Except that you don't actually SEE "Diebold in action" here, since the machines were made by Election Systems & Software. But why bother reading the article and let facts get in the way of a good gripe?
Re:Oh boy, where to start
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Russia definitely bore the brunt of the war. But the role of the US should not be underestimated. Perhaps a different perspective would help: I grew up in Russia, and went through school at the peak of the "stagnation" period. In high school, we had a history teacher who was a kid during the war. Now, history in Russia was one of the most politicised and heavilly guarded for ideological purify subjects, high school and college history even more so. So this teacher did not get to be where he was by being a dissident. When we came to covering the War (in Russia, there is only one "the War"), he went over the events, as he should, then glossed over the chapters describing US non-role and non-contribution. Naturally, we noticed, and asked (and not all of the student believed what the textbook said). The teacher said that he will tell us a story. He told us about starving children living in dread and fear, whose brightest days were when a truck delivered food shipment from the US. In the shipment were huge chunks of chocolate, shaped like canon shells. Was it not for that, and more food from US, some of those children would not live to grow up. He then said, "I know that I'm supposed to tell you that US did not matter at all in the War. But I can't bring myself to say this. I remember that chocolate."
It really starts to look like Saddam managed to pull off the ultimate anti-bluff. I'm not sure what a poker analogy would be... with a pair of twos, bluffing to convince the other guy that your hand is so strong that he, in desperation of about to lose his life's savings, hits you with a chair on the head?
Probably. On the other hand, on your own web site you could post things you'd reject from CmdrTaco or anyone else. Of course, there is that little detail that Taco's site gets thousands of viewers and yours... well, less than that, but this isn't really Taco's fault, now, is it?
I'm amazed at how incredibly common is this sense of entitlement: as soon as someone gets moderately successfull, he suddenly owes everyone something. Well, I have a news for you: he doesn't, and you are not entitled to post anything on his site, he may allow you to do so as long as it suits his interestes, whatever those might be, if you don't like it go get your own site.
Here is how I see it: Diebold makes sale kiosks for Home Depot, ATMs for Citybank, and voting machines for the government. Diebold comes to each customer and says, "We can save you XXX dollars on every machine if you don't need a paper printer in it".
What do the customers say? Home Depot manager: "XXX dollars and no paper? Are you nuts? We'll lose ten times that on fraud!" Citybank manager: "XXX dollars and no paper? Are you a complete moron? We'll lose hundred times that on lawsuits!" Government bureaucrat (he does not care about fraud - someone gets elected one way or the other, the bureaucrat will have his job, and he can't get sued): "XXX dollars? What a great idea!"
The match would indeed end in a draw, but the games themselves may or may not. It's possible that white have a guaranteed win from the starting position. In theory it's even possible that black have a guaranteed win from the starting position, instead (it's certainly possible to come up with a simpler position where whoever starts loses, but it does not seem that the normal starting position is like that). So it may not be enough to play one game perfectly to draw it.
As far as whether 'the day of the machines' is here or not, depends on how you define it. Kasparov drew the match, but... there is only one Kasparov, while Fritz can be replicated almost infinitely (limited only by the available CPU power). Also, if one game cannot serve to determine 'the day of the machines', then how many are needed? Remember the first match between Kasparov and Karpov? Kasparov was losing badly, but managed to draw so many games that Karpov's endurance started to fail. Well, Fritz X3d can do the same to Kasparov: it plays the 100th game as well as the 1st one, if the match consists of enough games, it'll win eventually. So, is 'the day of the machines' here already?
First of all, if you need support, say, for Oracle, then you pay for support, and that's it. I never said that if you want to use the service you should find a way to use it without paying.
The question is what to do if you don't need support and you NEVER SIGNED the contract (not terminated it).
You are a programmer and you want to respect licensing and copyrights? Great. Then respect the copyright of the actual copyright holders of the software. Redhat does not hold the copyright on most of the software they distribute. And the original copyright holders declared that their software can be freely copied under sertain restrictions (like providing sources, for example).
So you, RedHat, and everyone else should respect THAT copyright and THAT license, including the terms which might be inconvenient at times. GPLed binaries you can copy, IBM JRE you can copy, XFree86 you might have to rebuild from source RPM, RedHat artworks are off-limits. This is not playing games, this is playing by the rules. Sometimes the rules work in your favor and sometimes they don't, but anyone who insists that I follow the part of the rules which is good for them should be prepared to follow the part of the same rules which is good for me.
