The Supreme Court ruled that it does not violate the double jeopardy clause of the 5th Amendment to try someone at both the state and federal level. It's hard to imagine how they managed to interpret it that way. You can read some about it here. I don't agree with the logic. The Supreme Court seems to be focused on the violation of 'laws', whereas the language in the Bill of Rights is 'for the same offense'. I'd take that to mean that you do one bad thing, you can only be put in jeopardy for it once. If you shoot two people, you've committed two crimes. But in another violation of the 5th amendment, you'll be charged with two counts of murder, possession of an unlicensed firearm, possession of a firearm with intent to cause harm, assault with a deadly weapon, unlawful discharge of a firearm, conspiracy to commit murder, and so on. In fact, the Supreme Court specifically contramands such separate charges unless Congress uses "language which is clear and definite", which to me implies the creation of a judicial mandate to decide the applicability of the 5th amendment.
Someone actually reverse engineered the format of their compiled scripts, and there is, interestingly enough, a stand-alone compiler for scripts now on both windows and linux. It is actually how people are hacking in 'database access'. The game 'logs' writes to a logfile, and a parser turns those log entries into a script file. Before a restart, those scripts are compiled, put in NWN's/override directory, and loaded on demand from in-game (referenced using a hash of the various names of objects or PCs ingame).
You should try playing on better servers. Either meet a group ahead of time on Neverwinter Connections, or if you're playing PWs, then join something with RP-enforced in the PW Story section, using server-vault only.
I think this game would have been a boon for linux gaming if they'd stuck to their plans to do simultaneous release. I'm not so sure now. Still, I like native linux gaming, and it does raise the bar for developers a bit. But in all seriousness, if you're a big fan, you could not wait until now to get it for linux. Thankfully they don't sell a "linux version" in box, so there won't be bogus weird sales figures.
On a final note, there won't be any linux toolset, because of the environment they built theirs in.
If Apple was a $300B software giant, they'd be as bad or worse than Microsoft is. They're an amazing example of all the things that are disgusting in the computer and software industry. Rampant litigation, weak patents, disdain towards users. A+, A+, A+. It's nice to know that if they ever did supplant Microsoft, they'd be able to do it so well we wouldn't even know the difference.
Back at Netcom, in my first job (and only TS job, thank god!), one customer:
"Where are the booby gifs?! YOU CANNOT HIDE THEM FROM ME!"
Netcruiser had a newsreader, but it couldn't reassemble multi-part uuencodes. Actually, it couldn't even uudecode a single post on its own, so we go a lot of 'how do I see the pictures?' calls.
It's been 7+ years, and those of us who are still friends still joke over that one.
And Wil Wheaton called on my shift once! Although I didn't talk to him. I just got to supply all the TS knowledge while some girl got to do all the chatting.
Now, I can't speak for everyone, but I've only met one product marketing manager who truly qualified for the term 'highly skilled'. The rest were a bunch of marketroid frauds. The one who WAS highly skilled quit the last company I worked at, started his own, and just sold it (in the midst of the horrible recession, no less) to a huge company for well over a hundred million dollars.
If you're a programmer or other skilled person who can truly create something, do this if you find something you love, but don't do grunt work. Expand yourself. My first hobby -- network security -- turned into my full time job. My hobbies during that job have again become my work. I've cultivated a new set of hobbies, specifically with an eye on turning them into my full time work intentionally. Having had it happen many times, I'm determined to direct it a bit more the next time.
Good luck to those workers. I hope it works out. But the companies have a bunch of free labor, and you often get what you pay for.
That hasn't been my experience. My experience is that good managers who are knowledgable about the workforce will hire people without degrees. People who are poor managers and in over their heads are too afraid to hire non-degreed personnel because they feel it will reflect poorly on them. It's the HR equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
This is like saying that we need to draw the line between electricity use and pollution. Wrong. We need to innovate. The answer to a security issue isn't to take away freedoms to make it easier on us; the answer is to use more advanced methods to maintain privacy and liberty AND enhance security.
While the question is phrased that way -- liberty vs safety -- it's the only question we can answer. If we say: liberty is inviolate, now how else do we protect people? Then that question may be answered instead.
