FOOD FOR THOUGHT Bill Gates has donated $22 billion to charity while ESR said no to doing so after the VA Linux IPO
You mean ESR said no immediately following the IPO? I'd hope so. As a director (IIRC) he can't sell his shares for six months, and he had no guarantee they'd still be worth anything. They did, in fact, decrease about five-fold in price from the post-IPO value. Do you actually have any information on whether he has given to charity since he became able to touch the money, or are you just spreading FUD?
... as I understand it (and IANAL). But at this level of the legal system, the judges are not supposed to say "DMCA is unconstitutional". Instead, they are supposed to say, "Napster is violating the DMCA" and "2600 violated the DMCA." That's the judge's job. It's the job of the Supreme Court to declare laws unconstitutional; it's not the job of the lower courts (not sure about the appellate court).
Any judge can rule that a law is unconstitutional, but the lower a judge is, the smaller the region over which they set precedent. The Supreme Court is important because they set precedent for an entire nation, and because, unlike lower courts, there isn't uncertainty over whether the opinion will be overturned in the near future.
Lower court judges don't often have the guts to rule laws unconstitutional, but in theory, if the DMCA is unconstitutional, there is no reason for the lower court to rule otherwise. In such event, the RIAA would appeal to the higher courts in due course, which would set precedent at the higher levels.
While technically impossible to do, it is not difficult for Napster to make a reasonable effort to do so. Napster maintains an index of the music. It would not be impossible to set up filters which would work in most cases. Any judge would be lenient with them as long as they appeared to be making a reasonable effort.
Notwithstanding the fact that it would pretty hard to set up a filter when they've never been given a list of RIAA's copyrighted songs, the judge's order very strictly specified that no material copyrighted by the plaintiffs be transferred using Napster's service. Inevitably, a filter would fail in many cases, and Napster would be in contempt of court. Keeping the service running with a filter and hoping the judge would be lenient would be about as stupid as the hope method of avoiding pregnancy. Just because you might get lucky doesn't mean you should go and violate a court order.
As I understand it, Napster is refusing to install any kind of mechanism (as req. by RIAA) for report ( and, possibly, detecting ) of [copyright] infringements and the subsequent removal/blocking of such material. To me, this essentially means Napster understands itself as a vehicle to distribute copyrighted without paying. The unsettling thing is that Napster can make case law this way, and later judges may not be alert enough to pick out the difference in operation of another internet music mall operating by The Law. Summary: Napster spoils it for you.
Huh? Neither of those two provisions in the law required the ISP (Napster) to report or detect copyright infringement. They only allowed them to be ordered to block access to an identified user, or to a specific online location outside the US. This is what Napster did when they disabled the accounts of the 300,000 users specifically identified by Metallica. No provision of the law requires them to actively find infringing users. All they must do is terminate the accounts of users reported as infringing.
Imagine, if you will, that the book publishing industry decides on a standard which allows for limited readings of a purchased text, which cannot be transferred to another
person, without that person paying the publisher again, and reports your reading habits to the publisher. (ie: DIVX for books or 'BIVX'). Imagine that when this happens
there is no less-hassle alternative on the market because all of the publishers agreed on this one.
This is why we have anti-trust laws. Unless the entire publishing industry colludes, the non-colluders will make a killing by selling unrestricted books while their competitors sell BIVX books. If the entire industry colludes, they are probably guilty of an anti-trust violation.
Yes, DIVX failed because of market forces. That's why they wrote a handy law that made sure the next time, market forces would be irrelvant - because the next e-book standard, the online movie/music distribution standard, could very well be DIVX in nature - and the next time they might not make the mistake of making a DVD like standard. What do you do when e-books by all the major publishers require certain devices to read and make sure you have limited readings.
I'm afraid I don't understand how DMCA (I assume that's what law you're referring to) causes market forces to be irrelevant. DIVX failed because consumers didn't buy it. I fail to see how making it illegal to decrypt the disc will make consumers more likely to buy into a new restrictive format. It may have the force of law against decrypting it, but no law can force consumers to buy it, and they have showed that they won't buy extremely restrictive schemes.
I agree with sleek, but cheap??? The one linked to above costs $33,995, or $43,995 for one with a larger driving range. Are you talking about some other electric car I'm not aware of?
And no and no fossil fuels = no icky CO2...