Then don't get the original copy in a manner which requires you to sign a contract. Without the signed contract, you only have to avoid the packages they can copyright and not license under GPL. RedHat logos are copyrighted artworks, so don't use them. IBM JRE is not copyrighted by RedHat so the original IBM license applies. Everything which is GPLed you are free to use, source and binaries (RedHat has no obligation to provide free binaries, only sources, but at the same time they can't do stop you from copying those binaries from elsewhere).
Up until now, Linux in general, including Redhat, was mostly "smuggled in" into businesses at first: it entered through the "back door", typically in the form of unauthorised installs done by programmers, IT workers, and engineers. Then, when management hears about "that Linux thing", someone responds "we already done it!", and Linux gets the official blessing (that's the good scenario, anyway).
Now the programmers etc won't be installing RedHat for their own use at work (it would cost them too much of their own money, and it looks like quite a few of them are pissed at RedHat). You will have to enter the buisiness through the front door. The first person you have to convince is now the suit, not the geek.
This raises some problems: 1) Is Linux established enough in the buisness that the managers will be interested on their own, without their geeks prodding them? 2) At the front door, you'll meet the guy from Microsoft and the guy from Sun and the guy from HP, all elbowing each other. Can you go toe to toe with them, without the inside support of the "fifth column" of geeks rooting for you? 3) While you are fighting the Sun guy and the Microsoft guy at the front door, the geeks inside are still installing Linux on their boxes, only now it won't be RedHat. Aren't you afraid that when the management finally says "let's do Linux" the geeks will agains answer "Done already" but will point to their Debian or Gentoo boxes? The same force which was proven to be so effective at getting Redhat and other Linuxes into business can now turn against you.
Just install the advanced/enterprise server on as many machines as you want to. Don't call for support since you haven't bought it, but the bits are GPLed, there is nothing RH can do to stop you from copying them.
Yes, I built galeon 1.2.12 against Mozilla 1.4. In fact, in all my previous attempts to build galeon against mozilla of different version than it was hardcoded to use I found that either configure does not succeed or it compiles. With 1.2.11 configure did not succeed until I changed MOZILLA_VERSION_REQUIRED to 1.4 even with all the configure options set (this var is in several places, grep for it).
Fairly straightforward: get galeon-1.2.11 or later, and run./configure --help from the build directory. There are a couple options for mozilla: --with-mozilla-snapshot=1.4 and two more, mozilla libs and include directories. You need to specify them all, point to/usr/lib/mozilla-1.4 or wherever it's installed. You can even edit the RPM spec for galeon and add these parameters to configure, and it'll build from there.
but everything else is not. Since you can't get a Dell computer from the WEB, it's not something you can download, the rules of meatspace kick in. Dell must arrange shipping, provide warranty, and ensure that you can't reverse the charges and keep the computer, among other things. What are your local liability and consumer protection laws? It costs them money to hire lawyers who know, and, if a certain fraction of customers will sue or otherwise make trouble, they may have to litigate in your jurisdiction. Is the market big enough for them to go through these troubles? Apparently not.
Many places which sell downloadable stuff don't even care where you live, if you send them money by paypal they will email you the file to whatever address is registered with paypal. (iTunes could be truly world-wide, blame the labels on this one).
The trouble with that one is that you can state whatever you want, but if the customs and shipping companies don't enforce it, neither can you. I once sent something to Canada (ebay purchase), I stated that all fees are the buyer's responsibility, the buyer accepted, then a month later I get a bill from Fedex for $12 for some "brokerage fee". Guess what? In Canada, he apparently can get his stuff and an invoice for the brokerage fee, but if he does not pay the invoice, Fedex must pay it. Fedex tries to get it from him, but if that does not work, they get it from me. Meanwhile, the guy has vanished, does not respond to emails.
Face it, it's much easier to commit fraud when the transaction goes across the border, and the legal recourses are much harder and more expensive.