Seriously. You know, when I was a kid, I spent more time programming and fooling with my computer than anything, and practically nil listening to music. About college, I finally got a bit of taste for it, and started buying up CDs right and left. Years went by and I'd buy CDs if I heard a good song on the radio, heard good things from friends. Four years ago, I started swapping MP3 collections with friends and I'd listen through theirs and then buy anything I liked out of that.
And about a year and a half ago, I just stopped. All at once there were companies getting sued for trading music internally, CDs were crippled, Napster was crushed. I haven't really expected much from my boycott. Consumers just seem way to sheep-like. But I'm not buying shit from these greedy record-company whores. What's amazing is, if they gave me some sort of all-I-can-listen-and-download deal, they'd probably make a fortune off me. I've been a netflix subscriber for like 4 years, and I probably get a movie every month or so (making it slightly cheaper than when I tried to rent from Blockbuster:P), if that. I can easily see me, being me, spending $100 on the listen-and-download-all-you-want-to-uncrippled-160 kbps mp3s plan of a music service (with all the content, you scum, not your label's), yet only downloading a dozen songs -- if that.
I did buy DMB songs at a concert. I'd hate to have to give up DMB. I'd hate it. But what can I do? I don't have a CD player. Seriously. I don't own one. I have a computer, and a Nomad. I drive about an hour a week, if that, so the car CD player is out. So selling me a crippled CD is like selling me a ticket to see the band in Alaska. Not likely to be used. And so I won't buy them.
However, I am going to send $100 to Rick Boucher. And I'll do the same if my own newly elected Texan Senators do something to reign in out of control companies. I think nothing would benefit the US more than a big fat slap in the face of record and movie companies, who have all become the American iteration of kieretsu, or who are actually willing to take Microsoft and deal with it as the gigantic business-crushing consumer-screwing rapacious beast that it is, instead of letting it off easy for the _second_ time in an Anti-trust suit. Oh, well. Third time's the charm, eh? Maybe as Adobe dies, they'll really get broken into little bits.
Your crappy non-cross-platform javascript/vbscript front page renders absolutely nothing in mozilla, putting you in the.1% of morons who can't build anything even remotely user friendly for non-IE users.
This is a question you really must have anticipated in using an analogy of contracts. After all, BOTH sides must exchange some value to have a contract. It's the notion of consideration. It can be slight, but few are likely to agree to such a thing unless each finds it equitable.
Copyright laws are merely an automatic contract. Let's assume there was no such law, and I wish to create content for a living. I believe that my music, stories, or whatever, are of such quality that people will pay be to possess a copy. I create a contract that stipulates: (1) I'll show this to you, and if you don't like it, you have to return or destroy this copy that I give you. (2) If you do like it, you can pay me for this copy, but you agree not to make other copies. People have to come get one from me, so I can make the money from it.
If you don't agree to this contract, you don't get to view the work. If this contract was ubiquitous, you'd have to agree each time to preview something to buy it. I'm not 'forcing' you to not copy something -- I'm simply allowing you to enter into a contract to get access to my work, which you do not have the ability to view/hear/etc unless I grant it.
The practical problem, of course, is that it would be difficult to enforce. Once you've sold 100 copies, when illegitimate ones show up, how do you know who made them?
My point is that copyright is not some arbitrary thing created to encourage the creation of artistic works -- it is an expression of natural contracts. In the absense of the contract or the copyright, people would still create -- but the creation would not be as prolific, and many who might create things would find other work that guaranteed them pay, and we would all be worse off (if you believe that the lesser quantity of creation would mean we were worse off).
The thing about such a contract is that it places no onus on the potential consumer -- you can preview, and if you don't want the content, you pay nothing for having seen it. But despite the fact that it is 'information', and must, as you put it, be revealed for you to know it, that revelation does not enable a copy. You can't make a copy of Star Wars just because I show it to you and you view it. If I sing you a song, you can't recreate my voice. I can show you a book, without you being able to retype it. You can do some of these things with devices, but I can not show you or sing or such if you have such a device.
This is, as my original post pointed out, diametrically opposed to many patented things. If I say, "I have an idea where potential buyers can bid what they want to pay on things like plane tickets" -- well, I've just pretty much covered Pricelines "patent" on their business model. Our implementations of the idea may differ slightly, but the end result is the same. I wonder; what does it take for an idea simple enough to be expressed with a single sentence to be "non-obvious"? I think that the Priceline patent is for something that WAS obvious -- something that followed very naturally from the power of the Net, and even from typical auction sites.
