The alternative to a patent is keeping a secret. The whole idea behind granting a patent is exclusivity in exchange for revealing the secret-idea: patents are open source by definition
But, and this is why Stallman keeps harping about his concept of free, patents are not free speech, and they're not often free beer. It's an important distinction to make... RMS should be applauded for making it.
He should not be applauded for playing his little word game, though, it's too subtle, and it's not working. Free means what it means, not what he says it means, and except in the one case of the wordpair "free-speech", it means free-beer. However, I don't know if I can think of a better word, which would be more helpful. Anybody got any suggestions?
yikes! sue me, it'll legitimize me? this isn't a children's story, it's an adolescent fantasy like the book Catch-22. Clever, funny, but not perticularly true. I'm starting to see why the whiners keep whining about how slashdot will reward anything in favor of opensource.
Look opensource is great but this argument is the among the dumbest. Where the author went astray was in the meaning of the word liability: it's a vector, culpability(direction) and judgement(magnitude). So, saying there's "no one to sue" is shorthand for "no one to sue who has any cash."
Opensource is going to win because it's better and there'll be no need to sue anyone, not because of this pie in the sky reverse psychobabble.
there's a lotta smart, creative, energetic thinking on Slashdot, but this one aspect drives me nuts! A $10,000 fine would be a joke. Who posted that, Dr. Evil on defrost?
Color? Face it, most of us wouldn't dream of going back to monochrome displays on our desktops, or on our laptops... the PalmPilot is no different. It'll be fantastic. (Could we keep calling it the PalmPilot please? Never give in to giving one company the word "windows" (especially the company that most assuredly didn't invent them (I love geeks, I can nest parens)) and the word "palm" neither.)
And, I hope it is the pressure of competition that makes them rush it to market. Lord knows we need a lot more competition all over the industry!
While it's great to see the PalmPilot crush WinCE devices (because it's nice to see competition), it's too bad it's been crushing so handily: the PalmPilot has not exactly been innovating that much.
The one nice thing about Microsoft is that while they are stealing everyone else's ideas, they are putting a lot of stuff into this windowing monopoly product (like they didn't with DOS). Listen, clearly, Microsoft sycophants, saying one nice thing is not saying that monopolies are good. Monopolies are bad, even if they are arrived at fairly, which this one wasn't so it's doubly bad. And yeah, bloatware blah blah blah, save your breath. You can disagree with the way that they implement things and tie them together: I'm simply making the narrow point that Microsoft has put a lot of stuff into their windowing product, in order to make the point 3Com has not. The software has been unchanging for too darn long and I think it's because they face not enough competition.
My pet feature? I wish the to-do list had dependencies between events, like a mini project scheduler. uh-oh, shoulda kept my mouth shut, someone will undoubtedly tell me that this already exists;)
In addition to the "math is not patentable exception," there are exceptions for "prior art" (you can't patent something that other people already know how to do) and obviousness (as in, "obvious to a practitioner of the art" or some wording like that.)
So, without entering [yet] into the discussion of whether patents are a good idea (the system in general seems to mostly be working... I don't hear a lot of screaming about it in other industries, except drugs), in the case of a lot of software patents, it seems that the obviousness clause ought to be invoked.
People get patents for things like "storing digitized voice in a file system" or "conducting e-commerce with cookies and aitch-tee-tee-pee". It's insane! This stuff is obvious to any programmer, but apparently mystifying to the rest of the world. I mean, if you are going to give a patent on voicemail, give it to the guy who invented A/D or filesystems, but not the idea of using both: it's obvious.
In terms of some software patents, I don't know how to define it accurately, but public key encryption was a pretty good, non-obvious idea: seems as worthy of patent as anything. I think we need to keep going back to the basic question: does allowing the patent holder a temporary monopoly encourage more good in the world by stimulating more R/D? People often cite this as a reason, but citing it is not the same as showing that it's true.
Ya know, patent intellectual property rights were not invented to stimulate R&D, in particular. Think back to manufacturing days: patenting was created to stimulate people sharing ideas. You, then and now, had the choice: invent a process and keep it a secret but have no protection against me-toos, or share the idea and be granted a temporary monopoly. The community as a whole wanted to stimulate more sharing because after the patent expired, then you'd see some extra innovation taking place. So, R&D stimulation was indirect, and not all for the reason of the monopoly rents (that's a fancy word for "real profit").
Software does not have this "I can keep it a secret" nature like manufacturing does (unless it runs on your server...) so that sort of creates a bigger incentive to patent in this arena, and probably calls for a different set of rules.
here's the first 250 lines of 4000+ lines of unresolveds. my sense is that it is something "systemic", i.e. after the build is completed cleanly, depmod is not finding the perfectly good symbols... but what do I know:
I think you are going a little too far: The cancellation is not wrong in the moral sense if their policy clearly says that they can cancel orders.
I share your feelings, of course, in the sense that I'd be annoyed if I ordered one and it got cancelled (especially if I knew the price was going up and was patting myself on the back at having got in under the wire:), but I also keep a level head about stuff like this by remembering that it's a two-way street. I like to be able to cancel orders too, so why can't Apple?