Depends on what you've got and how you use it. Slowdown during intensive IDE output was a major issue for me, so I'll be trying 2.4.21 out tonight. Also, usb-storage over USB2 (ehci) is not very stable in 2.4.20 (although fixed in RedHat's version of it), and 2.4.21 changelog says that ehci is updated to what's not in 2.5 kernels, so I want to try that too. Finally, I have Hipoint onboard IDE controller which was not supported in 2.4.20 but again changelog mentions it (and RedHat's 2.4.20 supported it).
So, think of what problems and issues you have now, read the changelog to see if they were addressed, if a subsystem which did not work well for you is touched build the kernel and see if your issues are solved.
I think that at the end of the year where will be a lot of Linus users asking themselves, "just how hard would it be to move all my RedHat machines to something else?"
A distribution which comes out with RedHat migration tool will find their market share suddenly increase manyfold in a very short time. On the other hand, if no distribution will offer an easy install on top of RedHat which preserves existing configurations as much as possible, it's likely that RedHat install base will remain largely unchanged, in both quantity and quality (i.e. RedHat machines will simply remain as they are and people will stop installing patches when patches are not available).
I can already do this setup for my web server: NFS server exports directories with web pages to web server read-only and does not allow logins from the web server (and firewall does its best to block even attempts of such). So even if the web server is fully compromized, the web page cannot be changed. Of course, if the web server has writeable disks of its own the cracker could make it serve a page from there instead of the real page; but the two-headed disks will have the same problem, you can only solve it by not giving the web server any writeable disks, boot it from CDROM or from the network.
Selling the machine containing the binaries is indeed distribution (just like preloading Linux on a Dell PC is). It does not matter whether it's hard to get the code out (Dell PC may come with a XMoron window manager which does not allow you to get to the kernel files, they'd still have to make source available). Now, Tivo has binaries of two kinds: kernel mods and their own code which actually does recording, playback, etc. Kernel mods are released on their web site, because they distribute modified kernel binary. Their own code runs on the GPL kernel, but source is not distributed, and GPL does not require them to do so.
Finally, with all the concerns about use of GPL software on ASPs and web servers, there are limits to what the license can do: even if GPL is found by court to be 100% enforceable, the "derived work" term is NOT up the the license authors to define, it comes from copyright law (GPL says as much). If the court decides that HTML output of Slashcode is not a derived work, then the web site does no such distribution which requires source to Slashcode to be made available.
I don't really see a problem here: the ASP runs a GLPed program and charges you for use of their system resources. You want to make changes to that GPLed application? They do not stop you in any way, download the code and change all you want. You want them to run your modified program? It's THEIR computer, not yours, they don't have to let you hack their software. They are not distributing it either, they are selling you time on their machine. You have no right to demand to know what software do they run there. You would not want Microsoft to have a legal right to scan your hard drive to see if you are trying to disassemble a windows driver or do something else their license does not allow? Don't ask others to grant you access you would not want to give yourself.
Several posters have said that they can't support the boycott because Amazon *was* the first to offer one-click shopping, so the idea cannot be that obvious, at least not back when they started. The Amazon spokesdroid basically said the same.
Now, have you ever tried to write to Amazon with a protest about that lawsuit? I did, and got back a (presumably standard) reply, saying that they must protect the effort invested into implementation of one-click shopping. Here's your answer: the IDEA is trivial, the IMPLEMENTATION is not. Even Amazon in their canned reply does not bother to claim that the idea is non-obvious. But implementations cannot be patented. Algorithms can be patented, but the actual code cannot. So, unless B&N have actually stolen Amazon's code, the boycott looks totally justified to me - they ARE trying to protect an obvious idea, the only reason they were first and only one for a while is that it may have been hard to implement.
Ultra60's are nice, I have one on my desk at work (mine is 360MHz, but we have servers in the lab which are 450). But next to that Ultra60 sits a Dell with two 550MHz Xeons and 1G RAM, and it's about twice as fast, and it costs alot less than the Sun.
First of all, you cannot explain to kids that computers are expensive tools: they have not mastered some abstract concepts required to understand what this means. The closest thing they do unserstand is "things which, if you break, dad gets really mad". Unless they're looking for trouble (or sometimes just for attention), they will stay away from such things, to reduce wear on their tushes. This is not the attitude you probably want them to have toward computers.