Obviously, some patents are not like this. Despite the basics of public key encryption being expressable in a paragraph, that doesn't make them obvious at the time of their invention. Discovering drugs is hardly obvious -- anyone can make new molecules, but researching their results on living things is painstakingly difficult.
Still, many patents are for excruciatingly obvious "inventions", and they are the sort of thing where (1-click shopping, anyone?) they can be expressed trivially, and that mere expression does allow for a functionally perfect copy. That sort of information truly does want to be free -- it is the nature of its use that it produces perfect copies. Of course, that's the difference between art and science -- art is creation, ergo its subjective nature, whereas science is discovery, thus the way its revelation leads to duplication.
Most or all of these things can be re-written. All software can be re-coded, and thus not violate copyright. Textbooks can be re-written.
I'm certainly not saying that we should indefinitely extend copyright -- Bono and the supports of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act were clearly pandering to entertainment industry interests, starting with Disney.
That said, patents cause a larger problem -- if I wrote font rendering software, someone can circumvent my copyright by writing their own version. But if I patent the only valid method to render such fonts, then no one can circumvent it. This is why the focus on much of copyright is on creative works like music -- because no matter how much you listen to Dave Matthews Band, you can't just duplicate their creative abilities -- it just isn't the same. That can't be said of something more rote, like the copyrighted code produced during the creation of a program. That can be duplicated, and is, all the time.
Sorry -- it should be clear that it's an opinion. I think that, in a way, control over work created is a payment of sorts. Do I believe that people have an inherent right to intellectual property? Not necessarily. I do believe that people have the right to enforce contracts, and if you created intellectual property which people regarded as valuable, you might restrict it by contract so that only those who agreed to not redistribute it would have access. If it were redistributed, you could then trace that and take action against those who violated a contract with you. Copyright law just simplifies this by automatically forcing people into a contract of non-distribution.
So, in terms of the inherent right to intellectual property, I believe it does exist, because you shouldn't have the right to force me to think and create for you. Copyright law is merely a mechanism for shifting the onus of proof onto the distributor that they have the right to distribute, rather than the creator to show that they never publically released a work, thus meaning that someone violated a contract.
I don't believe that the 'popular culture' which is sold by big media firms is important to us, no. Art is important, but I'm talking about the dangers of losing Britney Spears, and you're countering that the Cistine Chapel is important? I'm sorry, but Britney != Cistine Chapel.
While abuse of copyright and dwindling fair use law is bad, fundamentally those things which are copyrighted are created by the authors, and they should have the ability to control them. If they control them in an anti-consumer way, consumers can always boycott them. This isn't going to change the world tomorrow or the day after, but what's at stake? Movies, music, TV, books -- mostly entertainment.
The patent problem is horrid. Unlike copyright, where at least people might claim some rights based on creation, patent law is clearly corrupted. People patent things that are not inventions -- they patent "business methods" of dubious originality, they patent software methods which have been in use long before the patent filing ("oh, no documentation that you used it? no prior art, then"), and moreover, patents screw the little guys, because patents cost a metric fuckton of money to get, especially en masse. If I write a book, copyright protects me automatically, and filing a copyright is cheap. If I didn't want to file a copyright, nowadays technology gives me other irrefutable options -- like publishing MD5 checksums in the paper -- that are even cheaper. If patents are truly for novel inventions, then why are developers in the software industry constantly afraid of stepping on patents? If all that many people are coming up with something independantly, doesn't that imply that the patent holder was just the first to file on something obvious that followed from existing technology, instead of the inventor of something novel?
Moreover, with patents, we affect all of technology, from CS to biotech, and we stop innovation. Having to pay $10 more than you should for a Britney Spears CD isn't going to hurt the economy -- but having to pay too much for inferior technology for 25 years that no one can legally improve upon, well, that's going to hurt the economy. Patents on obvious inventions slow innovation, hurt growth, damage industries, restrict R&D -- and this effect cuts across industries.
I'm sorry, but this is a lot more damaging that whether or not you can legally rip and/or trade mp3s.
