I'm sorry, where in my post did I say I was attacking you? I thought that when I quoted the part of your post which said it was a "real quote", it would be understood that I was attacking the quote, and its author, not you. Obviously I've not read Levy's book, nor am I likely to after this quote.
The 'koan' you cite is a made-up story written by someone, no doubt based on the original Levy material.
The koan is one of the most famous examples, has been in the jargon file since the koan examples were added in the early 90s, and has been attributed to Danny Hillis, who was at the MIT AI lab at the time. I think you give a bit too much weight to Levy.
I went with the factual account over the 'koan'.
I guess I find this bizarre in a post entitled "Programmer's Koans".
it's not a real koan if they explain the meaning in the text, now is it?
The koan explains the meaning? Any explanation in the koan is only by analogy, which is left to the reader to figure out. At least for myself, I find this more instructive and powerful than the direct quote.
Perhaps I should have been clearer and said that I find Levy's factual account to be shit compared to the koan.
That would have to be, unquestionably, the SINGLE MOST VILE BUTCHERING of the actual koan i have ever had the horrible misfortune of reading. It barely makes sense, let alone helps with enlightenment. Try this:
In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Quoting directly from http://giftfile.org/about (emphasis added): A nonproprietary intellectual work is a work of authorship such as music, literature, or computer software that may be used, copied, modified, and redistributed by anyone without charge. In other words, we are speaking of works from which the public has the freedom to benefit.... Software works can be nonproprietary only if they include source code.
To answer your question directly, free but non-open-source (ie. gratis, but not libre) software does provide some public benefit, but it is not the kind of benefit that the giftfile project is interested in supporting. There are very good reasons for this, most of which are the same as open-source vs non-open-source.
With specific regard to the tax exemption, the laws there talk about charitable work and "the public good" and stuff like that. It's much easier to justify that angle (ie. to the powers that be) if you only allow open source software, where people have far more freedoms than non-open-source software (even when it is gratis).
So yes, the definiton of nonproprietary used by the giftfile project specifically doesn't allow gratis but closed source software. But it's a deliberate choice, and these are the reasons behind it. (Although I'm not affiliated with the giftfile project - this is just my take on these things.)
Naturally, it was put there 20 years ago in anticipation of the mp3 craze. The purpose is for you to manually remap it to play/pause your mp3s. I have my fvwm setup to run xmms --play-pause when I hit it. I thought this would be blindingly obvious, given the name of the key.;)
That generally won't work, because when you get your $10k back, it counts as income and so you'll have to pay tax on it. This means you'll be paying the $4k which you would have had to pay 5 years ago anyway, and you gain nothing except perhaps a small amount of interest (probably less than you could have got by investing the original amount wisely yourself). These rules vary from country to country, but since giftfile is only a registered charity in the US, I expect we can assume US rules for the tax discussion.
Which means that any interest that acrues will end up as income to the 'giftfile' organization.
It is possible that any interest earned on a giftfile's balance be given to the giftfile's author, even if the realisticness of this is debatable.
Second off the proponents appear to making the suggestion that their should be multiple gift pools, which makes for a situation ripe with oppurtunities for fraud.
This is true. But it's part of their idea for a decentralised system, and it encourages competition between giftpools to best serve the public.
They claim they are 'grants', but the fact that they are monies earmarked for an individual and payable to that individual on demand moves that claim onto *very* shakey ground.
When I donate to particular charities, I'm often able to say what I want my money to be used for. I'm able to tick boxes which say that I want my money to be used only to help homeless kids, or only to provide aid to foreign countries, or not to be used for administrative costs. Well, in this case, I can "tick a box" which says that my money is to be used to support free software programmers. And there are lots of "boxes", so that I can tick exactly which programmers I think most need the help of my donation. Because the software in question (the software I'm supporting with my donation) is free software, I can argue that it benefits society as a whole since anybody can use it or improve on it. This is in comparison to donating money which ends up going to a homeless kid and helping them sleep somewhere at night. Don't get me wrong, I think that the homeless are a serious social issue, and I have nothing against spending money to help them - but I'm trying to show that the "bank-like" comparison is not necessarily as strong as the "charity-like" one. I can see the benefit in donating to homeless organisations and to free software programmers, but perhaps I can see more direct benefit (personally) in the latter.
