That case covers typesetting of actual characters in a non-made-up language. I'm not sure if fictional alphabets have ever been tested in court. You're probably correct, but I was hedging my bets on that one. Either way, it doesn't apply to a language like Java that's based entirely on keys pressed on a keyboard.
Perhaps more importantly, most programming languages are expressible with a formal grammar, which is nothing more than a statement of facts that completely describe a language's syntax. Facts cannot be copyrighted, thus the formal grammar cannot be copyrighted, thus the programming language cannot be copyrighted. Q.E.D.
I suspect that Elvish can't really be copyrighted either. It just hasn't been struck down in the courts yet. That said, to the extent that it might be copyrightable, it would be the non-Latin alphabet, not the words, that are protectable by virtue of their having been designed, and thus, a creative work in and of themselves.
If I copyright a novel, I can't sue someone who happened to use 30% of the same words in a completely different order to express a completely different thought. The fact that the words are different collections of letters than were previously used is immaterial. Once used, their meaning is now a fact, which is inherently not protectable by copyright, and their letters are existing Latin alphabetic characters, which are also not protectable by copyright.
There is exactly no chance that a programming language can be copyrighted. The EU courts already ruled on this, and I'd be shocked if the U.S. courts ruled differently.
Ah, but what if your neighbor lives within range of the tower, but merely does not own a radio?
That is what this company is doing. They are providing streams of content that those people are already at least ostensibly within the range of (assuming they aren't in some interior apartment where they can't receive anything). They are merely providing the same service that a tuner and slingbox would provide, just without having to have that extra equipment on your premises and a wire out to the roof.
This company provides content only to people who live within a single city, and provides content that is freely broadcast within that city. Therefore, that person has a fundamental legal right to receive those channels in whatever way he or she sees fit, whether it is through a tuner that he or she owns or through a tuner that someone else rents out.
In short, if this is ruled illegal, then so is Slingbox, so is recording something with MythTV and carrying it with you on an iPad so that you can watch it while on vacation in another city, and so on. In effect, this lawsuit is complete and utter bulls**t and needs to be slapped down as quickly and as hard as possible, preferably replete with fines for frivolous litigation.
The overpriced luxury manufacturer brings people in and asks them to listen to 50 varieties of car noise to find the best one.
The smart carmaker uses the sound of a moped by default and then sells hundreds of expansion packs with samples of different car engines so that the customers can choose their own favorites.
The really smart carmaker rents the expansion packs with a monthly fee like ringtones.
Worse than that. What the judge is saying is effectively that because you choose to disclose things about yourself, that it is reasonable for police to force me to disclose those same things about myself.
Rights do not cease to be rights merely because the majority of people do not exercise them; so long as even one person considers something to be private, the state has no legitimate authority to treat it otherwise unless failure to do so would pose an immediate threat of grave harm to another person. Period.
You're forgetting that the "page" for an iOS app is produced by Apple, contains reviews from Apple, etc. It's not something that can exist on a website in somebody else's domain. I'm assuming Google has similar functionality in its marketplace.
Also, the point of a domain name, to some extent, is guessability. If every app from Google's store, for example, could easily be found by typing its name dot android, it would be a win.
I think Thunderbolt requires more silicon for a hard drive than USB. Of course, it is also faster, so it may be worth it, but it isn't quite open and shut.
Where Thunderbolt shines is for displays. It can replace your video cable, your audio cable, your USB cable, your eSATA cable, and your FireWire cable all with a single wire. Now, you can plug in all your hard drives (via USB or FireWire or eSATA) into the monitor on top of your desk instead of fumbling around behind the machine underneath.
Dumping would be Amazon selling all of their books below cost for a year, taking huge losses to force Barnes & Noble out of business, then raising prices on everything. As long as Amazon is making a profit on nearly everything they sell, it is not dumping. Selling a $20 book for $10 is merely the use of loss leaders to draw customers in, nearly all of whom will then add another $15 worth of profitable merchandise to their carts in order to get free shipping.
Bear in mind that they usually aren't losing money on the sale. Amazon typically buys at a 40% discount. This means that their cost for that $20 book is typically about $12. So they might lose $2 on that one item, plus maybe $3 for the free shipping. The other $15 worth of books, however, assuming they aren't sale items, only costs them about $9, so they make $6 on them. Thus in total, they actually turn a $1 profit even with the free shipping and the loss leader factored in. Now admittedly that doesn't cover their warehousing costs or picking costs, but those are fairly minimal in quantities. I'd imagine that even in the worst case, they break even on those loss leader sales so long as the person buys enough merchandise to qualify for free shipping.
And, of course, if the person doesn't buy enough to get free shipping, there's probably some profit built into the shipping costs to offset part of the loss.
Sellers are not required by law to accept returned items unless they are defective.