What mp3s are you listening to? Try something encoded at a reasonably cd-quality bitrate, which 128 is not. 128 is "passable for CD sound in most circumstances", which does not include extended frequencies. But try 192 (my typical encoding rate), or even 224. At this point, you're not losing anything you'll notice.
Without citing a bitrate, you may as well listen toa 64-bit encoded version and say, "MP3 sounds like 3rd-generation taped copies! This sucks!"
This is NOT the first time that class action suits have been brought up, and I think it is VERY interesting, because some claim the law was only intended to give individual claimants the chance to get damages. Still, class action suits like this have been won before. Funny -- even fax.com has been sued before!.
First, while that's true, that's not the only part of their argument the judge found lacking. He also asserted that their patent claimed it involved "complete addresses", which a URL is typically not because it must be processed with name resolution to be useful. There were other issues, with BT trying to claim that an Internet address was 'equivalent' to a 'complete address' (per the "doctrine of equivalents" embodied in patent law), but that was shot down too, because apparently BT narrowed their claims on the patent to get around prior art.
I find it interesting, of course, since DNS is not the only address translation required. Before reaching the end server (and the patent says, "Central computer"), an ARP translation will be required as well to translate an IP address into a MAC address for transit across the physical+datalink layers of IP.
The funny thing is that this patent was supposedly dead from prior art from what we've all heard, and it didn't even get far enough. Basically, the judge dismissed them for grossly misinterpreting the patent, never mind that it would likely have been rendered invalid by prior art had they even made it that far. I hope BT had to pay court costs.
It doesn't surprise me to see you here. I've thought for a long time that the scientific bent of your show had geek appeal, and I certainly enjoy it. What are your interests outside of cooking?
That a Dell PC would cost you a truckload of money more than one from Wal-Mart anyhow, so go buy your OSless PC there. And be sure to let your relatives and such know where they can get non-MS PCs when they think of buying.
Slashdot Mirror
The Supreme Court ruled that it does not violate the double jeopardy clause of the 5th Amendment to try someone at both the state and federal level. It's hard to imagine how they managed to interpret it that way. You can read some about it here. I don't agree with the logic. The Supreme Court seems to be focused on the violation of 'laws', whereas the language in the Bill of Rights is 'for the same offense'. I'd take that to mean that you do one bad thing, you can only be put in jeopardy for it once. If you shoot two people, you've committed two crimes. But in another violation of the 5th amendment, you'll be charged with two counts of murder, possession of an unlicensed firearm, possession of a firearm with intent to cause harm, assault with a deadly weapon, unlawful discharge of a firearm, conspiracy to commit murder, and so on. In fact, the Supreme Court specifically contramands such separate charges unless Congress uses "language which is clear and definite", which to me implies the creation of a judicial mandate to decide the applicability of the 5th amendment.
Someone actually reverse engineered the format of their compiled scripts, and there is, interestingly enough, a stand-alone compiler for scripts now on both windows and linux. It is actually how people are hacking in 'database access'. The game 'logs' writes to a logfile, and a parser turns those log entries into a script file. Before a restart, those scripts are compiled, put in NWN's /override directory, and loaded on demand from in-game (referenced using a hash of the various names of objects or PCs ingame).
You should try playing on better servers. Either meet a group ahead of time on Neverwinter Connections, or if you're playing PWs, then join something with RP-enforced in the PW Story section, using server-vault only.
I think this game would have been a boon for linux gaming if they'd stuck to their plans to do simultaneous release. I'm not so sure now. Still, I like native linux gaming, and it does raise the bar for developers a bit. But in all seriousness, if you're a big fan, you could not wait until now to get it for linux. Thankfully they don't sell a "linux version" in box, so there won't be bogus weird sales figures.
On a final note, there won't be any linux toolset, because of the environment they built theirs in.
If Apple was a $300B software giant, they'd be as bad or worse than Microsoft is. They're an amazing example of all the things that are disgusting in the computer and software industry. Rampant litigation, weak patents, disdain towards users. A+, A+, A+. It's nice to know that if they ever did supplant Microsoft, they'd be able to do it so well we wouldn't even know the difference.
Why should he be? Is there some requirement to always write glowing recommendations when describing students to colleges?
Back at Netcom, in my first job (and only TS job, thank god!), one customer:
"Where are the booby gifs?! YOU CANNOT HIDE THEM FROM ME!"
