To astronomers, flat means that the usual rules of geometry are observed - light not being bent by gravity travels in straight lines, not curves.
Yes, the article was misleading on this point.
A corrected version of the BBC sentence would be:
"light not being bent more than an average amount by gravity travels in straight lines, not curves."
The experiment was about real light, not light in some hypothetical 'empty' space.
For astronomers, a flat universe also means that the negative curvature of geodesics being pulled apart by the expansion is exactly balanced by the positive curvature from gravitational attraction (and the expansion continues forever, but with no exponential runaway).
You might like to look at this press release from Berkeley:
A flat universe is flat in the absense of something that curves it, while a curved universe is curved even in such absense
You seem to be confusing two issues: (i) the 'average' flatness of the universe, and (ii) the cosmological constant.
The question of the flatness of the universe question is basically this: if you defined a triangle of geodesics, would the angles in the corners add up to more than 180 degrees (positive curvature: a 2d analogy would be the surface of a sphere); less than 180 degrees (negative curvature, cf the 2d surface of a saddle); or exactly 180 degress (like a 2d sheet of paper).
It turns out, when you do the sums, that an 'empty' expanding universe would not be flat, but would have negative curvature: two geodesics emerging from a point are pulled away from each other. For an expanding universe to be flat, there has to be enough gravitation attraction to balance this pulling apart. If the average energy density is a little higher, the attraction becomes more important than the divergence, leading to positive curvature and a closed universe.
These latest results confirm that the universe appears to be either exactly or very nearly flat. This implies that the average energy density is either exactly or very nearly at the critical value. But the amount of visible matter seems to be too small to account for this. So it has been suggested that there is either more mass in the universe than we can see - "dark matter" - or that empty space itself has an energy density (like a quantum particle's zero-point energy). The present results, by indicating that space is flat, tend to support this idea of a missing energy density. This leads to an extra term in the equations, the Cosmological Constant (Lambda), which appears in addition to the energy density terms arising from visible matter and radiation. A flat universe suggests that Lambda is not zero.
"on average" flat
Strictly speaking, the discussion above assumes a Friedmann model of the universe. This is a simplified model which assumes that the universe is and remains homogeneous -- the same everywhere, with the same density at every point. Normally in relativity there is no way to say whether events in different places are happening at the same time; but in the Friedmann universe one can use the local density of matter (which is the same everywhere) to define a universal "proper time" co-ordinate. Having nailed down the co-ordinate system, one can then separate the spatial and the temporal aspects of the equations.
Of course, the universe is not homogeneous when you look at it closely -- every so often you come across a planet or a star or a black hole; and getting too close to the latter can bend geodesics a lot (gravitational lensing). Nobody is suggesting anything but that the universe is curved "up-close". But on a larger length scale the Friedmann approximation seems to work well: very few geodesics will actually pass close by a black hole; most will indeed experience an "average" amount of bending.
Note what I said.....you can use the original code as a basis to create your own port of the runtime. If you create your own port of the runtime, then you are free to GPL it, sure. However, if you take the code that will be released, slap your name on it, and then GPL it, that will most likely not be allowed;-).
So how much of the code do you imagine I would have to change before MS would allow me to GPL my version ?
Particularly between unix variants, a "port" might just mean changing a handful of system calls.
Do you really think MS would allow something to be GPL'd if it was 98% their code ? Or 90% ? Or 10% ? Or 1% ?
One of the goals of this release is to have people like you be able to write their own.NET implementations, using this code as a starting point. The exact licensing terms have yet to be decided, but it will be free for non-comercial and educational use, and likely free for commercial use as well. It will definately be able to be ported and used as you wish without encumbering your ability to write.NET code!
But one post up:
if you mean, "Will I be allowed to GPL the C# compiler and CLI that Microsoft is releasing?" then the answer is most likely going to be no. However if you mean "Will I be able to write code that targets the.NET platform and is GPL'ed after looking at these sources?" Then the answer is yes you will.