Second, why Furby or the Tonka truck with voice commands is a toy, and a computer should not be? Because it has 100 times more gates on the chip? There is one other difference, the PC can be programmed to do many things, while the embedded chips in the games accept limited programming, if any, and only through the game's "interface". The difference is also superficial: the designers have imposed restrictions on those embedded chips by basically hiding or restricting the inputs (inside they could be quite complex). Why is it wrong to dress up a Pentium in the same manner? Kid does not know that this game is powered by a dedicated chip and that by multipurpose one.
Bands make most of their money off touring. T-shirts sales for example. There are alot less people invloved in tour than there are in the studio recording, advertsing, distribution etc...Ever wonder why smaller bands tour relentlessly?? Well there is your anwser.
I am an audio geek. I am a musician. I simply despise the music biz. Im sure tons of others like me feel the same way. But after listening to mp3 format...my ears tell me a different story. I, am I know I'm not alone, can tell a significant difference in the overall quality in the dynamic range of the music from LP..to CD..to mp3. I have listened to alot of mp3's on headphones and from a normal listening perspective. To me, the overall quality of mp3 annoys me. I was talking about this at a couple of xmas shin-digs at a couple of studios. All to often I would get into a conversation with an engineer about mp3. They agreed with me. What came out of those conversations was this...anytime you strip out 90% (mp3 claims to reduce the size of the file to about 1/10th the size) of the suppposedly "unused frquencies", it will affect the overall dynamic range of the recording. Everytime I put of some headphones and listen to mp3, I can hear it. It's a flanging affect..like some of the data still there has been aliased to much. I hear it everytime. I know I'm not alone here.
CD's won't go away anytime soon...nor will record companies. There are over 4000 record companies in the US alone..Indy and non-Indy. The big six still control a vast majority of them. All neatly branched out like a family tree. I agree with Katz that they are slow to respond to this digital "revolution", but on how many people ae invloved with the industry, it won't go away.
I see the only real bitch here here is the record execs..but why did they get into this biz in the first place?? Why did Steve Case start AOL?? WHy did anyone start a biz?? To make $$$...and they all get greedy. It's just how it goes. You see this kind of rants in every buisiness. Intellectual property rights and the like are everywhere.
I think it's cool that bands can use mp3 to promote themselves. I think it's cool that Crisco does what it does. I think it's cool that I can buy a little device that allows me to talk to people around the world (telephone). Just remember the little people involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that you don't actually SEE "Diebold in action" here, since the machines were made by Election Systems & Software. But why bother reading the article and let facts get in the way of a good gripe?
Russia definitely bore the brunt of the war. But the role of the US should not be underestimated.
Perhaps a different perspective would help:
I grew up in Russia, and went through school at the peak of the "stagnation" period. In high school, we had a history teacher who was a kid during the war. Now, history in Russia was one of the most politicised and heavilly guarded for ideological purify subjects, high school and college history even more so. So this teacher did not get to be where he was by being a dissident.
When we came to covering the War (in Russia, there is only one "the War"), he went over the events, as he should, then glossed over the chapters describing US non-role and non-contribution. Naturally, we noticed, and asked (and not all of the student believed what the textbook said). The teacher said that he will tell us a story. He told us about starving children living in dread and fear, whose brightest days were when a truck delivered food shipment from the US. In the shipment were huge chunks of chocolate, shaped like canon shells. Was it not for that, and more food from US, some of those children would not live to grow up. He then said, "I know that I'm supposed to tell you that US did not matter at all in the War. But I can't bring myself to say this. I remember that chocolate."
It really starts to look like Saddam managed to pull off the ultimate anti-bluff. I'm not sure what a poker analogy would be... with a pair of twos, bluffing to convince the other guy that your hand is so strong that he, in desperation of about to lose his life's savings, hits you with a chair on the head?
Probably. On the other hand, on your own web site you could post things you'd reject from CmdrTaco or anyone else. Of course, there is that little detail that Taco's site gets thousands of viewers and yours ... well, less than that, but this isn't really Taco's fault, now, is it?
I'm amazed at how incredibly common is this sense of entitlement: as soon as someone gets moderately successfull, he suddenly owes everyone something. Well, I have a news for you: he doesn't, and you are not entitled to post anything on his site, he may allow you to do so as long as it suits his interestes, whatever those might be, if you don't like it go get your own site.