Netcruiser had a newsreader, but it couldn't reassemble multi-part uuencodes. Actually, it couldn't even uudecode a single post on its own, so we go a lot of 'how do I see the pictures?' calls.
It's been 7+ years, and those of us who are still friends still joke over that one.
And Wil Wheaton called on my shift once! Although I didn't talk to him. I just got to supply all the TS knowledge while some girl got to do all the chatting.
Now, I can't speak for everyone, but I've only met one product marketing manager who truly qualified for the term 'highly skilled'. The rest were a bunch of marketroid frauds. The one who WAS highly skilled quit the last company I worked at, started his own, and just sold it (in the midst of the horrible recession, no less) to a huge company for well over a hundred million dollars.
If you're a programmer or other skilled person who can truly create something, do this if you find something you love, but don't do grunt work. Expand yourself. My first hobby -- network security -- turned into my full time job. My hobbies during that job have again become my work. I've cultivated a new set of hobbies, specifically with an eye on turning them into my full time work intentionally. Having had it happen many times, I'm determined to direct it a bit more the next time.
Good luck to those workers. I hope it works out. But the companies have a bunch of free labor, and you often get what you pay for.
Finally, the age-old question is answered:
How can we play Everquest all day and get paid for it?
That's a great out of context quote, since he never implies that event a significant portion of the code is his, let alone all of it.
The number of stories posted on Slashdot about the end of Moore's Law will double every 18 months.
That hasn't been my experience. My experience is that good managers who are knowledgable about the workforce will hire people without degrees. People who are poor managers and in over their heads are too afraid to hire non-degreed personnel because they feel it will reflect poorly on them. It's the HR equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
This is like saying that we need to draw the line between electricity use and pollution. Wrong. We need to innovate. The answer to a security issue isn't to take away freedoms to make it easier on us; the answer is to use more advanced methods to maintain privacy and liberty AND enhance security.
While the question is phrased that way -- liberty vs safety -- it's the only question we can answer. If we say: liberty is inviolate, now how else do we protect people? Then that question may be answered instead.
Seriously. You know, when I was a kid, I spent more time programming and fooling with my computer than anything, and practically nil listening to music. About college, I finally got a bit of taste for it, and started buying up CDs right and left. Years went by and I'd buy CDs if I heard a good song on the radio, heard good things from friends. Four years ago, I started swapping MP3 collections with friends and I'd listen through theirs and then buy anything I liked out of that.
:P), if that. I can easily see me, being me, spending $100 on the listen-and-download-all-you-want-to-uncrippled-160 kbps mp3s plan of a music service (with all the content, you scum, not your label's), yet only downloading a dozen songs -- if that.
And about a year and a half ago, I just stopped. All at once there were companies getting sued for trading music internally, CDs were crippled, Napster was crushed. I haven't really expected much from my boycott. Consumers just seem way to sheep-like. But I'm not buying shit from these greedy record-company whores. What's amazing is, if they gave me some sort of all-I-can-listen-and-download deal, they'd probably make a fortune off me. I've been a netflix subscriber for like 4 years, and I probably get a movie every month or so (making it slightly cheaper than when I tried to rent from Blockbuster
I did buy DMB songs at a concert. I'd hate to have to give up DMB. I'd hate it. But what can I do? I don't have a CD player. Seriously. I don't own one. I have a computer, and a Nomad. I drive about an hour a week, if that, so the car CD player is out. So selling me a crippled CD is like selling me a ticket to see the band in Alaska. Not likely to be used. And so I won't buy them.
However, I am going to send $100 to Rick Boucher. And I'll do the same if my own newly elected Texan Senators do something to reign in out of control companies. I think nothing would benefit the US more than a big fat slap in the face of record and movie companies, who have all become the American iteration of kieretsu, or who are actually willing to take Microsoft and deal with it as the gigantic business-crushing consumer-screwing rapacious beast that it is, instead of letting it off easy for the _second_ time in an Anti-trust suit. Oh, well. Third time's the charm, eh? Maybe as Adobe dies, they'll really get broken into little bits.
Your crappy non-cross-platform javascript/vbscript front page renders absolutely nothing in mozilla, putting you in the .1% of morons who can't build anything even remotely user friendly for non-IE users.