And the electricity came from... the electricity fairy? Sure, in areas where the power plants are zero emission, you're not putting CO2 in the air, but most of the time you're just shifting the source of emissions.
first off, that you can't use heat to do work is utter crap. ThermoVoltaics for producing electricty directly from heat are in developement now.
You know perfectly well that he meant that heat itself is useless without a temperature differential. Thermovoltaics would, of course, require such a temperature differential.
secondly, sure, NOW our technology requires a useful temperature difference to utilize the heat flow as a viable source of energy. however, is it that hard to conceptualize of a machine of some sort that could utilize the very flow of energy across in in either direction? if such a device was sensitive enough, you could conceivably get power any time, as no two temperatures are ever exactly the same.
I find it hard to conceptualize. Note that it's not actually important for the machine to work in both directions, because you could just produce a bunch of them, and half of the would be operating on average. The problem is making a device that harnesses energy from random temperature fluctuations in a fluid in thermodynic equlibrium, without losing energy when another random fluctuation causes a temperature differential in the other direction. I know of at least one such attempt that failed, and I have every confidence that the Second Law of Thermodynamics will remain inviolate.
Ah well, that's why I'm in computers, not chemistry. I WAS going to look it up, but I didn't even bother keeping those texts. Anyway, does it really matter, if the curve was different, wouldn't the liquid be under really, really high pressure at those temperatures anyway? Or is it a difference of really really high vs. a couple orders of magnitude higher really really high? Or am I completely wrong? It wouldn't be very effective if you had to refrigerate it; you'd drive your car into the wilderness, go canoe camping for a week, come back and you're 200 km from anywhere and out of gas.
You seem to be under the impression that when LN2 is stored at room temperature, the LN2 itself is at room temperature. This is not the case, because the whole point of having LN2 is usually to make use of the low temperature. LN2 is stored in unsealed Dewar flasks, which are double-walled flasks insulated by a vacuum. As they are unsealed, the LN2 slowly evaporates. This is not a problem because it is dirt cheap. AFAIK, no one actually refrigerates the stuff because that would be much more expensive than the LN2 lost to evaporation. Therefore, if you let your car sit for a long time, you would run out of LN2, at a rate dependent on the quality of the storage in the car.
But what if you had no choice but products that had licences like I outlined (esentially, DIVX)?
Well, DIVX failed miserably through good old market forces, so that probably wasn't the best example to bring up to try to support your point. Heavily encrypted and otherwise encumbered products can always be made available regardless of the eventual constitutionality of the DMCA. It will be consumers' dislike of them that prevent their adoption.
However, does this also mean Napster can just move all their servers outside USA and continue running like before?
Only if they moved the rest of the corporation outside the USA along with the servers. If they stayed in the USA but set up servers international, they could still get in trouble in the USA if there were an adverse ruling. IANAL.
Wouldn't a guard robot that obeyed Asimov's Laws of Robotics be completely useless?
Robot: Halt. No authorized person may enter.
Robber: I order you to let me enter. Heck, while you're at it, help carry the money to my car.
Robot: I have a more sophisticated method for discriminating between comflicting orders than mere chronology. Your orders will not be followed where they conflict with my previous order to guard this building.
Robber:(Placing gun to own head)
But you cannot allow a human to come to harm through any inaction. If you do not follow the following instructions completely, I will shoot myself. Open the safe and carry the money to my car. When you're done, bash in your head so you can't identify me.
The Comcast subscriber agreement already banned connecting a home LAN to the cable modem. A VPN allows your home system to appear to be part of private WAN across the public Internet. In reality, this change doesn't take anything away, as connecting to a non-Comcast WAN was already prohibited, but this makes it an explicit statement for people like Roblimbo who don't know what makes a LAN, a WAN, and a VPN different.
What are you talking about? Comcast does not ban home LANs and they have not ever done so to my knowledge. Indeed, they let customers buy additional IP addresses, which wouldn't make any sense if they ban LANs.
so if your mom wants a copy of her Thesis, she has to pay $30 to $60? But they dont have yours yet so you don't have the rights too it, but you still can't buy back your own
work either?
I don't think i'm ever going to college now...
So as not to see anyone dissuaded from writing a thesis, the author of the thesis always retains copyright, so the student has the right to duplicate and distribute their own thesis as much as they want. If you want UMI to print you a copy of your own thesis, you have to pay them, but presumably you'd still have a copy on your computer or whatever to print.