So what are you saying in your earlier post then, NRLax ?
Being able to GPL applications which use these libraries is irrelevant - the GPL has always allowed application code to link against "system" libraries, whether open or closed: the two are considered independent works.
The question is whether you can enhance this MS code -- for example, to use native linux calls instead of BSD; or to improve the garbage collection or memory management; or to rewrite the back end of the compiler to produce Java bytecode instead; or to do 1001 other things not necessarily in MS's corporate interest.
Under what terms can you release such mods ? Can anybody use "derived work" binaries which include them ? Are "all your patches belong to us" ? What if a later version is incompatible with your patches, or has a less friendly licence ?
All of this is far from clear: so I for one would rather see some clean-room GPL'd extensions to gcc. I hope this release will clarify the spec, and make such a thing easier to reverse engineer. But I share the worry that it may be used to legally "taint" the work of any developers who have looked at it.
The Open source community should be united in its rejection of Microsoft's.NET
I think you are wrong.
It would be better to clone the new API than to ignore it -- then there would be at least a chance of keeping MS honest, in the same way that having to make web pages Netscape-compatible has put the brakes on the proprietary extensions in IE.
At a technical level, it would also be nice to have the seamless inheritance and scriptability of objects between different languages -- this is considerably ahead of what can be done at the moment with JVMs, XPCOM or Bonobo.
Linux servers are going to find themselves at an increasingly serious market disadvantage, if they can't run scripts written for MS's new platform.
With luck this release should take a few weeks off the clean-room reverse-engineering.
Recent relevant articles from Linux Magazine:
Independent State -- Interview with Dick Hardt of ActiveState.
Pages 3-4 discuss.NET : What it is, what it is like to code for, why linux needs an implementation, what needs to be done. (April 2001)
Embrace and Extend -- Jon Udell from Byte
What linux can learn from.NET's component architecture. (February 2001)
GCC.NET -- Mark Mitchell from GCC
The practical work needed before GCC can be the cornerstone of a.NET-compatible environment (April 2001)
Getting.NET onto linux is a neccessity -- and soon. It's also probably a bigger project than any one company can support. But it is an effort that needs to be got underway a.s.a.p.
The issue of conflict with the U.S. Constitution doesn't really arise.
Article 29(f) of the proposed treaty (1999 draft) excludes 'recognition or enforcement [that] would be manifestly incompatible with the public policy of the State addressed.' Such "public policy" would clearly include First Amendment rights in the USA, as explained in this set of answers from the cousel to the US negotiators to questions from James Love.
But U.S. law wouldn't stop somebody collecting damages from you (or the forum owner, or the ISP) in any other third country if you (or they) had assets overseas.
The issue of conflict with the U.S. Constitution doesn't really arise.
Article 29(f) of the proposed treaty (1999 draft) excludes 'recognition or enforcement [that] would be manifestly incompatible with the public policy of the State addressed.'
Such "public policy" would clearly include First Amendment rights in the USA, as explained in this set of answers from the cousel to the US negotiators to questions from James Love.
The problem occurs if you (or your ISP, from their point of view) have any assets outside the USA.
If someone gets a judgment in country A against you (or your ISP; or the discussion board) for something you posted in country B (ie the USA), they can then collect in any country C that doesn't explicitly protect your speech rights.
the vast majority of websites in teh US that DON'T have an international presence
Are you sure ?
I would think the majority of private websites are on ISPs which do have an international presence; and many, many of the companies with sites will have international assets.
And some of us in other countries get out and travel a bit more. We would quite like the Hague treaty fixed too, please.
I guess what I'm saying is that once you start to interact with the world without mom and pop to back you up, you realize that you need a common framework of laws to amke society work.
If you are going to have common laws, they had better respect common freedoms.