...what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Here is how I see it: Diebold makes sale kiosks for Home Depot, ATMs for Citybank, and voting machines for the government. Diebold comes to each customer and says, "We can save you XXX dollars on every machine if you don't need a paper printer in it".
What do the customers say?
Home Depot manager: "XXX dollars and no paper? Are you nuts? We'll lose ten times that on fraud!"
Citybank manager: "XXX dollars and no paper? Are you a complete moron? We'll lose hundred times that on lawsuits!"
Government bureaucrat (he does not care about fraud - someone gets elected one way or the other, the bureaucrat will have his job, and he can't get sued): "XXX dollars? What a great idea!"
The match would indeed end in a draw, but the games themselves may or may not. It's possible that white have a guaranteed win from the starting position. In theory it's even possible that black have a guaranteed win from the starting position, instead (it's certainly possible to come up with a simpler position where whoever starts loses, but it does not seem that the normal starting position is like that). So it may not be enough to play one game perfectly to draw it.
As far as whether 'the day of the machines' is here or not, depends on how you define it. Kasparov drew the match, but... there is only one Kasparov, while Fritz can be replicated almost infinitely (limited only by the available CPU power). Also, if one game cannot serve to determine 'the day of the machines', then how many are needed? Remember the first match between Kasparov and Karpov? Kasparov was losing badly, but managed to draw so many games that Karpov's endurance started to fail. Well, Fritz X3d can do the same to Kasparov: it plays the 100th game as well as the 1st one, if the match consists of enough games, it'll win eventually. So, is 'the day of the machines' here already?
First of all, if you need support, say, for Oracle, then you pay for support, and that's it.
I never said that if you want to use the service you should find a way to use it without paying.
The question is what to do if you don't need support and you NEVER SIGNED the contract (not terminated it).
You are a programmer and you want to respect licensing and copyrights? Great. Then respect the copyright of the actual copyright holders of the software. Redhat does not hold the copyright on most of the software they distribute. And the original copyright holders declared that their software can be freely copied under sertain restrictions (like providing sources, for example).
So you, RedHat, and everyone else should respect THAT copyright and THAT license, including the terms which might be inconvenient at times. GPLed binaries you can copy, IBM JRE you can copy, XFree86 you might have to rebuild from source RPM, RedHat artworks are off-limits. This is not playing games, this is playing by the rules. Sometimes the rules work in your favor and sometimes they don't, but anyone who insists that I follow the part of the rules which is good for them should be prepared to follow the part of the same rules which is good for me.
Then don't get the original copy in a manner which requires you to sign a contract. Without the signed contract, you only have to avoid the packages they can copyright and not license under GPL. RedHat logos are copyrighted artworks, so don't use them. IBM JRE is not copyrighted by RedHat so the original IBM license applies. Everything which is GPLed you are free to use, source and binaries (RedHat has no obligation to provide free binaries, only sources, but at the same time they can't do stop you from copying those binaries from elsewhere).
Up until now, Linux in general, including Redhat, was mostly "smuggled in" into businesses at first: it entered through the "back door", typically in the form of unauthorised installs done by programmers, IT workers, and engineers. Then, when management hears about "that Linux thing", someone responds "we already done it!", and Linux gets the official blessing (that's the good scenario, anyway).
Now the programmers etc won't be installing RedHat for their own use at work (it would cost them too much of their own money, and it looks like quite a few of them are pissed at RedHat). You will have to enter the buisiness through the front door. The first person you have to convince is now the suit, not the geek.
This raises some problems:
1) Is Linux established enough in the buisness that the managers will be interested on their own, without their geeks prodding them?
2) At the front door, you'll meet the guy from Microsoft and the guy from Sun and the guy from HP, all elbowing each other. Can you go toe to toe with them, without the inside support of the "fifth column" of geeks rooting for you?
3) While you are fighting the Sun guy and the Microsoft guy at the front door, the geeks inside are still installing Linux on their boxes, only now it won't be RedHat. Aren't you afraid that when the management finally says "let's do Linux" the geeks will agains answer "Done already" but will point to their Debian or Gentoo boxes? The same force which was proven to be so effective at getting Redhat and other Linuxes into business can now turn against you.
