Be careful with "BSD". The first version of the BSD license actually had an advertising requirement that was untenable for most software developers, and could create a situation where the required ad text would smother any potential advertising when multiple BSD license sources were used. The BSD license everyone uses now is called "Modified BSD" with the advertising requirements stripped. The MIT license is even simpler than BSD, and a good choice for OGRE in my opinion. If you need the kind of user support GPL is designed for in a video game, that game has already failed.
"Let's take his OGRE game development framework released under a BSD license as opposed to the GPL as an example. The first thing that would happen is you would have game development companies adding their own changes to the code, but not distributing this with their games."
The point being made, that you missed entirely, is that this is precisely the scenario that is keeping most potential contributors away from the OGRE code in the first place. Why should any game developer want to be forced to release their entire codebase for their game to the public? They aren't even willing to spend the lawyer-time cash to see if the LGPL can get them around complete sharing!
Game companies are highly competitive over their AI and control routines, and even if they are using middleware or an externally developed engine, they don't like the idea of having to release all their code just to get one small part of their codebase for free. Epic, Valve, Havok, and iD make >$10K's for each of their licenses for this very reason. For a lot of money, you get full access to their engine code, without any obligation to share your own. That is far more cost effective to most commercial game companies than using OGRE under GPL. OGRE under MIT will change that cost comparison entirely.
MIT licensing doesn't stop the same companies from sharing back selected pieces of code or improvements to OGRE. It just makes them MUCH more likely to use OGRE in their game in the first place, and vastly increases the base of developers who are in a position to give back improvements. They just don't want to be forced to give away their whole game, and want to be more selective about how OGRE can benefit from their feedback. The "free rider problem" is the lesser of OGRE's distribution problems, precisely because they are making a game engine, and game companies don't like being forced to give away their games for free.
If you don't think your "real phones" don't get translated from analog to data, and data back to analog, you're an idiot. VoIP didn't start as a way to get around the phone system -- similar data conversions were used extensively by long distance companies and large businesses with their own backbone connections, so that they could fit more calls over less long-haul fiber lines, thus saving themselves massive deployment costs.
The "keys" you're thinking of are just QoS policies, which are expressly permitted in current Net Neutrality legislation, but must be transparent (read: in the fine print at sign-up time) to the consumer.
I like QoS rules that make "phone" calls more important than video downloads more than anyone -- I just think those QoS policies should be set by the consumer, not the monopolistic telco. Net Neutrality makes that the case, and without Net Neutrality rules you lose all consumer controls over QoS policy, so they can decide their partner video downloads are more important than your 911 VoIP call.
@AC: I hope that was your own poor attempt at parody. Not all environmentalists are scientists, but most real scientists are environmentalists, as they have discovered through peer-reviewed empirical study that the planet Earth's environment is very important to little things like human health. They have also managed to perform analysis of earth's features, like polar ice cores, upper atmosphere sampling, and general climate status sampling, that prove the Earth's oceans are currently both warmer and more acidic (due to carbon dioxide absorption) than all recorded or scientifically-estimable history.
I know you can't see all that evidence from your Cheeto-stained couch, especially while you have the AC on. Try reading a real science journal or paper sometime, rather than that Intelligent Design book you spilled your beer on.
I think even the "dumb pipes" analogy is giving them too much credit. I think roads are a more accurate analogy, and trucks are the data packets, in defiance of ex-Senator Stevens.
The data packets that travel to/from your home to the businesses you want to interact with are more like cars than water. They use traffic signals (routers) along the way to help them get to the right place, faster and more efficiently. We accept roads (last mile) and highways (national backbone) as public funded services, primarily because there aren't better alternatives (trains and trolleys were gutted by the automobile lobbys in the areas they served, and buses are just bigger autos). Allowing private entities to own the roads would result in endless toll stops, and they would end up almost useless.
The current private-owned Internet should be thought of in the same way: mired in endless toll roads.
"I don't know about most people, but the ones I know have never even considered 3rd party hardware for the 360."
Why not? Your "people" don't like saving money?