Charities distribute money to help people who are less fortunate people, or to help society as a whole. That's what they do. I would say that providing an income to programmers whose work is freely available to anyone in the community is a charitable function, no less than paying the wage of a social worker.
Also, it's worth noting, as another poster has, that the "demand" of the giftfile owner is more of a "request" or "application". Ultimately the giftpool has discretion over where the funds go. However, if a giftpool starts withholding monies from giftfile authors, or otherwise "misbehaving", then donors are free to stop using them and move to another giftpool. I guess the hope is that this would be enough of a deterrant to stop giftpools from doing this sort of thing.
Actually, this raises two excellent points which I can't see addressed in the stuff on their website, and are my biggest concerns with the system as I see it at the moment.
First, how to verify that the creator of a giftfile is the "owner" of a work? In other words, what's to stop me from taking the Linux source, making a giftfile for it using my private key, and then distributing the giftfile in an effort to get donations? I can't see anything which prevents behaviour like this.
Presumably the digital signature in the giftfile allows one to verify that a particular work matches a giftfile. That would stop me from putting my giftfile with someone else's work (to try and get people to donate to me instead of the real author), or putting my giftfile with some random crap which I claim is something useful.
Second, how to deal with works which are the result of several authors. In the case of the Linux kernel, there are hundreds of authors, but there can only be one private key to sign the giftfile (I think). Once there are funds donated towards this giftfile, who gets the money? Does it all go to Linus? Or must an organisation (eg. Apache) be setup for every project which has multiple contributors? Or do we have a similar situation to my first point above, where each author makes their own giftfile and then donors have to allocate money to every author? (Or perhaps some sort of grouping system so I can say "split my $10 donation equally among all the authors of linux-2.6.6.tar.bz2"? But I'm not sure how this would fit into their decentralised model...)
that's not to mention the restrictions placed on those who may contribute their work by requiring contributers to license with a handfull of licenses.
The reason for supporting only nonproprietary works is to get tax exemption. If you're producing proprietary works then you're not entitled to that, and so you can try yourself to get people to donate to you, without tax exemption.
I agree that snail-mail only donations isn't great, but it's not like this will always be the only way to donate. This system looks like a good start to a difficult problem.
Personally, I think PayPal already covers the online donation territory in a far less political and more trustworthy fashion.
You trust PayPal? I think most people "trust" PayPal merely by default, not for any particularly good reason or evidence.
RTFA. Donations are to "giftpools", which are non-profit organisations. Producers of giftfiles can apply to the giftpool for a "grant" of the amount of donations which have been allocated towards their giftfile. The grant may be subject to taxation, however the donation would be eligible as a deduction. It is, however, futile if you donate $500 to your friend and then claim back $500 in a grant which came from him (via the giftpool). In fact, it's pretty stupid, since the giftpool takes a small amount of the money for their operating costs.
... other participants in the giftfile system make allocations to giftfiles as described above, yet do not produce giftfiles themselves. The way they gain privilege to make allocations is by donating cash to a giftpool. Such donations are tax deductible, because giftpools are nonprofit entities chartered to fund nonproprietary works.
and
Be aware that giftpool grants may need to be declared on your taxes.
When I post my software on my website under an unenbcumbered license, every and all can come by and grab it. And if I want the unencumbered software of another that has been publicly posted, I can go and grab it. Neither side needs a special system to participate in.
