Note T-Mobile does offer a $30 "unlimited" month-at-a-time plan (data up to 5 gigs, then throttled, unlimited texts, 100 minutes, if I remember right), and there are people who do the math and end up buying an unlocked GSM phone to go with that. I don't know how many, but it has an attraction beyond hard-core android geeks.

(I don't know whether that meets your requirements for a "decent data plan". It works OK for my purposes.)

Ingo is talking about application ABI, not driver ABI. He's objected to proprietary drivers before, and I don't recall seeing any evidence of a change of heart.

Thanks to virtual memory and so on, applications have much more of an arms-length relationship to the rest of the system than drivers. That makes maintaining a fixed driver ABI more work.

In the judgement of most kernel developers, the most efficient use of limited resources is to write an open source driver that can be included in the upstream kernel. That makes it easier for other kernel developers to collaborate with your your developers on future maintenance.

In that situation the open source driver writer may work for the hardware company, or sign an NDA with them, and then they can call the same guy.

Never done it, don't know the details (what do they do to ensure nothing's unintentionally disclosed in the source code?). But it seems to be a common arrangement.

"The Scrabble word that bothers me is "aa". I mean seriously."

Why is this bothering you? Are you getting a little tense? Maybe it's time for a vacation somewhere? Hawaii is nice....

English-speaking people live in enough different places and have sufficiently diverse cultures and interests that there will *always* be words that seem obviously common words to group X and obviously made up to group Y. If you need a hard-and-fast decision for something like a board game, then you have to choose some authority to make the word-by-word judgement call.

I've heard English speakers use "qi" in English sentences, but can't ever recall hearing anyone use "quoi" on its own in an English sentence, so until we get an ascii-32 tile I think Scrabble is safe from "je ne sais quoi".

Words are imported from other languages all the time, and it's a judgement call when to start calling them English words. For a game like Scrabble where you need a black-and-white decision in each case, that means the only way to have a complete set of rules is to agree on a dictionary. There will be inevitably be cases where someone could dispute a dictionary's choices.

What rule do you think would disallow "pi"? I have a hard time with that, especially on Slashdot, especially around this time of year. And people really do write it "pi", at least as often as the actual Greek character, and not just because they have trouble finding the latter on the their keyboards.

A few ways of looking at that $400k figure:

- Assuming 50k TSA employees (from wikipedia), that's $8 a year each. So in a good week they find two dimes.
- The TSA budget is about 8 billion. This is one two-thousandth of a percent of their budget.
- The 2012 budget is a few trillion. If congress passed a bill like Jeff Miller's every hour of every day that would cover... um, I think I have this right... one tenth of one percent of the budget. Looking to cut government waste? How about electing people who won't waste everyone's time on trivia.

In short: look, I'm not particularly fond of airport security either, but this is stupid.

In addition to those they give (VCR's used for time-shifting, image thumbnailing), I'd also add copying a program into RAM for the purposes of executing it (assuming ownership of the copy on disk). (Distressingly, my memory is that the status of this isn't clear in the US, but elsewhere in the world I think it is).

Again, that's circular reasoning, when the question we're trying to ask is exactly the question of whether people should have this particular right.

Some rights don't have to be granted: we take them to be, as they say, "self evident". I don't consider the right to have a government-granted monopoly on certain texts or ideas as among those inherent moral rights.

Note, that's not the same as saying that I don't think such rights should be granted--I think they *should* be--I'm only saying that we do it mainly for practical reasons (as an incentive to creation and dissemination, etc.) rather than a priori "moral" reasons.

But even if you do consider copyright a "moral" to some degree, I don't think that continues to a good guide once you get down to questions like "does the owner of a book need the author's permission to allow a 3rd party to scan the book for the sole purpose of searching it and presenting snippets giving context for the search results".

So it really does come down to the question of weighing the practical advantages and disadvantages to the world of granting that specific right.

And considered that way, the ability to "accomplish a dream" in one or the other case really is one of the factors to be weighed.

And full-text search of 10's of millions of books--that's a hell of a dream.

Fine. That's not the question, though--the question is *which uses* of copyrighted works should people have to pay for?

The Lord of the Rings movies required payment to whoever inherited Tolkien's rights.

The warehouses worth of epic fantasy written since then required none.

That's a lot of money people who got paid for stuff that wouldn't have existed without Tolkien having set pen to paper.

Most of us would argue that's a reasonable trade off: Tolkien didn't get everything he could be said to have deserved, but there was also a lot of interesting and creative work done that wouldn't have been if it all had to go through the bottleneck of his heirs.

That happens all the time. For-profit institutions have libraries too. The price I paid for one measly copy of K&R doesn't begin to approach the value of the income I've received from what I've learned from it.

