Fraud is one of the few cases in tort law where punitive damages are somewhat commonly awarded...not usually on the order of what this guy is asking, but still to some degree.
Damages in any suit are almost never awarded to the total asked for by the plaintiff. The common-law court system operates a little oddly: the plaintiff is responsible for figuring out all the details of the rules under which damages could be awarded and presenting the judge with a list of which ones should be considered, and what range of penalties can be applied for each of them; the amount which they "ask for" is the total of all these. The judge (or jury, in certain brain-damaged jurisdictions) then decides which of these rules to apply, and to what extent, to generate the figure for damages awarded. Nobody ever expects this to be the maximum.
The idea behind this approach is that a common-law system has so many obscure and poorly-documented rules, you might never be sure that you have uncovered all of the ones that apply to a given case, so the courts limit themselves to considering only those rules that the plaintiff can cite.
The point here is that the amount which the plaintiff asks for is not a particularly interesting number in its own right. All it does is define the upper boundary on what the case will consider.
I don't disagree that the patent system is completely screwed up right now, but the solution is not to throw it away. It has a purpose.
You are operating under the assumption that the patent system is fulfilling that purpose, which is precisely the point most commonly disputed. The patent system as it stands today is not used to get products released with full documentation, it's used to prevent products from being released at all, and the patent filings don't comprise meaningful documentation of the invention.
Your proposal is for a patent system that gets products released with full documentation. What we have is a patent system that is being used to block inventions. The claim is that "no patent system at all" would be an improvement, even if it wouldn't necessarily be as good as the system you would like to see.
Throwing away the patent system would be a lot easier and more reliable than trying to fix it.
Microsoft ISA actually offers a very robust and powerful firewalling system, for exampling, allowing you to internally spoof/proxy SSL certificates to domain members so you can even inspect encrypted packets on the network.
Quoted for hilarity. Up to that point I thought your post was actually serious. Haven't seen a punchline that good in ages.
It's a bit frightening how big in the online ad market Google is becoming.
While it's quite true that Google might be obtaining an effective monopoly, I really can't bring myself to care that the advertising market might become even more unethical and braindamaged than it already is, and that the big advertising giants may drive all the small advertising houses out of the market and cause a bunch of marketdroids to lose their jobs.
yes, KDE purposefully linked GPL licensed code to QPLv1 code. however, it was THEIR code which means that they were fully within their rights to do so. anyone building apps on top of those libs implicitly agreed as well.
However, nobody else had the right to do so, which effectively excluded everybody else from working on it.
Calling on external C functions from Perl is a pain. You can't ignore all those C functions, there's way too many useful ones out there. There's UNIX system calls, XWindows and higher level GUI libraries, socket and networking stuff, file manipulation, and everything in libc. Perl has a good bit of that covered natively, but suppose you want to use OpenGL? Then you're stuck trying to figure out Frozen Bubble for example. Or you could do it yourself and grind out the XS manually, or fix some automatically generated XS. If you're lucky, someone else has already put together a module, and that module works. Or you say the heck with it and just use C.
Where have you been for the past five years? Go and read the Inline::C documentation immediately. There is no good reason for writing XSUB any more, unless you're fooling around with the guts of Perl itself.
There is a large amount of programmers who found their comfort zone in certain loosely-typed languages, typically they did a lot of C, moved on to Perl and realized that they were much more productive in Perl, but not really realizing why, only thinking that Perl must be some holy grail. They are programmers who have never used Visual Studio or Eclipse or similar IDEs for strongly typed languages, they have *no* *idea* what refactoring is, and what it can do for your productivity, or how easy it makes your job of reading other's code with functions like "find usage".
There is a large number of programmers who have found their comfort zone in glossy editors for certain limited languages; typically they went to a JavaSchool and went on to be an intern. They have it fixed in their head that the world is divided into "programming language" and "editor", and cannot understand why Perl programmers (who do all their work in Perl) don't need a fancy editor.
Perl programmers don't use their editor to perform non-trivial modification or analysis on their code. They use Perl. They would wonder why you could ever need an editor with a stack of limited features for performing certain tasks when you can perform any task you want in a few lines of code.
From the article summary: "...because it's unknown how many other users accessed the files in the KaZaA share in question and committed further acts of copyright infringement."