That is still the case. The system is of course completely voluntary and optional. As a producer of software you can choose to participate in the system by creating special "giftfiles" for your works (your software). You distribute the giftfiles with your software (same as you would an.asc or.md5 checksum file), and then anyone can use this giftfile to send you a donation via the giftpool. You're still free to release your software under whatever free license you choose (assuming the giftfile system supports it, which includes BSD and GPL). You don't need to register with a central authority to receive donations. Neither do users. OpenPGP based keys are used to sign giftfiles and their supporting works, to keep things secure.
This is simply an innovative decentralised way of allowing donations in support of "nonproprietary intellectual works" (eg. free software). There were a lot of links in the article, and the last one seems to be the best overview.
I think the best way to really film Neuromancer is to treat it as a movie about what could have been. A homage to what could have happened 20-30 years after it was written, had things turned out differently.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the Gibson book I'd LOVE to see as a movie is "The Difference Engine". Forget about going back 20-30 years for a different look, go back 100+ years to see what it would be like if the industrial revolution short-circuited into the information revolution. Just take out all of Sterling's rubbish and it could be really truly great. And because nothing even remotely like it has been attempted before, it wouldn't fall into the "lame Matrix copy" category. But the challenge of selling a Victorian England period piece (let alone one that also has "computers") to Americans, as well as adapting it down to movie-length (there's just so much stuff, and a lot of exposition too), are considerable, and mean that it'll probably never get made. Oh well.
In case anyone's interested in seeing more of the Osborne 1 itself, you might like to check out my Osborne 1 site, which has LOTS of pictures of the unit and various associated paraphenalia, some small mpeg movies of it in operation (including the great "disk grind" sound), and scans of the O1 Technical Manual, Field Service Manual, and a few others (though not the User's Manual, which is very large). And yes, it still works, although I've lost a few disks to bit rot... I get the feeling I'll have to dust it off after work and give it a spin, just for old time's sake.
More importantly, he seems to have forgotten about the "1" key. Many old typewriters, including the one he appears to have used, lack a "1" key. Typists would simply use a lowercase "l" (ell) key in lieu of 1 - you can probably still see this on very old documents if you look hard enough. The missing key made the typewriter mechanism (marginally) simpler, and helped to make them cheaper. I'm very curious as to how his wife types a one character, but there's no mention of that on the site.
Absolutely. On the whole, I loved this book, though many of the criticisms over its style are valid - it would have been much better if Sterling simply weren't involved, IMHO. I recommend it to my geek friends whenever possible, mainly because most of them have barely heard about it, if at all.
I think this book has AWESOME potential for being an excellent movie, if it could be pulled off properly. Far better prospects, than, say, Johnny Mnemonic.
there is no law that states what is and is not fair use. moreover, there is no law that requires companies to give consumers those rights.
There is case law. The Betamax case is the most famous, but there's also some that relate to video games (maybe modchips) I think. Actually, now that I think about it, the Audio Home Recording Act is a "fair use" law.
however, it is completely legal for companies to use technical measures (but not legal measures) to try to prevent you from doing those things. this btw, is precisely why dmca is so dangerous: it turns any technical protection measure into a legal one as well.
You sound confused. If DMCA turns a technical protection measure into a legal one, then by your previous sentence this means that companies can't do it. That would actually make DMCA a good thing.
You've stuffed up somewhere in your logic, but I'm not sure where. I think it's where you draw a distinction between technical measures and legal measures. I don't think there's any such distinction, and the laws apply to any measures (legal or technical) which restrict fair use rights. The more interesting question is has fair use been restricted if technical measures prevent lossless duplication, but allow lossy duplication?
Under traditional copyright laws, you have fair use, which means that once I pay your copyright fee, I have the right to use it however I please (barring that I don't make another copy.)
Wrong. Fair use entitles you only to SOME uses of the material, not "however you please".
Fair use grants exceptions to uses which would otherwise be copyright infringements. It is NOT a case of "all uses except copying are allowed". If this were the case, then you could legally buy a single license of some software and then allow many machines to use it from a networked disk. Clearly, this isn't the case. Software companies have been asking per-user licenses for years, and this is no different.
