Surely someone has it sitting around unused on a CD around there. Write a note explaining you're donating it and all rights associated with it to IBM, sign it, and mail it off to IBM's legal department in the original package.
This whole thing just keeps getting more and more surreal, doesn't it? A milti-billion dollar lawsuit over something that SCO lets people get away with for 50 dollars.
Um, actually, under legal theory it would be pretty damn stupid to sue someone for using what you sold them. There's basically no way they'd be able to get away with that in court, at least not until they issued a recall and offered to pay for the product, and even then it's iffy.
Getting viral licenses thrown out would be the last thing SCO wants, as they have a truly viral license, in that they are claiming ownership and control of everything that's ever been part of Unix, even if a third party put it in.
Even the GPL doesn't do that kind of wackiness. You can stick something in a GPL product and still retain copyright and control of other versions of the code in other locations.
SCO's claim is basically that their license is so viral, it's roughly akin to saying that if you purchase a copy of their book, and write a note in it, and then later you have a similiar note publish in a collection of short stories, they own the copyright on that entire collection.
Um, it's not barratry if there's grounds for the case. Barratry is threatening cases with no legal merit, or filing them, and can't apply if you have good legal grounds.
Both SCO's customers and any contributer to the kernel have perfectly valid reasons to sue SCO...the customers were lied to that they would be able to distribute the product under the terms of the GPL, and the contributers because SCO distributed their code without permission. (Which ironically gives the customers yet another thing to sue about...they are using code they have no permission to have, and are liable to be sued at any point in time by kernel contributers!)
SCO can fix both problems with a recall of OpenLinux, but that would utterly bankrupt the company. (Which is not a valid reason, under law, not to do it.)
I don't know what definations you use, but in my book you can certainly 'steal' something using the legal system, and this case is a perfect example. SCO is trying to steal the rights to every line of code that has ever touched System V Unix in any way, using the legal system and some dubious wording in contracts a decade old.
This is, to put it bluntly, theft. If they succeed, it will be theft of 95% of the world's operating systems, there is no better way to describe it.
Now, yes, to be 'theft' requires property to be taken 'unlawfully', so in a strictly legal sense, it's obviously not technically theft if done legally. But that's like saying framing someone for murder and them getting the death penalty isn't 'murder', because the legal system did it. It's certainly ethically murder, and using legally ambigious terms to steal an OS because someone once put something in it that they also put in your OS is ethically theft.
That's not to be confused with what SCO is doing with GPL software, which is probably just copyright violation.
SCO is giving your property out with various files and stuff that says those people can give it out, also in violation of your wishes.
A clever lawyer could argue that while SCO only sold x copies, there could in fact be an unknown number of copies made from the originals, because the people who purchased said copies were delibrately misinformed by SCO that they could hand them out like candy.
In other words, not only are SCO copyright violators, but they are delibrately misleading others into being copyright violators, and telling them to misinform still others! SCO is obviously liable for all that copying.
Not only should SCO have to pay damages, it should have to issue a recall, and it should have to try to track down every damn copy of a copy of a copy of the kernel made from SCO's distribution.
First, the terrorist WERE cowards. They dressed as civilians, they took civilians hostage, and they deliberately with full knowledge and desire killed civilians.
That is a very intesting definition of 'coward' you have there. It appears to be 'commits something you think is a war crime'. (Killing civilians isn't actually a war crime, killing civilians without military purpose is the war crime.) For the rest of us, a coward is someone who's afraid of stuff.
And, BTW, capturing civilians is not 'taking them hostage'. To be a hostage, there has to be a threat to kill them if X happens, or delibrately placing them where if you get killed, they get killed. Yes, they were on the same plane, and thus an external attack would kill them both, but it wasn't delibrate...its not like the civilians could leave the plane. As the attacker's entire plane depended on secrecy, it's fairly misleading to call those people 'hostages'.
They could be 'kidnappees', but there's nothing wrong with kidnapping people during war.
The passengers in the plane were in no way "collateral damage" and the Pentagon wasn't a millitary target.
In what universe is the Pentagon not a military target? Your dislike of the means of attack does not magically make the Pentagon not a military target. The Pentagon is not really the best target, just a very visible one, but that's another story. It is a government building intensely involved in military, intelligence, and counter-intelligence activities, and is a completely legitimate military target.