Just install the advanced/enterprise server on as many machines as you want to. Don't call for support since you haven't bought it, but the bits are GPLed, there is nothing RH can do to stop you from copying them.
Yes, I built galeon 1.2.12 against Mozilla 1.4.
In fact, in all my previous attempts to build galeon against mozilla of different version than it was hardcoded to use I found that either configure does not succeed or it compiles. With 1.2.11 configure did not succeed until I changed MOZILLA_VERSION_REQUIRED to 1.4 even with all the configure options set (this var is in several places, grep for it).
Fairly straightforward: get galeon-1.2.11 or later, and run ./configure --help from the build directory. /usr/lib/mozilla-1.4 or wherever it's installed. You can even edit the RPM spec for galeon and add these parameters to configure, and it'll build from there.
There are a couple options for mozilla: --with-mozilla-snapshot=1.4 and two more, mozilla libs and include directories. You need to specify them all, point to
They must be checking the Referer because the same link works fine when you come there through the main site.
but everything else is not. Since you can't get a Dell computer from the WEB, it's not something you can download, the rules of meatspace kick in. Dell must arrange shipping, provide warranty, and ensure that you can't reverse the charges and keep the computer, among other things. What are your local liability and consumer protection laws? It costs them money to hire lawyers who know, and, if a certain fraction of customers will sue or otherwise make trouble, they may have to litigate in your jurisdiction. Is the market big enough for them to go through these troubles? Apparently not.
Many places which sell downloadable stuff don't even care where you live, if you send them money by paypal they will email you the file to whatever address is registered with paypal.
(iTunes could be truly world-wide, blame the labels on this one).
The trouble with that one is that you can state whatever you want, but if the customs and shipping companies don't enforce it, neither can you. I once sent something to Canada (ebay purchase), I stated that all fees are the buyer's responsibility, the buyer accepted, then a month later I get a bill from Fedex for $12 for some "brokerage fee". Guess what? In Canada, he apparently can get his stuff and an invoice for the brokerage fee, but if he does not pay the invoice, Fedex must pay it. Fedex tries to get it from him, but if that does not work, they get it from me. Meanwhile, the guy has vanished, does not respond to emails.
Face it, it's much easier to commit fraud when the transaction goes across the border, and the legal recourses are much harder and more expensive.
Depends on what you've got and how you use it. Slowdown during intensive IDE output was a major issue for me, so I'll be trying 2.4.21 out tonight. Also, usb-storage over USB2 (ehci) is not very stable in 2.4.20 (although fixed in RedHat's version of it), and 2.4.21 changelog says that ehci is updated to what's not in 2.5 kernels, so I want to try that too. Finally, I have Hipoint onboard IDE controller which was not supported in 2.4.20 but again changelog mentions it (and RedHat's 2.4.20 supported it).
So, think of what problems and issues you have now, read the changelog to see if they were addressed, if a subsystem which did not work well for you is touched build the kernel and see if your issues are solved.
I think that at the end of the year where will be a lot of Linus users asking themselves, "just how hard would it be to move all my RedHat machines to something else?"
A distribution which comes out with RedHat migration tool will find their market share suddenly increase manyfold in a very short time. On the other hand, if no distribution will offer an easy install on top of RedHat which preserves existing configurations as much as possible, it's likely that RedHat install base will remain largely unchanged, in both quantity and quality (i.e. RedHat machines will simply remain as they are and people will stop installing patches when patches are not available).
I can already do this setup for my web server:
NFS server exports directories with web pages to web server read-only and does not allow logins from the web server (and firewall does its best to block even attempts of such). So even if the web server is fully compromized, the web page cannot be changed.
Of course, if the web server has writeable disks of its own the cracker could make it serve a page from there instead of the real page; but the two-headed disks will have the same problem, you can only solve it by not giving the web server any writeable disks, boot it from CDROM or from the network.
Selling the machine containing the binaries is indeed distribution (just like preloading Linux on a Dell PC is). It does not matter whether it's hard to get the code out (Dell PC may come with a XMoron window manager which does not allow you to get to the kernel files, they'd still have to make source available).
Now, Tivo has binaries of two kinds: kernel mods and their own code which actually does recording, playback, etc. Kernel mods are released on their web site, because they distribute modified kernel binary. Their own code runs on the GPL kernel, but source is not distributed, and GPL does not require them to do so.
