Personal liberty? You sure you aren't one of those commie pinko terrorist Linux-using MP3 pirates the tel-e-vizin's always warning me about? I mean, everyone knows that personal liberty's as unAmerican as home-made apple pie! The only American way to get apple pie or liberty is from some massive, faceless corporation!
That goes double since not only are any third-world petty dictator armies likely to be largely immune to it, relying on numbers instead of tech, and other first-world armies are going to be immune. Europe and such are at least as advanced as the US is, so you can bet that they'll either have EMP weapons of their own or shielding (read: thick lead cases) they can use on their essential gear to counter it.
Except that the US had a massive debt in the '80s and the early '90s. It was only the Clinton administration's careful sheparding of the budget that allowed them to create a surplus, and Bush blew that in a massive spending and kickback spree right after taking office. Oops!
AND didn't the White House just finish doing a number on Veteran's Comp? So while all these servicemen are hauling down the bonuses and helping the economy keep its head above water for now, think about what's going to happen when the quagmire's over and they're back home and on veteran's comp.
Now add that to the Bush administration's off-the-charts deficit spending.
Sounds like quite a mess for the next person to take office, isn't it?
Yeah, but that system would be readable and largely immunte to simple forms of tampering with the process itself. You could still strike thousands of "convicts" and minorities from the voting record, but you couldn't set up the ballot so that what looks like a vote for Gore is really a vote for Buchannan. And you couldn't have a voting machine report -16,000 Gore votes.
Remember, Diebold is 100% Republican owned and operated. While the Democrats may use similar dirty tricks, that's not the issue here. The issues is that the United State's election infrastructure is currently in the hands of one party... A party that's gotten a definite majority despite an almost-total lack of popular support. The issue here is that the party in power is corrupting the system to ensure they stay in power, and they need to get called on it.
Unfortunately, they also own the "liberal" media, so there's not much chance of that.
Sorry, no. If you don't accept the GPL, you default to ordinary copyright law and have no right to redistribute or modify at all. If you do accept the GPL, you have the right to redistribute and modify under certain controlled conditions.
Right. So that DOES seem to make acquiring ROMs for games you own copies of legal, even if those original cartridges no longer work. So if my ancient Zelda cartridge gives up the ghost, I can download a ROM and enjoy it on my PC.
The Justice department (and the enforcement panel) can certainly inspect the fees that are being charged here.
And who's on the enforcement panel? Why, I believe Microsoft is. What a coincidence. Yup, they can look at their own offerings and verify that they are indeed following the terms of the agreement.
First, given that there are licencees, obviously there are protocols to be licensed.
Licensees like SCO? That's not very good backing for the argument. And as I said, it'd be perfectly in-character for Microsoft to hand out a few licenses to point at when people accuse them of not following the agreement.
And there's no doubt that the Justice department & friends have seen the list.
This would be the list from the company that's famous for saying one thing and doing another? Or showing different things to different parties and making them swear not to talk about it on pain of being reduced to a greasy smear on the business landscape?
Obviously this process is going to be looked at very closely by the Justice department. Now the Judge wants an even CLOSER look. If your allegations were true they would be violating the terms, and I think we'd see something significant. What, do you think no one's paying any attention to what Microsoft's doing these days?
It is? The impression I got from Ashcroft's statements around the time of the settlement was that he thought the suit never should've been brought anyway (Microsoft is, after all, a good Christian company - remember that they've got "strategic partnerships" with several fundamentalist groups) and that he wanted to wash his hands of it as quickly as possible. I'm willing to bet that the Justice Department doesn't care what Microsoft's doing. They'd rather be chasing big-name bad guys, like Terrorists or Druggies. So far they've shown a startling disinclination to persecute Enron or White House staffers who committed treason in wartime - what makes you think they'll bother to pay attention to Microsoft?
This looks like one judge getting suspicious and wanting a closer look at the stuff she signed off on.
That means Microsoft is allowed to charge royalties for the protocols, but the royalty schedule is the same whether you are Sun or IBM or somebody else.
