Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Is Sued For Patent Violation Over .NET
randomErr writes "As reported by Info World, Microsoft was issued a cease and desist order on February 7 of this year by Vertical Computer Systems. The order was for patent infringement by the current implementations of the .NET framework. Both the .NET framework and Vertical Computer Systems' SiteFlash use XML to create component-based structures that are used to build and operate web sites. Vertical Computer Systems is requesting a full jury trial. If VCS prevails, .NET technology implementations as we know them may completely change and Microsoft would probably have to pay out a hefty sum."
BURN!
I, for one, welcome our new yelling at the Soviet Russia and the overlords people overlords.
...but there is a correct and incorrect way to speak.your argument instills things like Ebonics, which is just a conscience effort to intentionally avoid learning proper English. No. There's not a thing right in your entire comment. Language is arbitrary. There are a number of dialects of English, which can be divided at several levels of granularity (e.g. at a coarse grained level, American vs Commonwealth English) where different things are considered grammatical or considered to be correct spellings. Everyone (with the exception of people with developmental problems or certain kinds of brain damage) speaks a grammatical language by adulthood. There are social factors that make certain dialects strongly preferable for formal use. But what is "correct" formally can even vary contextually. Almost every journal has its own style guide, newspapers have several style guides they can work from, different professions have their own expected styles, etc. There is no Platonic ideal English that you can pick out of the aether and call "correct English".
As for Ebonics, it was *not* an effort to "avoid learning proper English". It was about as far from that as possible. It was a program that recognized that in poor, urban, primarily black areas children were coming to school who spoke a dialect of English that is just as rule based and structured as Standard American English (SAE), but different enough from SAE that they were having trouble understanding and learning. It proposed teaching them in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in Kindergarten and slowly mainstreaming them into SAE. It was much like the successful system that is used in many school districts to help children who speak Spanish in the home get mainstreamed into English speaking classes over the course of elementary school.