Some guy who also happens to be the co-inventor of UTF-8, the author of the first Unix windowing system, co-creator of Plan9 and Inferno, and co-author of a couple of the most respected books on Unix programming and programming in general. To dismiss him as a guy who works for an ad company is ridiculous.
Nonsense. First of all, EDT isn't even the most favorable district for patent plaintiffs. There are something like half a dozen districts where plaintiffs do better.
If you nuked EDT, all you would do is cause the suits to spread out to other districts, to the detriment of defendants. The reason so many suits are in EDT is because EDT can provide reasonably speedy trials. There are two reasons for this. First, because there have been many patent suits there in the past, the courts are familiar with patent litigation, which is one of the more complex areas of litigation. When you have a patent case in a court that has not dealt with patent cases, it is very slow going. (And much more likely that the judge will make reversible errors, so if you do fight off the troll, you'll just end up doing it all over again when the troll gets the verdict thrown out and the case remanded for a new trial on appeal).
Second, EDT doesn't have many Federal criminal cases. Criminal cases take priority over civil cases in Federal court, due to the constitutional requirement of a speedy trial for criminal cases. In districts where there are a lot of federal criminal cases (e.g., any place where the stupid war on drugs is being heavily waged) civil cases can take months or years to even get to preliminary hearings. File a patent case in one of those districts, and you'll be tied up for many many many years--something neither side wants.
Given a choice between being sued in EDT and being sued in the plaintiff's home district (if that is different from the defendant's home district), I would bet that most defendants would pick EDT, to get it over faster and keep costs down.
Out of curiosity once, I picked a particular porn model, and kept an eye out for that model on those sites that show a ton of small photos from a variety of sites. When I'd find a hit I'd check to see if it linked to another such site or linked to a sample of that model's work. If the later, I downloaded and kept the samples. After a couple months of this, I'd gathered a pretty decent collection of that model.
I then went and signed up for a month to get access to the full sets of photos, and grabbed them all and compared to what I'd collected in the couple months of grabbing the free samples.
It turned out I had pretty much everything. They rotated the samples, and over a few months rotated through the complete set.
Here's the summary, as provided by the site itself: Blue Screen of Death caused a crucial computer system not to prevent the biggest disaster of the 21st century. So yes, they are in fact claiming that it was a Windows failure that actually led to the explosion and oil spill.
I had thought that they had reached the limit of over-the-top claims when they tried to imply Microsoft caused Reiser to murder his wife, but they sure proved me wrong on that!
If I sit down and, without looking at WordPress code, write a WordPress theme, then I have not copied, adapted, translated, etc., any copyrightable WordPress elements, and hence have not made a derivative work. I may have Googled to find out the names and calling information for WordPress functions, but those are not copyrightable elements.
This is no different from writing an unauthorized plug-in for a proprietary program, or an unauthorized application for a closed phone, or an unauthorized game for a console. The vendor of the proprietary program, phone, or game console may be able to stop it, but not on the grounds of it being an unauthorized derivative work. They have to resort to other grounds, such as the user using it forms an unauthorized derivative work when the user combines my code and their code to run it and that violates their EULA. I can then be held for contributory infringement, based on that user's infringement.
This sometimes works for proprietary vendors to stop unauthorized third-party software (e.g., Blizzard stopped unauthorized WoW add-ons this way, I believe). It will not work for a free software vendor to stop unauthorized third party plug-ins, because the end user is authorized to make and use derivative works, and so it is not an infringement by the end user. If there is no DIRECT infringement by the end user, it is IMPOSSIBLE for their to be contributory infringement by the plug-in vendor.
Note that the above all assumes that I did not copy from WordPress when making my theme. If I actually copy from it, then there is a problem.
His analysis is all about how the code works when someone takes a theme and loads it in WordPress. While accurate on the technical details, it completely misses the point. When someone runs a theme in WordPress, they have caused a derivative work of WordPress to be created. They've also caused a derivative work of the theme to be created. No one seriously questions this. However, the license of WordPress allows this, so there's no problem here.