I work in the games industry and I buy 3rd party accessories, cables, and controllers all the time. Sometimes it's to make sure they work with our games, but way more often it's because the item does the same job at a lower price, or a better job at any price.
This is just Microsoft's same old "embrace, extend, and then extinguish" for standards, now applied to hardware. It's evil and it deserves DOJ scrutiny. Consoles have been doing this forever, but in this case they pulled a bait and switch by using standard interfaces up front, and then locking them down by device ID via software. There is no possible justifiable reason for this change, especially when the 3rd-party equipment often exceeds the capabilities of the 1st-party equivalents.
* All Internet consumers must have a choice among substantial competition, including connection providers, maintenance providers, and ISP markets.
The Internet is another service which may need a "Public Option", to provide real competition to the existing market Trusts and Monopolies. Breaking up Ma Bell never worked -- it reformed while they weren't looking, like a T-1000.
Competition and regulation are both basic requirements in basic needs markets that tend to form Natural Monopolies or Trusts, such as food, housing, health, transportation, and communications. Government should create competition when the market fails to. People need to realize that paying for monopoly rents and trust price-fixing is worse than paying for taxes, because you can't vote on corporate internal policy or management, only on external regulation. Imagine how much better services could be if you could directly vote on your landlord or ISP management. You can't even "vote with your dollars" (which is inherently not Democratic -- it's Oligarchic) when there's no competition.
I never voted for AT&T to dictate local DSL access limits -- they forced that on us through market manipulation and lobby money. I can only vote for politicians that will promise to strong-arm them into serving me better, or who will threaten them with real competition. Those politicians are far too rare.
This would be funny if it wasn't so completely false. If that were true, we would still be stuck deciding between Prodigy, AOL, or Compuserve, probably on the basis of their modem speed and per-message charges. The Internet as we know it started out as a GOVERNMENT project, in coordination with PUBLICLY FUNDED Universities, called ARPANET. Just look at the 3G wireless data market, where they try to dictate what kind of computer (these days cell phones are computers) you can connect to "their network." If we left it to businesses, there would be NO Internet -- just a series of loosely connected (if connected at all) CORPnets. If we were really lucky, Google would exist as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.
This article lead me to discover that there's already 10 RedBoxes within a 10 mile radius of my home. If Netflix is ever taking too long with my queue, maybe I'll try out Redbox instead. I hope the studios know that they're doing nothing more than advertising RedBox now. An Anti-Trust ruling against the MPAA/members would be icing on the cake!
"Doesn't Redbox or any rental outfit (Blockbuster, etc) require a licensing agreement and royalty payments to the studios?"
They could probably work out a contract like this if it's to their benefit, like early release access and (in the case of Blockbuster) special edits (i.e. more G rated cuts and dubs).
Based on the studios' reactions to RedBox's business model, I'm guessing they are sticking with good ol' First Sale Doctrine (FSD). This means if they buy the disc outright rather than "licensing" it (which is a B.S. concept unless you're licensing reprint/resell rights) they can use it as they please, including renting and selling used discs with impunity.
IIRC, Autodesk fought an eBay seller who was using FSD to resell boxes of their software that he found in garage sales, and they lost because FSD legally trumped their EULA. FSD is even more clear-cut when applied to retail media.
The problem isn't car companies wanting to make money. The problem is how they do it: on the backs of tax-payer citizens, some who depend on public transportation. This "car must make noise" bill would end up acting like a subsidy for "car tones" sales. Public funded roads are a subsidy for the car industry in general, just like public funded train tracks are a direct subsidy to a given train industry. Emissions standards also shouldn't be considered a limit -- they are actually a free "pollute this much or less" pass to the car industry, under which they are immune from paying for a lot of the health and environmental problems they cause.
Anti-tax people really need to open up their mind about what constitutes a tax or subsidy. Any time government sets up anything that favors one industry over another (corn over broccoli, cars over trains), or rests power in a privately held Trust or Monopoly (insurance, autos, telcos, cable, etc.), you are being taxed by those corporations via a combination of direct subsidies and monopoly rents. Those taxes probably amount to more than the ones the IRS deals in.