You're right, and this argument is a load of nonsense. The courts will most probably reject it - this isn't a ruling, it's the gibbering shrieks of the MPAA again, passed through the people they bought in the government.
She acknowledged and went along with the instructions, which included precisely how much she could be liable for if found guilty. In so doing she effectively waived her right to make this claim.
The courts don't work like this. It's normal to let such things pass initially if you're trying to win the case on the merits, and merely note in the records that you may appeal that particular point later if you don't win on your main argument. They do this so that the courts don't spend weeks debating exactly how much somebody will be fined for a crime of which they have not yet been convicted - judges hate that and usually put a stop to it quickly, because it's a huge waste of their time if the defendant wins. The details of sentences handed down by juries (beyond the basic 'jail or no jail') are usually adjusted on appeal, which just goes to show how silly it is to let juries do sentencing (most of the world has the judge do it, after the jury determines guilt).
That said, as others have noted, this situation is more complicated.
Do you ever suggest an alternative Office product that is free, such as Open Office or and online office suite?
Openoffice is part of our base install, since it'll be needed anyway to read any opendocument files. I treat MS Office as a very expensive upgrade for those people who can convince management to sign off on the purchase (rare).
People whine a lot about the minor flaws in openoffice, but they whine a lot about the minor flaws in MS Office; I merely make sure people know what it would cost to replace one set of whines with the other. And I don't even care which one they whine about.
My experience with small/medium businesses has been that the CEO/CFO don't want to spend the bucks necessary to get everybody legal and the poor IT guy gets stuck having to ignore the problem or find a new job.
About once every two months, our director comes to me saying that he wants MS Office installed on some box or other, and I quote him the current list price for it (£320, last I checked). He says that he's already got a copy. I tell him that you have to buy one copy per box. He says that he's got an old copy that didn't have that restriction. I tell him that the rule has always been there, and the only thing that's changed is that the new versions have the silly "activation" nonsense added. He says he never knew that.
It's not like farming - if you can hold a stick, you can be a farmer.
If that's your opinion on farming you wouldn't survive as a farmer
If farming required any particular talents, how do you explain the billion Chinese people who manage to do it? If it was even remotely difficult, most of them would starve, because there's nothing else they can do. Physical disability is pretty much the only thing that would mean a person can't be a farmer.
You turn them into knowledge based workers by giving them a laptop and network access and a wealth of educational data and software specifically designed to be easy to modify for their entire childhood.
We've done that to pretty much everybody in the western world, and it has not turned them into knowledge-based workers - most of them are still worthless idiots who couldn't produce anything worth paying for even if it was that or starve.
so they're no better at it than we are, but have a thousand times the unemployment rate in some localities and will work for one one hundredth the cost.
Our problem is not that we don't pay people enough to get them into knowledge-based fields. Our problem is that our people are by and large too bloody stupid to do useful work in those fields, which is why most of them don't get the numerous high-paying jobs in those fields, but instead get low-paying jobs as shop attendants and cleaners. Their people are not any better in this respect.
An economy is an economy and providing tools that educate and are usable, certainly can make a real difference.
Why should that be certain? How much experience do you have in raising third world economies to our standards?
This does not in any way reduce the amount of work involved in building an economy. The amount of work involved in doing that can be estimated as a few million people multiplied by a few centuries. These particular tools may be a necessary element in that development, but they represent a few people multiplied by a few years - it's a minuscule fraction of what it will take to get them up to our standard of living. They do not represent a significant amount of progress, and they are not likely to have a disproportionately large effect. A tiny fraction of their population will be better off, and the rest will be unaffected, for an overall result of nothing particularly significant.
this is the best effort I've ever seen to provide a sustainable income for people growing up in some of these countries
Then you haven't been paying much attention. Large numbers of people have been providing them with real jobs for decades - see http://traidcraft.com/ for one well-known example. These aren't people who are providing tools in the vague hope that somebody else might provide jobs, these are people directly creating real sustainable income in many of these countries.
let's hear your better and more effective idea
Stop the interference from western governments that is keeping them in this position. No more gratuitously unfair dumping of our surplus on their countries, benefiting a few rich people here at the expense of millions over there. No more deliberate corruption of their governments to get favourable tax laws. No more forcing them to sell at a pittance in order to boost our profits.
