there have been other thin notebooks. No, there has never been a thinner machine with a display above 11" (again, the Sharp compromised with a 64K TFT). There has never been a thinner notebook at a lower price ($1799 vs. your best, the Sharp at $2171 ($1900 adjusted for inflation)). As is often the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle between your hypothetical "Apple innovated first" and your argument. In many ways, it truly is a first. In some, it is an also-ran.
It was also $3500 ($3999 with the carbon fiber, which is the one reviewed and may have an impact on size). Even factoring in the relative difference between its 1GHz processor, 20GB hard drive and 512MB (given the 3-year old market), the price is not even close to the same ballpark.
For simple comparison, the high-end 17" PowerBook at that time was $2799, and was viewed of course by many as a tremendously expensive machine. This little computer outpriced it by 25%. Today's MacBook Air is cheaper by an even greater margin in comparison.
It has a 10" LCD, no touchpad, and no wifi built-in. It does not have an optical drive. Battery life is two hours less. On the whole, it is no thinner than the MacBook Air (in fact, it has a nearly identical cross-sectional area, though it would seem that the MBA does in fact retain the "thin" advantage, but just barely). So certainly, if you want to pay hundreds of dollars more for a smaller screen, same dongle situation, and much worse battery life, you could do that.
They are not recognizing notebooks on a subscription basis. No one else does, either. If you have a source on that I'd be interested to see it, since it would break with trade usage.
OS X isn't a device, and it is long-established custom that installable software is not a part of full-blown computers and so the computer doesn't make the software count as a "device." On the other hand, mobile devices running software that isn't available, say, as a separate SKU, aren't considered to be running installable software.
Software updates to a software product don't pose a problem.
It's a pure, textbook case of conflict of interest to allow lawyers to write the laws that they will be arguing because they're the ones who will be profiting from how those laws are written. Horseshit.
1. If you participated in the drafting of the legislation, you are barred from representing a client suing under it. 2. Lawyers as a class don't agree on anything more than doctors as a class, or programmers as a class. 3. Practicing lawyers hate legislators just as much as everyone else. They won't just sit on their thumbs, and they keep changing things, even if it's just to renumber everything to make all brief citations wrong every couple of years. 4. Lawyers argue all laws, and it doesn't matter who writes them. Judges make the final decision, and if you're qualified to read something, one would hope you're also qualified to write it and vice versa. 5. If you think that lawyers gain a strategic advantage by writing laws (with the underlying assumption that they are more complicated as a result), you're absolutely delirious. Lawyers and judges battle their caseloads, and no sane lawyer wants a case sitting around for five, six, seven years. You try to remember everything you've said from a case that is now 30 deep in the pile but just won't go away. Lawyers don't want them to last forever, either. Even if the sole source of income is from fees during that time, there comes a point where the amount of energy it takes to hold up that accretion ball is not worth your time in dealing with it. There are only so many billable hours in a week. 6. You don't have non-chemists review chemistry papers. Why should you bar "lawyers" by which I assume you mean all legal professionals from making sure that laws make legal sense? 7. If you put people in a room with no experience in how laws work, how they're applied, and what the consequences are to a given side in litigation, they'd have no clue how to draft a good law. A legislature should not be exclusively lawyers (and they rarely are), but there's a reason why experience in the thing you're creating is a desirable trait. 8. Attorneys make more than their legislative counterparts in almost every instance. Legislators either do it because they care, or because they're already so rich that they don't have anything to worry about it. Contrary to popular belief, the number of people in the latter category is not tremendous until you hit the US Senate, and even there, "rich" is a relative term.
here are limits to the thing, you know. No court would ever look at Wickard in connection with the copyright exception I propose. No one suggested that as such. Your person-to-person transfer, however, has a material value to that market despite not participating in that market. The example was used not as an authority, but as an empirical study demonstrating just how old such a belief in noncommercial but with commercial effects activity is.