This case shows exactly why no one should be allowed to trademark common or dictionary words. It's my understanding that such simple trademarks can only be enforced in coordination with the use of a specific logo and/or font with the use of the word. Otherwise the common use makes it too ambiguous to be enforceable, thus rendering the trademark unusable. Otherwise, what's keeping someone from trademarking the word "Best", and suing anyone who claims to have the "Best [Thing]" in any given product area?
Hey 'staff1', try listening to your own advice. Stop shilling for the patent trolls that don't produce anything real. You just make yourself and your "Pee uh USA" site look more ridiculous with every troll comment you make.
"Just hack out the law and go back to the drawing board."
I agree to the basic premise here, but I would go further and just hack out the old outdated tech, and have everyone upgrade to all-data lines plus VoIP (this can be done the Earthlink way, where the VoIP equipment is at the local colo, so the house connection just acts like a regular phone line). Get rid of the old minor remnants of the POTS system entirely. If you think your current "long distance" phone provider doesn't use VoIP tech internally, you're hopeless. Instead of Universal Telephone service we should have Universal Internet service, with a VoIP address registration requirement per building (for 911 and reverse-911 purposes). Concepts like area-codes and domestic long distance calling have been outdated since cell phones in the late 80's and should all be abandoned. Most of the old POTS based system should go along for the ride, into the trash bin of history.
Before people start yelling "but what if I'm not in DSL range?" you need to realize that analog audio is just another form of data. It can be digitized and compressed to use less of your POTS bandwidth than it does now, and you can use the leftover bandwidth for other data. Even if the space for other data is just a few Kb/s, that's better than what you can do with an old POTS type modem that isn't tolerant of simultaneous voice calls. Besides, government should have the incentive to bring you more broadband options, rather than stick you with an over-priced rural POTS connection like they do now.
Pharmacists have Federal, FDA, and State regulations they need to abide by to operate and keep their license. After the Pseudoehepdrine limit laws were passed, one of those regulations became reporting sales of Pseudoehepdrine products, with special attention to large sales.
Intent is already an important part of most crime law definitions. That's why "temporary insanity" is still an acceptable yet difficult line of defense in a murder case -- if you were insane, your actions cannot be attributed to intent. "Premeditated" actions are also punished more harshly than accidents or even crimes of "negligence". The problem Mike and the WSJ are talking about here actually have more to do with laws designed to predict and prevent crime, rather than solve any actual crime.
My parents were both cops when I grew up, and I know how they think. They are continuously frustrated with their inability to really prevent crime on their own, yet having to deal with the invariably depressing aftermath. So, being the types with a law enforcement hammer, and thus seeing all crimes as nails, they work with politicians and legislators to interpret actions that *usually* lead to crimes, and re-define them as crimes within themselves. Thus the law about hording pseudoephederine products -- that's something Meth manufacturers do way more often than anyone else, so rather than having to prove the crime of methamphetamine manufacture after the fact, they just make this preparation step a crime in itself.
I personally think a better approach is to deal with the social and community problems that lead to crime, rather than attempting to "prevent" crime by criminalizing pre-crime actions. In fact I think community development is the only ethical way to lower crime rates, and criminalizing (even statistically valid) pre-crime actions is a horrible encroachment on personal liberty. Everything else constitutes trying to make cops into psychics, and they can't do that on TV very well yet, much less in real life.
The "Worker UNIONS" you blame are a direct and natural result of the main layer of fat in the traditional news industry: Industrial Mass News production, and the resulting treatment of workers as replaceable chattel. I generally consider myself fairly libertarian, but when Corporatist "Conservatives" and "Libertarians" rattle on about the bane of Unions, I just think it's their own fault and they deserve every problem Unions create for them. Corporatists made the political will for Unions possible, via their extreme disregard for the labor that makes their business operations possible. I'm no Communist, in that I think a means for equitable reimbursement for value improvements in any given line of business are possible within the bounds of Secular Democratic Capitalism (yes there are many forms of non-Democratic capitalism, usually called Fascism, or China), with the help of government-enforced accounting transparency. But I also think any industry 'plagued' by Unions deserves everything Unions impose on them, because it was their own unethical behavior that provoked unionization. Treat your most valuable assets like loyal employees correctly, and you wont get the same problems. Any business under 'threat' of unionization should concentrate on the same problems the Unions are attempting to solve, rather than setting up the Unions as straw-men for baseless and counter-productive attacks on their own staff.