But the thing is, and what I think the original poster was saying, that doesn't seem to be the case. Microsoft appears to have a form that you fill out saying that you want to license something, and then they "get back to you" about the fees. That doesn't sound like the behavior of an entity that intends to use the same royalty schedule for IBM and SCO. In fact, it sounds suspiciously like an entity that's trying to avoid licensing its technology at all, except to carefully-chosen partners. (As "proof" that its complying)
Also convenient that you have to sign an NDA to look at the protocol list. This prevents you from telling the public, for example, that there are no protocols on the list. Or that Microsoft wanted to know what you'd use it for before giving you pricing information. Or any one of a dozen other violations.
Face it. Microsoft's violating the spirit and intent of the agreement while they try to look like they're adhering to its text. The wrist-slap just made their violations of the antitrust laws even bolder and more blatant, as they know the Cheney/Ashcroft/Rove administration won't touch them.
Remember this next time it comes time to vote or purchase software. Microsoft's a convicted felon. Yet they have more influence in your nation than you do, and recieved a smaller punishment than a 12-year-old girl who downloaded an MP3 off Kazaa.
Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
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· Score: 1
Damn, if you were competing against Vishnu for a job maintaining software... Well, I'm sorry to say this, but you've got no chance. And I don't think Vishnu really needs money all that much.
What the heck was your company doing to catch his attention, though?
Yeah - they'll stay the hell away from Office 2003, and anyone that tries to forward/send them one of these documents will wind up permanently blacklisted. Having an important legal or financial document (like, say, the one authorizing you to sell five million dollars of a client's shares) self-destruct four hours after you recieve it, leaving no paper trail, is a recipie for a lawsuit. Never mind companies built around "intellectual property" - this could make their lives a nightmare, because it makes something like the SCO suit that much easier to pull off.
The only thing this is going to get used on is things like the documents that got used to nail Microsoft in the antitrust lawsuit. Specifically, questionably legal internal policy documents. Convenient that their newest version of Office has features that supposedly make the sort of evidence-gathering that got them convicted impossible, isn't it?
Not that Canada's the only ones abusing the lawsuit provisions of NAFTA. I seem to recall that the US lumber industry, among others, have been harassing Canadian companies over supposed "unfair subsidies", even though they get exactly the same (if not larger) subsidies from the US government.
Yeah, I understand, and that's what makes it rediculous. How do you determine who the trademark holder(s) are when I type in Ford? Suppose there's a guy named Ford who runs a small but growing car dealership in Nowhereland called "Ford's Cars", and wants to raise awareness of his company. So he buys a text ad for the keyword "Ford"... But he also sells only Toyota vehicles. (Or a car salesman named "Toyota" who sells only Fords)
This ruling would seem to ban him from doing this. Even though he, I believe, has a valid trademark for the word 'Ford' in the context of car sales for the state of Nowhereland.
Of course, trademark law has always been applied to the Internet in a ludicrous fashion from the start. Remember the domain name dispute resolution process and all the ludicrous results THAT's produced.
Trademarks? WHAT trademarks? This is ludicrous. If someone types in Ford, how is Google supposed to know if they're searching for Ford Motors, Gerald Ford, or informating on fording rivers? If I type in Windows, do they have to screen all ads not by Microsoft - even those for window cleaners?
Insanity. Trademark laws were a good idea, but they're now even more insane than copyright laws. The courts seem to have forgotten that trademarks have a limited scope based on area of business and geographical area.
Yeah, but doesn't Pom Poko have the same message too? And maybe Totoro, come to think of it. It seems to be a common theme in Studio Ghibli's work, though there are many others that they use. Though I wouldn't say I got the same message from Nausicaa and Mononoke. Mononoke seemed to be more about living in harmony with nature (though not necessarily surrendering to it - remember that Iron Town was rebuilt by Ashitaka) while Nausicaa seemed to be more about accepting the inherent balance between corruption and purty that is life and not striving for either extreme. (The manga, at least - I've never seen the movie)
Indeed! This is exactly what most of us want. An ethical record label that lets us try the music and gives most of the money to the people who deserve it: the artists.
However, stupid moves like this will only kill off Yahoo's service. I know very few people who used it as their primary messenger service - most used it through something like Trillian or Jabber because they knew one or two people on it, and didn't want to bother with the official YIM client. Now that they've blocked Trillian and Jabber and such, these people have no reason to stay - they can't talk with their friends on YIM anymore, so they might as well move to AIM.