It may or may not be motivated by greed, but that has no bearing on the copyright issues.
However, the charges per user for zone transfer makes no sense as the MAPS service bears no additional load or bandwidth charges from the extra users as the zones are stored on the ISP?s name servers locally.
As MAPS point out, they own the copyright on their information. This means that they're not charging for load you cause on their servers, but rather for the privilege of being able to use the information. You don't have to like it, but this is the way things work.
Nature isn't that wasteful, and it wouldn't carry around 90% of the DNA for no good reason.
That's right, Darwin's theory of evolution says that. The thing is, just being there might be the only reason needed. Padding is a perfectly valid possible use/function. When these people say "useless", they mean "no direct functionality, unlike these other interesting parts over here."
If they don't know what it means, they should just say so and keep working at it.
They do. They say "We don't know what this means, but here's our best guess...". The problem is that all too often the media takes the best guess and reports it with more certainty than it deserves.
You assume that.NET will be better than MS's current (shitty) offerings, and therefore solve the problems. I'll be quite surprised if this is the case. Remember, the windows registry was supposed to "solve" the problem of having all those.ini files everywhere.
Why solve the problems with.NET, when they can leave them in (or shuffle them around a bit) and then make even more money on.NET's successor? Microsoft has literally no incentive to provide near-perfect software, because then there's a much smaller upgrade incentive (for users). They're quite happy to keep fucking over their users until the end of (their) time, all the while providing ever more "upgrades" of dubious quality - typically only just enough quality to get people to adopt it.
For a couple *BILLION* I'd let Bill fuck me every day of the week and twice on sundays......
Most people PAY HIM to be fucked over every day, by buying his software. Except for those pirates who get a "free ride of Bill"... Very amusing imagery.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it is just an education tool to show martians the meaning of BSOD.
Well, why not, after all, even Bill Gates got one.
I'm sorry, where in my post did I say I was attacking you? I thought that when I quoted the part of your post which said it was a "real quote", it would be understood that I was attacking the quote, and its author, not you. Obviously I've not read Levy's book, nor am I likely to after this quote.
The 'koan' you cite is a made-up story written by someone, no doubt based on the original Levy material.
The koan is one of the most famous examples, has been in the jargon file since the koan examples were added in the early 90s, and has been attributed to Danny Hillis, who was at the MIT AI lab at the time. I think you give a bit too much weight to Levy.
I went with the factual account over the 'koan'.
I guess I find this bizarre in a post entitled "Programmer's Koans".
it's not a real koan if they explain the meaning in the text, now is it?
The koan explains the meaning? Any explanation in the koan is only by analogy, which is left to the reader to figure out. At least for myself, I find this more instructive and powerful than the direct quote.
Perhaps I should have been clearer and said that I find Levy's factual account to be shit compared to the koan.
And now a real quote, from Steven Levy's Hackers:
That would have to be, unquestionably, the SINGLE MOST VILE BUTCHERING of the actual koan i have ever had the horrible misfortune of reading. It barely makes sense, let alone helps with enlightenment. Try this:
In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe." "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play." Minsky shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
also check out rdiff-backup for a very nice solution which doesn't require 10Gb every time you change a few bytes in your 10Gb file.
Quoting directly from http://giftfile.org/about (emphasis added):
... Software works can be nonproprietary only if they include source code.
A nonproprietary intellectual work is a work of authorship such as music, literature, or computer software that may be used, copied, modified, and redistributed by anyone without charge. In other words, we are speaking of works from which the public has the freedom to benefit.
To answer your question directly, free but non-open-source (ie. gratis, but not libre) software does provide some public benefit, but it is not the kind of benefit that the giftfile project is interested in supporting. There are very good reasons for this, most of which are the same as open-source vs non-open-source.
With specific regard to the tax exemption, the laws there talk about charitable work and "the public good" and stuff like that. It's much easier to justify that angle (ie. to the powers that be) if you only allow open source software, where people have far more freedoms than non-open-source software (even when it is gratis).