I attribute attitudes like yours (I'm not singling you out) to this weird thing people do on the subject of money: for example, when buying something used from a friend, people always expect a good deal on price because it's "for a friend". Why don't people ever want to throw in extra money because it's "for a friend"?
The law, by the way, recognizes something similar to what Apple did in the legal definition of a contract. A contract is not binding just because two people sign and agree to do something. One of them has to "rely" on it and actually do something to indicate that that they relied on it. Now, there are also laws about "false advertizing" and as a result Apple probably has a disclaimer that says that they can cancel, so contract law doesn't enter into it, but it's still interesting (and very much on topic;) to see that it's nothing new.
As to your hating Marketing Departments, it was probably Finance that said "hey, this is going to cost us too much." Marketing was undoubtedly saying, "this is going to hurt us a lot in PR." Doesn't that kill you: Marketing was on your side!
It's a good thing to distinguish between what is rumor and what is formal announcement, sure, but info is info and it's good. Seeing the news here makes me pay attention elsewhere so I'll notice the real thing when it's finally announced.
But the sub-text of what you wrote is valid: no reason to act like a bunch chickens with our heads cut off.
well, I, too, was reworking old material, that's why I pointed it out. Let me also point out that this newer version of the joke contains an extra joke about "American extravagence" reflecting something else Europeans think about us: makes it much funnier, IMHO. Another funny [yes, and old] version of the latter joke is, "America is the only civilization to go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of culture":)
And, since some will undoubtedly claim this has been off-topic... bollocks, for several reasons.
First, the main thread was killed as soon as it was pointed out that
the organization involved is a.gov, and
those tlds are guidelines not rules anyway, as evidenced by profits.slashdot.org
Second, to bring this back on topic even further, the foolish consistency some want to bring to domain TLDs (the main topic of this discussion) is the same as the foolish consistency some wish to bring to threading. "off-topic" should be applied to things which are jarringly off-topic, way back at the TLDiscussion. This deeply nested thread, for the 2 people still reading it, is insightful and on topic, else it'd have been abandoned several clicks ago.
And third, just as domain TLDs allow for "topical" exceptions, so does "off-topic" allow for the exception for humor... and valiance?
You're right some people have better things to do than keep up with domain-name rules, but I don't think you go far enough.
Only geeks think hierarchically. The average non-geek has a single ACCumulator and just a JMP instruction, no JSUB. Sure, they could theoretically implement recursion, but they won't and never will because they don't have the stackspace anyway. They do stuff like watch "Voyager" on Wednesay without ever thinking, "'Voyager.UPN.net' and 'Voyager.WSBK.Ch56.tv'... must be multiple inheritance."
Actually, they don't even watch Voyager at all, but that was the only program I knew the call letters for.
TLDs should be wiped out completely. For all of our geek glory, exactly how many sites do we actually use TLDs for either? "Hmmm... let me think, do I want the profit-making foo, or the non-profit foo?" It's so stupid! We think just like everyone else does: "I want Altavista, I want Slashdot, I want Yahoo, I want InterNIC" and then we have to remember which TLD is appropriate.
"Hierarchy through obscurity" is what it is, and it's stupid.
thanks a lot for taking the time, and a learned a bit, but it didn't fix the problem.
I had to adapt some of what you wrote.
I got rid of the EXTRA VERSION as you suggested... rebuilt the works
I've got a 2.2.5 kernel (RH60) that works and I'm trying to upgrade to 2.2.12, so I presume that both can co-reside in/lib so I don't need to move anything out of the way... but I did anyway. same with the kernel file itself
copied new System.map to/boot
screwed with all of the symbolic links that Redhat puts in/boot
liloed
running depmod -a still prints a bezillion unresolveds, and rebooting freezes at the spot where it would ordinarily start to load modules
Hey, if we all donate our machines to helping each other compute, pretty soon we'll each, on average, be able to tap into all of the computing power that.... hmmm... sits in front of us on our desks.
well, I do use a text console a good bit, so you can have the spare DSP cycles in my video card.
Oh, I forgot the bit about the TM. (Maybe this is why people should get advice from lawyers rather than relying on programmers shooting their mouths off.)
You should put the little TM next to Jao(tm) every time you use it. And, if you do actually register it, you'll need to use the little R-in-circle. The point of this is basically that you need to treat your name like a trademark (hence all the receipts above) and you need to further prove that you treat it like a trademark by telling the world that you consider it to be one, and you need to tell anyone else who comes along and uses it or anything similar that they may not.
The law requires that you make the effort to prove that you really do consider this name to be yours and that you closely identify it with your business, and that your customers do to.
[note: guess I need a disclaimer here? Jao(tm) is a trademark of Jao Software.]
[will registering this name as a trademark make any difference?]
Yes, it will make a difference, but perhaps not enough to help you. Plus, registration virtually requires a lawyer and that can cost thousands on it's own. However, you can do it without a lawyer and you can do it without registering... but remember, it might not be worth it.