This is a question you really must have anticipated in using an analogy of contracts. After all, BOTH sides must exchange some value to have a contract. It's the notion of consideration. It can be slight, but few are likely to agree to such a thing unless each finds it equitable.
Copyright laws are merely an automatic contract. Let's assume there was no such law, and I wish to create content for a living. I believe that my music, stories, or whatever, are of such quality that people will pay be to possess a copy. I create a contract that stipulates: (1) I'll show this to you, and if you don't like it, you have to return or destroy this copy that I give you. (2) If you do like it, you can pay me for this copy, but you agree not to make other copies. People have to come get one from me, so I can make the money from it.
If you don't agree to this contract, you don't get to view the work. If this contract was ubiquitous, you'd have to agree each time to preview something to buy it. I'm not 'forcing' you to not copy something -- I'm simply allowing you to enter into a contract to get access to my work, which you do not have the ability to view/hear/etc unless I grant it.
The practical problem, of course, is that it would be difficult to enforce. Once you've sold 100 copies, when illegitimate ones show up, how do you know who made them?
My point is that copyright is not some arbitrary thing created to encourage the creation of artistic works -- it is an expression of natural contracts. In the absense of the contract or the copyright, people would still create -- but the creation would not be as prolific, and many who might create things would find other work that guaranteed them pay, and we would all be worse off (if you believe that the lesser quantity of creation would mean we were worse off).
The thing about such a contract is that it places no onus on the potential consumer -- you can preview, and if you don't want the content, you pay nothing for having seen it. But despite the fact that it is 'information', and must, as you put it, be revealed for you to know it, that revelation does not enable a copy. You can't make a copy of Star Wars just because I show it to you and you view it. If I sing you a song, you can't recreate my voice. I can show you a book, without you being able to retype it. You can do some of these things with devices, but I can not show you or sing or such if you have such a device.
This is, as my original post pointed out, diametrically opposed to many patented things. If I say, "I have an idea where potential buyers can bid what they want to pay on things like plane tickets" -- well, I've just pretty much covered Pricelines "patent" on their business model. Our implementations of the idea may differ slightly, but the end result is the same. I wonder; what does it take for an idea simple enough to be expressed with a single sentence to be "non-obvious"? I think that the Priceline patent is for something that WAS obvious -- something that followed very naturally from the power of the Net, and even from typical auction sites.
Obviously, some patents are not like this. Despite the basics of public key encryption being expressable in a paragraph, that doesn't make them obvious at the time of their invention. Discovering drugs is hardly obvious -- anyone can make new molecules, but researching their results on living things is painstakingly difficult.
Still, many patents are for excruciatingly obvious "inventions", and they are the sort of thing where (1-click shopping, anyone?) they can be expressed trivially, and that mere expression does allow for a functionally perfect copy. That sort of information truly does want to be free -- it is the nature of its use that it produces perfect copies. Of course, that's the difference between art and science -- art is creation, ergo its subjective nature, whereas science is discovery, thus the way its revelation leads to duplication.
Most or all of these things can be re-written. All software can be re-coded, and thus not violate copyright. Textbooks can be re-written.
I'm certainly not saying that we should indefinitely extend copyright -- Bono and the supports of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act were clearly pandering to entertainment industry interests, starting with Disney.
That said, patents cause a larger problem -- if I wrote font rendering software, someone can circumvent my copyright by writing their own version. But if I patent the only valid method to render such fonts, then no one can circumvent it. This is why the focus on much of copyright is on creative works like music -- because no matter how much you listen to Dave Matthews Band, you can't just duplicate their creative abilities -- it just isn't the same. That can't be said of something more rote, like the copyrighted code produced during the creation of a program. That can be duplicated, and is, all the time.
Sorry -- it should be clear that it's an opinion. I think that, in a way, control over work created is a payment of sorts. Do I believe that people have an inherent right to intellectual property? Not necessarily. I do believe that people have the right to enforce contracts, and if you created intellectual property which people regarded as valuable, you might restrict it by contract so that only those who agreed to not redistribute it would have access. If it were redistributed, you could then trace that and take action against those who violated a contract with you. Copyright law just simplifies this by automatically forcing people into a contract of non-distribution.