So yes, the definiton of nonproprietary used by the giftfile project specifically doesn't allow gratis but closed source software. But it's a deliberate choice, and these are the reasons behind it. (Although I'm not affiliated with the giftfile project - this is just my take on these things.)
Naturally, it was put there 20 years ago in anticipation of the mp3 craze. The purpose is for you to manually remap it to play/pause your mp3s. I have my fvwm setup to run xmms --play-pause when I hit it. I thought this would be blindingly obvious, given the name of the key. ;)
That generally won't work, because when you get your $10k back, it counts as income and so you'll have to pay tax on it. This means you'll be paying the $4k which you would have had to pay 5 years ago anyway, and you gain nothing except perhaps a small amount of interest (probably less than you could have got by investing the original amount wisely yourself). These rules vary from country to country, but since giftfile is only a registered charity in the US, I expect we can assume US rules for the tax discussion.
Which means that any interest that acrues will end up as income to the 'giftfile' organization.
It is possible that any interest earned on a giftfile's balance be given to the giftfile's author, even if the realisticness of this is debatable.
Second off the proponents appear to making the suggestion that their should be multiple gift pools, which makes for a situation ripe with oppurtunities for fraud.
This is true. But it's part of their idea for a decentralised system, and it encourages competition between giftpools to best serve the public.
They claim they are 'grants', but the fact that they are monies earmarked for an individual and payable to that individual on demand moves that claim onto *very* shakey ground.
When I donate to particular charities, I'm often able to say what I want my money to be used for. I'm able to tick boxes which say that I want my money to be used only to help homeless kids, or only to provide aid to foreign countries, or not to be used for administrative costs. Well, in this case, I can "tick a box" which says that my money is to be used to support free software programmers. And there are lots of "boxes", so that I can tick exactly which programmers I think most need the help of my donation. Because the software in question (the software I'm supporting with my donation) is free software, I can argue that it benefits society as a whole since anybody can use it or improve on it. This is in comparison to donating money which ends up going to a homeless kid and helping them sleep somewhere at night. Don't get me wrong, I think that the homeless are a serious social issue, and I have nothing against spending money to help them - but I'm trying to show that the "bank-like" comparison is not necessarily as strong as the "charity-like" one. I can see the benefit in donating to homeless organisations and to free software programmers, but perhaps I can see more direct benefit (personally) in the latter.
Charities distribute money to help people who are less fortunate people, or to help society as a whole. That's what they do. I would say that providing an income to programmers whose work is freely available to anyone in the community is a charitable function, no less than paying the wage of a social worker.
Also, it's worth noting, as another poster has, that the "demand" of the giftfile owner is more of a "request" or "application". Ultimately the giftpool has discretion over where the funds go. However, if a giftpool starts withholding monies from giftfile authors, or otherwise "misbehaving", then donors are free to stop using them and move to another giftpool. I guess the hope is that this would be enough of a deterrant to stop giftpools from doing this sort of thing.
Actually, this raises two excellent points which I can't see addressed in the stuff on their website, and are my biggest concerns with the system as I see it at the moment.
First, how to verify that the creator of a giftfile is the "owner" of a work? In other words, what's to stop me from taking the Linux source, making a giftfile for it using my private key, and then distributing the giftfile in an effort to get donations? I can't see anything which prevents behaviour like this.
Presumably the digital signature in the giftfile allows one to verify that a particular work matches a giftfile. That would stop me from putting my giftfile with someone else's work (to try and get people to donate to me instead of the real author), or putting my giftfile with some random crap which I claim is something useful.
Second, how to deal with works which are the result of several authors. In the case of the Linux kernel, there are hundreds of authors, but there can only be one private key to sign the giftfile (I think). Once there are funds donated towards this giftfile, who gets the money? Does it all go to Linus? Or must an organisation (eg. Apache) be setup for every project which has multiple contributors? Or do we have a similar situation to my first point above, where each author makes their own giftfile and then donors have to allocate money to every author? (Or perhaps some sort of grouping system so I can say "split my $10 donation equally among all the authors of linux-2.6.6.tar.bz2"? But I'm not sure how this would fit into their decentralised model...)
that's not to mention the restrictions placed on those who may contribute their work by requiring contributers to license with a handfull of licenses.