All that is required under the GPL with regard to this is that source code be provided in a machine-readable format. There is no reason why the hardware must allow you to do anything in particular. Otherwise, it would be illegal to run GPL'd software on many embeded devices, which would be a bad thing. If the device allowed no easy way for the user to read the GPL'd source code, it would have to come with a CD. From what you've said though, the Fujitsu device allows you to read the files on it, so it should be perfectly legal provided that the source code is stored on it somewhere.
It's not his site - it's the public's site (and partly mine).
But not tomorrow after I call Deutche Bank and sell off my shares of VA Linux stock (thus dumping my part of the ownership of Andover)
Publicly traded companies don't belong to the public, just to the particular people who own shares. So, if you think the company should change its practices, what do you expect to accomplish by selling your shares and thus losing whatever degree of control you may have had? You're not hurting VA any.
I know we all hate spam, but is it really such a concern that we need to waste taxpayer resources on preventing it?
This law allows recipients of spam and ISPs to sue spammers who violate it. The State of Colorado won't sue/prosecute spammers. How does this use taxpayer resources?
Not if they have to pay court costs. Filing in small claims will probably cost at least 30 or 40 dollars, and add to that the 10, and they'd be paying potentionally $50 or so per piece of spam that they send off to an aware and pissed resident. I like it!
Don't forget attorney's fees! I often think they charge to much, but if it's coming out of the spammer's pocket...
I'm really really really confused. What postmasters have to do is very trivially grant mail server access to only those with a valid login and password.
Then there'd be a lot less unintentional relay servers. The question is, WHY hasn't it happened already?
Password authentication is not part of the SMTP protocol. Many mail clients wouldn't support it. If it's done at all, it's usually done by requiring the user to authenticate themselves to the POP server before allowing them to send mail through the SMTP server. Instead, relaying is normally closed by allowing access only from certain hosts or networks. Some admins are simply to lazy or unknowledgeable to set this up.
Um... class action? Maybe you could start a spam-watch, where everyone "affected" by a certain peice of spam bands together and sues the pants off the offender.
You missed the point, which is that under this law, when the spammer loses, they must pay court costs and attorney's fees for the person who sued. It would actually be much more expensive for the spammers if the cases are not brought as a class action, because then they'd have to pay the court costs for each of the people who sued, which could add up very quickly.
I mean come on, how can you prove to me that 2 + 2 is 4? What the hell is a 2? And what's a 4? Someone told him that 2+2 was 4 and he believed them. Talk about gullible. And if 2/2 = 1, and 0/2 = 0, why does 0/0 = undefined instead of 1? or 0? Math is just as much specious religious raving as any OTHER religion. It's all a matter of perspective.
In math, things are not proven in isolation, but only under the assumption that certain axioms are true. For example, one can use the Peano axioms to define natural numbers and addition on them. Roughly, 0 is a natural number, and it has an unlimited number of successors, also in the natural numbers (using the notation a' is a successor of a). So, 1=0', 2=1'=0'', and 4=0''''. Addition is defined in two cases: a+0=a, and a+b'=(a+b)'. So, 2+2=0''+0''=(0''+0')'=((0''+0)')'=((0'')')'=0''''= 4. Of course, no one is forcing you to use the Peano axioms, you can come up with your own system of arithmetic if you wish. Math doesn't claim that 2+2=4 is fundamentally true no matter what context you're in, only in the context that 2, 4, and addition are defined in a certain way. The same idea applies with division
Micro-Evolution can be demonstrated and is obviously factual. However Macro-Evolution has no such proof. No one has yet been able to change one species into another, no one has been able to demonstrate Macro-Evolution in any fashion, hence it's still bullshit.
Calling electricity a theory is a fallacy. A theory (sorry, I don't have websters on me, had to use dictionary.com) is "An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture." http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-b in/dict.pl?term=theory
Yeah, it's easy to prove your point if you use the wrong definition. Dictionary.com provided 4 definitions, and you picked the fourth. The first definition, the one used in the context of scientific theories, is:
a. Systematically organized knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances, especially a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena.
b. Such knowledge or such a system.
A theory is a conjecture. Electricity may once have been a theory (back in Ben Franklin's day) but it can't be considered that any longer.
Plenty of well-established physics is referred to as theory, such as the Special and General Theories of Relativity.