And, BTW, while it's not very nice to fly a plane full of civilians into a military target, it's not a war crime unless you had a equivilent way of doing it that wouldn't kill civilians and delibrately choose to kill them. It's not like they could have let the people off before ramming it, and hence it's no more a war crime than blowing up an important bridge with civilians walking on it. Civilians die in war.
Why not you might ask? Because these people were not military soldiers acting under state sanction in an announced aggression against another country.
And that has nothing at all to do with them being 'cowards' (It's not like they can just magically create a country to fight for.), and nothing at all to do with the Pentagon not being a legitimate target. Guerrilla warfare is quite well accepted, and simply because Bush insists on calling people unlawful combatants, that doesn't actually make them be unlawful.
By that logic, every single rebel in existence is an unlawful combatant.
Hell, not wearing a uniform isn't a war crime either...it's spying, and means you might not protected under various Geneva rules, but it's not a war crime. A country that captures you might treat you as a criminal instead of a soldier, but you aren't going to brought before the Hague.
Of course, that doesn't mean Al Queda were waging a legitimate war...they are terrorists, after all. But pretending all their attacks are illegal is just stupid and pointless.
They were common thugs. They were the guy who sticks up the little old lady on the street corner.
No, they were terrorists. They were the kind of scum who thought holding us in fear was the way to win a war against us.
But that doesn't make all Bush's rhetoric about 'illegal combatants' and whatnot true. A group of individuals can, in fact, quite 'legally' wage war against a country. It's hard for them to get Geneva Convention protection, but that's another matter entirely, and doesn't automatically make everything they do a war crime.
Now, flying planes into the WTC, that was a war crime.
And for Tim McVeigh. What was he rebelling aginst then? What was his message to the world? What did he hope to accomplish by "overthrowing" the government?
If by that you're trying to imply he didn't have one, you are amazingly mistaken. None of us know it, because it was probably some
BE AWARE that sheriff's auctions hardly ever get the full value of whatever's being sold. You may want to find something that you PERSONALLY want, have it seized, then buy it at auction, likely for whatever price you were owed. Then use it, or sell it yourself, or whatever.
I'm slightly confused: Why should you care?
The way you describe it, it sounds like you get cash calculated after the auction. It doesn't really matter if the sheriff seizes $10,000 worth of junk and sells it for $1,400, or $1,500 dollars and sells it for $1,400...either way the guy gets $1,400. In fact, if the sheriff seizes $10,000 to pay him, it's a bit more fulfilling to know this company that tried to screw him over was itself screwed over.
Of course, what he does has is the abilty to pick out specific things to auction, and some inside knowledge of the actual value of things...so he should go in, and pick things that look valueless but are actually worth a lot, and purchase them...but he still should act like he's at a normal auction, and pay as little as possible.
Or, if he's really vindictive, he can pick otherwise valueless things the company needs to operate but aren't exempted by law.
Well, yes, you can always put a bunch of pointless command line options and make it look complicated.
In reality, you can just use the defaults, which work perfectly fine for burning already existing ISOs, or generating simple 'CDs with a bunch of files on it', or you can just grab one of the tools designed to figure all that out.
Yes, that UDF support sucks, but isn't really relevant to the point at hand, which was disputing the claim that Windows had better burners and rippers than Linux.
And Linux does have UDF support, it's just not in the standard kernel. So I'd call it about 50% support, it's about as working as CD-ROM burning is under ME...you need to go get tools to use it.
Anyone who say Windows has better burning applications is full of shit.
It cost money, or you have to use a POS shareware program with nags, to burn and manage ISOs under anything older than XP.
Whereas under Linux you just stick the stuff in a directory, run mkisofs on the directory, and run a program I can't think of the name of to put it on a CD.
You know, it's amazingly lame that Windows goes around including the kitchen sink, but doesn't do stuff OSes actually should do, like manage file systems like ISOs, and devices like CD burners. Device access and filesystem access are actually what OSes should do.
And, yes, I'm aware XP finally got CD burning tools.
Also, I'm not aware of how Linux's CD ripping tools are lacking. I remember having no problems at all with a crappy CD several years ago. Whereas I remember having to download shareware stuff for Windows. And yes, I know that Windows Media Player can now rip CDs, so basically I'd consider them about equal now. (Despite the silliness of having an MP3 encoder with the OS and no CD writer.)