They would probably be far better off if we left them alone entirely. We're largely responsible for the mess that most of these countries are in, for no reason other than simple greed. The best and most important thing that we could do for them is to stop.
What they need is for us to have non-corrupt governments, who will stop meddling in their governments and economy. Their governments are corrupt because ours keep deliberately corrupting them.
And one great way to learn to do better agriculture science is to have access to the www. The biggest and best thing that internet access brings to the developing world is the knowledge of how to develop themselves.
That's possible, but on the whole the internet contains a lot of photographs of cats in boxes and not very many tutorials on agricultural science that can be understood by a person with a very limited education. Its value should not be overstated.
Providing them with the foundation to enter into the intellectual property industry, including custom software.
That particular idea is fundamentally flawed. If there is one thing that we have learned from the technology-based industry in the western world, it's that the vast majority of people have absolutely no ability to work in it. It's not like farming - if you can hold a stick, you can be a farmer. To write custom software worth paying for takes ten years of near-full-time experience and practice, a flexible mind, and the ability to think. People in the third world are not going to be any better at doing these things than we are, and we suck at it. A small handful will be able to do it, probably will do it, and will get disproportionate attention in the media. The vast majority will accomplish nothing at all. You do not turn farmers into knowledge-based workers by giving them a laptop. There are no short cuts in establishing a modern-style economy across half a planet - it takes centuries of work, in education, industry, construction, and technological development. Nothing that you can put into a media soundbite will accomplish a damn thing.
If this endeavour is going to have any benefits at all (and that's pretty questionable - whether it's worthwhile is open to debate, but it is definitely not certain that it will be), this is not going to be one of them.
Sure, some other country can have some and threaten us with them, but they'll be the tyrants, not us, and I'm sure when their citizens see how their government acts, they will be scared of them and not trust them or be happy themselves.
One only has to look at the US in recent years to see that this, sadly, does not work. They invade foreign countries for their own power and profit, they force insane laws on other countries, and they are the only country ever to use nuclear weapons on civilian targets - and most of their citizens still somehow think that all this is a good idea.
More than that, if the takedown notice does not include all of the relevant information, then it is invalid. The required information includes:
Identification of the work that is allegedly being infringed
Identification of the material that is allegedly infringing that work
Sufficient information for you to contact the complaining party
A declaration under penalty of perjury that the complaining party is the copyright holder, or is authorised to act on their behalf (meaning that if you send a takedown notice for something you don't have the rights to, you go to jail - perjury means roughly "lying to the court", and is a very serious crime)
If no contact information is provided (so you don't even know who complained), you may simply ignore it. For some of the other parts you are obliged to inform the complaining party so that they can correct the error, but you don't have to do anything further until they do. Since you can't contact them at all without their contact details, you have no obligations when that bit is missing.
I do not think that Comcast are sending real DMCA notices here, they're just making noise in the hope that people do what they say anyway. But if they were, the above would apply.
Actually, they lifted an idea that was already in common use in the major DBMSes. All they did was sell it as a 'filesystem' rather than as a 'database', and then take out a patent on calling it a 'filesystem'. This patent is absurd. It certainly isn't innovative, it is an obvious, logical step forward to anybody skilled in the art.
The problem here being that the number of people skilled in the art of filesystem design probably numbers in the hundreds, at most, and none of them work for the patent office.
Google's workloads are insignificant compared to the kind of things that IBM's big iron is designed to do - it's just not the same scale. Also, Google has a lot of hardware because they have a lot of users, but it's an embarrassingly parallel system - each user uses only a very small part of it, and there's no interconnect. Your search query doesn't run on all their hardware, it runs on one very small server for about a second, and has no effect on any of the other queries that are running. This just isn't a complicated problem to solve.
IBM deals in problems that are not embarrassingly parallel, and so need serious hardware and software to solve them. Google deals in problems that can be solved by very simple hardware and software, repeated a million times.
Oh, and Google have never used mysql to power their search engine - that's pure custom software. You're thinking of adwords.