Do some research and find the rules for trademarks before you embark on this. I'd tell them to you but I don't remember them all. Here's what I do remember which should get you started:
You must establish that nobody else is using the name in your business. The law requires that you do a really good job of this. That includes looking in all of the phonebooks in all of the places where you will sell. It includes looking in all of the newspapers. Impractical? There are companies you can pay to do it. Money is not the concern of the PTO or the courts. OK, if you want to risk it, just search the internet. Look in the online phonebooks too. Remember, if you miss anybody, it's your problem.
OK? Nobody using the name? You now must begin to use the name, and you must use it for the purposes of legitimate trade. This is what establishes that it is a trademark (got it? trade + mark = trademark... somethings do make sense:) You need to "legitimize" this as trade by doing stuff like printing labels, having somebody pay you, shipping it across state lines to trigger Federal law, etc. The more legitimate and independently verifiable paper you create (receipts, shipping slips, phone book entries, newspaper ads, cancelled checks), the better. Make sure Alexa gets ahold of your website.
It can also be a good idea to sell ancillary merchandise. Making and selling "Jao" coffee cups, T-shirts and action figures gives you the right to the name in more industries than just software.
OK, now, you have established your claim on the name. You don't even need to officially "register" it: Registering it will give you some more rights, but once you start using it, the only person who can stop you from using it is someone who used it before you, or someone who can convince a jury that yours is confusing with theirs.
How does this help you get the domain name? Only indirectly: you can send an email to the domain squatter and point out that you own the name and nobody else will be able to use it (not for coffee cups, not for T-shirts, not for action figures, etc.)
One more note. Don't be cynical about this or you will lose your rights (or actually, you will not have the rights): you must legitimately be offering the good or service (including the action figures) for trade under the trademark, and you must keep offering it. The law is, FWIW, not tolerant of squatters in meatspace.
Hope this helps. I am not a lawyer. I don't even play one on TV.
Wait a minute... you say "people suddenly don't *want* to treat it as property". But they do. It is you who suddenly doesn't want to. This different interpretation is that the people who got the trademark granted to them as property (from the US PTO and int'l treaty, etc.) think that the names are their property, and suddenly, you want to reset the game and keep DNS outside of of trademark law.
But should DNS be outside of trademark law? Many companies have invested good money giving "meaning" to their trademarks, whether or not you like them, and they did it on the basis of a legal/regulatory promise that they owned the names, whether or not you suddenly want to ignore that either. Both as a merchant or as a consumer, it is quite reasonable to hope that trademark law should apply to domains. Let me give more examples of how ignoring the history of trademarks would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
You call Intellectual Property "fictional". I think you mean "abstract", right? it's not a fiction that you pay fines for violating the law surrounding IP, but the property in question is an abstraction and certainly it's legitimate to consider whether it's a good idea or not, or a "moral" one, for that matter (who, after all, has the right to say I can't use whatever words I want). I'll dive in right here:
You say, the "whole concept of squatting as somehow Bad is very silly." It's not at all! Am I being inconsistent? One minute I think names are property, the next minute I don't? To understand the consistency, you've got to understand some trademark basics. There is nobody out there except a few anarchists and nihilists who don't believe in the principles behind trademark law, and this includes you. When you buy a Coke, you want, as a purely practical matter, some assurance that you are getting a Coke and not a can of 7up. When you come to slashdot.org, you want to come to slashdot. If you are slashdot, yes, you feel even more strongly that when people type slashdot that they should get slashdot.
Responding to this need on the part of buyers and sellers, governments all over the world have authorized merchants to "own" their names. But the law is actually tempered to respond to many of the objections that people are raising in this forum. For example, you can't get a trademark for nothing (read: squatting). You can only trademark a good or service that you are actually offering for trade under that name. (The application asks on what date did you start selling, and asks for a copy of the label. And, BTW, you lose the trademark if you stop using it. Really.) So, right here we can see that domain squatting is breaking a trademark rule, and it's a good rule. [Now, before you hit reply, I'm not saying that domains are trademarks; I am advocating that they should be.] Like so many posters are noticing, we give up some freedom when we allow ownership of names; At least let's minimize that by not giving up freedom for nothing.
Other aspects of trademark law do not map cleanly onto domain names. which is partly why DNS is considered so broken. For example, trademark law is tempered by a whole bunch of "reasonableness" sorts of clauses based on the likelihood of confusion on the part of the consumer: geography and product category are used to maximize the number of people who can share a name, minimizing the restriction on freedom. This is why there is a trademarked Johnson outboard motor, and a floorwax, and dozens of smaller "Johnson" companies. That sort of distinction is problematic in the DNS system, (and especially moreso in the ".COM" system), but it is not necessarily solved by increasing the number of TopLevelDomains, or by deeply qualifying the hierarchy because some trademarks are trademarks in all categories. "Sony" makes lots of different sorts of products, and if you hate 'em, don't buy em, but at least you know who they are.
There's lots more to say about trademarks, but I'll let other people talk now.
I'm just like the guy who started this thing: "I've been a moderately skilled Linux user for several years now but my problem solving skills on this one have got me stumped. I have compiled many kernels before..."