Again, for me it comes down to weighing practical consequences: how much income are authors going to give up, versus what kinds of services are no longer going to be possible?

How?

A big university library has around 10 million books. Google claims a goal of scanning 130 million. There are something like a million more published a year.

Forget orphaned work or hard-to-reach authors; just consider authors that still individually hold rights to their books. How do you get legal permission from millions of them, at a per-book cost (I'm not even talking about the licensing; just the labor cost to contact them and verify that they agreed) that makes the whole project feasible?

And once you do, what do you actually expect to actually wring out of them for your 10 millionth (or whatever it works out to be) of the advertising income due to google books?

Hey, I'm just hand-waving here myself, but my intuition here is that if we require opt-in, we're just not going to get anything like Google books in our lifetimes, if ever.

"libraries have to buy copies of their books like everyone else, and they can still only lend one copy out to one person at a time. No extra copying or duplicated access is going on here"

So, the question is which uses of the copyrighted work require the rights-holders permissions, and which don't. It would be convenient to be able to draw a simple bright line at "copying", but that's never how it's worked:

- photocopying a small part of a book for your personal use in research is generally fine (but: go see reams of fair use guidelines for details).
- renting is complicated even though there's no copying involved (if I remember right: generally "first sale" permits it, but there are specific prohibitions in the US in the case of music).
- Using a character from a novel in a movie may involve no literal copying, but may require permission even when the plot and dialog is new.

Computers fuzz the lines too: you normally have to copy a program into RAM to run it, though most people would consider that ordinary use of a copy that they owned.

And personally I don't see a strong "moral" argument from one side or the other in these cases--I think the best way to decide where to draw these lines, however messy it may be, is weighing the likely practical consequences.

"First sale rights means that I am allowed to sell the copy of a book that I bought."

Apologies, I thought I remembered first sale include more general rights to make personal use of a copy, but I think you're right. (The same rights may still exist but more likely fall under fair use.)

"First sale rights does not allow me to let you scan my copy of the book."

If we permit a library to scan its own books, and then provide a google-books like search in them, then I wonder where we'd draw the line?:

- Universities A, B, and C each provide full-text search of their own collections.
- Google provides Google book searches by collating results from searches sent to A, B, and C.
- Google in addition rents and/or sells hardware and services necessary for A, B, and C to scan and provide full-text search to their collections. At this point it's just Google book search except that the data stored in Google's data servers is nominally still the university's.
- Google book search.

To me the differences all seem unimportant as long as the only use of the scans is to provide search results.

"You have no right to full-text searches of books."

That's exactly the question posed by the case. I suspect you can make a good case that current last *does* grant you that right.

And, then whether it does or not, you can ask: *should* the law grant that right? Deciding that is a matter of trying to decide in which world we'd all be better off: a world where authors got a little more incentive to write (thanks to the additional revenue stream from licensing to search engines) versus a world in which a project like Google books is possible. Personally, I'm pulling for the latter.

"People pay good money for access to databases to search published journals."

And they get access to some little walled garden of works controlled by one publisher or consortium of publishers.

Compare that to full-text search of multiple major university libraries.

And ask if there's any chance we'll ever get the latter, if the only way to do it is to track down ever single copyright holder.

"What is Google's defense?"

They're not distributing copies of books--they're doing searches and returning small snippets. The books are scanned, with the permission of their owners, only in order to allow those searches.

I would have thought first-sale rights would permit the owners of books to have their own copies scanned, and that fair use would permit Google to search them and return snippets.

None of this cuts into the publisher's traditional source of profits at all, as the publisher is still who a member of the public goes to to get a copy of the book.

If we really think copyright holders should have complete control over how every copy of their work is *used*, not only distributed, then they should have cut off the problem at the source and forbidden libraries....

"Rule of law"?

Look, google isn't distributing copies of these books. They're searching for terms in them and returning snippets. That doesn't compete in the least with the business of people that are selling the entire book.

"there is nothing good about what Google is doing, except to the very short sighted."

They're providing an unprecedented and extremely useful service: the ability to perform full-text searches of entire multiple libraries' worth of books in fractions of a second from anywhere in the world.

If we require opt-in, then the immense number of rights owners involved is likely to make building such a service impractical.

We could be having the same argument about libraries: why shouldn't copyright owners be consulted about whether they want their books loaned out?

Fortunately the drafters of the copright law produced something flexible enough to provide incentives to authors while still allowing for services such as libraries. Flexible enough, even, to accommodate services like Google's that didn't exist at the time--fair use and first-sale rights provide all the basis the courts would need to find Google well within the rule of law, and I very much hope that's what happens.

Is that using open-source drivers or nvidia's proprietary drivers? (Again, for my case I'm only interested in the free drivers.)