Still, your attempt to derail the discussion by selective misreading is unsurprising. To wit:
Hey, you're the one who said that for technological reasons, there was no copyright in the time of Shakespeare. Since copyright law was invented less than a century later, and there was no material change in technology in the intervening time, your claim must be false. This is an egregious failure of rationality, not to mention an ass-backwards misconstruction. There was no need for protection more specific than the letters patent and copyright precursors in effect--there was no mass market technology to defeat the protections of the theatre companies from putting on their protections. Indeed, Shakespeare battled reproductions of his Second Folio precisely during this transitional stage. The "material change" wasn't to the technology, but rather to its accessibility--Shakespeare's work was largely unprinted in his day. A century later, copies had descended into a whole new price class. The law introduced more comprehensive protections in response to maintain the same approximate level of exclusivity as before.
No, that's wrong. Remember, copyright only applied to books and maps originally. An unconvincing argument from an unsophisticated understanding. At the time, there was no way to reproduce anything other than books and maps. The argument is a tautology. You know what also happened in the 19th C. to explain what you clearly deem an arbitrary exception? Lithography. As the technological medium shifts, the law is extended to protect works on that medium. Reproductions of sound weren't limited by copyright until the phonograph, either. None of this gets you anywhere.
He is well known to have been skeptical about them. He is well known to have been skeptical of the presidency as well, but that didn't stop him. The fact remains that Jefferson embraced the limited patent as the best solution for competing interests. He helped establish the Patent Office, and that damned 1813 letter is tossed around out of context and misconstrued by every third "information wants to be free" nutter on the planet.
Your assumption, so thoroughly and facially misplaced, is nothing more than a cheap attempt to score points as you bow out, based on nothing more than a willful disregard for an issue you have shown an imprecise understanding of. Reasonable people certainly differ on a number of points here, but support can still be shown through systemic means, and on that it's clear that your exception to the comment that started this discussion is misplaced at best.
Re:Now there are 3 Liberals to decide between..
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Has Ron Paul Quit?
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It has never really been a question that the United States is a moderate-right nation that has sadly been tipping more and more to the right over the past few decades. The American public tends not to recognize this because the Republicans managed to turn the word "liberal" into an attack against those less conservative than they are...while the Democrats were too spineless to pick up the label and wear it as a badge of honor, knowing that there aren't many true liberals to be found.
What you get in political dynamics such as this though is something very much like bringing protons closer to each other--the intensity of repulsion increases palpably as they grow closer, but once they pile on top of each other, they manage to stick together. If the distance between your major parties isn't that great, you can get some of the worst kinds of partisan warfare.
At the same time, though, critics of an American "two party" system don't often realize that we don't actually have a two party system. We have a two label system, but each major party is itself what would be a coalition in PR systems. The real problem is that PR gives the voters a better chance to decide who's in charge of the coalition (e.g. moderates, jesus people, neocons, states-rights for Republicans) but this closed-party-leadership model was an intentional systemic choice. This country is designed to be insulated from "the people", and this is one of the institutional features to do it.
I could certainly claim that a work was mine, or was not yours and still not actually infringe on that work.
Copyright infringement isn't where the solution that would lie. Fraudulent misrepresentation is, well, fraudulent.
o long as I've got a decent memory, I can make my own copy of the poem, and I'd own that copy. Copyright might bar me from doing so, while and if it is in force as to the work,
No, it wouldn't. If you want to produce your own copy, that's fine. But you better hang onto it for your own use.
I said that all the other rights -- the right to use the work, to make copies of the work, etc. -- the rights that copyright has to stand in the way of -- are acquired along with access. And they are.
Not at issue. Those rights aren't what is prohibited by copyright bars, nor part of what is reserved by the author. Copyright generally allows copies to be made, so long as you don't break a protection measure or distribute said copies. There's really no argument to make as to how you are constrained by that.
AFAIK there were no material changes in printing press technology between 1616 and 1710
Another intentional or ignorant straw man. The change is between the days of the printing press, when books in the 17th C. were still only in the hands of what we'd consider the upper middle class, and 2008.
t is a classic quid pro quo: The public temporarily agrees to refrain from certain actions, giving the author control over whether they can be done, and the author provides a work, which will ultimately fall into the public domain. The public winds up winning, in that it permanently gets a valuable work in exchange for a relatively minor and temporary payment, and the author comes up second, having risked his investment (since there's no guarantee that the copyright will have economic value) and at best only gotten any manner of reward during a temporary span of time.