The important question is whether or not a WordPress theme, AS DISTRIBUTED BY ITS AUTHOR, is a derivative work, and he fails to address this. The answer to that depends on whether or not the theme has incorporated (by copying, transforming, adapting, etc) any copyrightable elements of WordPress.
The particular theme in question did include such elements, and so has a problem. However, in general, you do not appear to have to include any copyrightable Wordpress elements in a theme, and so a theme does not inherently have to be GPL.
The majority of court cases that are relevant to this agree that writing code X to interface to code Y does NOT automatically make X a derivative work of Y. The FSF thinks that merely designing code to link with another piece of code makes the first a derivative work of the other, but there's no court cases that support that view, and better lawyers (such as Larry Rosen) than the FSF uses say that it doesn't automatically make a derivative work.
Section 2 only covers the requirement that source code must be transmitted along with the product itself. There is no guarantee of indiscriminate redistribution contained in this section.
Yes, there is stop. Stop playing stupid games. First, you ignore section 2. Then when it is called to your attention, you only read part of it. Read the whole of section 2.
If humans can survive at, say, 1000 mph entering the atmosphere, that still implies you have only 100 something miles (or maybe less) to decelerate around 13000 mph. I don't know whether or not this would cause problems, but I'm guessing in order for that to happen, organs are going to get squished
14000 mph to 1000 mph over a distance of 100 miles would be 12.3 g deceleration for 48 seconds.
This is survivable with no damage and no loss of consciousness by untrained individuals if they are facing the direction of travel (or, as wikipedia puts it, "eyeballs-in"). The limit for eyeballs-in with no damage or LOC experimentally is about 17g. Eyeball-out is only 12g.
If the force is parallel to the spine, rather than perpendicular, the numbers are much lower. Around 9g for a trained person in a g suit.
So, as long as this was done in a controlled fashion, so as to keep the people aligned properly, it would be survivable and not too harmful, at least for healthy people. Probably not too pleasant.
However, your 100 miles is way to low. It's 100 miles if they are traveling straight down, but they would not be. They are starting with a velocity of 14000 mph perpendicular to straight down. The goal is to end up 100 miles lower with a velocity of 1000 mph or less, so you can enter the atmosphere. You'd do this over much longer than 48 seconds, and travel much farther than 100 miles while doing it. Depending on how much fuel you've got, you could make it arbitrarily gentle.
I forget the exact value -- LEO isn't my specialty -- but objects in low Earth orbit are traveling somewhere north of 14,000 mph. (Meteors coming in from interplanetary space have even faster velocities measured in km/sec.)
14000 mph is fast enough to reasonably measure in km/sec, as it is 6.3 km/sec.
So, suppose the guys in the parachutes changed their minds and didn't link up with Pastrana, instead letting him fall to his death.
Murder? Manslaughter? Negligent homicide? Generally, one does not have an obligation to save another person's life (final episode of Seinfeld notwithstanding), so it would be perfectly legal for a skydiver who sees a fellow skydiver fall by without a suit to decline to try to help. On the other hand, presumably the two other skydivers had told Pastrana that they would save him, so they certainly have some kind of obligation to try to do so.
I spent several years as a Unix kernel hacker, working extensively with AT&T source code. I also went to law school and was one bad case of writer's block away from becoming a copyright lawyer. Thus I found those code snippets quite interesting, both from my Unix kernel hacker persepective and my almost-became-a-copyright-laywer perspective.
My conclusion, from the half dozen or so of his samples that I looked at? They show nothing remotely resembling copyright violation.
Copyright covers expression, not ideas.
What that means when dealing with functional works, such as computer programs, is that things that anyone implementing that functionality will have to do are unlikely to be covered by copyright.
All of the functions I saw that were allegedly copied were very simple functions.
All they did was check arguments to make sure they were legal, return the expected error code if not, or return some very simply value otherwise.
Even if the corresponding functions in Linux were exact matches to the SCO code, it would probably not be enough to support an inference of copying, because there just aren't a lot of ways to reasonably express such simple functions. And they were not exact matches. One would check for a null pointer by comparing to NULL, one would use if(!p), for instance.
