Hal. Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
The fraction of insightful but contrarian postings is probably small, so you simply aren't going to see a lot of them moderated down even if they are consistently moderated out of existence. And unless metamoderation has fairly complete coverage, it's not going to help those postings recover either.
You're basically saying the same thing as me in terms of what people can do, but you're wrong on the motivation. The purpose of trademarks is to protect buyers, not to help companies. Brand identity and good names are simply the incentives for companies to maintain their trademarks.
But those are inexpensive products where the cost of testing them is a few bucks. When I upgrade to an HDTV, it's going to be a Toshiba or Sony or Samsung or LG; it's not going to be an Avanti. When I spend $2,000, I want the assurance of a brand name (quality, warranty, likelihood the maker will be around in five years).
Of course, that is the purpose of trademarks.
Now: how is returning an ad by Avanti in response to a search for "Samsung" going to diminish that assurance? Are you somehow too stupid to figure out that an ad that says "Avanti TVs" is actually for Avanti TVs?
The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools.
And some teacher with a few years of college education two decades ago and in a different field is? Or some textbook whose primary purpose is not to teach but to make money for the publisher? Or newspaper articles written by reporters who care more about their own notoriety than getting the facts right?
Students need to learn early on that there is no single "reliable" source of information; claims and assertions need to be examined and checked for consistency with lots of sources.
Far from being bad for education, Wikipedia is an excellent educational site, if not for its content (which is often better that sources that claim authority), then at least for discussions about authority and knowledge. Of course, that appears to be a fact lost on the school board, which tells me that instead of blocking Wikipedia, the school district should fire the school board.
The Utah legislators are confusing trademarks with owning a word. The purpose of a trademark is to identify a product uniquely, not to give a company control of a word.
Advertising a competing product when potential customers search for a trademark is exactly what trademarks were supposed to accomplish.
I'd say on most days it does a fair job of at least hiding the blatant trolls from view.
Unfortunately, it also lets fanboys/shills for platform/company/philosophy X hide comments critical of platform/company/philosophy X. And they do, with great regularity.
"Plagiarism" is an academic and creative concept. Plagiarism is about denying an individual credit for his creativity and misrepresenting someone else's ideas as your own. Using a text input method file from another product in your own product is not plagiarism because it doesn't involve creative ideas and because creating this kind of product is not about giving credit to individuals. Google may or may not be violating copyright (but, then, this is China).
That is not to say that a company can never commit plagiarism. In fact, several well-known computer companies are claiming in their marketing materials that they invented important technologies that they simply did not invent; arguably, they are committing some form of plagiarism, since they are, in fact, misrepresenting the source of creative ideas.
He's right that the single biggest reason phones are not allowed on planes is that it would annoy the hell out of many passengers. So what?
Allowing cell phone use on planes would be disastrous: people couldn't get any work done, they couldn't sleep, and there would be many more incidences of air rage.
The ban is justified, reasonable, and a good thing. I hope it will stay in place.
(Strictly speaking, allowing SMS and IM might make sense on planes, but I'd rather not have anything at all than open the door to people like him making a nuisance of themselves.)
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you saying that publication in that web log constitutes prior art? It probably doesn't; not every publication counts as public disclosure from a patent point of view.
Sounds like the devs of the gpl didn't even try to contact the original module dev at all,
Why should they? The original module developer apparently copied and misrepresented a piece of source code, which means that he can't be trusted.
While it was his right to kick and scream and cry in a public setting, is that the most mature thing to do?
He didn't "kick and scream", he sent a clear and well-written message to the mailing list. Not only was it the "most mature" thing to do, it was the right thing to do.
I think you just don't get in what kind of legal hot water BSD can get through this kind of behavior. Or perhaps you do, which is why you want to sweep it under the rug.
Trouble is that programming is not a solitary occupation anymore; it's done in large groups, and much of it involves face-to-face communication, compromise, and group decision making.
As far as I'm concerned, the only acceptable reaction from a developer, open source or otherwise, to an allegation of a GPL violation is "we'll look into it right away and let you know". And the only acceptable reaction to a documented GPL violation is "we're sorry, we are going to remove the offending code immediately, and we're putting mechanisms in place to make sure it doesn't happen again".
Yes, a presentation with PowerPoint may be worse than a presentation without PowerPoint, but it's usually better than no presentation at all. And PowerPoint does make preparation of presentations easy enough that a lot of stuff people wouldn't have talked about/shown in the past now gets at least talked about.