... except my problem is different. kernel builds find, modules build fine, modules install fine, kernel starts out booting just fine... except at the end it hangs, I think when it tries to load modules. When I do a "depmod -a 2.2.12-20" for the new kernel version, I get tons of "unresolved symbol(s)" errors messages. I suspect that is the problem
In searching for help I've seen suggestions like "clean out your old modules" and in RedHat's instructions it says stuff like "rm System.map ; ln -s System.map-2.2.12 System.map" but I haven't tried that because I think I should be able to have old and new on there at once... what if new doesn't work (it doesn't!). I'm glad I can reboot old and don't want to lose that.
Rebuilding the kernel used to be easy but I have not got the hang of the modular kernels. Sometimes I rebuild the sucker and then just put the once eensy little.o that I want down into lib/modules and that has worked well. Can anybody point me to what newish facts about kernel modules that I'm missing?
Insider trading is "trading by insiders" and it is entirely legal. It is subject to some extra rules. Insiders need to notify the market publicly well in advance of their trading so that the fact of their trading is part of the information available about the company before the trade takes place.
What the popular press calls "insider trading" should more accurately be called "trading on inside information" and it (a) does not only apply to insiders, and (b) is illegal. It covers anyone who has access to information about a company that (a) is not generally available and (b) has a material impact on the value of the company. So, if you are the boyfriend of the janitor who works for the outsourced cleaning company that cleans up at the printing company that prints the stock certificates, and you learn about an impending transaction completely inadvertantly because one of the certificates has stuck to the bottom of your [genderneutral]friend's shoe, it is illegal for you to trade on this information. It is probably illegal for anyone who works at Slashdot to monitor the logfiles and measure what some tiny public company is interested in... the whole point of publicly traded companies is that you, the average Jo, can assume you have access to all the information anyone else does.
OK, but pay attention to this: before you get all hot and bothered about the greedy people who engage in trading on inside information, consider that it actually has a positive effect on the world at large! You see, if there is secret information that tells us that a company should be worth more or less than its current price, then the question really is, why isn't this information available to the public? The more that the rapacious people-with-inside-information trade, the more the stock price will move in the direction in which it should be moving.
So, if you sold stock at a low price to someone who knew "inside" that it was worth more, you have a right to be angry. But if you didn't engage in any trading, you should be angry that the info was not public, not that the people who did know were motivated to trade on it. Who wouldn't be?
In trademark law, the question is not whether you find the products confusing, it's whether you find the names confusing.
Separately, and I think what you are referring to, trademark protection is generally offered within a "class" of goods. "Restaurants and cars are different classes" would be one reason to reject the Jeep lawsuit. But, websites that dish out information would so far be in the same class, so the name confusion issue comes to the fore. Someday, this may not be true any longer. Because Jeep cars and Jeep restaurants both use telephones does not make either of them a phone company, and perhaps someday the web will be considered like a phone. But for the time being, a portal is a portal is a portal.
A broader form of trademark protection across classes is also legally available. I don't know what the details are exactly, but "made up name" is very helpful to meet the condition. So, Xerox, for example, could claim that they own the name without regard to class. Jeep might have a claim along the same lines, except that the word jeep started out generic, GI slang for General Purpose vehicles, so that's probably why AMC/Chrysler does not get the word across all classes. Or perhaps they didn't defend it vigorously enough in the past.
This latter point is very important:
Under trademark law, a trademark holder is required to take legal action to defend its trademark. Otherwise, future infringers can claim "look, they didn't say anything about those guys". So, it is not necessary for whatshappening to actually believe their claim in order for them to feel that it is prudent to make it. Else, their shareholders may sue the officers for not protecting the company's interests.
Yeah, it can lead to some absurdity, but the system is not totally broken. Without trademarks, realize that a certain Redmond firm could come call their next version "Windows Linux", without regard to what was in it... Linux is trademarked, isn't it?
I very highly recommend the email client in Netscape Communicator for the purpose you've described. In the sense of being cross-platform it works very similarly between linux/XWindows and Microsoft's two main windowing products.
I started using it way-back-when because out of the box it could handle HTML. There is a ton about it that I don't like, so every six months or so I get frustrated about something and go look at the others, but I always conclude that this one sucks less than eudora, less than outlook, less than outlook express, less than postilion, less than emacs... I think that's what I've looked at.
I've done the interesting cross-platform things like copy the mailfolders, address books, bookmarks, etc. back and forth and it has worked well whenever I've done it. YMMV because "they" do have a tendency to keep changing the way it works and one never knows when they'll break it.
I've used it in POP3, POP3 "leave on server" and IMAP modes. I would recomment IMAP if your server has it available. It can be confusing to configure (no, I don't want to treat all of my.dotfiles as mailfolders, why are you asking?), but once you get it to work it works the same every day after that.
Perhaps if I get time I'll post more about how I configure it and how I wish I could configure it. One final note: the very latest version silently turned off Emacs-keys but the release notes did mention it and I was able to get them back by ditching the new/usr/X11/blahblahblah/Netscape appdefaults.