You frame this in opposition, but this is exactly the point, once again. The bargain pulls a work which would be wholly private into public use. The arrangements were made to reduce the barrier of entry of the general public to have access to works of art and substance--to make acquisition cheaper. To this end, and coupled with the technology to reproduce, artists were guaranteed government protection in exchange for releasing the works to be copied in the first place. Without this arrangement, most artists would not have done so, and would have continued in the business of selling originals.
There is no historical reason to believe that it was an imposition on anyone--the public gets the better end of the deal, and now we have people trying to achieve a competitive advantage on that deal, which is equally egregious compared to those who try to exploit the system to gain perpetual rights and those not negotiated.
The notion of promoting the public good has never meant contemporaneous promotion, but merely the eventual seeding of the people with broad access. Without patents and copyrights to bring these forward, they would remain entirely proprietary and privatized as they were before such arrangements. YOu are absolutely correct that the development does not occur in a vacuum, and in our modern society the absence of copyrights and patents would not open up the information to immediate consumption by all. There are any number of alternative mechanisms to ensure proprietary control of that which is considered valuable.
As much as Slashdot doesn't like it, information is the basic currency of the economy in the 21st century. Protections are essential to create portfolios of value. Raw materials and physical assets are no longer adequate. Our economy simply could not function on a realistic level without booting us back to an agrarian society. Hell, most people on Slashdot wouldn't be employed at all were it not for IP. That makes it a threshold issue, and those who argue for abolition are
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Loss of an item has nothing to do with it. It does not matter what you took or whether the owner was without it; it only matters that you violated their legally protected right. A transgression is quite simply the violation of a legal right. By your logic, attempted murder isn't a problem because no one was actually hurt. (You see how bad a twisted misapplication takes things? So you might want to stop.) Wrong. Look at the "free stuff" section on craigslist - it's full of stuff that is legitimately and legally for sale elsewhere. Instead of taking that free used microwave from someone who doesn't want it anymore, you could buy a used one from someone on eBay, or a new one from the store. By your logic, taking the free one is "stealing". Quit trolling. First and foremost, the free section on Craigslist is a section where individuals with title are offering to transfer it to you for the low, low price of coming to pick it up. Individuals are free to do so with their protected works as well. Second, "taking the free one" isn't done without permission and contrary to the law, because they're offering it to you.
That's the way it works. The courts get to define what the words mean, because that's where the Constitution vested the power to interpret the law.
The courts have repeatedly held for centuries that (a) private parties aren't required to honor a free speech right and (b) free speech doesn't extend to the speech of others.
You're free to repeat the ideas you learned from books. You're free to repeat musical ideas gleaned from listening to others. You're free to repeat style and interpretation you learned from art and film. You're not free to duplicate verbatim books or anything else verbatim for (1) commercial purposes or (2) purposes that burden commerce, unless (3) the owner(s)'s rights have lapsed. You can reproduce facts (e.g. formulas in published works) to your heart's content, but you can't just appropriate someone's compilation, editing, and narration of that information.
That's crap.
Stealing is a verb. It is an act that involves taking something to which you're not entitled. That's it. You are, once again, conflating theft (a legal construct which involves deprivation of property) with stealing (a verb). THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING. You are also conveniently ignoring the fact that the onus under the law is on the person committing the act, not the impact on the owner.
It doesn't matter that the owner has more, even if there are infinitely many more. You aren't punished because someone has lost something; you're punished because you have committed a transgression against someone. We don't care, as a legal matter, whether you took a dollar from a dishwasher or from Donald Trump, who'd never even know it was gone. It's something that is legitimately and legally for sale, which you acquired without paying for. You have stolen. Idiotic semantic arguments (which use 'steal' and 'theft' interchangeably, but try to split hairs on fractional parts of hand-picked definitions) notwithstanding, there's no issue here.
This is worse than the utterly moronic "piracy is only on boats" horseshit that is scattered around Slashdot. Newsflash, Dexter: 'piracy' has been used in the modern sense since the 1880s. It's a word more deeply established than "computer".
Common sense. Go to the vendor's website and download it; if it's not available, send an email asking for it to review before beginning. In the alternative, open the box and review it, though you'll probably have to fight for a refund if the software package doesn't have an inner seal around the disc. Most commercial software does these days. If the box is open but the disc seal is intact, you should have no trouble getting a refund; if you do, take it up with the retailer.