Just in case anyone taking this seriously, calling someone a 'bastard' or a 'jerk' or an 'asshole' is never libel, it's obviously an opinion, and thus cannot be 'correct' or 'incorrect'.
It is however illegal to be in a position of authority and recommend others DO violate the law.
No, it's not. It's illegal to pay someone to break the law, but it is never, at least in America, to urge someone to generally break the law. It can be illegal to urge them to break a law at this exact moment with a strong probablity they will follow your urging ('Beat that man up!' vs. 'Everyone should beat the crap out of blue eyed people whenever they see them.'.), which makes you an accessory, but that's not what Linux is doing.
But all that's completely moot as violating a patent unknowingly, and even knowingly failing to learn you are violating a patent, isn't illegal, which you didn't seem to grasp. Hence the entire argument is completely and utterly pointless.
Violating someone's patent unknowingly is no more illegal than failing to pay the rent because you thought it was due next week. It's a simple mistake on your part, and sometimes you will get a visit from someone demanding money. If you don't pay, you will end up in court. It's not a 'crime'.
It's not illegal to unknowingly violate a patent. Duh.
Someone needs to go back to law school. Almost all crimes require 'intent'.
Once you're informed about a patent, of course, you may have to pay the owners of the patent, but that's because you failed to pay required royalties, not because you 'broke the law'. (Obviously, people don't go around paying fines to other people when they break the law, they pay fines to the government.)
It is the responsiblity of patent owners to notify infringers, otherwise no one could ever get any work done, considering a patent search takes several months and pretty much any process can be patented.
Have you done a patent search on how you back up your car? Or how you butter your toast? No? Then shut up.
The output of 'ls -l' is almost certainly not copyrightable.
Alphabetical order isn't copyrightable anyway, and neither is a bunch of columns, but that's moot because the formatting and order were not created by you, and hence aren't copyrighted by you.
File sizes and permissions are facts, which are not copyrightable, just like phone numbers. (The ability to alter these facts is not important. After all, the phone company can do the same thing. )
That leaves you with trying to copyright each individual name, and titles of works are not copyrightable (Hence things like a song and a TV show named 'Third Rock from the Sun'), and are much much too short anyway.
So, basically, no, you can't copyright the output of 'ls -l'. It's a combination of uncopyrightable formatting, uncopyrightable facts, and uncopyrightable titles, just like the phone book. (And you don't even have the 'we put a lot of work into it' excuse the phone company tried. Typing l s [space] - l [enter] does not count as 'a lot of work'.)
And that's ignoring the fact it's perfectly possible to duplicate a copyrighted work. If someone on a desert island since the fifties wrote a book that was exactly like HHGttG, he could sell it and whatnot, as long as he could prove he didn't copy it. That, of course, is completely absurd...but it would be pretty damn easy to prove you independently created a directory listing.
It's quite possibly also a pump-n-dump fraud, where you purchase a bunch of stock, then make a bunch of wild claims about the company in public to drive the stock price up as everyone leaps on the bandwagon, and then sell it before everyone figures out they've been had.
Patent violations occur when you duplicate the process outlined in the patent application. You have to exactly duplicate it, but this is why patents are written so broadly and patent lawyers make so much money. I'm not quite sure how you could duplicate 75% of a process, or figure out what that means, anyway.
If there are four steps required in the patent, and you do three of them and then some other ones, no, you haven't violated the patent. But no one writes patent claims like that, AFAIK.
Copyright is an entirely different kettle of fish, copyright violations can be very vague, but there is no 75% rule at all. There is a concept called 'fair use', which is partially written law and partially case law, which says that you can use parts of copyright works in all sort of ways, like in parody or in critism, or in a classroom, or to translate into another media for your own use, and all sorts of stuff.
With regard to programming, programmers often use reference implimentations, or just stuff that everyone learned out of textbooks. Everyone's implimentation of 'add an pointer to a linked list using C' is going to look basically the same, because there's really only one good way to do it, and everyone learned it using the same examples in various textbooks.