One of the main principles of the internet is that the value your the network to your users is proportional to the number of users on the network. The more users you have, even if they aren't all paying you, the more paying users you'll have because they'll have less reason to look elsewheres for their IM needs.
Except the objections are to patents that are a) trivial and b) abused. While IBM's may be trivial, they are definitely not abused. This is the first time I can remember hearing about IBM using them, which seems to say that IBM believes they shouldn't be used except to take out kamikaze lunatics like SCO that threaten the entire industry.
Ditto. I can't remember anyone except total MS fanatics cheering the demise of OS/2. Everyone I knew who knew anything about computers at the time was at least curious about it, and quite a few (especially in the PC gaming realm) saw Warp 4 as a serious contender to the much-hated tyranny andp pain of Windows and MS-DOS.
Thanks to the invisible hand, we got Win95 instead. Aren't monopolies wonderful?
Yes, IBM was once hated. That was back in the early PC days and the mainframe days, when they were the monopoly in the computer industry. The PC clones and the antitrust suit against them changed that - while they're a big player, they're no longer the only game in town and they're much less abusive than they once were.
IBM versus Microsoft and SCO? I know whose side I'm on.
Of course, they can fix this in a heartbeat -- just take their FTP server down.
Of course, THEN they get trod on by their own customers (what few they have left), who are suddenly without official support. Remember, its not just public distribution. IIRC, SCO can't distribute Linux at all while violating the GPL like this.
Well, we've got a solution! We define the OSI language code standard that's exactly the same as this one, but replaces all _s with -s. See, Slashdot can produce things other than bad BSD trolls and SCO stories!
The incentive is that it provides value to your customers, and thus gives them more reason to use your service. (And even your client) The value of an IM system grows with the number of users that have access. So even if you don't allow direct access for other clients, if you let your YIM users talk with AIM or Jabber users, they'll be less likely to leave your service for AIM or Jabber.
Its only one of the founding principles of the Internet.:P
As for funding, why bother with a centralized server?
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Personal liberty? You sure you aren't one of those commie pinko terrorist Linux-using MP3 pirates the tel-e-vizin's always warning me about? I mean, everyone knows that personal liberty's as unAmerican as home-made apple pie! The only American way to get apple pie or liberty is from some massive, faceless corporation!
That goes double since not only are any third-world petty dictator armies likely to be largely immune to it, relying on numbers instead of tech, and other first-world armies are going to be immune. Europe and such are at least as advanced as the US is, so you can bet that they'll either have EMP weapons of their own or shielding (read: thick lead cases) they can use on their essential gear to counter it.
Except that the US had a massive debt in the '80s and the early '90s. It was only the Clinton administration's careful sheparding of the budget that allowed them to create a surplus, and Bush blew that in a massive spending and kickback spree right after taking office. Oops!
AND didn't the White House just finish doing a number on Veteran's Comp? So while all these servicemen are hauling down the bonuses and helping the economy keep its head above water for now, think about what's going to happen when the quagmire's over and they're back home and on veteran's comp.
Now add that to the Bush administration's off-the-charts deficit spending.
Sounds like quite a mess for the next person to take office, isn't it?
Yeah, but that system would be readable and largely immunte to simple forms of tampering with the process itself. You could still strike thousands of "convicts" and minorities from the voting record, but you couldn't set up the ballot so that what looks like a vote for Gore is really a vote for Buchannan. And you couldn't have a voting machine report -16,000 Gore votes.
Remember, Diebold is 100% Republican owned and operated. While the Democrats may use similar dirty tricks, that's not the issue here. The issues is that the United State's election infrastructure is currently in the hands of one party... A party that's gotten a definite majority despite an almost-total lack of popular support. The issue here is that the party in power is corrupting the system to ensure they stay in power, and they need to get called on it.
Unfortunately, they also own the "liberal" media, so there's not much chance of that.
Sorry, no. If you don't accept the GPL, you default to ordinary copyright law and have no right to redistribute or modify at all. If you do accept the GPL, you have the right to redistribute and modify under certain controlled conditions.
Heck, OpenOffice 1.1 is in testing now.