Slashdot Mirror
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Bill Gates has donated $22 billion to charity while ESR said no to doing so after the VA Linux IPO
You mean ESR said no immediately following the IPO? I'd hope so. As a director (IIRC) he can't sell his shares for six months, and he had no guarantee they'd still be worth anything. They did, in fact, decrease about five-fold in price from the post-IPO value. Do you actually have any information on whether he has given to charity since he became able to touch the money, or are you just spreading FUD?
Any judge can rule that a law is unconstitutional, but the lower a judge is, the smaller the region over which they set precedent. The Supreme Court is important because they set precedent for an entire nation, and because, unlike lower courts, there isn't uncertainty over whether the opinion will be overturned in the near future.
Lower court judges don't often have the guts to rule laws unconstitutional, but in theory, if the DMCA is unconstitutional, there is no reason for the lower court to rule otherwise. In such event, the RIAA would appeal to the higher courts in due course, which would set precedent at the higher levels.
IANAL
While technically impossible to do, it is not difficult for Napster to make a reasonable effort to do so. Napster maintains an index of the music. It would not be impossible to set up filters which would work in most cases. Any judge would be lenient with them as long as they appeared to be making a reasonable effort.
Notwithstanding the fact that it would pretty hard to set up a filter when they've never been given a list of RIAA's copyrighted songs, the judge's order very strictly specified that no material copyrighted by the plaintiffs be transferred using Napster's service. Inevitably, a filter would fail in many cases, and Napster would be in contempt of court. Keeping the service running with a filter and hoping the judge would be lenient would be about as stupid as the hope method of avoiding pregnancy. Just because you might get lucky doesn't mean you should go and violate a court order.
As I understand it, Napster is refusing to install any kind of mechanism (as req. by RIAA) for report ( and, possibly, detecting ) of [copyright] infringements and the subsequent removal/blocking of such material. To me, this essentially means Napster understands itself as a vehicle to distribute copyrighted without paying. The unsettling thing is that Napster can make case law this way, and later judges may not be alert enough to pick out the difference in operation of another internet music mall operating by The Law. Summary: Napster spoils it for you.
Huh? Neither of those two provisions in the law required the ISP (Napster) to report or detect copyright infringement. They only allowed them to be ordered to block access to an identified user, or to a specific online location outside the US. This is what Napster did when they disabled the accounts of the 300,000 users specifically identified by Metallica. No provision of the law requires them to actively find infringing users. All they must do is terminate the accounts of users reported as infringing.
But imagine if they could give tax breaks selectively, only to the people who helped them get re-elected! That would be pretty fucked up.
Yeah, it's a good thing that politicians never enact tax breaks or subsidies that selectively benefit groups that donated to their campaigns!
Imagine, if you will, that the book publishing industry decides on a standard which allows for limited readings of a purchased text, which cannot be transferred to another person, without that person paying the publisher again, and reports your reading habits to the publisher. (ie: DIVX for books or 'BIVX'). Imagine that when this happens there is no less-hassle alternative on the market because all of the publishers agreed on this one.
This is why we have anti-trust laws. Unless the entire publishing industry colludes, the non-colluders will make a killing by selling unrestricted books while their competitors sell BIVX books. If the entire industry colludes, they are probably guilty of an anti-trust violation.
Yes, DIVX failed because of market forces. That's why they wrote a handy law that made sure the next time, market forces would be irrelvant - because the next e-book standard, the online movie/music distribution standard, could very well be DIVX in nature - and the next time they might not make the mistake of making a DVD like standard. What do you do when e-books by all the major publishers require certain devices to read and make sure you have limited readings.
I'm afraid I don't understand how DMCA (I assume that's what law you're referring to) causes market forces to be irrelevant. DIVX failed because consumers didn't buy it. I fail to see how making it illegal to decrypt the disc will make consumers more likely to buy into a new restrictive format. It may have the force of law against decrypting it, but no law can force consumers to buy it, and they have showed that they won't buy extremely restrictive schemes.
Remeber the electric car? The one that never got out of the showroom?
This one? Looks out of the showroom to me.
It was cheap, sleek.
I agree with sleek, but cheap??? The one linked to above costs $33,995, or $43,995 for one with a larger driving range. Are you talking about some other electric car I'm not aware of?
And no and no fossil fuels = no icky CO2...
And the electricity came from... the electricity fairy? Sure, in areas where the power plants are zero emission, you're not putting CO2 in the air, but most of the time you're just shifting the source of emissions.
first off, that you can't use heat to do work is utter crap. ThermoVoltaics for producing electricty directly from heat are in developement now.