Finally, with all the concerns about use of GPL software on ASPs and web servers, there are limits to what the license can do: even if GPL is found by court to be 100% enforceable, the "derived work" term is NOT up the the license authors to define, it comes from copyright law (GPL says as much). If the court decides that HTML output of Slashcode is not a derived work, then the web site does no such distribution which requires source to Slashcode to be made available.
I don't really see a problem here: the ASP runs a GLPed program and charges you for use of their system resources. You want to make changes to that GPLed application? They do not stop you in any way, download the code and change all you want. You want them to run your modified program? It's THEIR computer, not yours, they don't have to let you hack their software. They are not distributing it either, they are selling you time on their machine. You have no right to demand to know what software do they run there. You would not want Microsoft to have a legal right to scan your hard drive to see if you are trying to disassemble a windows driver or do something else their license does not allow? Don't ask others to grant you access you would not want to give yourself.
Now, have you ever tried to write to Amazon with a protest about that lawsuit? I did, and got back a (presumably standard) reply, saying that they must protect the effort invested into implementation of one-click shopping. Here's your answer: the IDEA is trivial, the IMPLEMENTATION is not. Even Amazon in their canned reply does not bother to claim that the idea is non-obvious. But implementations cannot be patented. Algorithms can be patented, but the actual code cannot. So, unless B&N have actually stolen Amazon's code, the boycott looks totally justified to me - they ARE trying to protect an obvious idea, the only reason they were first and only one for a while is that it may have been hard to implement.
Ultra60's are nice, I have one on my desk at work (mine is 360MHz, but we have servers in the lab which are 450). But next to that Ultra60 sits a Dell with two 550MHz Xeons and 1G RAM, and it's about twice as fast, and it costs alot less than the Sun.
Second, why Furby or the Tonka truck with voice commands is a toy, and a computer should not be? Because it has 100 times more gates on the chip? There is one other difference, the PC can be programmed to do many things, while the embedded chips in the games accept limited programming, if any, and only through the game's "interface". The difference is also superficial: the designers have imposed restrictions on those embedded chips by basically hiding or restricting the inputs (inside they could be quite complex). Why is it wrong to dress up a Pentium in the same manner? Kid does not know that this game is powered by a dedicated chip and that by multipurpose one.
Bands make most of their money off touring. T-shirts sales for example. There are alot less people invloved in tour than there are in the studio recording, advertsing, distribution etc...Ever wonder why smaller bands tour relentlessly?? Well there is your anwser.
I am an audio geek. I am a musician. I simply despise the music biz. Im sure tons of others like me feel the same way. But after listening to mp3 format...my ears tell me a different story. I, am I know I'm not alone, can tell a significant difference in the overall quality in the dynamic range of the music from LP..to CD..to mp3. I have listened to alot of mp3's on headphones and from a normal listening perspective. To me, the overall quality of mp3 annoys me. I was talking about this at a couple of xmas shin-digs at a couple of studios. All to often I would get into a conversation with an engineer about mp3. They agreed with me. What came out of those conversations was this...anytime you strip out 90% (mp3 claims to reduce the size of the file to about 1/10th the size) of the suppposedly "unused frquencies", it will affect the overall dynamic range of the recording. Everytime I put of some headphones and listen to mp3, I can hear it. It's a flanging affect..like some of the data still there has been aliased to much. I hear it everytime. I know I'm not alone here.
CD's won't go away anytime soon...nor will record companies. There are over 4000 record companies in the US alone..Indy and non-Indy. The big six still control a vast majority of them. All neatly branched out like a family tree. I agree with Katz that they are slow to respond to this digital "revolution", but on how many people ae invloved with the industry, it won't go away.
I see the only real bitch here here is the record execs..but why did they get into this biz in the first place?? Why did Steve Case start AOL?? WHy did anyone start a biz?? To make $$$...and they all get greedy. It's just how it goes. You see this kind of rants in every buisiness. Intellectual property rights and the like are everywhere.
I think it's cool that bands can use mp3 to promote themselves. I think it's cool that Crisco does what it does. I think it's cool that I can buy a little device that allows me to talk to people around the world (telephone). Just remember the little people involved.