"you think the government can pay to have fiber put in?"
Yes, I do. What most people don't realize, especially Anonymous Cowards, is that taxes don't just go to government. When government grants any kind of monopoly to a corporation, that is a tax that you pay directly to that corporation, but they get to call it a "fee" instead of a tax. Governments often give them part of their tax money as well, in the form of a "subsidy." They both try to hide that fact that our tax dollars are going to private profits, by claiming these monopolies are a "service", as if they were optional. Let's take a survey of how many people think "services" like water, electricity, roads, insurance, health, and phones are "optional". If there are above 20% of people who think these things are seriously optional, and still maintain full-time employment, then I'll stop calling them taxes.
I would rather have these taxes go to elected representatives and public servants, not local monopoly CEOs. I would rather have my ISP taxes spent in ways I can vote on. Right now we have what I call "taxation without representation." Does that ring a bell?
You're full of crap. Name the researchers that "pointed out that many inventions would never have existed without the existence of patents". I would like to laugh at them for claiming "X would have never existed without Y", and still calling themselves researchers (certainly this broad supposition proves their "research" has no scientific merit). That is, unless they had a time machine. Then I want to see the time machine.
On the post: Even The Open Source Community Gets Overly Restrictive At Times
Re:
On the post: Even The Open Source Community Gets Overly Restrictive At Times
Re: Look At The Evidence
On the post: Even The Open Source Community Gets Overly Restrictive At Times
Re: This Article is Nonsense
The point being made, that you missed entirely, is that this is precisely the scenario that is keeping most potential contributors away from the OGRE code in the first place. Why should any game developer want to be forced to release their entire codebase for their game to the public? They aren't even willing to spend the lawyer-time cash to see if the LGPL can get them around complete sharing!
Game companies are highly competitive over their AI and control routines, and even if they are using middleware or an externally developed engine, they don't like the idea of having to release all their code just to get one small part of their codebase for free. Epic, Valve, Havok, and iD make >$10K's for each of their licenses for this very reason. For a lot of money, you get full access to their engine code, without any obligation to share your own. That is far more cost effective to most commercial game companies than using OGRE under GPL. OGRE under MIT will change that cost comparison entirely.
MIT licensing doesn't stop the same companies from sharing back selected pieces of code or improvements to OGRE. It just makes them MUCH more likely to use OGRE in their game in the first place, and vastly increases the base of developers who are in a position to give back improvements. They just don't want to be forced to give away their whole game, and want to be more selective about how OGRE can benefit from their feedback. The "free rider problem" is the lesser of OGRE's distribution problems, precisely because they are making a game engine, and game companies don't like being forced to give away their games for free.
On the post: Recognizing That Voice Is Just Data (Or How Google Voice Could Be Disruptive)
Re:
The "keys" you're thinking of are just QoS policies, which are expressly permitted in current Net Neutrality legislation, but must be transparent (read: in the fine print at sign-up time) to the consumer.
I like QoS rules that make "phone" calls more important than video downloads more than anyone -- I just think those QoS policies should be set by the consumer, not the monopolistic telco. Net Neutrality makes that the case, and without Net Neutrality rules you lose all consumer controls over QoS policy, so they can decide their partner video downloads are more important than your 911 VoIP call.
On the post: Chamber Of Commerce Uses DMCA Claim Against Yes Men Prank Site
Re: Parody
I know you can't see all that evidence from your Cheeto-stained couch, especially while you have the AC on. Try reading a real science journal or paper sometime, rather than that Intelligent Design book you spilled your beer on.
