emmCee - Slashdot User

Judge Thinks Linking To Copyrighted Material Should Be Illegal 390

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday June 28, 2009 @01:16PM from the don't-you-point-at-me dept.

An article at TechCrunch discusses a blog post from Richard Posner, a US Court of Appeals judge, about the struggling newspaper industry. Posner explains why he thinks the newspapers will continue to struggle, and then comes to a rather unusual conclusion: "Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion."

Mass Arrests of Journalists Follow Iran Elections 333

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday June 22, 2009 @10:36AM from the it's-a-sheikh-down dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Reporters Without Borders is alarmed by the fact that no less than 23 journalists have been arrested in Iran in the week following the elections, making Iran one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist. Online activists are trying to counter this trend by giving advice for helping Iranian protesters. One problem is that Iranian leaders are trying to delegitimize the reform movement by pretending that the reformers are puppets of foreign powers, so special discretion is required for anyone wanting to help the Iranian people."

Comment Re:Obviously! (Score 1) 715

by emmCee on Tuesday May 05, 2009 @05:56PM (#27838441) Attached to: RMS Says "Software As a Service" Is Non-free

And where, specifically does he say it's ok to buy access to someone else's SMTP server when said server uses non-Free software?

As for Google, agm is exactly right: he shouldn't use it (or any of its non-Free services) according to his own philosophy.

And for what it's worth I owe you no explanation; I'm just trying to do my bit to kurb ignorant ranting by presenting the facts.

Comment Re:Obviously! (Score 1) 715

by emmCee on Monday April 27, 2009 @01:38PM (#27732935) Attached to: RMS Says "Software As a Service" Is Non-free

RMS doesn't assume that humanity has a hacker complex: he neither insists nor expects that most users of Free software do anything other than use the binaries.

RMS doesn't think using an application that someone else hosts is illegal: he suggests Free software projects use Savannah, a Free web app.

In fact, RMS wholeheardedly supports commercialisation of Free software. After leaving his university position, he made his first bunch of cash by selling binaries of Free software.

SMTP servers that you use, he believes, should use software that is Free so, should you decide, you can buy some hardware and bandwidth and host your own email server with alterarions you decide.

RMS doesn't believe open source "is as evil as any other software". Indeed he doesn't care about open source as a movement. He can't hate the software since most of it is technically Free software too. He just doesn't like the philosophy of software freedom being confused with the engineering method of open source.

Obviously I'm not RMS and can't speak for the man himself, but it seems to me that you're being rather unfair on him.

Gav.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Spawns Real-Life Car 93

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday October 03, 2008 @03:54PM from the and-i'm-sure-it-will-be-affordable dept.

Car Analogy Please writes to tell us that a new car unveiled at the Paris Auto Show was modeled after the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue car. GTbyCITROËN is the first car that has been designed in tandem with a video game to then spill out onto the actual pavement. "The GTbyCITROËN is the product of a partnership built up during the creation of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Takumi Yamamoto, from Citroen and Kazunori Yamauchi from Polyphony Digital Inc, the games developer were inspired by each others industries to design a concept car for the game that then flowed further into the real-world. The game version of the car mirrors the real-world performance of the concept."

Comment Re:Always think about maintenance (Score 1) 662

by emmCee on Friday September 26, 2008 @04:27PM (#25171073) Attached to: What To Do Right As a New Programmer?

It was Brian Kernighan:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

* "The Elements of Programming Style", 2nd edition, chapter 2

A Cautionary Tale of Open Source Social Technologies 330

Posted by kdawson on Saturday June 21, 2008 @10:27PM from the careful-what-you-let-go-viral dept.

eweekhickins writes "The 'country' drop-down menu on one organization's donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes 'Palestine.' Among other things, this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages; it also presents the risk of a PR nightmare for the organization. This EWeek story cautions that while basic Web 2.0 technologies combined with open source can be incredibly powerful and productive, they can also lead to disastrous results for an organization that isn't paying close enough attention."

Mobile Carriers Cry "Less Operating Systems" 217

Posted by Hemos on Monday March 12, 2007 @09:59AM from the less-qq-more-pew-pew dept.

A NYTimes story says "Multiple systems have hampered the growth of new services, mobile phone executives say. " The story does a good job of capturing some of the changing dynamics in the mobile OS market — but rightly raises the point that given the sheer size of the mobile market, it's unlikely we're going to see the homogenization we have in the desktop market.

Submission + - Music execs think DRM slows the marketplace

Submitted by

MacGod

on Thursday February 15, 2007 @08:55AM

MacGod writes: "From BBC News comes a story about a Jupiter Research survey conducted before Steve Job's anti-DRM essay, indicating that most music industry execs see DRM-free music as a way to expand the sales on digital tracks. To summarise: 54% of music execs think the current DRM is too restrictive and 62% think selling unencumbered music would be a way to boost sales. Even limiting the survey to the record labels themselves, 48% believe this. Yet, many also believe it's not going to happen without significant governmental intervention-even though most insiders think DRM is harmful, the labels are keen to stick with it.

Is this yet another sign of the typical media industry "head in the sand, refuse to change" approach, or might we be seeing the early stages or some actual change? After all, admitting you have a problem is the first step to fixing it."

NASA World Wind 1.4 Released With Trailer 117

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 14, 2007 @06:45PM from the fun-toys dept.

Bull_UK writes "As many of you probably already know NASA had to shift it's priorities to the upcoming Java version of World Wind, leaving 1.4 effectively orphaned, but the Open Source community came together and with a lot of hard work we were able to finish what Chris Maxwell started. Some of the new things which differentiate the new World Wind from the competition are the amazing new visual effects, including HDR, check out the video for some examples. Remember this virtual globe has never had the same goals as Google Earth, if you just want to see your house stick with GE, although many areas have high resolution as good and sometimes better than GE. World Wind is aimed at education and science, all the default imagery is copyright free, you don't need to purchase a license to redistribute the imagery and there are no pro or expert versions to buy, you can happily use World Wind at work or school without fear of any lawyers confiscating your research."

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