Just in comparison, it is half the cross-sectional depth of the MacBook, already one of the world's slimmest notebooks. It is about 35% of the cross-sectional thickness of the typical notebook.
Just like you're responsible when someone uses your car, your credit card, or some other instrumentality, you're generally responsible when someone uses your computer. If it's a professional relationship, that is usually enforced by separate terms (e.g. further contracts), such that your damaging acts are grounds for a separate action against you. AFAIK EU law already requires both of these for the EULA to have any chance at enforcement. It does not. Most software does this anyway, and I have never encountered a software publisher that would not make terms available in advance, and I have quite a bit of practice in this field. You know this is the case because the number of unsuccessful EULA challenges vastly outweighs the number that go to court, which further outnumbers the number which are struck down (and those that are successfully challenged fail on other grounds, usually arbitration clauses or unlawful waivers). Again, you take a contrarian attitude to enforceability that belies an inaccurate understanding of the legal, commercial, and political situation, not to mention this study and its effects.
Well, it's principle, and you'd be faced with the same problem irrespective of DRM. I know the moderators are too dumb to stop and think about what's going on here and would rather just groupthink their way into any attack on DRM, regardless of the situation, but one can hope, can't he?
These discs are fundamentally different formats. DRM isn't what makes this not cost effective. DRM isn't the reason why your HD-DVDs don't work in a Blu-ray player.
Every time in the history of recordings that there has been a new format, it has been set up so you'll buy it again. After a few years when it becomes cheap, people can start moving over their collections from the old format. There's nothing special about that. Tape decks captured LP recordings in the 70s; CD recorders moved tapes to discs by the late 90's. DV connections moved VHS to DVD in the early 00s, DVDs can be moved to BD if you are enterprising. This has been par for the course throughout the entire past century. They don't break the old format; there's nothing forcing you to upgrade or to pay again. Consumers pay again because it offers them something they want at a price they're willing to pay. There's nothing nefarious about that--if Bob wants to buy the DVD instead of spending two hours converting his VHS, why shouldn't a retailer make a sale? The fact that vendors know they'll continue making residual sales is one of the major factors that cause prices to drop after release. It's all part of a larger system.
The fact that it's more expensive to do so than just to repurchase isn't something that's new. Even if your HD-DVD collection didn't have DRM at all, it would still be impractical and expensive to convert it to BD.
The issue is that EULAs have become increasing modeled after merchant-merchant exchanges, while the consumer remains relatively unsophisticated and doesn't have an easy way to object or counter said form contract. The consumer advocacy group is pushing largely for three things: a mandated warning label on boxes or before point of purchase of online software, legally mandated prior availability of license terms (which every US company already complies with upon request) like nutrition information at fast-food restaurants, and simpler terms with more direct action in the way of outlining which specific rights the contract is not allowed to take (e.g. arbitration clauses, which courts do not like).
Taking these actions would strengthen the EULA as a device for rights transfers. It's not new; contracts have long created positions that differ from generic copyright licenses; standard form contracts have long replaced individually-negotiated contracts where volume exceeds bargaining capacity. No one has ever challenged the blanket validity of a license agreement and won. EU directives curtail the acceptable terms for non-negotiated contracts Yes, they do. That doesn't get you anywhere, except to strike out terms which are unenforceable anyway. It doesn't abrogate the entire agreement.
They've waived their claims to another distribution vehicle at that point.
Simply put, if you don't have permission, you can't have legal acquisition.
There are certainly issues that need to be worked out (e.g. some fairly ridiculous and one-sided provisions are common; if the terms are rejected, getting a refund for open software generally requires you to send a letter threatening to sue before they offer to take care of it), but similar devices are and have been a commonly used tool and will remain so.
And once again, the report, like Netscape and the other seminal cases people like to point to, don't go as far as people commonly believe they do. This report says that EULAs are unfair and overly complex. That is true; it doesn't mean they're saying EULAs themselves are wrong. As a consumer advocacy group, their job is to simplify and re-balance the terms. This is a great thing, but it's not an incrimination of the agreement as a tool, so don't lose sight of that.
At minimum, it is not in most companys' interest to invest large sums of money protecting users' data... On the contrary, if information gleaned from personal data has a commercial value (i.e. generates revenue), there is an inherent interest in keeping it secure. There's not an interest in keeping it private, but that is a wholly separate issue.