The reason for supporting only nonproprietary works is to get tax exemption. If you're producing proprietary works then you're not entitled to that, and so you can try yourself to get people to donate to you, without tax exemption.
I agree that snail-mail only donations isn't great, but it's not like this will always be the only way to donate. This system looks like a good start to a difficult problem.
Personally, I think PayPal already covers the online donation territory in a far less political and more trustworthy fashion.
You trust PayPal? I think most people "trust" PayPal merely by default, not for any particularly good reason or evidence.
RTFA. Donations are to "giftpools", which are non-profit organisations. Producers of giftfiles can apply to the giftpool for a "grant" of the amount of donations which have been allocated towards their giftfile. The grant may be subject to taxation, however the donation would be eligible as a deduction. It is, however, futile if you donate $500 to your friend and then claim back $500 in a grant which came from him (via the giftpool). In fact, it's pretty stupid, since the giftpool takes a small amount of the money for their operating costs.
... other participants in the giftfile system make allocations to giftfiles as described above, yet do not produce giftfiles themselves. The way they gain privilege to make allocations is by donating cash to a giftpool. Such donations are tax deductible, because giftpools are nonprofit entities chartered to fund nonproprietary works.
From the last link in the story:
and
Be aware that giftpool grants may need to be declared on your taxes.
When I post my software on my website under an unenbcumbered license, every and all can come by and grab it. And if I want the unencumbered software of another that has been publicly posted, I can go and grab it. Neither side needs a special system to participate in.
.asc or .md5 checksum file), and then anyone can use this giftfile to send you a donation via the giftpool. You're still free to release your software under whatever free license you choose (assuming the giftfile system supports it, which includes BSD and GPL). You don't need to register with a central authority to receive donations. Neither do users. OpenPGP based keys are used to sign giftfiles and their supporting works, to keep things secure.
That is still the case. The system is of course completely voluntary and optional. As a producer of software you can choose to participate in the system by creating special "giftfiles" for your works (your software). You distribute the giftfiles with your software (same as you would an
This is simply an innovative decentralised way of allowing donations in support of "nonproprietary intellectual works" (eg. free software). There were a lot of links in the article, and the last one seems to be the best overview.
I think the best way to really film Neuromancer is to treat it as a movie about what could have been. A homage to what could have happened 20-30 years after it was written, had things turned out differently.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the Gibson book I'd LOVE to see as a movie is "The Difference Engine". Forget about going back 20-30 years for a different look, go back 100+ years to see what it would be like if the industrial revolution short-circuited into the information revolution. Just take out all of Sterling's rubbish and it could be really truly great. And because nothing even remotely like it has been attempted before, it wouldn't fall into the "lame Matrix copy" category. But the challenge of selling a Victorian England period piece (let alone one that also has "computers") to Americans, as well as adapting it down to movie-length (there's just so much stuff, and a lot of exposition too), are considerable, and mean that it'll probably never get made. Oh well.
Kev.
More to the point, what else could possibly fit?
In case anyone's interested in seeing more of the Osborne 1 itself, you might like to check out my Osborne 1 site, which has LOTS of pictures of the unit and various associated paraphenalia, some small mpeg movies of it in operation (including the great "disk grind" sound), and scans of the O1 Technical Manual, Field Service Manual, and a few others (though not the User's Manual, which is very large). And yes, it still works, although I've lost a few disks to bit rot... I get the feeling I'll have to dust it off after work and give it a spin, just for old time's sake.