The header files are more similar, so copying is more believable there.
The problem with SCO's case there is that the elements in the header files I looked at are entirely dictated by compatibility requirements. There's no copyrightable expression in them.
To summarize, SCO's claims appear to fall into two groups. First, things where the implementation is so simple that it is not possible to infer copying from similarity since the similarity is imposed by the nature of the function. Second, things where there may have been copying--of things that aren't protected by copyright.
Treat the disk as if it were a tape, and use the GNU version of cpio.
You can install GNU cpio via macports on your Macs, and people with Linux should find it either already installed or available in their distribution's package system.
You need to use the GNU cpio instead of the BSD cpio that ships with OS X because there are incompatibilities between the two, and I was unable to find a set of settings that would make them compatible. (There are settings that should, but they did not work, so there's a bug in one or the other--or both. However, after a few minutes experimenting it occurred to me to just grab GNU cpio from macports and use it on both ends, so I never pursued tracking down the incompatibility)
To create anything for any of their platforms, you need to use Apple tools, Apple hardware and pay Apple. It's not even technical limits on the hardware, but all artifical barriers created by Apple
Wrong on all three points. You can create Mac software without using Apple tools, without using Apple hardware, and you don't have to pay Apple anything.
If it is like the US, ham radio is not supposed to supplant other services. For instance, last time I checked (several years ago, so I don't know if this changed) you could not do broadcasts over ham radio. That's for regular radio services. Ham was for person to person communication. I could see prohibiting connecting to the internet to fall under that kind of policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Some guy who also happens to be the co-inventor of UTF-8, the author of the first Unix windowing system, co-creator of Plan9 and Inferno, and co-author of a couple of the most respected books on Unix programming and programming in general. To dismiss him as a guy who works for an ad company is ridiculous.
Nonsense. First of all, EDT isn't even the most favorable district for patent plaintiffs. There are something like half a dozen districts where plaintiffs do better.
If you nuked EDT, all you would do is cause the suits to spread out to other districts, to the detriment of defendants. The reason so many suits are in EDT is because EDT can provide reasonably speedy trials. There are two reasons for this. First, because there have been many patent suits there in the past, the courts are familiar with patent litigation, which is one of the more complex areas of litigation. When you have a patent case in a court that has not dealt with patent cases, it is very slow going. (And much more likely that the judge will make reversible errors, so if you do fight off the troll, you'll just end up doing it all over again when the troll gets the verdict thrown out and the case remanded for a new trial on appeal).
Second, EDT doesn't have many Federal criminal cases. Criminal cases take priority over civil cases in Federal court, due to the constitutional requirement of a speedy trial for criminal cases. In districts where there are a lot of federal criminal cases (e.g., any place where the stupid war on drugs is being heavily waged) civil cases can take months or years to even get to preliminary hearings. File a patent case in one of those districts, and you'll be tied up for many many many years--something neither side wants.
Given a choice between being sued in EDT and being sued in the plaintiff's home district (if that is different from the defendant's home district), I would bet that most defendants would pick EDT, to get it over faster and keep costs down.
How careful were you to not give too much away?
Out of curiosity once, I picked a particular porn model, and kept an eye out for that model on those sites that show a ton of small photos from a variety of sites. When I'd find a hit I'd check to see if it linked to another such site or linked to a sample of that model's work. If the later, I downloaded and kept the samples. After a couple months of this, I'd gathered a pretty decent collection of that model.
I then went and signed up for a month to get access to the full sets of photos, and grabbed them all and compared to what I'd collected in the couple months of grabbing the free samples.
It turned out I had pretty much everything. They rotated the samples, and over a few months rotated through the complete set.
Nobody is bashing Windows so far[...]
Don't worry, the "journalists" at Boycott Novel have that covered: Microsoft Windows BSOD Caused Deepwater Horizon Disaster.
Here's the summary, as provided by the site itself: Blue Screen of Death caused a crucial computer system not to prevent the biggest disaster of the 21st century . So yes, they are in fact claiming that it was a Windows failure that actually led to the explosion and oil spill.
