Oh come on. Next you'll be telling us that patents favor large, entrenched players to the detriment of small businesses without legal departments.
Or that insanely complex tax, reporting, and data retention laws favor large players unfairly.
Are you seriously suggesting that the new backbone of western civilization, lawyers, accountants, police, and social workers should have their industries cut down to size because they only exist to satisfy the asinine legal structure that we've created.
Come on dude, it's a 21st century, global village, innovation centric economy. Think synergy!
Just curious, when you say petrodollar, what are you referring to?
I've always heard it used to describe the (T-bill -> 3rd-party-oil-sales -> US-deficit) cycle, with the oil exporting nations getting strong "encouragement" to sell for only US denominated assetts.
Are you talking about something different? Any links appreciated.
I've started about 3 different replies and erased them, for fear that if I continued trying to understand the judge's logic, my head would explode. Anti-liberty scum with a robe and gavel.
I did want to bring this up though. From one of the linked Ars articles:
The question is, how is installing a third-party tool copyright infringement if it doesn't use Blizzard's code? This is where things get dicey. In a filing, Blizzard quotes a section from its EULA that says that "All connections to the Game and/or the Service, whether created by the Game Client or by other tools and utilities, may only be made through methods and means expressly approved by Blizzard." In other words, you're only allowed to play WoW using Blizzard-approved software.
By scrolling through the EULA and clicking okay, you agree, and can then play the game. Here's where Blizzard's logic gets slippery. To play the game, certain parts of the code have to loaded into your computer's RAM. In effect, Blizzard says you're making a copy of the game. Since Glider breaks the EULA, you no longer have a license to make that copy in your system's RAM, and now you're infringing on Blizzard's copyright.
First, it would have to be the user breaking the EULA. The bot can't break it because it never "clicked" OK. Second, their logic is that because the EULA is broken, any subsequent RAM operations are copyright violations.
So my question: Did I miss the memo that made EULAs legally binding contracts, and gives EULA "agreements" the authority to invalidate the license to copy the software into RAM? Has this been true ever since the DMCA was passed? I know that EULAs always talk shit about this, but I had no idea that this logic was valid in court. I knew it was bad, but Jesus.
No, but it does tell me I need to close Process Explorer while I'm installing it.
So let me get this straight. I use a program on startup and throughout my session to be able to troubleshoot any stability problems, but I need to turn it off to install your game because I might catch a glimpse of what YOUR software is doing to MY computer?
That was more than enough for me. I was a happy purchaser of morrowind and oblivion, and wanted to get fallout 3. But after seeing that, I am boycotting bethesda forever.
It will be largely forgotten because the file sharing generations will be in government?
Maybe, maybe not. Don't give humanity that much credit. The 60's and 70's were trippy times, but pot, x, acid are still illegal in many countries, and there are even serious moves against tobacco.
Now granted, these are animated gifs. But wouldn't it be nice if they had play/pause? Wikipedia is known for the quality of its scientific articles. What demographic would want this? College students maybe? And what demographic, if Wikipedia said "Download firefox to see this helpful video", would be most likely to actually do that?
And of course, when American executives see college students flocking to something, it must automatically be golden. Not much, but it's a start.
FTA: "Mozilla is integrating support for the Ogg format directly into Firefox 3.1, so the next version of the popular open source web browser will be able to play Ogg media without requiring any plugins or external software."
Nice! Thank you mozilla.
Overall this is good, as long as they can afford it. I would love it if firefox users could use our collective weight to force(?) web sites to just stream the damn video to us, rather than using whatever lame flash interface they have set up.
Question for someone more knowledgeable: Since vorbis is inherently VBR, does that pose any problems for internet streaming?
Other than that, no word about flac makes me a sad panda. Well, maybe directly in the browser isn't the right place for flac. But I keep thinking we're going to wake up one day and all music will go straight from microphone to ~192kbps before even leaving the studio. And we'll look around wondering what happened.
LOL, apparently "plugin", "mozilla", and "firefox" are spelling errors.
Shouldn't we (US, Canada, Europe) then be looking at the things that have allowed this to happen in the first place? Instead of reactively playing whack a mole with monopolies, why can't we realize that we granted the monopoly and we can take it away at any time?
If the EU believes that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly, well, that monopoly comes in the form of copyrights and patents enforced by the EU legal system. If they're serious about, they should nullify MS's IP.