Re:Most important thing
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GIMP 2.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Similarly, IBM has really shot themselves in the foot with the OS/400 platform. Here you have a a really really rock solid piece of software, arguably one of the most stable operating system/platforms in existence today, but you have a problem. If I wanted to go out and learn OS/400, I mean REALLY learn it (the way that i can with Linux/BSD) I wouldn't be able to. It is FARRRR to expensive for a hobbyist like myselft to get into.
They don't care. If your budget doesn't have a minimum of six zeros on the end of it, IBM is entirely disinterested in your existence.
IBM big iron is designed for those people who cannot use anything else. They have no competition. It doesn't matter if you prefer mysql or whatever - it cannot handle those kinds of loads, because it can't scale up to clusters of hundreds of thousands of CPUs. You, as a person who uses things like mysql, probably have no conception that those kinds of loads even exist. There are probably only a few hundred users in the world who need it. Nonetheless, their problems are real and have to be solved. IBM mainframe hardware is the only way to do it, so they pay a premium measured in millions. We are talking about problems that cannot be solved without filling an entire BUILDING with hardware. Most of them are related to the financial industry, who have to be able to process all the transactions in the world in real time, and where any failure of the system would cause irreparable damage to the world economy. This is up in the space where a system failure really could throw large countries into a recession overnight, so it absolutely has to be missile-proof.
This is not a consumer industry. Hobbyists are irrelevant. The consumer industry will always continue to grow and occupy most of the world, but it is never going to be able to supply those few hundred at the top, and there is always going to be a need for IBM (or somebody very similar to them) to service their needs. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Unless you have friends in high places, the "investigation" will consist of taking some statements, filing a report, and then ignoring the matter. If they ever trip over the guy who did it and somebody makes the connection, they might pursue it further, but they aren't going to be making an effort.
Slashdot Mirror
An excellent question. I can. Why are you finding this so difficult to accomplish?
I think the problem is that you are using the "desktop metaphor" (ie, Windows). I am using unix. I do not have a "desktop".
Damages in any suit are almost never awarded to the total asked for by the plaintiff. The common-law court system operates a little oddly: the plaintiff is responsible for figuring out all the details of the rules under which damages could be awarded and presenting the judge with a list of which ones should be considered, and what range of penalties can be applied for each of them; the amount which they "ask for" is the total of all these. The judge (or jury, in certain brain-damaged jurisdictions) then decides which of these rules to apply, and to what extent, to generate the figure for damages awarded. Nobody ever expects this to be the maximum.
The idea behind this approach is that a common-law system has so many obscure and poorly-documented rules, you might never be sure that you have uncovered all of the ones that apply to a given case, so the courts limit themselves to considering only those rules that the plaintiff can cite.
The point here is that the amount which the plaintiff asks for is not a particularly interesting number in its own right. All it does is define the upper boundary on what the case will consider.
You are operating under the assumption that the patent system is fulfilling that purpose, which is precisely the point most commonly disputed. The patent system as it stands today is not used to get products released with full documentation, it's used to prevent products from being released at all, and the patent filings don't comprise meaningful documentation of the invention.
Your proposal is for a patent system that gets products released with full documentation. What we have is a patent system that is being used to block inventions. The claim is that "no patent system at all" would be an improvement, even if it wouldn't necessarily be as good as the system you would like to see.
Throwing away the patent system would be a lot easier and more reliable than trying to fix it.
Quoted for hilarity. Up to that point I thought your post was actually serious. Haven't seen a punchline that good in ages.
While it's quite true that Google might be obtaining an effective monopoly, I really can't bring myself to care that the advertising market might become even more unethical and braindamaged than it already is, and that the big advertising giants may drive all the small advertising houses out of the market and cause a bunch of marketdroids to lose their jobs.
I just don't see any tragedy here. Nor do I see any conceivable way in which the advertising market could make things any worse for us than it already has. We already live in a world where advertising gets people fired for writing honest reviews. It just can't get any worse.
Maybe not, but Carly Fiorina recently proved that one woman can turn the ship into a colossal mess that it may never recover from.
However, nobody else had the right to do so, which effectively excluded everybody else from working on it.
Where have you been for the past five years? Go and read the Inline::C documentation immediately. There is no good reason for writing XSUB any more, unless you're fooling around with the guts of Perl itself.