Slashdot Mirror
But, and this is why Stallman keeps harping about his concept of free, patents are not free speech, and they're not often free beer. It's an important distinction to make... RMS should be applauded for making it.
He should not be applauded for playing his little word game, though, it's too subtle, and it's not working. Free means what it means, not what he says it means, and except in the one case of the wordpair "free-speech", it means free-beer. However, I don't know if I can think of a better word, which would be more helpful. Anybody got any suggestions?
Look opensource is great but this argument is the among the dumbest. Where the author went astray was in the meaning of the word liability: it's a vector, culpability(direction) and judgement(magnitude). So, saying there's "no one to sue" is shorthand for "no one to sue who has any cash."
Opensource is going to win because it's better and there'll be no need to sue anyone, not because of this pie in the sky reverse psychobabble.
there's a lotta smart, creative, energetic thinking on Slashdot, but this one aspect drives me nuts! A $10,000 fine would be a joke. Who posted that, Dr. Evil on defrost?
And, I hope it is the pressure of competition that makes them rush it to market. Lord knows we need a lot more competition all over the industry!
While it's great to see the PalmPilot crush WinCE devices (because it's nice to see competition), it's too bad it's been crushing so handily: the PalmPilot has not exactly been innovating that much.
The one nice thing about Microsoft is that while they are stealing everyone else's ideas, they are putting a lot of stuff into this windowing monopoly product (like they didn't with DOS). Listen, clearly, Microsoft sycophants, saying one nice thing is not saying that monopolies are good. Monopolies are bad, even if they are arrived at fairly, which this one wasn't so it's doubly bad. And yeah, bloatware blah blah blah, save your breath. You can disagree with the way that they implement things and tie them together: I'm simply making the narrow point that Microsoft has put a lot of stuff into their windowing product, in order to make the point 3Com has not. The software has been unchanging for too darn long and I think it's because they face not enough competition.
My pet feature? I wish the to-do list had dependencies between events, like a mini project scheduler. uh-oh, shoulda kept my mouth shut, someone will undoubtedly tell me that this already exists ;)
So, without entering [yet] into the discussion of whether patents are a good idea (the system in general seems to mostly be working... I don't hear a lot of screaming about it in other industries, except drugs), in the case of a lot of software patents, it seems that the obviousness clause ought to be invoked.
People get patents for things like "storing digitized voice in a file system" or "conducting e-commerce with cookies and aitch-tee-tee-pee". It's insane! This stuff is obvious to any programmer, but apparently mystifying to the rest of the world. I mean, if you are going to give a patent on voicemail, give it to the guy who invented A/D or filesystems, but not the idea of using both: it's obvious.
In terms of some software patents, I don't know how to define it accurately, but public key encryption was a pretty good, non-obvious idea: seems as worthy of patent as anything. I think we need to keep going back to the basic question: does allowing the patent holder a temporary monopoly encourage more good in the world by stimulating more R/D? People often cite this as a reason, but citing it is not the same as showing that it's true.
Ya know, patent intellectual property rights were not invented to stimulate R&D, in particular. Think back to manufacturing days: patenting was created to stimulate people sharing ideas. You, then and now, had the choice: invent a process and keep it a secret but have no protection against me-toos, or share the idea and be granted a temporary monopoly. The community as a whole wanted to stimulate more sharing because after the patent expired, then you'd see some extra innovation taking place. So, R&D stimulation was indirect, and not all for the reason of the monopoly rents (that's a fancy word for "real profit").
Software does not have this "I can keep it a secret" nature like manufacturing does (unless it runs on your server...) so that sort of creates a bigger incentive to patent in this arena, and probably calls for a different set of rules.
thanks for tyring to help.