But that won't happen, because of corruption alone. But even if somehow we could get someone to look at it who was above corruption, it still wouldn't be an idea acceptable to the mainstream. Because so much of the economy in Western civilization has become based on fluff, we're too afraid to do the right thing wrt IP, because it would open a pandora's box of purging useless, fluff businesses. So we will keep on with asinine regulations, making bureaucrats look important, but not accomplishing much of anything.
The music industry has transformed its business models, offering consumers an increasing range of new services with leading technology partners.
My ass. I used to download music legally (well, paid for anyway). But that was before my country's Commerce Department decided to kill allofmp3. All that the labels needed to do was buy allofmp3 and set up servers worldwide. Hell, combine it with pandora and they'd have a great service. But no, we can't let that happen, it just has to be shitty quality doesn't it? FLAC or bust, morons.
(Before anyone brings it up, yes, I know about sparks, but never got it to work. And yes, there are many songs in which there is no noticeable advantage with FLAC.)
"There is a momentous debate going on about the environment on which our business, and all the people working in it, depends. Governments are beginning to accept that, in the debate over "free content" and engaging ISPs in protecting intellectual property rights, doing nothing is not an option if there is to be a future for commercial digital content."
Yeah, 'engaging'. Uh huh. Doing nothing is not an option? Oh, I don't know, I think it's a damn good option. Then again, I don't have lobbyists.
The opinion did not directly rule on the legality of the once-secret operation authorized by President Bush between October 2001 and early 2007, which allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international communications of Americans suspected of ties to terrorists. The disclosure of the program's existence in The New York Times in December 2005 set off a national debate on wiretapping, privacy and the limits of presidential power.
This is the second time I've seen NYT using weasel words to make it sound like they broke this story. If you remember, it was USA Today. I'm not really a fan of either one, but give credit where it's due.
I smoke. Not proud of it, but I do. Tried to quit, but haven't yet.
Now then. As to the addictiveness, I can attest. They are very addictive, although my anecdotal experience suggests that it's different for everyone depending on your chemistry.
It's tricking you into dependence on their product.
No, we smokers are not getting tricked. We know exactly what we're doing, and choose to do it anyway. We are not five year olds here. Now, if cigarettes are being sold to minors, that's one thing, and whoever's doing the selling should be punished. But there is a line between child and adult. Let's stop blurring that line and respect it.
I also question broad statements like " Windows is not really competitive and schools that switch save tens of millions of dollars.". Anecdotally maybe this is has happened. But it's not really clear that this is true in general. School systems are one of the most budget limited govt run orgs. They try everything to shave dollars, like fees for art supplies, to hot lunches paid for by PTO fund raisers. I find it hard to believe the schools would somehow be so blind as to over look an easy "tens of millions" if the case was clear cut.
No offense, but this couldn't be further from the truth. I work in a public school. They don't really try that hard to save money on certain things, for whatever reason. These things include: technology, special ed, construction, and sports departments, to name a few.
Not sure if you're in this situation, but a lot of people know a teacher who isn't that well paid and have heard them complaining about lack of funding they get, and so they get the idea that schools are really hurting for money. From everything I've seen, this usually isn't true unless you're talking about inner city schools. But just because money isn't going to the right places doesn't mean that money isn't being thrown around left, right, and center. Trust me, it is.
Even if wine was perfect tomorrow, it wouldn't matter. "Who's going to give us our support contract?," they'll say. Red Who?
In short, it has relatively little to do with money, software quality, etc. This is especially true being that, at least here in the US, spending money on Microsoft licensing is not generally seen as wasteful. This perception matters. And yes, we live in a fucked up world.
Wait till they start learning the tricks of Western governments. IOW, less emphasis on blocking and more emphasis on spin, misdirection, and obfuscation. Of course, all governments use both to different extents, but the Western governments are masters at the latter. At least with blocking, the government gives away the fact that something is being hidden.
"R is a real demonstration of the power of collaboration, and I don't think you could construct something like this any other way," Mr. Ihaka said. "We could have chosen to be commercial, and we would have sold five copies of the software."
Very true. This is what I try to explain to people when they can't understand why some software is given away gratis. Because if they charged for it, given the current attitudes of the market, they wouldn't stand a chance and wouldn't ever get any market share to begin with.