I would be (somewhat) happier about the Hague Convention if it incorporated the free speech clauses from the European Declaration on Human Rights, as Jamie Love etc were lobbying for (and even that would be a lot weaker than the 1st Amendment in the US). But it was rejected out of hand.
For example, I doubt if a U.S. court would enforce a judgment from a secret, Iranian military court (where people are tried without even being allowed to be present to mount a defense or confront their accusers).
On the other hand, other jurisdictions just might enforce such the said judgment. You had better be quite careful in which countries you keep assets overseas -- under the Hague Convention they could try to get enforcement anywhere.
CYC's knowledge base is built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or "rules") designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world.
As the interview with Google on/. yesterday brought out, one of the great challenges of the moment is how to take enormous quantites of easily available data, and store it for retrieval in ways that reflect an understanding of the real world. (One might try to quantify the "intelligence" of a database by the extent to which it can achieve this kind of data association / data reduction).
Good ontologies are a big part of this --
identifying and distinguishing different contexts, associated with their likely possible properties.
The work CYC have done in finding good ways to represent such ontologies is important, but only goes so far -- in particular it seems to be essentially static.
What impresses me more is some of the work that has been done elsewhere to automate the process of the discovery and maintenance of ontology -- extracting it dynamically from the associations revealed in a large pile of documents.
One example of a site which is an end user of such technology is the well known news portal
moreover.com, powered mostly (I believe) by
Autonomy
I agree with your assessment about them not wanting people to redistribute their SDK (in particular, with Openly/Freely licensed code), but the phrase, "not using Potentially Viral Software (e.g. tools) to develop Recipient software which includes the Software, in whole or in part" (emphasis mine) is what bothers me.
The important point that it is only in the context of distribution that MS claim the open source "Publicly Available Software" licenses (A) to (F) are "Potentially Viral":
by way of example but not limitation of the foregoing, [the] Recipient shall not distribute the Software, in whole or in part, in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software
[my bold]
MS never claim that the use of tools under licenses (A) to (F) is Potentially Viral -- manifestly it is not.
It is important that MS
never prohibit using these tools, because if they did MS could be sued for product tying; and tool distributors could obtain an injuction to stop any distribution of this EULA dead in its tracks.
They are really pushing their luck, obligating people to not use a competitiors dev tools (emacs, gcc etc.) in order to use their SDK (which is often needed to develop apps for their OS)
These dev tools are not prohibited.
All the Open Source "Publicly Available Software" licenses (A) to (F) that they cite are listed
by way of example but not limitation of the foregoing, [the] Recipient shall not distribute the Software, in whole or in part, in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software
[my bold]
MS never prohibit using these tools. If they did, MS could be sued for product tying; and tool distributors could obtain an injuction to stop any distribution of this EULA dead in its tracks.
software which is licensed pursuant to terms that: (x) create, or purport to create, obligations for Microsoft with respect to the Software or (y) grant, or purport to grant, to any third party any rights to or immunities under Microsoft's intellectual property or proprietary rights in the Software
They list a number of open source "Publicly Available Software" licenses which they say are "Potentially Viral" -- but only in the context of distribution:
By way of example but not limitation of the foregoing, Recipient shall not distribute the Software, in whole or in part, in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software [my bold].
If you look very closely, they never actually claim that the use of any of these tools is potentially viral.
This is in fact just as well for MS.
If they had tried to block the use of the (non-viral) open-source tools, this would be an example of product tying. The tool distributor could then have sued Microsoft for trying to use its dominance in the OS market to reinforce its position in the tools market. They could also have applied for an immediate legal injuction to stop any further distribution of the licence -- effectively grounding MS's toolkit.
Sadly, it seems MS's licence doesn't actually prevent people from using open source tools.
By way of example but not limitation of the foregoing, Recipient shall not distribute the Software, in whole or in part, in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software.