Emphasis mine. I'm not talking about accepting returns because you didn't like something. This thread was about whether retailers had to accept returns of defective goods, and the answer even based on the paragraph you quoted above is yes. BTW, those sections are not just about assistive devices. A little farther down, it talks about electronics in general, there's a section on cars (IIRC), and I think there's also a broad section that covers just about everything (saying that the implied warranty shall be no less than 30 days nor longer than 1 year), but I just skimmed that part, so that might have been specific to assistive devices. EIther way, the implied warranty in California is not just limited to assistive devices.
The rest of the paragraph you quoted is talking about non-defective returns, which is a separate issue.
I hope they were smart enough to write this law fairly broadly. Employers should not be allowed to ask for passwords to any account, social media or otherwise. If they wrote it specifically for social media accounts, then they'll just have to write it all over again the next time some other type of account becomes the target of unscrupulous employers.
Try essentially impossible to investigate. How many people do you walk within twenty feet of in any given week? Any given year? Now imagine that any one of those people might have been the person who injected code that waits a predetermined period of time, does something bad, and then erases the location where the time delay is stored so that the original value cannot be recovered after the fact.... Or worse, overwrites the time delay with a value that implicates someone else.
Actually, stores aren't required to take returns...
At least in California, that's not true. Under sections 1792-1795.8 of California Civil Code, unless the seller explicitly disclaims a warranty by attaching something to the product itself that explicitly states that the product is being sold as-is with no warranty. Otherwise, as a general rule, the seller must accept the product back for a minimum of 30 days, by law.
No, I'm saying that nobody in their right minds should have Java even enabled on their computer because it fundamentally breaks the whole security model of the web browsing environment. Therefore, even as a prototype, it is unacceptable.
I would much rather have seen this implemented in JavaScript using the new HTML5 file API. It can provide the required access to local files without requiring testers to significantly increase the potential attack surface of their browsers.
His comment is akin to saying that since C and C++ has been used on viruses that get delivered as windows executables, you should not use anything written in C, C++ or windows.
No, it isn't. Not at all. If you had read the article I linked to, you would understand that the attack was only possible because of actual bugs in Java itself. Not because of code written in Java. Because of bugs in Java.
I don't care if companies become rich, or people earn lots of money - that's not the problem. The problem is when these people influence government - who in turn makes the rules for the population.
No, influencing government is only a small part of the problem. The bigger problem with allowing any entity (human or corporate) to accumulate too much money is that it can exert excessive control over the free market. For example, a company making electronics that becomes a monopoly in a particular industry could ostensibly pre-purchase inventory at the capacity of every part manufacturer, thus essentially squashing the ability of any new competitor to enter the market. A major retailer with major bulk purchasing power could crush any new competitors by undercutting them, then raise prices again. And so on.
At some point, you become rich enough to eliminate competition. Once that happens, the invisible hand of the free market ceases to function. Not only are customers no longer free to buy the product from someone else, but your employees may no longer have the ability to easily get a job in the field without moving a large distance. And when you decide to consolidate your plants and move them all to Mexico or China or whatever, those employees are screwed because your competitors no longer exist. The U.S. has lost so many manufacturing jobs in large part because we allowed a small number of corporations to grow arbitrarily large instead of insisting that each of those plants be operated as a separate business.
At least when it comes to corporations, the public interest is almost always better served by a larger number of medium-sized companies than by a smaller number of large companies. It stands to reason that this is the case for individuals as well, though an individual is more likely to manipulate the stock market than the components market. Either way, the same basic principle applies.
You know why GC has knowledgeable staff, right? They offer deep discounts on merchandise to employees. Thus, most of the people they hire are musicians who are working to make enough money to buy the gear that they want.
Best Buy could ostensibly do something similar, but because their product offering is not particularly specialized, it would be somewhat harder. Also, even if you cut Best Buy's prices in half on many products, it would still be about what they cost at Fry's or Wal-Mart every day (particularly for DVDs). I doubt they could give discounts deep enough to attract knowledgeable employees. As a rule, my experience has been that unless products are on sale, Best Buy provides some of the worst buys in town. Even if the sales people were helpful, IMO, they would still be a really awful place to shop.
I jokingly suggested using a bunch of Nook/Kindle tablets instead of paper hymnals just the other day. Instead of having printed copies of two books (one for Spanish, one for English), we could have one device. Even better, with the right software, we could "push" page turn commands to all the devices over Wi-Fi instead of just updating the electronic sign.:-D
Which brings us to my contribution to technology in the liturgy. I go to church in a gothic-style church built in the late 1800s. Attached to the front wall, there is a small LCD screen on which we display the numbers of each song electronically in large numbers so that they will be visible throughout the church. It is surrounded by a wooden box with a magnetic flip-down front panel to allow access to the monitor's controls. Hanging behind that VESA-swivel-mounted screen lies a Mac Mini in a custom mounting bracket, with a custom mechanical linkage that allows the computer's power button to be pressed using a dimpled wooden power button on the underside of the box. (It's an audiophile's dream....)