So, in terms of the inherent right to intellectual property, I believe it does exist, because you shouldn't have the right to force me to think and create for you. Copyright law is merely a mechanism for shifting the onus of proof onto the distributor that they have the right to distribute, rather than the creator to show that they never publically released a work, thus meaning that someone violated a contract.
I don't believe that the 'popular culture' which is sold by big media firms is important to us, no. Art is important, but I'm talking about the dangers of losing Britney Spears, and you're countering that the Cistine Chapel is important? I'm sorry, but Britney != Cistine Chapel.
While abuse of copyright and dwindling fair use law is bad, fundamentally those things which are copyrighted are created by the authors, and they should have the ability to control them. If they control them in an anti-consumer way, consumers can always boycott them. This isn't going to change the world tomorrow or the day after, but what's at stake? Movies, music, TV, books -- mostly entertainment.
The patent problem is horrid. Unlike copyright, where at least people might claim some rights based on creation, patent law is clearly corrupted. People patent things that are not inventions -- they patent "business methods" of dubious originality, they patent software methods which have been in use long before the patent filing ("oh, no documentation that you used it? no prior art, then"), and moreover, patents screw the little guys, because patents cost a metric fuckton of money to get, especially en masse. If I write a book, copyright protects me automatically, and filing a copyright is cheap. If I didn't want to file a copyright, nowadays technology gives me other irrefutable options -- like publishing MD5 checksums in the paper -- that are even cheaper. If patents are truly for novel inventions, then why are developers in the software industry constantly afraid of stepping on patents? If all that many people are coming up with something independantly, doesn't that imply that the patent holder was just the first to file on something obvious that followed from existing technology, instead of the inventor of something novel?
Moreover, with patents, we affect all of technology, from CS to biotech, and we stop innovation. Having to pay $10 more than you should for a Britney Spears CD isn't going to hurt the economy -- but having to pay too much for inferior technology for 25 years that no one can legally improve upon, well, that's going to hurt the economy. Patents on obvious inventions slow innovation, hurt growth, damage industries, restrict R&D -- and this effect cuts across industries.
I'm sorry, but this is a lot more damaging that whether or not you can legally rip and/or trade mp3s.
What mp3s are you listening to? Try something encoded at a reasonably cd-quality bitrate, which 128 is not. 128 is "passable for CD sound in most circumstances", which does not include extended frequencies. But try 192 (my typical encoding rate), or even 224. At this point, you're not losing anything you'll notice.
Without citing a bitrate, you may as well listen toa 64-bit encoded version and say, "MP3 sounds like 3rd-generation taped copies! This sucks!"
This is NOT the first time that class action suits have been brought up, and I think it is VERY interesting, because some claim the law was only intended to give individual claimants the chance to get damages. Still, class action suits like this have been won before. Funny -- even fax.com
has been sued before!.
There's also the question of whether junk fax statutory damages can be appropriate for class action, although obviously this is only one perspective.
First, while that's true, that's not the only part of their argument the judge found lacking. He also asserted that their patent claimed it involved "complete addresses", which a URL is typically not because it must be processed with name resolution to be useful. There were other issues, with BT trying to claim that an Internet address was 'equivalent' to a 'complete address' (per the "doctrine of equivalents" embodied in patent law), but that was shot down too, because apparently BT narrowed their claims on the patent to get around prior art.
I find it interesting, of course, since DNS is not the only address translation required. Before reaching the end server (and the patent says, "Central computer"), an ARP translation will be required as well to translate an IP address into a MAC address for transit across the physical+datalink layers of IP.
The funny thing is that this patent was supposedly dead from prior art from what we've all heard, and it didn't even get far enough. Basically, the judge dismissed them for grossly misinterpreting the patent, never mind that it would likely have been rendered invalid by prior art had they even made it that far. I hope BT had to pay court costs.
It doesn't surprise me to see you here. I've thought for a long time that the scientific bent of your show had geek appeal, and I certainly enjoy it. What are your interests outside of cooking?
Called "Dodge the Slashdotting 2002", and base it on personal experience.
I've never had one of my generics (not wal-marts, but nonetheless not name brands) break, but the only dell I had did.
That a Dell PC would cost you a truckload of money more than one from Wal-Mart anyhow, so go buy your OSless PC there. And be sure to let your relatives and such know where they can get non-MS PCs when they think of buying.