There is no "Publicly Available Software" on this list which is "Potentially Viral" when used as a tool:
their description of "Publicly Available Software" as "Potentially Viral" only applies to distribution
The authentication process really isn't the issue. The basic protocols for talking to their authentication database should be fairly straightforward to reverse engineer. (MS may even have made them public).
If MS try to restrict things so that only MS servers can talk to their database, and lock out Sun and Apache systems, they will get nailed for product tying.
MS are hoping to win big in server space by offering a better programming environment and a better toolchain, making it faster and easier to write server-based applets, and faster and easier to re-use existing experience and code fragments from single-user single-desktop projects.
That is the challenge for the rest of the industry and the open-source community: to provide as easy to use an environment for knocking together web apps as users have become accustomed to when putting together join-the-dots VB apps in a visual environment, and as seamless a transition path.
.NET's promise of no-fuss linking and inheritance of object properties between different languages is another significant part of its potential attractiveness to coders, both on and off the web.
As just one example, in numerical software it would be nice if there was a really good fast set of open-source objects for matrix calculations, (eigensystems, SVD etc); and if the same objects could be used, with no performance hit, whether in C++, Fortran, Java or whatever; and could easily inherit methods written by other people in other languages. (Compare that to having to write a different hack for every compiler to access Fortran's Lapack from C, never mind C++).
If MS can create that kind of seamless integration, it will be a huge plus for writing code in their environment, locked in to their system service libraries.
Similarly if end-users can transparently convert back and forwards -- using the visual tools they already know -- between the existing page and form designs they already have in current existing standalone apps,
and the pages' direct equivalents as web-served content, this could be another big draw, another big chance for MS to leverage on their existing user base.
The free software community needs to wake up: MS's Common Runtime environment, and its associated (very extensive) service libraries, are a much bigger proposition to compete with than just another clunky java clone.
The EU has been systematically using satellite data to monitor farmers for almost ten years now, to prevent farmers falsely claiming government subsidies for crops they then never plant.
Every farm in Europe now has to submit an annual IACS form (Integrated Administration and Control System), listing what they are going to grow that year field-by-field; and submit new maps with it showing any changes in field boundaries (new fences etc), with the new areas measured to the nearest 100 square metres (0.01 of a hectare).
These plans are then automatically compared against the IR satellite photos of what actually gets grown. If you have planted less than you have claimed for, your entire subsidy claim is void. If it looks like you've done it intentionally, they'll nail you for fraud. (The inspectors are on results bonuses, so they don't take prisoners).
Crazy system, the C.A.P., in lots of ways; but without farm support, many of the more marginal Scottish rural areas would turn into depopulated deserts.
BillG & Co are making so much noise, and the logic of their comments is so random and confusing and random, that it may actually be pushing some journalists to find out what the deal really is.
For example, this story asking why GPL rather than BSD by Evan Leibovitch on ZDnet yesterday, which struck me as surprisingly clueful.
However, the case of yahoosucks.com, is clearly different. yahoosucks.com is not easily mistaken
for yahoo.com. The intent is not to confuse the public, the intent is to exercise freedom of
speech in particular freedom. This will be allowed by the courts, expecially since freedom
of speech is still a "preferred freedom" (although prehaps slightly less so than in the
recent past)
So why does yahoosucks.com give a page which purports to be about supermodels driving sports cars ?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the article was misleading on this point.
A corrected version of the BBC sentence would be:
The experiment was about real light, not light in some hypothetical 'empty' space.
For astronomers, a flat universe also means that the negative curvature of geodesics being pulled apart by the expansion is exactly balanced by the positive curvature from gravitational attraction (and the expansion continues forever, but with no exponential runaway).
You might like to look at this press release from Berkeley:
- MAXIMA, a balloon-borne experiment directed by UC Berkeley, finds evidence for a flat universe, inflation and a cosmological constant.
Alternatively search google for "Boomerang Cosmological Constant flat".You seem to be confusing two issues: (i) the 'average' flatness of the universe, and (ii) the cosmological constant.