Controlling the flow of data and making sure that your investment and your proprietary information doesn't give a free ride to your competitors sits at the very heart of an information-based economy.
They will invest a considerable amount of money protecting access to data, because if you make money from selling something, it doesn't do well not to build any fences or locks. Why would anyone enter into a financial partnership with, say, Facebook, if they could access that same information without doing so? You can bet they'll go to the mat for your privacy from unauthorized parties. The only conflict arises from who has the power to authorize.
I don't believe that is this case. He was suggesting that a four-core setup can be configured so that one is idle to moderate heat buildup. This was a direct response indicating that with such a configuration, heat production is uneven even if there are four good cores. The post further states that the conductive medium would distribute heat throughout, which is correct.
The reply to that states that "one core is defective, so it can't cycle through them." That doesn't make any sense.
In a three-core system, the unevenness is not a problem, because heat production is uneven in a fully-function four core system, too.
Why?
If one is disabled, it would cycle 1,2,4,1,2,4 (assuming #3 is the bad one).
Moreover, if one of the cores isn't running, and you have a cooling system designed for four cores, it really doesn't matter. If it can handle four full-tilt cores, it can handle three. The zero heat production is a bigger benefit than a slightly uneven distribution. If it's truly a suitable medium, the heat generated will be spread throughout pretty well, even if the heat-production is only on one edge of the medium. Think of an electric stove burner--it only has heat applied at one end, but the opposite end heats up pretty well. Obviously it's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be.
Karl Rove, is that you?
Choosing the answer you want and then altering reality to ensure that it's at least somewhat true is not the same as discovering the answer to the question.
That's not to mention the sheer irresponsibility of intentionally manipulating whatever ecosystem might (but probably doesn't) exist on Mars. Accidental contamination is one thing, but haven't we learned by now that we can't just impetuously troll the galaxy doing whatever we want? It's certainly caused us all sorts of problems down here.
Further, the MBA is an average of a half-inch thick. Compare the profiles of the machines. The MBA starts out a hair thinner, and it tapers faster. The average depth of the MBA is approximately
It makes significant tradeoffs itself--namely with a weak CPU, 2.5 hour battery life, and 64K color TFT. It also, interestingly enough, comes with a sealed-in battery as well. The problem I have is with those who believe Apple is always the first to break new ground or innovate. I don't believe anyone said Apple was always first. You'd be more credible if you didn't overstate your case dramatically, while simultaneously comparing the thinnest measures of your chosen PC with the thickest measurement of the MBA.
Yes, it is true that there have been other thin notebooks. No, there has never been a thinner machine with a display above 11" (again, the Sharp compromised with a 64K TFT). There has never been a thinner notebook at a lower price ($1799 vs. your best, the Sharp at $2171 ($1900 adjusted for inflation)). As is often the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle between your hypothetical "Apple innovated first" and your argument. In many ways, it truly is a first. In some, it is an also-ran.
Further, the MBA is an average of a half-inch thick. Compare the profiles of the machine. The MBA starts out a hair thinner, and it tapers faster. The average depth of the MBA is approximately
It makes significant tradeoffs itself--namely with a weak CPU, 2.5 hour battery life, and 64K color TFT. It also, interestingly enough, comes with a sealed-in battery as well. The problem I have is with those who believe Apple is always the first to break new ground or innovate. I don't believe anyone said Apple was always first. You'd be more credible if you didn't overstate your case dramatically, while simultaneously comparing the thinnest measures of your chosen PC with the thickest measurement of the MBA.
Yes, it is true that there have been other thin notebooks. No, there has never been a thinner machine with a display above 11" (again, the Sharp compromised with a 64K TFT). There has never been a thinner notebook at a lower price ($1799 vs. your best, the Sharp at $2171 ($1900 adjusted for inflation)). As is often the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle between your hypothetical "Apple innovated first" and your argument. In many ways, it truly is a first. In some, it is an also-ran.
It was also $3500 ($3999 with the carbon fiber, which is the one reviewed and may have an impact on size). Even factoring in the relative difference between its 1GHz processor, 20GB hard drive and 512MB (given the 3-year old market), the price is not even close to the same ballpark.
For simple comparison, the high-end 17" PowerBook at that time was $2799, and was viewed of course by many as a tremendously expensive machine. This little computer outpriced it by 25%. Today's MacBook Air is cheaper by an even greater margin in comparison.