Maybe, but I'd say that large businesses like IP because it gives more influence to larger incumbents and allows them to shut out smaller competition, at least in the aggregate.
Slashdot Mirror
Frenchman: Where'd you get the Gbps?
Arthur: We found them.
Frenchman: Found them? In Mercia?
Arthur: Yes.
Frenchman: Gbps are South Korean! This is a 2Mbps zone!
Arthur: The manga may fly east, or the JRPGs seek more censored climes 6 months after Japanese release, yet these are not strangers to our lands!
Frenchman: Are you suggesting Gbps migrate?!!
Arthur: Not at all! They could be tunneled!
Oh come on. Next you'll be telling us that patents favor large, entrenched players to the detriment of small businesses without legal departments. Or that insanely complex tax, reporting, and data retention laws favor large players unfairly. Are you seriously suggesting that the new backbone of western civilization, lawyers, accountants, police, and social workers should have their industries cut down to size because they only exist to satisfy the asinine legal structure that we've created. Come on dude, it's a 21st century, global village, innovation centric economy. Think synergy!
Just curious, when you say petrodollar, what are you referring to?
I've always heard it used to describe the (T-bill -> 3rd-party-oil-sales -> US-deficit) cycle, with the oil exporting nations getting strong "encouragement" to sell for only US denominated assetts.
Are you talking about something different? Any links appreciated.
Wow.
I've started about 3 different replies and erased them, for fear that if I continued trying to understand the judge's logic, my head would explode. Anti-liberty scum with a robe and gavel.
I did want to bring this up though. From one of the linked Ars articles:
First, it would have to be the user breaking the EULA. The bot can't break it because it never "clicked" OK. Second, their logic is that because the EULA is broken, any subsequent RAM operations are copyright violations.
So my question: Did I miss the memo that made EULAs legally binding contracts, and gives EULA "agreements" the authority to invalidate the license to copy the software into RAM? Has this been true ever since the DMCA was passed? I know that EULAs always talk shit about this, but I had no idea that this logic was valid in court. I knew it was bad, but Jesus.
Wimpy: William Wallace is sevuhn feet tahl.
WW: Aye, soh uv hurd. Ahnd uf e wer here, he'd powuhr ahl uf Scotland wth fyrhbahlls frum is eyes, ahnd bolts of lyhtning frum is arse!
Soldiers, in unison: Haw haw haw haw!!
WW: I ahm William Wallace!
No, but it does tell me I need to close Process Explorer while I'm installing it.
So let me get this straight. I use a program on startup and throughout my session to be able to troubleshoot any stability problems, but I need to turn it off to install your game because I might catch a glimpse of what YOUR software is doing to MY computer?
That was more than enough for me. I was a happy purchaser of morrowind and oblivion, and wanted to get fallout 3. But after seeing that, I am boycotting bethesda forever.
Likely. Well, them with the coalition children-protectors, terrorism-fearers, and various other goose-steppers. Anyone have a fork?
It will be largely forgotten because the file sharing generations will be in government?
Maybe, maybe not. Don't give humanity that much credit. The 60's and 70's were trippy times, but pot, x, acid are still illegal in many countries, and there are even serious moves against tobacco.
Sabotage maybe? Doesn't that imply coming from within?
Well, not yet, but wikipedia does have good way to push this kind of thing. Look at these:
Now granted, these are animated gifs. But wouldn't it be nice if they had play/pause? Wikipedia is known for the quality of its scientific articles. What demographic would want this? College students maybe? And what demographic, if Wikipedia said "Download firefox to see this helpful video", would be most likely to actually do that?
And of course, when American executives see college students flocking to something, it must automatically be golden. Not much, but it's a start.
FTA:
"Mozilla is integrating support for the Ogg format directly into Firefox 3.1, so the next version of the popular open source web browser will be able to play Ogg media without requiring any plugins or external software."
Nice! Thank you mozilla.
Overall this is good, as long as they can afford it. I would love it if firefox users could use our collective weight to force(?) web sites to just stream the damn video to us, rather than using whatever lame flash interface they have set up.
Question for someone more knowledgeable: Since vorbis is inherently VBR, does that pose any problems for internet streaming?