The question of the flatness of the universe question is basically this: if you defined a triangle of geodesics, would the angles in the corners add up to more than 180 degrees (positive curvature: a 2d analogy would be the surface of a sphere); less than 180 degrees (negative curvature, cf the 2d surface of a saddle); or exactly 180 degress (like a 2d sheet of paper).
It turns out, when you do the sums, that an 'empty' expanding universe would not be flat, but would have negative curvature: two geodesics emerging from a point are pulled away from each other. For an expanding universe to be flat, there has to be enough gravitation attraction to balance this pulling apart. If the average energy density is a little higher, the attraction becomes more important than the divergence, leading to positive curvature and a closed universe.
These latest results confirm that the universe appears to be either exactly or very nearly flat. This implies that the average energy density is either exactly or very nearly at the critical value. But the amount of visible matter seems to be too small to account for this. So it has been suggested that there is either more mass in the universe than we can see - "dark matter" - or that empty space itself has an energy density (like a quantum particle's zero-point energy). The present results, by indicating that space is flat, tend to support this idea of a missing energy density. This leads to an extra term in the equations, the Cosmological Constant (Lambda), which appears in addition to the energy density terms arising from visible matter and radiation. A flat universe suggests that Lambda is not zero.
"on average" flat
Strictly speaking, the discussion above assumes a Friedmann model of the universe. This is a simplified model which assumes that the universe is and remains homogeneous -- the same everywhere, with the same density at every point. Normally in relativity there is no way to say whether events in different places are happening at the same time; but in the Friedmann universe one can use the local density of matter (which is the same everywhere) to define a universal "proper time" co-ordinate. Having nailed down the co-ordinate system, one can then separate the spatial and the temporal aspects of the equations.
Of course, the universe is not homogeneous when you look at it closely -- every so often you come across a planet or a star or a black hole; and getting too close to the latter can bend geodesics a lot (gravitational lensing). Nobody is suggesting anything but that the universe is curved "up-close". But on a larger length scale the Friedmann approximation seems to work well: very few geodesics will actually pass close by a black hole; most will indeed experience an "average" amount of bending.
So how much of the code do you imagine I would have to change before MS would allow me to GPL my version ?
Particularly between unix variants, a "port" might just mean changing a handful of system calls.
Do you really think MS would allow something to be GPL'd if it was 98% their code ? Or 90% ? Or 10% ? Or 1% ?
One of the goals of this release is to have people like you be able to write their own .NET implementations, using this code as a starting point. The exact licensing terms have yet to be decided, but it will be free for non-comercial and educational use, and likely free for commercial use as well. It will definately be able to be ported and used as you wish without encumbering your ability to write .NET code!
But one post up:
if you mean, "Will I be allowed to GPL the C# compiler and CLI that Microsoft is releasing?" then the answer is most likely going to be no. However if you mean "Will I be able to write code that targets the .NET platform and is GPL'ed after looking at these sources?" Then the answer is yes you will.
So what are you saying in your earlier post then, NRLax ?
Being able to GPL applications which use these libraries is irrelevant - the GPL has always allowed application code to link against "system" libraries, whether open or closed: the two are considered independent works.
The question is whether you can enhance this MS code -- for example, to use native linux calls instead of BSD; or to improve the garbage collection or memory management; or to rewrite the back end of the compiler to produce Java bytecode instead; or to do 1001 other things not necessarily in MS's corporate interest.
Under what terms can you release such mods ? Can anybody use "derived work" binaries which include them ? Are "all your patches belong to us" ? What if a later version is incompatible with your patches, or has a less friendly licence ?
All of this is far from clear: so I for one would rather see some clean-room GPL'd extensions to gcc. I hope this release will clarify the spec, and make such a thing easier to reverse engineer. But I share the worry that it may be used to legally "taint" the work of any developers who have looked at it.
I think you are wrong.