There is a large number of programmers who have found their comfort zone in glossy editors for certain limited languages; typically they went to a JavaSchool and went on to be an intern. They have it fixed in their head that the world is divided into "programming language" and "editor", and cannot understand why Perl programmers (who do all their work in Perl) don't need a fancy editor.
Perl programmers don't use their editor to perform non-trivial modification or analysis on their code. They use Perl. They would wonder why you could ever need an editor with a stack of limited features for performing certain tasks when you can perform any task you want in a few lines of code.
Cite your source.
Don't have one, do you? That sums up your entire post.
You're right, and this argument is a load of nonsense. The courts will most probably reject it - this isn't a ruling, it's the gibbering shrieks of the MPAA again, passed through the people they bought in the government.
The courts don't work like this. It's normal to let such things pass initially if you're trying to win the case on the merits, and merely note in the records that you may appeal that particular point later if you don't win on your main argument. They do this so that the courts don't spend weeks debating exactly how much somebody will be fined for a crime of which they have not yet been convicted - judges hate that and usually put a stop to it quickly, because it's a huge waste of their time if the defendant wins. The details of sentences handed down by juries (beyond the basic 'jail or no jail') are usually adjusted on appeal, which just goes to show how silly it is to let juries do sentencing (most of the world has the judge do it, after the jury determines guilt).
That said, as others have noted, this situation is more complicated.
Openoffice is part of our base install, since it'll be needed anyway to read any opendocument files. I treat MS Office as a very expensive upgrade for those people who can convince management to sign off on the purchase (rare).
People whine a lot about the minor flaws in openoffice, but they whine a lot about the minor flaws in MS Office; I merely make sure people know what it would cost to replace one set of whines with the other. And I don't even care which one they whine about.
About once every two months, our director comes to me saying that he wants MS Office installed on some box or other, and I quote him the current list price for it (£320, last I checked). He says that he's already got a copy. I tell him that you have to buy one copy per box. He says that he's got an old copy that didn't have that restriction. I tell him that the rule has always been there, and the only thing that's changed is that the new versions have the silly "activation" nonsense added. He says he never knew that.
Two months later, we do this again. Bizarre.
If farming required any particular talents, how do you explain the billion Chinese people who manage to do it? If it was even remotely difficult, most of them would starve, because there's nothing else they can do. Physical disability is pretty much the only thing that would mean a person can't be a farmer.
We've done that to pretty much everybody in the western world, and it has not turned them into knowledge-based workers - most of them are still worthless idiots who couldn't produce anything worth paying for even if it was that or starve.
Our problem is not that we don't pay people enough to get them into knowledge-based fields. Our problem is that our people are by and large too bloody stupid to do useful work in those fields, which is why most of them don't get the numerous high-paying jobs in those fields, but instead get low-paying jobs as shop attendants and cleaners. Their people are not any better in this respect.
Why should that be certain? How much experience do you have in raising third world economies to our standards?
This does not in any way reduce the amount of work involved in building an economy. The amount of work involved in doing that can be estimated as a few million people multiplied by a few centuries. These particular tools may be a necessary element in that development, but they represent a few people multiplied by a few years - it's a minuscule fraction of what it will take to get them up to our standard of living. They do not represent a significant amount of progress, and they are not likely to have a disproportionately large effect. A tiny fraction of their population will be better off, and the rest will be unaffected, for an overall result of nothing particularly significant.
Then you haven't been paying much attention. Large numbers of people have been providing them with real jobs for decades - see http://traidcraft.com/ for one well-known example. These aren't people who are providing tools in the vague hope that somebody else might provide jobs, these are people directly creating real sustainable income in many of these countries.
Stop the interference from western governments that is keeping them in this position. No more gratuitously unfair dumping of our surplus on their countries, benefiting a few rich people here at the expense of millions over there. No more deliberate corruption of their governments to get favourable tax laws. No more forcing them to sell at a pittance in order to boost our profits.
They would probably be far better off if we left them alone entirely. We're largely responsible for the mess that most of these countries are in, for no reason other than simple greed. The best and most important thing that we could do for them is to stop.
What they need is for us to have non-corrupt governments, who will stop meddling in their governments and economy. Their governments are corrupt because ours keep deliberately corrupting them.