These developers have to compete against multi billion dollar software companies that provide reasonably unified APIs, UIs and frankly, better backward compatibility.
You must be kidding. UNIX APIs (also implemented in Linux) have been stable since before Windows even existed, and X11 applications from 20 years ago still work without change. Not only have those APIs been rock solid and stable, they are stable because they were designed right from the start.
In contrast, both Microsoft and Apple have gone through half a dozen incompatible, broken APIs each over the same time period.
I'm left wondering if Lua is merely a language for writing extensions or if it's intended for building things (like, say, application frameworks?).
It's primarily intended for writing extensions. That is, a little bit of scripting and configuratino that goes into a big C/C++ program.
The other thing I hope someone here can answer is this: are there no other languages designed for extending other applications?
Tcl/Tk was also designed for this purpose, but doesn't work as well. S-Lang is another choice.
Why can't this be done in Ruby or Python or Perl or JavaScript?
You can embed Ruby, Python, Perl, or JavaScript, and sometimes that makes sense. However, those languages and their implementations aren't primarily designed for embedding. For example, you can trivially embed Lua in a self-contained executable, but if you embed Python, you will probably have to ship some Python library functions with it, plus the installers and path management necessary to support that. Documentation and security are also much easier for embedded Lua.
For the same 181K, I can get python embedded in my application.
Except it won't be Python, it will be Python-without-its-standard-library. And that's pretty much what Lua is, except for minor syntactic differences and the fact that Lua is easier to interface with from C and runs faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Hal. Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
The fraction of insightful but contrarian postings is probably small, so you simply aren't going to see a lot of them moderated down even if they are consistently moderated out of existence. And unless metamoderation has fairly complete coverage, it's not going to help those postings recover either.
You're basically saying the same thing as me in terms of what people can do, but you're wrong on the motivation. The purpose of trademarks is to protect buyers, not to help companies. Brand identity and good names are simply the incentives for companies to maintain their trademarks.
But those are inexpensive products where the cost of testing them is a few bucks. When I upgrade to an HDTV, it's going to be a Toshiba or Sony or Samsung or LG; it's not going to be an Avanti. When I spend $2,000, I want the assurance of a brand name (quality, warranty, likelihood the maker will be around in five years).
Of course, that is the purpose of trademarks.
Now: how is returning an ad by Avanti in response to a search for "Samsung" going to diminish that assurance? Are you somehow too stupid to figure out that an ad that says "Avanti TVs" is actually for Avanti TVs?
"Open Source and Linux Has No Place in OLPC"
"The Top 5 Things I Hate About Linux"
Either the guy is an opinionated moron, or he is simply paid by Microsoft to attack any technology that threatens Microsoft's cash cows.
The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools.
And some teacher with a few years of college education two decades ago and in a different field is? Or some textbook whose primary purpose is not to teach but to make money for the publisher? Or newspaper articles written by reporters who care more about their own notoriety than getting the facts right?
Students need to learn early on that there is no single "reliable" source of information; claims and assertions need to be examined and checked for consistency with lots of sources.
Far from being bad for education, Wikipedia is an excellent educational site, if not for its content (which is often better that sources that claim authority), then at least for discussions about authority and knowledge. Of course, that appears to be a fact lost on the school board, which tells me that instead of blocking Wikipedia, the school district should fire the school board.
The Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japanese equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)...
The Utah legislators are confusing trademarks with owning a word. The purpose of a trademark is to identify a product uniquely, not to give a company control of a word.
Advertising a competing product when potential customers search for a trademark is exactly what trademarks were supposed to accomplish.
I'd say on most days it does a fair job of at least hiding the blatant trolls from view.
Unfortunately, it also lets fanboys/shills for platform/company/philosophy X hide comments critical of platform/company/philosophy X. And they do, with great regularity.
"Plagiarism" is an academic and creative concept. Plagiarism is about denying an individual credit for his creativity and misrepresenting someone else's ideas as your own. Using a text input method file from another product in your own product is not plagiarism because it doesn't involve creative ideas and because creating this kind of product is not about giving credit to individuals. Google may or may not be violating copyright (but, then, this is China).
That is not to say that a company can never commit plagiarism. In fact, several well-known computer companies are claiming in their marketing materials that they invented important technologies that they simply did not invent; arguably, they are committing some form of plagiarism, since they are, in fact, misrepresenting the source of creative ideas.