It would be better to clone the new API than to ignore it -- then there would be at least a chance of keeping MS honest, in the same way that having to make web pages Netscape-compatible has put the brakes on the proprietary extensions in IE.
At a technical level, it would also be nice to have the seamless inheritance and scriptability of objects between different languages -- this is considerably ahead of what can be done at the moment with JVMs, XPCOM or Bonobo.
Linux servers are going to find themselves at an increasingly serious market disadvantage, if they can't run scripts written for MS's new platform.
With luck this release should take a few weeks off the clean-room reverse-engineering.
Recent relevant articles from Linux Magazine:
-- Interview with Dick Hardt of ActiveState.
Pages 3-4 discuss
-- Jon Udell from Byte
What linux can learn from
-- Mark Mitchell from GCC
The practical work needed before GCC can be the cornerstone of a
Getting .NET onto linux is a neccessity -- and soon. It's also probably a bigger project than any one company can support. But it is an effort that needs to be got underway a.s.a.p.
This is exactly what the Hague treaty changes.
They could get enforcement through any court in the world, unless what you had done was explicitly allowed under the laws of that country.
Article 29(f) of the proposed treaty (1999 draft) excludes 'recognition or enforcement [that] would be manifestly incompatible with the public policy of the State addressed.' Such "public policy" would clearly include First Amendment rights in the USA, as explained in this set of answers from the cousel to the US negotiators to questions from James Love.
But U.S. law wouldn't stop somebody collecting damages from you (or the forum owner, or the ISP) in any other third country if you (or they) had assets overseas.
Article 29(f) of the proposed treaty (1999 draft) excludes 'recognition or enforcement [that] would be manifestly incompatible with the public policy of the State addressed.' Such "public policy" would clearly include First Amendment rights in the USA, as explained in this set of answers from the cousel to the US negotiators to questions from James Love.
The problem occurs if you (or your ISP, from their point of view) have any assets outside the USA.
If someone gets a judgment in country A against you (or your ISP; or the discussion board) for something you posted in country B (ie the USA), they can then collect in any country C that doesn't explicitly protect your speech rights.
Are you sure ?
I would think the majority of private websites are on ISPs which do have an international presence; and many, many of the companies with sites will have international assets.
And some of us in other countries get out and travel a bit more. We would quite like the Hague treaty fixed too, please.
If you are going to have common laws, they had better respect common freedoms.
I would be (somewhat) happier about the Hague Convention if it incorporated the free speech clauses from the European Declaration on Human Rights, as Jamie Love etc were lobbying for (and even that would be a lot weaker than the 1st Amendment in the US). But it was rejected out of hand.
On the other hand, other jurisdictions just might enforce such the said judgment. You had better be quite careful in which countries you keep assets overseas -- under the Hague Convention they could try to get enforcement anywhere.
Reminder: the convention is about allowing a judgment in Country A against a national of country B be enforced against their assets in Country C.
If Country A has dodgy laws or a dodgy judiciary, you had better not have assets in any Country C which does not explicitly reject those laws.
Good ontologies are a big part of this -- identifying and distinguishing different contexts, associated with their likely possible properties.
The work CYC have done in finding good ways to represent such ontologies is important, but only goes so far -- in particular it seems to be essentially static. What impresses me more is some of the work that has been done elsewhere to automate the process of the discovery and maintenance of ontology -- extracting it dynamically from the associations revealed in a large pile of documents.
One example of a site which is an end user of such technology is the well known news portal moreover.com, powered mostly (I believe) by Autonomy
The important point that it is only in the context of distribution that MS claim the open source "Publicly Available Software" licenses (A) to (F) are "Potentially Viral":
[my bold]MS never claim that the use of tools under licenses (A) to (F) is Potentially Viral -- manifestly it is not.
It is important that MS never prohibit using these tools, because if they did MS could be sued for product tying; and tool distributors could obtain an injuction to stop any distribution of this EULA dead in its tracks.