More importantly, he seems to have forgotten about the "1" key. Many old typewriters, including the one he appears to have used, lack a "1" key. Typists would simply use a lowercase "l" (ell) key in lieu of 1 - you can probably still see this on very old documents if you look hard enough. The missing key made the typewriter mechanism (marginally) simpler, and helped to make them cheaper. I'm very curious as to how his wife types a one character, but there's no mention of that on the site.
Absolutely. On the whole, I loved this book, though many of the criticisms over its style are valid - it would have been much better if Sterling simply weren't involved, IMHO. I recommend it to my geek friends whenever possible, mainly because most of them have barely heard about it, if at all.
I think this book has AWESOME potential for being an excellent movie, if it could be pulled off properly. Far better prospects, than, say, Johnny Mnemonic.
Maybe so, but Slashdot isn't a democracy and has never even given the illusion of supporting free speech.
there is no law that states what is and is not fair use. moreover, there is no law that requires companies to give consumers those rights.
There is case law. The Betamax case is the most famous, but there's also some that relate to video games (maybe modchips) I think. Actually, now that I think about it, the Audio Home Recording Act is a "fair use" law.
however, it is completely legal for companies to use technical measures (but not legal measures) to try to prevent you from doing those things. this btw, is precisely why dmca is so dangerous: it turns any technical protection measure into a legal one as well.
You sound confused. If DMCA turns a technical protection measure into a legal one, then by your previous sentence this means that companies can't do it. That would actually make DMCA a good thing.
You've stuffed up somewhere in your logic, but I'm not sure where. I think it's where you draw a distinction between technical measures and legal measures. I don't think there's any such distinction, and the laws apply to any measures (legal or technical) which restrict fair use rights. The more interesting question is has fair use been restricted if technical measures prevent lossless duplication, but allow lossy duplication?
Or, more likely, both.
Under traditional copyright laws, you have fair use, which means that once I pay your copyright fee, I have the right to use it however I please (barring that I don't make another copy.)
Wrong. Fair use entitles you only to SOME uses of the material, not "however you please".
Fair use grants exceptions to uses which would otherwise be copyright infringements. It is NOT a case of "all uses except copying are allowed". If this were the case, then you could legally buy a single license of some software and then allow many machines to use it from a networked disk. Clearly, this isn't the case. Software companies have been asking per-user licenses for years, and this is no different.
It may or may not be motivated by greed, but that has no bearing on the copyright issues.
However, the charges per user for zone transfer makes no sense as the MAPS service bears no additional load or bandwidth charges from the extra users as the zones are stored on the ISP?s name servers locally.
As MAPS point out, they own the copyright on their information. This means that they're not charging for load you cause on their servers, but rather for the privilege of being able to use the information. You don't have to like it, but this is the way things work.
Nature isn't that wasteful, and it wouldn't carry around 90% of the DNA for no good reason.
That's right, Darwin's theory of evolution says that. The thing is, just being there might be the only reason needed. Padding is a perfectly valid possible use/function. When these people say "useless", they mean "no direct functionality, unlike these other interesting parts over here."
If they don't know what it means, they should just say so and keep working at it.
They do. They say "We don't know what this means, but here's our best guess...". The problem is that all too often the media takes the best guess and reports it with more certainty than it deserves.
You assume that .NET will be better than MS's current (shitty) offerings, and therefore solve the problems. I'll be quite surprised if this is the case. Remember, the windows registry was supposed to "solve" the problem of having all those .ini files everywhere.
.NET, when they can leave them in (or shuffle them around a bit) and then make even more money on .NET's successor? Microsoft has literally no incentive to provide near-perfect software, because then there's a much smaller upgrade incentive (for users). They're quite happy to keep fucking over their users until the end of (their) time, all the while providing ever more "upgrades" of dubious quality - typically only just enough quality to get people to adopt it.
Why solve the problems with
For a couple *BILLION* I'd let Bill fuck me every day of the week and twice on sundays......
;)
Most people PAY HIM to be fucked over every day, by buying his software. Except for those pirates who get a "free ride of Bill"... Very amusing imagery.