On the post: Recognizing That Voice Is Just Data (Or How Google Voice Could Be Disruptive)
Even "dumb pipes" is too much credit
The data packets that travel to/from your home to the businesses you want to interact with are more like cars than water. They use traffic signals (routers) along the way to help them get to the right place, faster and more efficiently. We accept roads (last mile) and highways (national backbone) as public funded services, primarily because there aren't better alternatives (trains and trolleys were gutted by the automobile lobbys in the areas they served, and buses are just bigger autos). Allowing private entities to own the roads would result in endless toll stops, and they would end up almost useless.
The current private-owned Internet should be thought of in the same way: mired in endless toll roads.
On the post: Microsoft Wants To Block Out 3rd Party Storage
Re:
Why not? Your "people" don't like saving money?
I work in the games industry and I buy 3rd party accessories, cables, and controllers all the time. Sometimes it's to make sure they work with our games, but way more often it's because the item does the same job at a lower price, or a better job at any price.
This is just Microsoft's same old "embrace, extend, and then extinguish" for standards, now applied to hardware. It's evil and it deserves DOJ scrutiny. Consoles have been doing this forever, but in this case they pulled a bait and switch by using standard interfaces up front, and then locking them down by device ID via software. There is no possible justifiable reason for this change, especially when the 3rd-party equipment often exceeds the capabilities of the 1st-party equivalents.
On the post: FCC: We Want Net Neutrality
Re: Net Neutrality
* All Internet consumers must have a choice among substantial competition, including connection providers, maintenance providers, and ISP markets.
The Internet is another service which may need a "Public Option", to provide real competition to the existing market Trusts and Monopolies. Breaking up Ma Bell never worked -- it reformed while they weren't looking, like a T-1000.
Competition and regulation are both basic requirements in basic needs markets that tend to form Natural Monopolies or Trusts, such as food, housing, health, transportation, and communications. Government should create competition when the market fails to. People need to realize that paying for monopoly rents and trust price-fixing is worse than paying for taxes, because you can't vote on corporate internal policy or management, only on external regulation. Imagine how much better services could be if you could directly vote on your landlord or ISP management. You can't even "vote with your dollars" (which is inherently not Democratic -- it's Oligarchic) when there's no competition.
I never voted for AT&T to dictate local DSL access limits -- they forced that on us through market manipulation and lobby money. I can only vote for politicians that will promise to strong-arm them into serving me better, or who will threaten them with real competition. Those politicians are far too rare.
I don't trust invisible hands.
On the post: FCC: We Want Net Neutrality
Re:
This would be funny if it wasn't so completely false. If that were true, we would still be stuck deciding between Prodigy, AOL, or Compuserve, probably on the basis of their modem speed and per-message charges. The Internet as we know it started out as a GOVERNMENT project, in coordination with PUBLICLY FUNDED Universities, called ARPANET. Just look at the 3G wireless data market, where they try to dictate what kind of computer (these days cell phones are computers) you can connect to "their network." If we left it to businesses, there would be NO Internet -- just a series of loosely connected (if connected at all) CORPnets. If we were really lucky, Google would exist as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.
On the post: Looking At The Redbox Antitrust Fight
Redbox in my area!
On the post: Looking At The Redbox Antitrust Fight
Re:
They could probably work out a contract like this if it's to their benefit, like early release access and (in the case of Blockbuster) special edits (i.e. more G rated cuts and dubs).
Based on the studios' reactions to RedBox's business model, I'm guessing they are sticking with good ol' First Sale Doctrine (FSD). This means if they buy the disc outright rather than "licensing" it (which is a B.S. concept unless you're licensing reprint/resell rights) they can use it as they please, including renting and selling used discs with impunity.
IIRC, Autodesk fought an eBay seller who was using FSD to resell boxes of their software that he found in garage sales, and they lost because FSD legally trumped their EULA. FSD is even more clear-cut when applied to retail media.