I had thought that they had reached the limit of over-the-top claims when they tried to imply Microsoft caused Reiser to murder his wife, but they sure proved me wrong on that!
If I sit down and, without looking at WordPress code, write a WordPress theme, then I have not copied, adapted, translated, etc., any copyrightable WordPress elements, and hence have not made a derivative work. I may have Googled to find out the names and calling information for WordPress functions, but those are not copyrightable elements.
This is no different from writing an unauthorized plug-in for a proprietary program, or an unauthorized application for a closed phone, or an unauthorized game for a console. The vendor of the proprietary program, phone, or game console may be able to stop it, but not on the grounds of it being an unauthorized derivative work. They have to resort to other grounds, such as the user using it forms an unauthorized derivative work when the user combines my code and their code to run it and that violates their EULA. I can then be held for contributory infringement, based on that user's infringement.
This sometimes works for proprietary vendors to stop unauthorized third-party software (e.g., Blizzard stopped unauthorized WoW add-ons this way, I believe). It will not work for a free software vendor to stop unauthorized third party plug-ins, because the end user is authorized to make and use derivative works, and so it is not an infringement by the end user. If there is no DIRECT infringement by the end user, it is IMPOSSIBLE for their to be contributory infringement by the plug-in vendor.
Note that the above all assumes that I did not copy from WordPress when making my theme. If I actually copy from it, then there is a problem.
His analysis is all about how the code works when someone takes a theme and loads it in WordPress. While accurate on the technical details, it completely misses the point. When someone runs a theme in WordPress, they have caused a derivative work of WordPress to be created. They've also caused a derivative work of the theme to be created. No one seriously questions this. However, the license of WordPress allows this, so there's no problem here.
The important question is whether or not a WordPress theme, AS DISTRIBUTED BY ITS AUTHOR, is a derivative work, and he fails to address this. The answer to that depends on whether or not the theme has incorporated (by copying, transforming, adapting, etc) any copyrightable elements of WordPress.
The particular theme in question did include such elements, and so has a problem. However, in general, you do not appear to have to include any copyrightable Wordpress elements in a theme, and so a theme does not inherently have to be GPL.
The majority of court cases that are relevant to this agree that writing code X to interface to code Y does NOT automatically make X a derivative work of Y. The FSF thinks that merely designing code to link with another piece of code makes the first a derivative work of the other, but there's no court cases that support that view, and better lawyers (such as Larry Rosen) than the FSF uses say that it doesn't automatically make a derivative work.
And now you overlook section 4...
Section 2 only covers the requirement that source code must be transmitted along with the product itself. There is no guarantee of indiscriminate redistribution contained in this section.
Yes, there is stop. Stop playing stupid games. First, you ignore section 2. Then when it is called to your attention, you only read part of it. Read the whole of section 2.
If humans can survive at, say, 1000 mph entering the atmosphere, that still implies you have only 100 something miles (or maybe less) to decelerate around 13000 mph. I don't know whether or not this would cause problems, but I'm guessing in order for that to happen, organs are going to get squished
14000 mph to 1000 mph over a distance of 100 miles would be 12.3 g deceleration for 48 seconds.
This is survivable with no damage and no loss of consciousness by untrained individuals if they are facing the direction of travel (or, as wikipedia puts it, "eyeballs-in"). The limit for eyeballs-in with no damage or LOC experimentally is about 17g. Eyeball-out is only 12g.
If the force is parallel to the spine, rather than perpendicular, the numbers are much lower. Around 9g for a trained person in a g suit.
So, as long as this was done in a controlled fashion, so as to keep the people aligned properly, it would be survivable and not too harmful, at least for healthy people. Probably not too pleasant.
However, your 100 miles is way to low. It's 100 miles if they are traveling straight down, but they would not be. They are starting with a velocity of 14000 mph perpendicular to straight down. The goal is to end up 100 miles lower with a velocity of 1000 mph or less, so you can enter the atmosphere. You'd do this over much longer than 48 seconds, and travel much farther than 100 miles while doing it. Depending on how much fuel you've got, you could make it arbitrarily gentle.