here's the first 250 lines of 4000+ lines
of unresolveds. my sense is that it is something
"systemic", i.e. after the build is completed
cleanly, depmod is not finding the perfectly
good symbols... but what do I know:
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_koi8-r.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-15.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-14.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-9.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-8.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-7.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-6.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-5.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-4.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-3.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-2.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_iso8859-1.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp874.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp869.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp866.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp865.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp864.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp863.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp862.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp861.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp860.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp857.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp855.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp852.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp850.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp775.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp737.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/nls_cp437.o: unresolved symbol(s)
register_nls
unregister_nls
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/binfmt_misc.o: unresolved symbol(s)
dput
prepare_binprm
kmalloc
_ctype
create_proc_entry
open_namei
copy_strings
register_binfmt
kfree
remove_proc_entry
search_binary_handler
sprintf
unregister_binfmt
remove_arg_zero
printk
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/binfmt_aout.o: unresolved symbol(s)
send_sig
filp_open
lookup_exec_domain
dump_thread
read_exec
setup_arg_pages
open_dentry
sys_close
compute_creds
filp_close
register_binfmt
do_mmap
fput
jiffies
flush_old_exec
unregister_binfmt
printk
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/autofs.o: unresolved symbol(s)
lookup_dentry
dput
__wake_up
kmalloc
unregister_filesystem
iput
is_root_busy
d_rehash
iget
register_filesystem
d_alloc_root
cap_bset
interruptible_sleep_on
kfree
__wait_on_super
fput
xtime
simple_strtoul
jiffies
d_instantiate
strtok
printk
__generic_copy_to_user
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/romfs.o: unresolved symbol(s)
lookup_dentry
dput
__wake_up
kmalloc
kdevname
init_fifo
unregister_filesystem
bread
generic_file_mmap
d_rehash
iget
generic_file_read
register_filesystem
free_pages
d_alloc_root
kfree
__wait_on_super
chrdev_inode_operations
set_blocksize
mem_map
blkdev_inode_operations
__brelse
d_instantiate
printk
__generic_copy_to_user
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/ufs.o: unresolved symbol(s)
lookup_dentry
securebits
send_sig
dput
d_delete
__wake_up
in_group_p
__generic_copy_from_user
schedule
update_atime
vsprintf
clear_inode
kmalloc
kdevname
__wait_on_buffer
mark_buffer_uptodate
init_fifo
__mark_inode_dirty
file_fsync
unregister_filesystem
iput
bread
getblk
update_vm_cache
generic_file_mmap
d_rehash
panic
ll_rw_block
iget
generic_file_read
register_filesystem
d_alloc_root
cap_bset
get_hash_table
event
refile_buffer
kfree
__wait_on_super
__bforget
chrdev_inode_operations
get_empty_inode
set_blocksize
xtime
blkdev_inode_operations
__brelse
d_instantiate
insert_inode_hash
strtok
printk
set_writetime
__generic_copy_to_user
generic_readpage
/lib/modules/2.2.12/fs/ntfs.o: unresolved symbol(s)
__wake_up
load_nls
vsprintf
kmalloc
__wait_on_buffer
load_nls_default
unregister_filesystem
iput
bread
generic_file_mmap
d_rehash
iget
register_filesystem
unload_nls
d_alloc_root
refile_buffer
kfree
__wait_on_super
set_blocksize
xtime
simple_strtoul
__brelse
d_instantiate
strtok
printk
set_writetime
__generic_copy_to_user
generic_readpage
hate to break it to you, but you just did.
My region of the country gets moderated up the most. oops! till now, that is.
I share your feelings, of course, in the sense that I'd be annoyed if I ordered one and it got cancelled (especially if I knew the price was going up and was patting myself on the back at having got in under the wire :), but I also keep a level head about stuff like this by remembering that it's a two-way street. I like to be able to cancel orders too, so why can't Apple?
I attribute attitudes like yours (I'm not singling you out) to this weird thing people do on the subject of money: for example, when buying something used from a friend, people always expect a good deal on price because it's "for a friend". Why don't people ever want to throw in extra money because it's "for a friend"?
The law, by the way, recognizes something similar to what Apple did in the legal definition of a contract. A contract is not binding just because two people sign and agree to do something. One of them has to "rely" on it and actually do something to indicate that that they relied on it. Now, there are also laws about "false advertizing" and as a result Apple probably has a disclaimer that says that they can cancel, so contract law doesn't enter into it, but it's still interesting (and very much on topic ;) to see that it's nothing new.
As to your hating Marketing Departments, it was probably Finance that said "hey, this is going to cost us too much." Marketing was undoubtedly saying, "this is going to hurt us a lot in PR." Doesn't that kill you: Marketing was on your side!
But the sub-text of what you wrote is valid: no reason to act like a bunch chickens with our heads cut off.
And, since some will undoubtedly claim this has been off-topic ... bollocks, for several reasons.
First, the main thread was killed as soon as it was pointed out that
- the organization involved is a
.gov, and - those tlds are guidelines not rules anyway, as evidenced by profits.slashdot.org
Second, to bring this back on topic even further, the foolish consistency some want to bring to domain TLDs (the main topic of this discussion) is the same as the foolish consistency some wish to bring to threading. "off-topic" should be applied to things which are jarringly off-topic, way back at the TLDiscussion. This deeply nested thread, for the 2 people still reading it, is insightful and on topic, else it'd have been abandoned several clicks ago.And third, just as domain TLDs allow for "topical" exceptions, so does "off-topic" allow for the exception for humor... and valiance?
Only geeks think hierarchically. The average non-geek has a single ACCumulator and just a JMP instruction, no JSUB. Sure, they could theoretically implement recursion, but they won't and never will because they don't have the stackspace anyway. They do stuff like watch "Voyager" on Wednesay without ever thinking, "'Voyager.UPN.net' and 'Voyager.WSBK.Ch56.tv'... must be multiple inheritance."
Actually, they don't even watch Voyager at all, but that was the only program I knew the call letters for.
TLDs should be wiped out completely. For all of our geek glory, exactly how many sites do we actually use TLDs for either? "Hmmm... let me think, do I want the profit-making foo, or the non-profit foo?" It's so stupid! We think just like everyone else does: "I want Altavista, I want Slashdot, I want Yahoo, I want InterNIC" and then we have to remember which TLD is appropriate.
"Hierarchy through obscurity" is what it is, and it's stupid.