He's right that the single biggest reason phones are not allowed on planes is that it would annoy the hell out of many passengers. So what?
Allowing cell phone use on planes would be disastrous: people couldn't get any work done, they couldn't sleep, and there would be many more incidences of air rage.
The ban is justified, reasonable, and a good thing. I hope it will stay in place.
(Strictly speaking, allowing SMS and IM might make sense on planes, but I'd rather not have anything at all than open the door to people like him making a nuisance of themselves.)
Yeah, funny, is saying the same thing I'm saying:
"In different words, first-to-file doesn't give you the ability to invent something and then sit on it without patenting it."
It's particularly funny since you cite the same paragraph that I cite.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you saying that publication in that web log constitutes prior art? It probably doesn't; not every publication counts as public disclosure from a patent point of view.
Why should a successful multi-protocol open source project advertise an obsolete on-line service anyway?
The only thing unreasonable about the email that I saw was the wide distribution.
I see nothing unreasonable about it.
The initial email from Michael Buesch, IMHO, should have gone to the comitter and the OpenBSD core team...
The CVS repository was public, so it was appropriate to send the message to the corresponding public mailing list.
It doesn't matter what license the stolen code was under. The issue is that the OpenBSD module author took code without complying with its license.
So, debates about the relative meaning of the BSD and GPL license are simply not relevant.
Sounds like the devs of the gpl didn't even try to contact the original module dev at all,
Why should they? The original module developer apparently copied and misrepresented a piece of source code, which means that he can't be trusted.
While it was his right to kick and scream and cry in a public setting, is that the most mature thing to do?
He didn't "kick and scream", he sent a clear and well-written message to the mailing list. Not only was it the "most mature" thing to do, it was the right thing to do.
I think you just don't get in what kind of legal hot water BSD can get through this kind of behavior. Or perhaps you do, which is why you want to sweep it under the rug.
Trouble is that programming is not a solitary occupation anymore; it's done in large groups, and much of it involves face-to-face communication, compromise, and group decision making.
As far as I'm concerned, the only acceptable reaction from a developer, open source or otherwise, to an allegation of a GPL violation is "we'll look into it right away and let you know". And the only acceptable reaction to a documented GPL violation is "we're sorry, we are going to remove the offending code immediately, and we're putting mechanisms in place to make sure it doesn't happen again".
Yes, a presentation with PowerPoint may be worse than a presentation without PowerPoint, but it's usually better than no presentation at all. And PowerPoint does make preparation of presentations easy enough that a lot of stuff people wouldn't have talked about/shown in the past now gets at least talked about.
I volunteer Bush. Either way, we can't lose.
These developers have to compete against multi billion dollar software companies that provide reasonably unified APIs, UIs and frankly, better backward compatibility.
You must be kidding. UNIX APIs (also implemented in Linux) have been stable since before Windows even existed, and X11 applications from 20 years ago still work without change. Not only have those APIs been rock solid and stable, they are stable because they were designed right from the start.
In contrast, both Microsoft and Apple have gone through half a dozen incompatible, broken APIs each over the same time period.
One of linux's greatest weaknesses is the amount of duplication that happens.
It's called a "free market approach", "competition", and "customer choice". Windows and Macintosh should try it sometimes.
I'm left wondering if Lua is merely a language for writing extensions or if it's intended for building things (like, say, application frameworks?).
It's primarily intended for writing extensions. That is, a little bit of scripting and configuratino that goes into a big C/C++ program.
The other thing I hope someone here can answer is this: are there no other languages designed for extending other applications?
Tcl/Tk was also designed for this purpose, but doesn't work as well. S-Lang is another choice.
Why can't this be done in Ruby or Python or Perl or JavaScript?
You can embed Ruby, Python, Perl, or JavaScript, and sometimes that makes sense. However, those languages and their implementations aren't primarily designed for embedding. For example, you can trivially embed Lua in a self-contained executable, but if you embed Python, you will probably have to ship some Python library functions with it, plus the installers and path management necessary to support that. Documentation and security are also much easier for embedded Lua.
For the same 181K, I can get python embedded in my application.
Except it won't be Python, it will be Python-without-its-standard-library. And that's pretty much what Lua is, except for minor syntactic differences and the fact that Lua is easier to interface with from C and runs faster.