Interestingly, almost all copyright information is available without a prior license. All books, CDs, movies (Claims 'this copy is licensed for home viewing only aside...they aren't actually 'licensed' that way, it's just that copyright law counts a 'public performance' as basically the same as making a copy.), even shrinkwrapped software is available without a license. (There's the fact you supposedly need to agree to a license to install it...but you have the CD in your hand without a license before you install it, and still can't copy it.)
Saying 'You cannot impose restrictions on copyrighted material you made available to others.' would be mindbogglyingly idiotic, as that's the entire point of copyright law.
Swans have somehow managed to get a reputation that has nothing to do with their behavior.
Not only do they make noises, they will rear back and wildly attack you if you come too close, beating their wings and trying to bite you, while hissing like a cat.
I don't know who decided they were silent majestic creatures. Swans are the evilest of waterfowl.
That's simply opinion. I think print looks much nicer than cursive, mainly because I can read the damn thing ten times easier.
The only reason anyone thinks cursive looks nicer is that they've been taught it looks nicer.
It doesn't actually look nicer, it wasn't even invented to look nicer, or easier to read, it was invented to be faster, which is possibly is...but now we have typing, which is faster than cursive and print combined.
Cursive was invented as a stopgap measure because writing fifty pages of print will cramp your hand, and it's somehow hidiously become a standard, even though no one writes more than a page manually anymore.
I personally think it's amazingly rude to use cursive, just because it's harder to read and easier to write. (Well, easier if you're used to it.) You're putting more burden on your readers and less on yourself. You are the one trying to communicate, it's your responsibility to use the format that's less burden on others.
However, you just made me think of a legitimate example...if you're, for some reason, writing a book by hand, and paying someone to type it in, by all means use cursive.
How is cursive 'beyond' or in any way better than printing?
Cursive is hard to read, period. (Hence the reason computers use print, and why you're supposed to print on forms, and the reason print is used in books.)
It's a lot easier to write poorly than print. (You have the additional problem of not knowing which letter is which, which can happen in print, but not knowing when letters start and end.)
It's a lot harder to write better than print. (Hence the taking *years* to teach it.)
And that's not even mentioning the future, as OCR becomes more common, and the person reading what we write in five years might not be a person at all.
I, personally, read cursive at least an order of magnitude slower than print.
There are two questions that now arise: Why does anyone write in cursive at all, and what type of communication is cursive better for, if any? (Note these can differ.)
For the first...I submit it's simply inertia. People were taught to write in cursive, so they do. While this is a compelling reason to continue to let them write in cursive, it's a pretty damn stupid reason to continue to teach it to children.
As for the second...I have to say...NONE. Seriously, come up with one example. (Besides signing your name, which it's better for because it's harder to duplicate, which is the exact opposite of any criterial of any actual mode of communication. Signing your name is not a mode of communication, because then signing with an 'X' wouldn't work, and it does.)
Or flood the whole place and start over, or blow up cities that aren't working right, or flip into cheat mode and tear down city walls so your invading army can invade...;)
And ghosts are just where an enviroment was busy with a pointer somewhere so it didn't get NULLed and continues to point at the non-existence person. Of course, this 'person' doesn't have a functioning motivational system and the clipping is all wrong, so it ends up walking through walls and other people in a pre-defined pattern.
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This whole thing just keeps getting more and more surreal, doesn't it? A milti-billion dollar lawsuit over something that SCO lets people get away with for 50 dollars.
Um, actually, under legal theory it would be pretty damn stupid to sue someone for using what you sold them. There's basically no way they'd be able to get away with that in court, at least not until they issued a recall and offered to pay for the product, and even then it's iffy.
Even the GPL doesn't do that kind of wackiness. You can stick something in a GPL product and still retain copyright and control of other versions of the code in other locations.
SCO's claim is basically that their license is so viral, it's roughly akin to saying that if you purchase a copy of their book, and write a note in it, and then later you have a similiar note publish in a collection of short stories, they own the copyright on that entire collection.
Which is about as viral as you can get.
Both SCO's customers and any contributer to the kernel have perfectly valid reasons to sue SCO...the customers were lied to that they would be able to distribute the product under the terms of the GPL, and the contributers because SCO distributed their code without permission. (Which ironically gives the customers yet another thing to sue about...they are using code they have no permission to have, and are liable to be sued at any point in time by kernel contributers!)