You know perfectly well that he meant that heat itself is useless without a temperature differential. Thermovoltaics would, of course, require such a temperature differential.
secondly, sure, NOW our technology requires a useful temperature difference to utilize the heat flow as a viable source of energy. however, is it that hard to conceptualize of a machine of some sort that could utilize the very flow of energy across in in either direction? if such a device was sensitive enough, you could conceivably get power any time, as no two temperatures are ever exactly the same.
I find it hard to conceptualize. Note that it's not actually important for the machine to work in both directions, because you could just produce a bunch of them, and half of the would be operating on average. The problem is making a device that harnesses energy from random temperature fluctuations in a fluid in thermodynic equlibrium, without losing energy when another random fluctuation causes a temperature differential in the other direction. I know of at least one such attempt that failed, and I have every confidence that the Second Law of Thermodynamics will remain inviolate.
Ah well, that's why I'm in computers, not chemistry. I WAS going to look it up, but I didn't even bother keeping those texts. Anyway, does it really matter, if the curve was different, wouldn't the liquid be under really, really high pressure at those temperatures anyway? Or is it a difference of really really high vs. a couple orders of magnitude higher really really high? Or am I completely wrong? It wouldn't be very effective if you had to refrigerate it; you'd drive your car into the wilderness, go canoe camping for a week, come back and you're 200 km from anywhere and out of gas.
You seem to be under the impression that when LN2 is stored at room temperature, the LN2 itself is at room temperature. This is not the case, because the whole point of having LN2 is usually to make use of the low temperature. LN2 is stored in unsealed Dewar flasks, which are double-walled flasks insulated by a vacuum. As they are unsealed, the LN2 slowly evaporates. This is not a problem because it is dirt cheap. AFAIK, no one actually refrigerates the stuff because that would be much more expensive than the LN2 lost to evaporation. Therefore, if you let your car sit for a long time, you would run out of LN2, at a rate dependent on the quality of the storage in the car.
But what if you had no choice but products that had licences like I outlined (esentially, DIVX)?
Well, DIVX failed miserably through good old market forces, so that probably wasn't the best example to bring up to try to support your point. Heavily encrypted and otherwise encumbered products can always be made available regardless of the eventual constitutionality of the DMCA. It will be consumers' dislike of them that prevent their adoption.
However, does this also mean Napster can just move all their servers outside USA and continue running like before?
Only if they moved the rest of the corporation outside the USA along with the servers. If they stayed in the USA but set up servers international, they could still get in trouble in the USA if there were an adverse ruling. IANAL.
Wouldn't a guard robot that obeyed Asimov's Laws of Robotics be completely useless?
Robot: Halt. No authorized person may enter.
Robber: I order you to let me enter. Heck, while you're at it, help carry the money to my car.
Robot: I have a more sophisticated method for discriminating between comflicting orders than mere chronology. Your orders will not be followed where they conflict with my previous order to guard this building.
Robber: (Placing gun to own head) But you cannot allow a human to come to harm through any inaction. If you do not follow the following instructions completely, I will shoot myself. Open the safe and carry the money to my car. When you're done, bash in your head so you can't identify me.
Robot: Yes, sir.
The Comcast subscriber agreement already banned connecting a home LAN to the cable modem. A VPN allows your home system to appear to be part of private WAN across the public Internet. In reality, this change doesn't take anything away, as connecting to a non-Comcast WAN was already prohibited, but this makes it an explicit statement for people like Roblimbo who don't know what makes a LAN, a WAN, and a VPN different.
What are you talking about? Comcast does not ban home LANs and they have not ever done so to my knowledge. Indeed, they let customers buy additional IP addresses, which wouldn't make any sense if they ban LANs.
so if your mom wants a copy of her Thesis, she has to pay $30 to $60? But they dont have yours yet so you don't have the rights too it, but you still can't buy back your own work either?
I don't think i'm ever going to college now...
So as not to see anyone dissuaded from writing a thesis, the author of the thesis always retains copyright, so the student has the right to duplicate and distribute their own thesis as much as they want. If you want UMI to print you a copy of your own thesis, you have to pay them, but presumably you'd still have a copy on your computer or whatever to print.