America is a one-party state. But with typical American extravagence, they have two of them.
I had to adapt some of what you wrote.
running depmod -a still prints a bezillion unresolveds, and rebooting freezes at the spot where it would ordinarily start to load modules
well, I do use a text console a good bit, so you can have the spare DSP cycles in my video card.
You should put the little TM next to Jao(tm) every time you use it. And, if you do actually register it, you'll need to use the little R-in-circle. The point of this is basically that you need to treat your name like a trademark (hence all the receipts above) and you need to further prove that you treat it like a trademark by telling the world that you consider it to be one, and you need to tell anyone else who comes along and uses it or anything similar that they may not.
The law requires that you make the effort to prove that you really do consider this name to be yours and that you closely identify it with your business, and that your customers do to.
[note: guess I need a disclaimer here? Jao(tm) is a trademark of Jao Software.]
Yes, it will make a difference, but perhaps not enough to help you. Plus, registration virtually requires a lawyer and that can cost thousands on it's own. However, you can do it without a lawyer and you can do it without registering... but remember, it might not be worth it.
Do some research and find the rules for trademarks before you embark on this. I'd tell them to you but I don't remember them all. Here's what I do remember which should get you started:
You must establish that nobody else is using the name in your business. The law requires that you do a really good job of this. That includes looking in all of the phonebooks in all of the places where you will sell. It includes looking in all of the newspapers. Impractical? There are companies you can pay to do it. Money is not the concern of the PTO or the courts. OK, if you want to risk it, just search the internet. Look in the online phonebooks too. Remember, if you miss anybody, it's your problem.
OK? Nobody using the name? You now must begin to use the name, and you must use it for the purposes of legitimate trade. This is what establishes that it is a trademark (got it? trade + mark = trademark... somethings do make sense :) You need to "legitimize" this as trade by doing stuff like printing labels, having somebody pay you, shipping it across state lines to trigger Federal law, etc. The more legitimate and independently verifiable paper you create (receipts, shipping slips, phone book entries, newspaper ads, cancelled checks), the better. Make sure Alexa gets ahold of your website.
It can also be a good idea to sell ancillary merchandise. Making and selling "Jao" coffee cups, T-shirts and action figures gives you the right to the name in more industries than just software.
OK, now, you have established your claim on the name. You don't even need to officially "register" it: Registering it will give you some more rights, but once you start using it, the only person who can stop you from using it is someone who used it before you, or someone who can convince a jury that yours is confusing with theirs.
How does this help you get the domain name? Only indirectly: you can send an email to the domain squatter and point out that you own the name and nobody else will be able to use it (not for coffee cups, not for T-shirts, not for action figures, etc.)
One more note. Don't be cynical about this or you will lose your rights (or actually, you will not have the rights): you must legitimately be offering the good or service (including the action figures) for trade under the trademark, and you must keep offering it. The law is, FWIW, not tolerant of squatters in meatspace.
Hope this helps. I am not a lawyer. I don't even play one on TV.
But should DNS be outside of trademark law? Many companies have invested good money giving "meaning" to their trademarks, whether or not you like them, and they did it on the basis of a legal/regulatory promise that they owned the names, whether or not you suddenly want to ignore that either. Both as a merchant or as a consumer, it is quite reasonable to hope that trademark law should apply to domains. Let me give more examples of how ignoring the history of trademarks would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
You call Intellectual Property "fictional". I think you mean "abstract", right? it's not a fiction that you pay fines for violating the law surrounding IP, but the property in question is an abstraction and certainly it's legitimate to consider whether it's a good idea or not, or a "moral" one, for that matter (who, after all, has the right to say I can't use whatever words I want). I'll dive in right here:
You say, the "whole concept of squatting as somehow Bad is very silly." It's not at all! Am I being inconsistent? One minute I think names are property, the next minute I don't? To understand the consistency, you've got to understand some trademark basics. There is nobody out there except a few anarchists and nihilists who don't believe in the principles behind trademark law, and this includes you. When you buy a Coke, you want, as a purely practical matter, some assurance that you are getting a Coke and not a can of 7up. When you come to slashdot.org, you want to come to slashdot. If you are slashdot, yes, you feel even more strongly that when people type slashdot that they should get slashdot.
Responding to this need on the part of buyers and sellers, governments all over the world have authorized merchants to "own" their names. But the law is actually tempered to respond to many of the objections that people are raising in this forum. For example, you can't get a trademark for nothing (read: squatting). You can only trademark a good or service that you are actually offering for trade under that name. (The application asks on what date did you start selling, and asks for a copy of the label. And, BTW, you lose the trademark if you stop using it. Really.) So, right here we can see that domain squatting is breaking a trademark rule, and it's a good rule. [Now, before you hit reply, I'm not saying that domains are trademarks; I am advocating that they should be.] Like so many posters are noticing, we give up some freedom when we allow ownership of names; At least let's minimize that by not giving up freedom for nothing.