SCO can fix both problems with a recall of OpenLinux, but that would utterly bankrupt the company. (Which is not a valid reason, under law, not to do it.)
This is, to put it bluntly, theft. If they succeed, it will be theft of 95% of the world's operating systems, there is no better way to describe it.
Now, yes, to be 'theft' requires property to be taken 'unlawfully', so in a strictly legal sense, it's obviously not technically theft if done legally. But that's like saying framing someone for murder and them getting the death penalty isn't 'murder', because the legal system did it. It's certainly ethically murder, and using legally ambigious terms to steal an OS because someone once put something in it that they also put in your OS is ethically theft.
That's not to be confused with what SCO is doing with GPL software, which is probably just copyright violation.
SCO is giving your property out with various files and stuff that says those people can give it out, also in violation of your wishes.
A clever lawyer could argue that while SCO only sold x copies, there could in fact be an unknown number of copies made from the originals, because the people who purchased said copies were delibrately misinformed by SCO that they could hand them out like candy.
In other words, not only are SCO copyright violators, but they are delibrately misleading others into being copyright violators, and telling them to misinform still others! SCO is obviously liable for all that copying.
Not only should SCO have to pay damages, it should have to issue a recall, and it should have to try to track down every damn copy of a copy of a copy of the kernel made from SCO's distribution.
That is a very intesting definition of 'coward' you have there. It appears to be 'commits something you think is a war crime'. (Killing civilians isn't actually a war crime, killing civilians without military purpose is the war crime.) For the rest of us, a coward is someone who's afraid of stuff.
And, BTW, capturing civilians is not 'taking them hostage'. To be a hostage, there has to be a threat to kill them if X happens, or delibrately placing them where if you get killed, they get killed. Yes, they were on the same plane, and thus an external attack would kill them both, but it wasn't delibrate...its not like the civilians could leave the plane. As the attacker's entire plane depended on secrecy, it's fairly misleading to call those people 'hostages'.
They could be 'kidnappees', but there's nothing wrong with kidnapping people during war.
The passengers in the plane were in no way "collateral damage" and the Pentagon wasn't a millitary target.
In what universe is the Pentagon not a military target? Your dislike of the means of attack does not magically make the Pentagon not a military target. The Pentagon is not really the best target, just a very visible one, but that's another story. It is a government building intensely involved in military, intelligence, and counter-intelligence activities, and is a completely legitimate military target.
And, BTW, while it's not very nice to fly a plane full of civilians into a military target, it's not a war crime unless you had a equivilent way of doing it that wouldn't kill civilians and delibrately choose to kill them. It's not like they could have let the people off before ramming it, and hence it's no more a war crime than blowing up an important bridge with civilians walking on it. Civilians die in war.
Why not you might ask? Because these people were not military soldiers acting under state sanction in an announced aggression against another country.
And that has nothing at all to do with them being 'cowards' (It's not like they can just magically create a country to fight for.), and nothing at all to do with the Pentagon not being a legitimate target. Guerrilla warfare is quite well accepted, and simply because Bush insists on calling people unlawful combatants, that doesn't actually make them be unlawful.
By that logic, every single rebel in existence is an unlawful combatant.
Hell, not wearing a uniform isn't a war crime either...it's spying, and means you might not protected under various Geneva rules, but it's not a war crime. A country that captures you might treat you as a criminal instead of a soldier, but you aren't going to brought before the Hague.
Of course, that doesn't mean Al Queda were waging a legitimate war...they are terrorists, after all. But pretending all their attacks are illegal is just stupid and pointless.
They were common thugs. They were the guy who sticks up the little old lady on the street corner.
No, they were terrorists. They were the kind of scum who thought holding us in fear was the way to win a war against us.
But that doesn't make all Bush's rhetoric about 'illegal combatants' and whatnot true. A group of individuals can, in fact, quite 'legally' wage war against a country. It's hard for them to get Geneva Convention protection, but that's another matter entirely, and doesn't automatically make everything they do a war crime.
Now, flying planes into the WTC, that was a war crime.
And for Tim McVeigh. What was he rebelling aginst then? What was his message to the world? What did he hope to accomplish by "overthrowing" the government?
If by that you're trying to imply he didn't have one, you are amazingly mistaken. None of us know it, because it was probably some
I'm slightly confused: Why should you care?