These dev tools are not prohibited.
All the Open Source "Publicly Available Software" licenses (A) to (F) that they cite are listed
[my bold]MS never prohibit using these tools. If they did, MS could be sued for product tying; and tool distributors could obtain an injuction to stop any distribution of this EULA dead in its tracks.
software which is licensed pursuant to terms that: (x) create, or purport to create, obligations for Microsoft with respect to the Software or (y) grant, or purport to grant, to any third party any rights to or immunities under Microsoft's intellectual property or proprietary rights in the Software
They list a number of open source "Publicly Available Software" licenses which they say are "Potentially Viral" -- but only in the context of distribution:
By way of example but not limitation of the foregoing, Recipient shall not distribute the Software, in whole or in part, in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software [my bold].
If you look very closely, they never actually claim that the use of any of these tools is potentially viral.
This is in fact just as well for MS.
If they had tried to block the use of the (non-viral) open-source tools, this would be an example of product tying. The tool distributor could then have sued Microsoft for trying to use its dominance in the OS market to reinforce its position in the tools market. They could also have applied for an immediate legal injuction to stop any further distribution of the licence -- effectively grounding MS's toolkit.
Sadly, it seems MS's licence doesn't actually prevent people from using open source tools.
By way of example but not limitation of the foregoing, Recipient shall not distribute the Software, in whole or in part, in conjunction with any Publicly Available Software.
There is no "Publicly Available Software" on this list which is "Potentially Viral" when used as a tool: their description of "Publicly Available Software" as "Potentially Viral" only applies to distribution
When they write
not using Potentially Viral Software (e.g. tools) to develop Recipient software which includes the Software,
that last "the Software" really does mean their software, as defined at the top of the licence.
Northernlight categorises its returns into "Custom Search Folders", subject by subject.
MS are hoping to win big in server space by offering a better programming environment and a better toolchain, making it faster and easier to write server-based applets, and faster and easier to re-use existing experience and code fragments from single-user single-desktop projects. That is the challenge for the rest of the industry and the open-source community: to provide as easy to use an environment for knocking together web apps as users have become accustomed to when putting together join-the-dots VB apps in a visual environment, and as seamless a transition path.
Similarly if end-users can transparently convert back and forwards -- using the visual tools they already know -- between the existing page and form designs they already have in current existing standalone apps, and the pages' direct equivalents as web-served content, this could be another big draw, another big chance for MS to leverage on their existing user base.
The free software community needs to wake up: MS's Common Runtime environment, and its associated (very extensive) service libraries, are a much bigger proposition to compete with than just another clunky java clone.
Every farm in Europe now has to submit an annual IACS form (Integrated Administration and Control System), listing what they are going to grow that year field-by-field; and submit new maps with it showing any changes in field boundaries (new fences etc), with the new areas measured to the nearest 100 square metres (0.01 of a hectare).
These plans are then automatically compared against the IR satellite photos of what actually gets grown. If you have planted less than you have claimed for, your entire subsidy claim is void. If it looks like you've done it intentionally, they'll nail you for fraud. (The inspectors are on results bonuses, so they don't take prisoners).
Crazy system, the C.A.P., in lots of ways; but without farm support, many of the more marginal Scottish rural areas would turn into depopulated deserts.
For example, this story asking why GPL rather than BSD by Evan Leibovitch on ZDnet yesterday, which struck me as surprisingly clueful.
The worrying thing is that this argument was explicitly rejected by the first two judges.
However, the case of yahoosucks.com, is clearly different. yahoosucks.com is not easily mistaken for yahoo.com. The intent is not to confuse the public, the intent is to exercise freedom of speech in particular freedom. This will be allowed by the courts, expecially since freedom of speech is still a "preferred freedom" (although prehaps slightly less so than in the recent past)
So why does yahoosucks.com give a page which purports to be about supermodels driving sports cars ?