Right. So that DOES seem to make acquiring ROMs for games you own copies of legal, even if those original cartridges no longer work. So if my ancient Zelda cartridge gives up the ghost, I can download a ROM and enjoy it on my PC.
The Justice department (and the enforcement panel) can certainly inspect the fees that are being charged here.
And who's on the enforcement panel? Why, I believe Microsoft is. What a coincidence. Yup, they can look at their own offerings and verify that they are indeed following the terms of the agreement.
First, given that there are licencees, obviously there are protocols to be licensed.
Licensees like SCO? That's not very good backing for the argument. And as I said, it'd be perfectly in-character for Microsoft to hand out a few licenses to point at when people accuse them of not following the agreement.
And there's no doubt that the Justice department & friends have seen the list.This would be the list from the company that's famous for saying one thing and doing another? Or showing different things to different parties and making them swear not to talk about it on pain of being reduced to a greasy smear on the business landscape?
Obviously this process is going to be looked at very closely by the Justice department. Now the Judge wants an even CLOSER look. If your allegations were true they would be violating the terms, and I think we'd see something significant. What, do you think no one's paying any attention to what Microsoft's doing these days?
It is? The impression I got from Ashcroft's statements around the time of the settlement was that he thought the suit never should've been brought anyway (Microsoft is, after all, a good Christian company - remember that they've got "strategic partnerships" with several fundamentalist groups) and that he wanted to wash his hands of it as quickly as possible. I'm willing to bet that the Justice Department doesn't care what Microsoft's doing. They'd rather be chasing big-name bad guys, like Terrorists or Druggies. So far they've shown a startling disinclination to persecute Enron or White House staffers who committed treason in wartime - what makes you think they'll bother to pay attention to Microsoft?
This looks like one judge getting suspicious and wanting a closer look at the stuff she signed off on.
That means Microsoft is allowed to charge royalties for the protocols, but the royalty schedule is the same whether you are Sun or IBM or somebody else.
But the thing is, and what I think the original poster was saying, that doesn't seem to be the case. Microsoft appears to have a form that you fill out saying that you want to license something, and then they "get back to you" about the fees. That doesn't sound like the behavior of an entity that intends to use the same royalty schedule for IBM and SCO. In fact, it sounds suspiciously like an entity that's trying to avoid licensing its technology at all, except to carefully-chosen partners. (As "proof" that its complying)
Also convenient that you have to sign an NDA to look at the protocol list. This prevents you from telling the public, for example, that there are no protocols on the list. Or that Microsoft wanted to know what you'd use it for before giving you pricing information. Or any one of a dozen other violations.
Face it. Microsoft's violating the spirit and intent of the agreement while they try to look like they're adhering to its text. The wrist-slap just made their violations of the antitrust laws even bolder and more blatant, as they know the Cheney/Ashcroft/Rove administration won't touch them.
Remember this next time it comes time to vote or purchase software. Microsoft's a convicted felon. Yet they have more influence in your nation than you do, and recieved a smaller punishment than a 12-year-old girl who downloaded an MP3 off Kazaa.
Damn, if you were competing against Vishnu for a job maintaining software... Well, I'm sorry to say this, but you've got no chance. And I don't think Vishnu really needs money all that much.
What the heck was your company doing to catch his attention, though?
Yeah - they'll stay the hell away from Office 2003, and anyone that tries to forward/send them one of these documents will wind up permanently blacklisted. Having an important legal or financial document (like, say, the one authorizing you to sell five million dollars of a client's shares) self-destruct four hours after you recieve it, leaving no paper trail, is a recipie for a lawsuit. Never mind companies built around "intellectual property" - this could make their lives a nightmare, because it makes something like the SCO suit that much easier to pull off.
The only thing this is going to get used on is things like the documents that got used to nail Microsoft in the antitrust lawsuit. Specifically, questionably legal internal policy documents. Convenient that their newest version of Office has features that supposedly make the sort of evidence-gathering that got them convicted impossible, isn't it?
Not that Canada's the only ones abusing the lawsuit provisions of NAFTA. I seem to recall that the US lumber industry, among others, have been harassing Canadian companies over supposed "unfair subsidies", even though they get exactly the same (if not larger) subsidies from the US government.