The way you describe it, it sounds like you get cash calculated after the auction. It doesn't really matter if the sheriff seizes $10,000 worth of junk and sells it for $1,400, or $1,500 dollars and sells it for $1,400...either way the guy gets $1,400. In fact, if the sheriff seizes $10,000 to pay him, it's a bit more fulfilling to know this company that tried to screw him over was itself screwed over.
Of course, what he does has is the abilty to pick out specific things to auction, and some inside knowledge of the actual value of things...so he should go in, and pick things that look valueless but are actually worth a lot, and purchase them...but he still should act like he's at a normal auction, and pay as little as possible.
Or, if he's really vindictive, he can pick otherwise valueless things the company needs to operate but aren't exempted by law.
In reality, you can just use the defaults, which work perfectly fine for burning already existing ISOs, or generating simple 'CDs with a bunch of files on it', or you can just grab one of the tools designed to figure all that out.
And Linux does have UDF support, it's just not in the standard kernel. So I'd call it about 50% support, it's about as working as CD-ROM burning is under ME...you need to go get tools to use it.
It cost money, or you have to use a POS shareware program with nags, to burn and manage ISOs under anything older than XP.
Whereas under Linux you just stick the stuff in a directory, run mkisofs on the directory, and run a program I can't think of the name of to put it on a CD.
You know, it's amazingly lame that Windows goes around including the kitchen sink, but doesn't do stuff OSes actually should do, like manage file systems like ISOs, and devices like CD burners. Device access and filesystem access are actually what OSes should do.
And, yes, I'm aware XP finally got CD burning tools.
Also, I'm not aware of how Linux's CD ripping tools are lacking. I remember having no problems at all with a crappy CD several years ago. Whereas I remember having to download shareware stuff for Windows. And yes, I know that Windows Media Player can now rip CDs, so basically I'd consider them about equal now. (Despite the silliness of having an MP3 encoder with the OS and no CD writer.)
Just in case anyone taking this seriously, calling someone a 'bastard' or a 'jerk' or an 'asshole' is never libel, it's obviously an opinion, and thus cannot be 'correct' or 'incorrect'.
No, it's not. It's illegal to pay someone to break the law, but it is never, at least in America, to urge someone to generally break the law. It can be illegal to urge them to break a law at this exact moment with a strong probablity they will follow your urging ('Beat that man up!' vs. 'Everyone should beat the crap out of blue eyed people whenever they see them.'.), which makes you an accessory, but that's not what Linux is doing.
But all that's completely moot as violating a patent unknowingly, and even knowingly failing to learn you are violating a patent, isn't illegal, which you didn't seem to grasp. Hence the entire argument is completely and utterly pointless.
Violating someone's patent unknowingly is no more illegal than failing to pay the rent because you thought it was due next week. It's a simple mistake on your part, and sometimes you will get a visit from someone demanding money. If you don't pay, you will end up in court. It's not a 'crime'.
Someone needs to go back to law school. Almost all crimes require 'intent'.
Once you're informed about a patent, of course, you may have to pay the owners of the patent, but that's because you failed to pay required royalties, not because you 'broke the law'. (Obviously, people don't go around paying fines to other people when they break the law, they pay fines to the government.)
It is the responsiblity of patent owners to notify infringers, otherwise no one could ever get any work done, considering a patent search takes several months and pretty much any process can be patented.
Have you done a patent search on how you back up your car? Or how you butter your toast? No? Then shut up.
Alphabetical order isn't copyrightable anyway, and neither is a bunch of columns, but that's moot because the formatting and order were not created by you, and hence aren't copyrighted by you.
File sizes and permissions are facts, which are not copyrightable, just like phone numbers. (The ability to alter these facts is not important. After all, the phone company can do the same thing. )
That leaves you with trying to copyright each individual name, and titles of works are not copyrightable (Hence things like a song and a TV show named 'Third Rock from the Sun'), and are much much too short anyway.
So, basically, no, you can't copyright the output of 'ls -l'. It's a combination of uncopyrightable formatting, uncopyrightable facts, and uncopyrightable titles, just like the phone book. (And you don't even have the 'we put a lot of work into it' excuse the phone company tried. Typing l s [space] - l [enter] does not count as 'a lot of work'.)