Other than that, no word about flac makes me a sad panda. Well, maybe directly in the browser isn't the right place for flac. But I keep thinking we're going to wake up one day and all music will go straight from microphone to ~192kbps before even leaving the studio. And we'll look around wondering what happened.
LOL, apparently "plugin", "mozilla", and "firefox" are spelling errors.
Am I late for the funeral?
<Gasp!!> Calculon!!
Shouldn't we (US, Canada, Europe) then be looking at the things that have allowed this to happen in the first place? Instead of reactively playing whack a mole with monopolies, why can't we realize that we granted the monopoly and we can take it away at any time?
If the EU believes that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly, well, that monopoly comes in the form of copyrights and patents enforced by the EU legal system. If they're serious about, they should nullify MS's IP.
But that won't happen, because of corruption alone. But even if somehow we could get someone to look at it who was above corruption, it still wouldn't be an idea acceptable to the mainstream. Because so much of the economy in Western civilization has become based on fluff, we're too afraid to do the right thing wrt IP, because it would open a pandora's box of purging useless, fluff businesses. So we will keep on with asinine regulations, making bureaucrats look important, but not accomplishing much of anything.
Are you using xp, and if so, do you know about this? It's made all my fonts in every program look better, but I'm not sure if it effects open office.
My ass. I used to download music legally (well, paid for anyway). But that was before my country's Commerce Department decided to kill allofmp3. All that the labels needed to do was buy allofmp3 and set up servers worldwide. Hell, combine it with pandora and they'd have a great service. But no, we can't let that happen, it just has to be shitty quality doesn't it? FLAC or bust, morons.
(Before anyone brings it up, yes, I know about sparks, but never got it to work. And yes, there are many songs in which there is no noticeable advantage with FLAC.)
Yeah, 'engaging'. Uh huh. Doing nothing is not an option? Oh, I don't know, I think it's a damn good option. Then again, I don't have lobbyists.
On a second look, maybe I'm mistaken.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/25/0029204
This is the second time I've seen NYT using weasel words to make it sound like they broke this story. If you remember, it was USA Today. I'm not really a fan of either one, but give credit where it's due.
I smoke. Not proud of it, but I do. Tried to quit, but haven't yet.
Now then. As to the addictiveness, I can attest. They are very addictive, although my anecdotal experience suggests that it's different for everyone depending on your chemistry.
No, we smokers are not getting tricked. We know exactly what we're doing, and choose to do it anyway. We are not five year olds here. Now, if cigarettes are being sold to minors, that's one thing, and whoever's doing the selling should be punished. But there is a line between child and adult. Let's stop blurring that line and respect it.
No offense, but this couldn't be further from the truth. I work in a public school. They don't really try that hard to save money on certain things, for whatever reason. These things include: technology, special ed, construction, and sports departments, to name a few.
Not sure if you're in this situation, but a lot of people know a teacher who isn't that well paid and have heard them complaining about lack of funding they get, and so they get the idea that schools are really hurting for money. From everything I've seen, this usually isn't true unless you're talking about inner city schools. But just because money isn't going to the right places doesn't mean that money isn't being thrown around left, right, and center. Trust me, it is.
Even if wine was perfect tomorrow, it wouldn't matter. "Who's going to give us our support contract?," they'll say. Red Who?
In short, it has relatively little to do with money, software quality, etc. This is especially true being that, at least here in the US, spending money on Microsoft licensing is not generally seen as wasteful. This perception matters. And yes, we live in a fucked up world.
Wait till they start learning the tricks of Western governments. IOW, less emphasis on blocking and more emphasis on spin, misdirection, and obfuscation. Of course, all governments use both to different extents, but the Western governments are masters at the latter. At least with blocking, the government gives away the fact that something is being hidden.
block : encryption :: spin : steganography
Let's see, Director of technology product marketing. I'm gonna go with a big NO.
Very true. This is what I try to explain to people when they can't understand why some software is given away gratis. Because if they charged for it, given the current attitudes of the market, they wouldn't stand a chance and wouldn't ever get any market share to begin with.
Maybe, but I'd say that large businesses like IP because it gives more influence to larger incumbents and allows them to shut out smaller competition, at least in the aggregate.
FYI, that can happen and 99% of the time, it's fixed for me by just reloading. Makes me think it has to do with a timeout.
Kudos for having enough balls to put that out there.