It has a 10" LCD, no touchpad, and no wifi built-in. It does not have an optical drive. Battery life is two hours less. On the whole, it is no thinner than the MacBook Air (in fact, it has a nearly identical cross-sectional area, though it would seem that the MBA does in fact retain the "thin" advantage, but just barely). So certainly, if you want to pay hundreds of dollars more for a smaller screen, same dongle situation, and much worse battery life, you could do that.
...but would there be anyone left standing at the end of the first week? :)
They are not recognizing notebooks on a subscription basis. No one else does, either. If you have a source on that I'd be interested to see it, since it would break with trade usage.
OS X isn't a device, and it is long-established custom that installable software is not a part of full-blown computers and so the computer doesn't make the software count as a "device." On the other hand, mobile devices running software that isn't available, say, as a separate SKU, aren't considered to be running installable software.
Software updates to a software product don't pose a problem.
1. If you participated in the drafting of the legislation, you are barred from representing a client suing under it.
2. Lawyers as a class don't agree on anything more than doctors as a class, or programmers as a class.
3. Practicing lawyers hate legislators just as much as everyone else. They won't just sit on their thumbs, and they keep changing things, even if it's just to renumber everything to make all brief citations wrong every couple of years.
4. Lawyers argue all laws, and it doesn't matter who writes them. Judges make the final decision, and if you're qualified to read something, one would hope you're also qualified to write it and vice versa.
5. If you think that lawyers gain a strategic advantage by writing laws (with the underlying assumption that they are more complicated as a result), you're absolutely delirious. Lawyers and judges battle their caseloads, and no sane lawyer wants a case sitting around for five, six, seven years. You try to remember everything you've said from a case that is now 30 deep in the pile but just won't go away. Lawyers don't want them to last forever, either. Even if the sole source of income is from fees during that time, there comes a point where the amount of energy it takes to hold up that accretion ball is not worth your time in dealing with it. There are only so many billable hours in a week.
6. You don't have non-chemists review chemistry papers. Why should you bar "lawyers" by which I assume you mean all legal professionals from making sure that laws make legal sense?
7. If you put people in a room with no experience in how laws work, how they're applied, and what the consequences are to a given side in litigation, they'd have no clue how to draft a good law. A legislature should not be exclusively lawyers (and they rarely are), but there's a reason why experience in the thing you're creating is a desirable trait.
8. Attorneys make more than their legislative counterparts in almost every instance. Legislators either do it because they care, or because they're already so rich that they don't have anything to worry about it. Contrary to popular belief, the number of people in the latter category is not tremendous until you hit the US Senate, and even there, "rich" is a relative term.
Still, your attempt to derail the discussion by selective misreading is unsurprising. To wit: Hey, you're the one who said that for technological reasons, there was no copyright in the time of Shakespeare. Since copyright law was invented less than a century later, and there was no material change in technology in the intervening time, your claim must be false. This is an egregious failure of rationality, not to mention an ass-backwards misconstruction. There was no need for protection more specific than the letters patent and copyright precursors in effect--there was no mass market technology to defeat the protections of the theatre companies from putting on their protections. Indeed, Shakespeare battled reproductions of his Second Folio precisely during this transitional stage. The "material change" wasn't to the technology, but rather to its accessibility--Shakespeare's work was largely unprinted in his day. A century later, copies had descended into a whole new price class. The law introduced more comprehensive protections in response to maintain the same approximate level of exclusivity as before. No, that's wrong. Remember, copyright only applied to books and maps originally. An unconvincing argument from an unsophisticated understanding. At the time, there was no way to reproduce anything other than books and maps. The argument is a tautology. You know what also happened in the 19th C. to explain what you clearly deem an arbitrary exception? Lithography. As the technological medium shifts, the law is extended to protect works on that medium. Reproductions of sound weren't limited by copyright until the phonograph, either. None of this gets you anywhere. He is well known to have been skeptical about them. He is well known to have been skeptical of the presidency as well, but that didn't stop him. The fact remains that Jefferson embraced the limited patent as the best solution for competing interests. He helped establish the Patent Office, and that damned 1813 letter is tossed around out of context and misconstrued by every third "information wants to be free" nutter on the planet.