I forget the exact value -- LEO isn't my specialty -- but objects in low Earth orbit are traveling somewhere north of 14,000 mph. (Meteors coming in from interplanetary space have even faster velocities measured in km/sec.)
14000 mph is fast enough to reasonably measure in km/sec, as it is 6.3 km/sec.
So, suppose the guys in the parachutes changed their minds and didn't link up with Pastrana, instead letting him fall to his death.
Murder? Manslaughter? Negligent homicide? Generally, one does not have an obligation to save another person's life (final episode of Seinfeld notwithstanding), so it would be perfectly legal for a skydiver who sees a fellow skydiver fall by without a suit to decline to try to help. On the other hand, presumably the two other skydivers had told Pastrana that they would save him, so they certainly have some kind of obligation to try to do so.
Try section 2.
That's nice. However, there are other sections besides section 1. They aren't there just to help with the feng shui of the site.
I spent several years as a Unix kernel hacker, working extensively with AT&T source code. I also went to law school and was one bad case of writer's block away from becoming a copyright lawyer. Thus I found those code snippets quite interesting, both from my Unix kernel hacker persepective and my almost-became-a-copyright-laywer perspective.
My conclusion, from the half dozen or so of his samples that I looked at? They show nothing remotely resembling copyright violation.
Copyright covers expression, not ideas. What that means when dealing with functional works, such as computer programs, is that things that anyone implementing that functionality will have to do are unlikely to be covered by copyright.
All of the functions I saw that were allegedly copied were very simple functions. All they did was check arguments to make sure they were legal, return the expected error code if not, or return some very simply value otherwise.
Even if the corresponding functions in Linux were exact matches to the SCO code, it would probably not be enough to support an inference of copying, because there just aren't a lot of ways to reasonably express such simple functions. And they were not exact matches. One would check for a null pointer by comparing to NULL, one would use if(!p), for instance.
The header files are more similar, so copying is more believable there. The problem with SCO's case there is that the elements in the header files I looked at are entirely dictated by compatibility requirements. There's no copyrightable expression in them.
To summarize, SCO's claims appear to fall into two groups. First, things where the implementation is so simple that it is not possible to infer copying from similarity since the similarity is imposed by the nature of the function. Second, things where there may have been copying--of things that aren't protected by copyright.
That's nothing. I paid $2500 for a TV, and there are ads on it!
How exactly is iBooks prior art for an application filed a year before iBooks was first shown?
That's been updated and replaced by SQL and Relational Theory: How to Write Accurate SQL Code .
There is so much editorializing in the submission, and so little explanation, that I have no idea what the submission is about.
Stick to the facts in the submission. The rest belongs in comments.
Treat the disk as if it were a tape, and use the GNU version of cpio.
You can install GNU cpio via macports on your Macs, and people with Linux should find it either already installed or available in their distribution's package system.
You need to use the GNU cpio instead of the BSD cpio that ships with OS X because there are incompatibilities between the two, and I was unable to find a set of settings that would make them compatible. (There are settings that should, but they did not work, so there's a bug in one or the other--or both. However, after a few minutes experimenting it occurred to me to just grab GNU cpio from macports and use it on both ends, so I never pursued tracking down the incompatibility)
Note that you can also get GNU cpio for Windows.
In 1997, Internet Explorer was a really good browser compared to the competition.
To create anything for any of their platforms, you need to use Apple tools, Apple hardware and pay Apple. It's not even technical limits on the hardware, but all artifical barriers created by Apple
Wrong on all three points. You can create Mac software without using Apple tools, without using Apple hardware, and you don't have to pay Apple anything.
Why not blame RMS for the 3000 jobs lost? He too opposed Oracle getting control of MySQL.
If there were gays at Google, they would have a lot more beautiful site design.
If it is like the US, ham radio is not supposed to supplant other services. For instance, last time I checked (several years ago, so I don't know if this changed) you could not do broadcasts over ham radio. That's for regular radio services. Ham was for person to person communication. I could see prohibiting connecting to the internet to fall under that kind of policy.
TAOCP is being rewritten to use Java.