Yeah, I understand, and that's what makes it rediculous. How do you determine who the trademark holder(s) are when I type in Ford? Suppose there's a guy named Ford who runs a small but growing car dealership in Nowhereland called "Ford's Cars", and wants to raise awareness of his company. So he buys a text ad for the keyword "Ford"... But he also sells only Toyota vehicles. (Or a car salesman named "Toyota" who sells only Fords)
This ruling would seem to ban him from doing this. Even though he, I believe, has a valid trademark for the word 'Ford' in the context of car sales for the state of Nowhereland.
Of course, trademark law has always been applied to the Internet in a ludicrous fashion from the start. Remember the domain name dispute resolution process and all the ludicrous results THAT's produced.
Trademarks? WHAT trademarks? This is ludicrous. If someone types in Ford, how is Google supposed to know if they're searching for Ford Motors, Gerald Ford, or informating on fording rivers? If I type in Windows, do they have to screen all ads not by Microsoft - even those for window cleaners?
Insanity. Trademark laws were a good idea, but they're now even more insane than copyright laws. The courts seem to have forgotten that trademarks have a limited scope based on area of business and geographical area.
Yeah, but doesn't Pom Poko have the same message too? And maybe Totoro, come to think of it. It seems to be a common theme in Studio Ghibli's work, though there are many others that they use. Though I wouldn't say I got the same message from Nausicaa and Mononoke. Mononoke seemed to be more about living in harmony with nature (though not necessarily surrendering to it - remember that Iron Town was rebuilt by Ashitaka) while Nausicaa seemed to be more about accepting the inherent balance between corruption and purty that is life and not striving for either extreme. (The manga, at least - I've never seen the movie)
Or English to Newspeak. Doubleplusungood!
Indeed! This is exactly what most of us want. An ethical record label that lets us try the music and gives most of the money to the people who deserve it: the artists.
However, stupid moves like this will only kill off Yahoo's service. I know very few people who used it as their primary messenger service - most used it through something like Trillian or Jabber because they knew one or two people on it, and didn't want to bother with the official YIM client. Now that they've blocked Trillian and Jabber and such, these people have no reason to stay - they can't talk with their friends on YIM anymore, so they might as well move to AIM.
One of the main principles of the internet is that the value your the network to your users is proportional to the number of users on the network. The more users you have, even if they aren't all paying you, the more paying users you'll have because they'll have less reason to look elsewheres for their IM needs.
Except the objections are to patents that are a) trivial and b) abused. While IBM's may be trivial, they are definitely not abused. This is the first time I can remember hearing about IBM using them, which seems to say that IBM believes they shouldn't be used except to take out kamikaze lunatics like SCO that threaten the entire industry.
Ditto. I can't remember anyone except total MS fanatics cheering the demise of OS/2. Everyone I knew who knew anything about computers at the time was at least curious about it, and quite a few (especially in the PC gaming realm) saw Warp 4 as a serious contender to the much-hated tyranny andp pain of Windows and MS-DOS.
Thanks to the invisible hand, we got Win95 instead. Aren't monopolies wonderful?
Yes, IBM was once hated. That was back in the early PC days and the mainframe days, when they were the monopoly in the computer industry. The PC clones and the antitrust suit against them changed that - while they're a big player, they're no longer the only game in town and they're much less abusive than they once were.
IBM versus Microsoft and SCO? I know whose side I'm on.
Of course, they can fix this in a heartbeat -- just take their FTP server down.
Of course, THEN they get trod on by their own customers (what few they have left), who are suddenly without official support. Remember, its not just public distribution. IIRC, SCO can't distribute Linux at all while violating the GPL like this.
Well, we've got a solution! We define the OSI language code standard that's exactly the same as this one, but replaces all _s with -s. See, Slashdot can produce things other than bad BSD trolls and SCO stories!
Umm... Why would the user run their own? They don't run their own e-mail server, do they? Yet most still manage to get their e-mail just fine.
The incentive is that it provides value to your customers, and thus gives them more reason to use your service. (And even your client) The value of an IM system grows with the number of users that have access. So even if you don't allow direct access for other clients, if you let your YIM users talk with AIM or Jabber users, they'll be less likely to leave your service for AIM or Jabber.
Its only one of the founding principles of the Internet. :P
As for funding, why bother with a centralized server?