On the post: Fake Car Noises Being Added To Many New Cars... May Be Required Soon
Re: Re:
Anti-tax people really need to open up their mind about what constitutes a tax or subsidy. Any time government sets up anything that favors one industry over another (corn over broccoli, cars over trains), or rests power in a privately held Trust or Monopoly (insurance, autos, telcos, cable, etc.), you are being taxed by those corporations via a combination of direct subsidies and monopoly rents. Those taxes probably amount to more than the ones the IRS deals in.
On the post: A Monstrous Trademark Dispute That Has Nothing To Do With Monster Cable
Trademark common words?
On the post: Court Invalidates Key Patent Claims In Acacia's Streaming Media Patent
Re: stop the shilling!!!
On the post: Speakeasy The Latest VoIP Provider To Block Certain Calls
Re: Hmm
I agree to the basic premise here, but I would go further and just hack out the old outdated tech, and have everyone upgrade to all-data lines plus VoIP (this can be done the Earthlink way, where the VoIP equipment is at the local colo, so the house connection just acts like a regular phone line). Get rid of the old minor remnants of the POTS system entirely. If you think your current "long distance" phone provider doesn't use VoIP tech internally, you're hopeless. Instead of Universal Telephone service we should have Universal Internet service, with a VoIP address registration requirement per building (for 911 and reverse-911 purposes). Concepts like area-codes and domestic long distance calling have been outdated since cell phones in the late 80's and should all be abandoned. Most of the old POTS based system should go along for the ride, into the trash bin of history.
Before people start yelling "but what if I'm not in DSL range?" you need to realize that analog audio is just another form of data. It can be digitized and compressed to use less of your POTS bandwidth than it does now, and you can use the leftover bandwidth for other data. Even if the space for other data is just a few Kb/s, that's better than what you can do with an old POTS type modem that isn't tolerant of simultaneous voice calls. Besides, government should have the incentive to bring you more broadband options, rather than stick you with an over-priced rural POTS connection like they do now.
On the post: Shouldn't Intent Be A Part Of Criminal Law?
Re:
On the post: Shouldn't Intent Be A Part Of Criminal Law?
Re:
My parents were both cops when I grew up, and I know how they think. They are continuously frustrated with their inability to really prevent crime on their own, yet having to deal with the invariably depressing aftermath. So, being the types with a law enforcement hammer, and thus seeing all crimes as nails, they work with politicians and legislators to interpret actions that *usually* lead to crimes, and re-define them as crimes within themselves. Thus the law about hording pseudoephederine products -- that's something Meth manufacturers do way more often than anyone else, so rather than having to prove the crime of methamphetamine manufacture after the fact, they just make this preparation step a crime in itself.
I personally think a better approach is to deal with the social and community problems that lead to crime, rather than attempting to "prevent" crime by criminalizing pre-crime actions. In fact I think community development is the only ethical way to lower crime rates, and criminalizing (even statistically valid) pre-crime actions is a horrible encroachment on personal liberty. Everything else constitutes trying to make cops into psychics, and they can't do that on TV very well yet, much less in real life.
On the post: Perhaps The Real Problem With Newspapers Is All That Extra Overhead...
Re: Unions
On the post: AT&T, Google Spat Over Google Voice Blocked Calls Is Important... But Totally Misses The Point
Re:
Yes, I do. What most people don't realize, especially Anonymous Cowards, is that taxes don't just go to government. When government grants any kind of monopoly to a corporation, that is a tax that you pay directly to that corporation, but they get to call it a "fee" instead of a tax. Governments often give them part of their tax money as well, in the form of a "subsidy." They both try to hide that fact that our tax dollars are going to private profits, by claiming these monopolies are a "service", as if they were optional. Let's take a survey of how many people think "services" like water, electricity, roads, insurance, health, and phones are "optional". If there are above 20% of people who think these things are seriously optional, and still maintain full-time employment, then I'll stop calling them taxes.
I would rather have these taxes go to elected representatives and public servants, not local monopoly CEOs. I would rather have my ISP taxes spent in ways I can vote on. Right now we have what I call "taxation without representation." Does that ring a bell?
On the post: Patent Holder Takes A Second Crack At Toyota Over Hybrid Technology
Re: Re: Re: License? What License?
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