And that's ignoring the fact it's perfectly possible to duplicate a copyrighted work. If someone on a desert island since the fifties wrote a book that was exactly like HHGttG, he could sell it and whatnot, as long as he could prove he didn't copy it. That, of course, is completely absurd...but it would be pretty damn easy to prove you independently created a directory listing.
It's quite possibly also a pump-n-dump fraud, where you purchase a bunch of stock, then make a bunch of wild claims about the company in public to drive the stock price up as everyone leaps on the bandwagon, and then sell it before everyone figures out they've been had.
Patent violations occur when you duplicate the process outlined in the patent application. You have to exactly duplicate it, but this is why patents are written so broadly and patent lawyers make so much money. I'm not quite sure how you could duplicate 75% of a process, or figure out what that means, anyway.
If there are four steps required in the patent, and you do three of them and then some other ones, no, you haven't violated the patent. But no one writes patent claims like that, AFAIK.
Copyright is an entirely different kettle of fish, copyright violations can be very vague, but there is no 75% rule at all. There is a concept called 'fair use', which is partially written law and partially case law, which says that you can use parts of copyright works in all sort of ways, like in parody or in critism, or in a classroom, or to translate into another media for your own use, and all sorts of stuff.
With regard to programming, programmers often use reference implimentations, or just stuff that everyone learned out of textbooks. Everyone's implimentation of 'add an pointer to a linked list using C' is going to look basically the same, because there's really only one good way to do it, and everyone learned it using the same examples in various textbooks.
Saying 'You cannot impose restrictions on copyrighted material you made available to others.' would be mindbogglyingly idiotic, as that's the entire point of copyright law.
Not only do they make noises, they will rear back and wildly attack you if you come too close, beating their wings and trying to bite you, while hissing like a cat.
I don't know who decided they were silent majestic creatures. Swans are the evilest of waterfowl.
The only reason anyone thinks cursive looks nicer is that they've been taught it looks nicer.
It doesn't actually look nicer, it wasn't even invented to look nicer, or easier to read, it was invented to be faster, which is possibly is...but now we have typing, which is faster than cursive and print combined.
Cursive was invented as a stopgap measure because writing fifty pages of print will cramp your hand, and it's somehow hidiously become a standard, even though no one writes more than a page manually anymore.
I personally think it's amazingly rude to use cursive, just because it's harder to read and easier to write. (Well, easier if you're used to it.) You're putting more burden on your readers and less on yourself. You are the one trying to communicate, it's your responsibility to use the format that's less burden on others.
However, you just made me think of a legitimate example...if you're, for some reason, writing a book by hand, and paying someone to type it in, by all means use cursive.
Cursive is hard to read, period. (Hence the reason computers use print, and why you're supposed to print on forms, and the reason print is used in books.)
It's a lot easier to write poorly than print. (You have the additional problem of not knowing which letter is which, which can happen in print, but not knowing when letters start and end.)
It's a lot harder to write better than print. (Hence the taking *years* to teach it.)
And that's not even mentioning the future, as OCR becomes more common, and the person reading what we write in five years might not be a person at all.
I, personally, read cursive at least an order of magnitude slower than print.
There are two questions that now arise: Why does anyone write in cursive at all, and what type of communication is cursive better for, if any? (Note these can differ.)
For the first...I submit it's simply inertia. People were taught to write in cursive, so they do. While this is a compelling reason to continue to let them write in cursive, it's a pretty damn stupid reason to continue to teach it to children.
As for the second...I have to say...NONE. Seriously, come up with one example. (Besides signing your name, which it's better for because it's harder to duplicate, which is the exact opposite of any criterial of any actual mode of communication. Signing your name is not a mode of communication, because then signing with an 'X' wouldn't work, and it does.)
I don't know why we'd be in a simulation that wasn't designed for us. I mean, honestly, that just seems a bit absurd.
Or flood the whole place and start over, or blow up cities that aren't working right, or flip into cheat mode and tear down city walls so your invading army can invade... ;)
And ghosts are just where an enviroment was busy with a pointer somewhere so it didn't get NULLed and continues to point at the non-existence person. Of course, this 'person' doesn't have a functioning motivational system and the clipping is all wrong, so it ends up walking through walls and other people in a pre-defined pattern.
I don't know why people are assuming there are any humans in those movies.