All that is required under the GPL with regard to this is that source code be provided in a machine-readable format. There is no reason why the hardware must allow you to do anything in particular. Otherwise, it would be illegal to run GPL'd software on many embeded devices, which would be a bad thing. If the device allowed no easy way for the user to read the GPL'd source code, it would have to come with a CD. From what you've said though, the Fujitsu device allows you to read the files on it, so it should be perfectly legal provided that the source code is stored on it somewhere.
It's not his site - it's the public's site (and partly mine).
But not tomorrow after I call Deutche Bank and sell off my shares of VA Linux stock (thus dumping my part of the ownership of Andover)
Publicly traded companies don't belong to the public, just to the particular people who own shares. So, if you think the company should change its practices, what do you expect to accomplish by selling your shares and thus losing whatever degree of control you may have had? You're not hurting VA any.
I know we all hate spam, but is it really such a concern that we need to waste taxpayer resources on preventing it?
This law allows recipients of spam and ISPs to sue spammers who violate it. The State of Colorado won't sue/prosecute spammers. How does this use taxpayer resources?
Not if they have to pay court costs. Filing in small claims will probably cost at least 30 or 40 dollars, and add to that the 10, and they'd be paying potentionally $50 or so per piece of spam that they send off to an aware and pissed resident. I like it!
Don't forget attorney's fees! I often think they charge to much, but if it's coming out of the spammer's pocket...
I'm really really really confused. What postmasters have to do is very trivially grant mail server access to only those with a valid login and password.
Then there'd be a lot less unintentional relay servers. The question is, WHY hasn't it happened already?
Password authentication is not part of the SMTP protocol. Many mail clients wouldn't support it. If it's done at all, it's usually done by requiring the user to authenticate themselves to the POP server before allowing them to send mail through the SMTP server. Instead, relaying is normally closed by allowing access only from certain hosts or networks. Some admins are simply to lazy or unknowledgeable to set this up.
Um... class action? Maybe you could start a spam-watch, where everyone "affected" by a certain peice of spam bands together and sues the pants off the offender.
You missed the point, which is that under this law, when the spammer loses, they must pay court costs and attorney's fees for the person who sued. It would actually be much more expensive for the spammers if the cases are not brought as a class action, because then they'd have to pay the court costs for each of the people who sued, which could add up very quickly.
I mean come on, how can you prove to me that 2 + 2 is 4? What the hell is a 2? And what's a 4? Someone told him that 2+2 was 4 and he believed them. Talk about gullible. And if 2/2 = 1, and 0/2 = 0, why does 0/0 = undefined instead of 1? or 0? Math is just as much specious religious raving as any OTHER religion. It's all a matter of perspective.
In math, things are not proven in isolation, but only under the assumption that certain axioms are true. For example, one can use the Peano axioms to define natural numbers and addition on them. Roughly, 0 is a natural number, and it has an unlimited number of successors, also in the natural numbers (using the notation a' is a successor of a). So, 1=0', 2=1'=0'', and 4=0''''. Addition is defined in two cases: a+0=a, and a+b'=(a+b)'. So, 2+2=0''+0''=(0''+0')'=((0''+0)')'=((0'')')'=0''''= 4. Of course, no one is forcing you to use the Peano axioms, you can come up with your own system of arithmetic if you wish. Math doesn't claim that 2+2=4 is fundamentally true no matter what context you're in, only in the context that 2, 4, and addition are defined in a certain way. The same idea applies with division
Micro-Evolution can be demonstrated and is obviously factual. However Macro-Evolution has no such proof. No one has yet been able to change one species into another, no one has been able to demonstrate Macro-Evolution in any fashion, hence it's still bullshit.
Speciation has been observed. See the Observed Instances of Speciations FAQ and Some More Observed Speciation Events on talkorigins.org.
Calling electricity a theory is a fallacy. A theory (sorry, I don't have websters on me, had to use dictionary.com) is "An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture." http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-b in/dict.pl?term=theory
Yeah, it's easy to prove your point if you use the wrong definition. Dictionary.com provided 4 definitions, and you picked the fourth. The first definition, the one used in the context of scientific theories, is:
A theory is a conjecture. Electricity may once have been a theory (back in Ben Franklin's day) but it can't be considered that any longer.
Plenty of well-established physics is referred to as theory, such as the Special and General Theories of Relativity.
I'm wondering if Fujitsu is violating the GPL by using Linux in a "read-only" format(as seen here)?
Yeah, and RedHat's violating the GPL by distributing Linux on read-only CDs... Seriously, how does this relate to the GPL at all?
That's trademark, not copyright