That's possible, but on the whole the internet contains a lot of photographs of cats in boxes and not very many tutorials on agricultural science that can be understood by a person with a very limited education. Its value should not be overstated.
That particular idea is fundamentally flawed. If there is one thing that we have learned from the technology-based industry in the western world, it's that the vast majority of people have absolutely no ability to work in it. It's not like farming - if you can hold a stick, you can be a farmer. To write custom software worth paying for takes ten years of near-full-time experience and practice, a flexible mind, and the ability to think. People in the third world are not going to be any better at doing these things than we are, and we suck at it. A small handful will be able to do it, probably will do it, and will get disproportionate attention in the media. The vast majority will accomplish nothing at all. You do not turn farmers into knowledge-based workers by giving them a laptop. There are no short cuts in establishing a modern-style economy across half a planet - it takes centuries of work, in education, industry, construction, and technological development. Nothing that you can put into a media soundbite will accomplish a damn thing.
If this endeavour is going to have any benefits at all (and that's pretty questionable - whether it's worthwhile is open to debate, but it is definitely not certain that it will be), this is not going to be one of them.
One only has to look at the US in recent years to see that this, sadly, does not work. They invade foreign countries for their own power and profit, they force insane laws on other countries, and they are the only country ever to use nuclear weapons on civilian targets - and most of their citizens still somehow think that all this is a good idea.
If no contact information is provided (so you don't even know who complained), you may simply ignore it. For some of the other parts you are obliged to inform the complaining party so that they can correct the error, but you don't have to do anything further until they do. Since you can't contact them at all without their contact details, you have no obligations when that bit is missing.
I do not think that Comcast are sending real DMCA notices here, they're just making noise in the hope that people do what they say anyway. But if they were, the above would apply.
Actually, they lifted an idea that was already in common use in the major DBMSes. All they did was sell it as a 'filesystem' rather than as a 'database', and then take out a patent on calling it a 'filesystem'. This patent is absurd. It certainly isn't innovative, it is an obvious, logical step forward to anybody skilled in the art.
The problem here being that the number of people skilled in the art of filesystem design probably numbers in the hundreds, at most, and none of them work for the patent office.
Google's workloads are insignificant compared to the kind of things that IBM's big iron is designed to do - it's just not the same scale. Also, Google has a lot of hardware because they have a lot of users, but it's an embarrassingly parallel system - each user uses only a very small part of it, and there's no interconnect. Your search query doesn't run on all their hardware, it runs on one very small server for about a second, and has no effect on any of the other queries that are running. This just isn't a complicated problem to solve.
IBM deals in problems that are not embarrassingly parallel, and so need serious hardware and software to solve them. Google deals in problems that can be solved by very simple hardware and software, repeated a million times.
Oh, and Google have never used mysql to power their search engine - that's pure custom software. You're thinking of adwords.
They don't care. If your budget doesn't have a minimum of six zeros on the end of it, IBM is entirely disinterested in your existence.
IBM big iron is designed for those people who cannot use anything else. They have no competition. It doesn't matter if you prefer mysql or whatever - it cannot handle those kinds of loads, because it can't scale up to clusters of hundreds of thousands of CPUs. You, as a person who uses things like mysql, probably have no conception that those kinds of loads even exist. There are probably only a few hundred users in the world who need it. Nonetheless, their problems are real and have to be solved. IBM mainframe hardware is the only way to do it, so they pay a premium measured in millions. We are talking about problems that cannot be solved without filling an entire BUILDING with hardware. Most of them are related to the financial industry, who have to be able to process all the transactions in the world in real time, and where any failure of the system would cause irreparable damage to the world economy. This is up in the space where a system failure really could throw large countries into a recession overnight, so it absolutely has to be missile-proof.
This is not a consumer industry. Hobbyists are irrelevant. The consumer industry will always continue to grow and occupy most of the world, but it is never going to be able to supply those few hundred at the top, and there is always going to be a need for IBM (or somebody very similar to them) to service their needs. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Unless you have friends in high places, the "investigation" will consist of taking some statements, filing a report, and then ignoring the matter. If they ever trip over the guy who did it and somebody makes the connection, they might pursue it further, but they aren't going to be making an effort.