Your assumption, so thoroughly and facially misplaced, is nothing more than a cheap attempt to score points as you bow out, based on nothing more than a willful disregard for an issue you have shown an imprecise understanding of. Reasonable people certainly differ on a number of points here, but support can still be shown through systemic means, and on that it's clear that your exception to the comment that started this discussion is misplaced at best.
It has never really been a question that the United States is a moderate-right nation that has sadly been tipping more and more to the right over the past few decades. The American public tends not to recognize this because the Republicans managed to turn the word "liberal" into an attack against those less conservative than they are...while the Democrats were too spineless to pick up the label and wear it as a badge of honor, knowing that there aren't many true liberals to be found.
What you get in political dynamics such as this though is something very much like bringing protons closer to each other--the intensity of repulsion increases palpably as they grow closer, but once they pile on top of each other, they manage to stick together. If the distance between your major parties isn't that great, you can get some of the worst kinds of partisan warfare.
At the same time, though, critics of an American "two party" system don't often realize that we don't actually have a two party system. We have a two label system, but each major party is itself what would be a coalition in PR systems. The real problem is that PR gives the voters a better chance to decide who's in charge of the coalition (e.g. moderates, jesus people, neocons, states-rights for Republicans) but this closed-party-leadership model was an intentional systemic choice. This country is designed to be insulated from "the people", and this is one of the institutional features to do it.
I could certainly claim that a work was mine, or was not yours and still not actually infringe on that work.
Copyright infringement isn't where the solution that would lie. Fraudulent misrepresentation is, well, fraudulent.
o long as I've got a decent memory, I can make my own copy of the poem, and I'd own that copy. Copyright might bar me from doing so, while and if it is in force as to the work,
No, it wouldn't. If you want to produce your own copy, that's fine. But you better hang onto it for your own use.
I said that all the other rights -- the right to use the work, to make copies of the work, etc. -- the rights that copyright has to stand in the way of -- are acquired along with access. And they are.
Not at issue. Those rights aren't what is prohibited by copyright bars, nor part of what is reserved by the author. Copyright generally allows copies to be made, so long as you don't break a protection measure or distribute said copies. There's really no argument to make as to how you are constrained by that.
AFAIK there were no material changes in printing press technology between 1616 and 1710
Another intentional or ignorant straw man. The change is between the days of the printing press, when books in the 17th C. were still only in the hands of what we'd consider the upper middle class, and 2008.
t is a classic quid pro quo: The public temporarily agrees to refrain from certain actions, giving the author control over whether they can be done, and the author provides a work, which will ultimately fall into the public domain. The public winds up winning, in that it permanently gets a valuable work in exchange for a relatively minor and temporary payment, and the author comes up second, having risked his investment (since there's no guarantee that the copyright will have economic value) and at best only gotten any manner of reward during a temporary span of time.
You frame this in opposition, but this is exactly the point, once again. The bargain pulls a work which would be wholly private into public use. The arrangements were made to reduce the barrier of entry of the general public to have access to works of art and substance--to make acquisition cheaper. To this end, and coupled with the technology to reproduce, artists were guaranteed government protection in exchange for releasing the works to be copied in the first place. Without this arrangement, most artists would not have done so, and would have continued in the business of selling originals.
There is no historical reason to believe that it was an imposition on anyone--the public gets the better end of the deal, and now we have people trying to achieve a competitive advantage on that deal, which is equally egregious compared to those who try to exploit the system to gain perpetual rights and those not negotiated.
The notion of promoting the public good has never meant contemporaneous promotion, but merely the eventual seeding of the people with broad access. Without patents and copyrights to bring these forward, they would remain entirely proprietary and privatized as they were before such arrangements. YOu are absolutely correct that the development does not occur in a vacuum, and in our modern society the absence of copyrights and patents would not open up the information to immediate consumption by all. There are any number of alternative mechanisms to ensure proprietary control of that which is considered valuable.
As much as Slashdot doesn't like it, information is the basic currency of the economy in the 21st century. Protections are essential to create portfolios of value. Raw materials and physical assets are no longer adequate. Our economy simply could not function on a realistic level without booting us back to an agrarian society. Hell, most people on Slashdot wouldn't be employed at all were it not for IP. That makes it a threshold issue, and those who argue for abolition are