Other aspects of trademark law do not map cleanly onto domain names. which is partly why DNS is considered so broken. For example, trademark law is tempered by a whole bunch of "reasonableness" sorts of clauses based on the likelihood of confusion on the part of the consumer: geography and product category are used to maximize the number of people who can share a name, minimizing the restriction on freedom. This is why there is a trademarked Johnson outboard motor, and a floorwax, and dozens of smaller "Johnson" companies. That sort of distinction is problematic in the DNS system, (and especially moreso in the ".COM" system), but it is not necessarily solved by increasing the number of TopLevelDomains, or by deeply qualifying the hierarchy because some trademarks are trademarks in all categories. "Sony" makes lots of different sorts of products, and if you hate 'em, don't buy em, but at least you know who they are.
There's lots more to say about trademarks, but I'll let other people talk now.
"I've been a moderately skilled Linux user for several years now but my problem solving skills on this one have got me stumped. I have compiled many kernels before
In searching for help I've seen suggestions like "clean out your old modules" and in RedHat's instructions it says stuff like "rm System.map ; ln -s System.map-2.2.12 System.map" but I haven't tried that because I think I should be able to have old and new on there at once... what if new doesn't work (it doesn't!). I'm glad I can reboot old and don't want to lose that.
Rebuilding the kernel used to be easy but I have not got the hang of the modular kernels. Sometimes I rebuild the sucker and then just put the once eensy little .o that I want down into lib/modules and that has worked well. Can anybody point me to what newish facts about kernel modules that I'm missing?
What the popular press calls "insider trading" should more accurately be called "trading on inside information" and it (a) does not only apply to insiders, and (b) is illegal. It covers anyone who has access to information about a company that (a) is not generally available and (b) has a material impact on the value of the company. So, if you are the boyfriend of the janitor who works for the outsourced cleaning company that cleans up at the printing company that prints the stock certificates, and you learn about an impending transaction completely inadvertantly because one of the certificates has stuck to the bottom of your [genderneutral]friend's shoe, it is illegal for you to trade on this information. It is probably illegal for anyone who works at Slashdot to monitor the logfiles and measure what some tiny public company is interested in... the whole point of publicly traded companies is that you, the average Jo, can assume you have access to all the information anyone else does.
OK, but pay attention to this: before you get all hot and bothered about the greedy people who engage in trading on inside information, consider that it actually has a positive effect on the world at large! You see, if there is secret information that tells us that a company should be worth more or less than its current price, then the question really is, why isn't this information available to the public? The more that the rapacious people-with-inside-information trade, the more the stock price will move in the direction in which it should be moving.
So, if you sold stock at a low price to someone who knew "inside" that it was worth more, you have a right to be angry. But if you didn't engage in any trading, you should be angry that the info was not public, not that the people who did know were motivated to trade on it. Who wouldn't be?
Separately, and I think what you are referring to, trademark protection is generally offered within a "class" of goods. "Restaurants and cars are different classes" would be one reason to reject the Jeep lawsuit. But, websites that dish out information would so far be in the same class, so the name confusion issue comes to the fore. Someday, this may not be true any longer. Because Jeep cars and Jeep restaurants both use telephones does not make either of them a phone company, and perhaps someday the web will be considered like a phone. But for the time being, a portal is a portal is a portal.
A broader form of trademark protection across classes is also legally available. I don't know what the details are exactly, but "made up name" is very helpful to meet the condition. So, Xerox, for example, could claim that they own the name without regard to class. Jeep might have a claim along the same lines, except that the word jeep started out generic, GI slang for General Purpose vehicles, so that's probably why AMC/Chrysler does not get the word across all classes. Or perhaps they didn't defend it vigorously enough in the past.
This latter point is very important:
Under trademark law, a trademark holder is required to take legal action to defend its trademark. Otherwise, future infringers can claim "look, they didn't say anything about those guys". So, it is not necessary for whatshappening to actually believe their claim in order for them to feel that it is prudent to make it. Else, their shareholders may sue the officers for not protecting the company's interests.
Yeah, it can lead to some absurdity, but the system is not totally broken. Without trademarks, realize that a certain Redmond firm could come call their next version "Windows Linux", without regard to what was in it... Linux is trademarked, isn't it?
I started using it way-back-when because out of the box it could handle HTML. There is a ton about it that I don't like, so every six months or so I get frustrated about something and go look at the others, but I always conclude that this one sucks less than eudora, less than outlook, less than outlook express, less than postilion, less than emacs... I think that's what I've looked at.
I've done the interesting cross-platform things like copy the mailfolders, address books, bookmarks, etc. back and forth and it has worked well whenever I've done it. YMMV because "they" do have a tendency to keep changing the way it works and one never knows when they'll break it.
I've used it in POP3, POP3 "leave on server" and IMAP modes. I would recomment IMAP if your server has it available. It can be confusing to configure (no, I don't want to treat all of my .dotfiles as mailfolders, why are you asking?), but once you get it to work it works the same every day after that.
Perhaps if I get time I'll post more about how I configure it and how I wish I could configure it. One final note: the very latest version silently turned off Emacs-keys but the release notes did mention it and I was able to get them back by ditching the new /usr/X11/blahblahblah/Netscape appdefaults.