The software itself is a combination of a full-screen JavaScript-based web application, a small amount of PHP code to read and update a text file, a custom daemon that listens for button presses on a remote control clicker (HID device), and a custom bit of disk arbitration code that allows you to insert a USB stick containing either an updated list of songs or a software update for the device. The background daemon also creates a computer-to-computer Wi-Fi network with a custom DHCP server, allowing it to be controlled using an iPhone or iPod Touch. It provides a full-screen iPhone web app that shows what is on the screen while controlling it, and another full-screen iPhone web app for editing the numbers in the background without affecting what is shown on the screen.
All in all, it's insanely cool under the hood, but you'd never guess how much technology is involved just by looking at. So if you ever catch me doing something with my iPhone in church, I'm probably trying to insert a new number without anyone noticing, not sending an IM.
Except that the comma in that picture is wrong unless you put a comma before "Jack" as well. The commas aren't needed anyway. The capitalization is what makes the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
That case covers typesetting of actual characters in a non-made-up language. I'm not sure if fictional alphabets have ever been tested in court. You're probably correct, but I was hedging my bets on that one. Either way, it doesn't apply to a language like Java that's based entirely on keys pressed on a keyboard.
Perhaps more importantly, most programming languages are expressible with a formal grammar, which is nothing more than a statement of facts that completely describe a language's syntax. Facts cannot be copyrighted, thus the formal grammar cannot be copyrighted, thus the programming language cannot be copyrighted. Q.E.D.
I suspect that Elvish can't really be copyrighted either. It just hasn't been struck down in the courts yet. That said, to the extent that it might be copyrightable, it would be the non-Latin alphabet, not the words, that are protectable by virtue of their having been designed, and thus, a creative work in and of themselves.
If I copyright a novel, I can't sue someone who happened to use 30% of the same words in a completely different order to express a completely different thought. The fact that the words are different collections of letters than were previously used is immaterial. Once used, their meaning is now a fact, which is inherently not protectable by copyright, and their letters are existing Latin alphabetic characters, which are also not protectable by copyright.
There is exactly no chance that a programming language can be copyrighted. The EU courts already ruled on this, and I'd be shocked if the U.S. courts ruled differently.
Ah, but what if your neighbor lives within range of the tower, but merely does not own a radio?
That is what this company is doing. They are providing streams of content that those people are already at least ostensibly within the range of (assuming they aren't in some interior apartment where they can't receive anything). They are merely providing the same service that a tuner and slingbox would provide, just without having to have that extra equipment on your premises and a wire out to the roof.
This company provides content only to people who live within a single city, and provides content that is freely broadcast within that city. Therefore, that person has a fundamental legal right to receive those channels in whatever way he or she sees fit, whether it is through a tuner that he or she owns or through a tuner that someone else rents out.
In short, if this is ruled illegal, then so is Slingbox, so is recording something with MythTV and carrying it with you on an iPad so that you can watch it while on vacation in another city, and so on. In effect, this lawsuit is complete and utter bulls**t and needs to be slapped down as quickly and as hard as possible, preferably replete with fines for frivolous litigation.
What part of "unless failure to do so would pose an immediate threat of grave harm to another person" did you not understand?
Sue the lawmakers.
The overpriced luxury manufacturer brings people in and asks them to listen to 50 varieties of car noise to find the best one.
The smart carmaker uses the sound of a moped by default and then sells hundreds of expansion packs with samples of different car engines so that the customers can choose their own favorites.
The really smart carmaker rents the expansion packs with a monthly fee like ringtones.
Worse than that. What the judge is saying is effectively that because you choose to disclose things about yourself, that it is reasonable for police to force me to disclose those same things about myself.
Rights do not cease to be rights merely because the majority of people do not exercise them; so long as even one person considers something to be private, the state has no legitimate authority to treat it otherwise unless failure to do so would pose an immediate threat of grave harm to another person. Period.
How many people have a keyboard and mouse on their desks? Those can also plug into the monitor.
You're forgetting that the "page" for an iOS app is produced by Apple, contains reviews from Apple, etc. It's not something that can exist on a website in somebody else's domain. I'm assuming Google has similar functionality in its marketplace.
Also, the point of a domain name, to some extent, is guessability. If every app from Google's store, for example, could easily be found by typing its name dot android, it would be a win.
I think Thunderbolt requires more silicon for a hard drive than USB. Of course, it is also faster, so it may be worth it, but it isn't quite open and shut.
Where Thunderbolt shines is for displays. It can replace your video cable, your audio cable, your USB cable, your eSATA cable, and your FireWire cable all with a single wire. Now, you can plug in all your hard drives (via USB or FireWire or eSATA) into the monitor on top of your desk instead of fumbling around behind the machine underneath.
Obvious example of where a brand suffix would make sense: Apple/iPhone/iPad/iOS, Android, etc.. For example:
"Check out our new mobile Tux racing game at www.disgruntledpenguins.apple or download the Android version at www.disgruntledpenguins.android.
Repeat after me. Loss leaders are not dumping.
Dumping would be Amazon selling all of their books below cost for a year, taking huge losses to force Barnes & Noble out of business, then raising prices on everything. As long as Amazon is making a profit on nearly everything they sell, it is not dumping. Selling a $20 book for $10 is merely the use of loss leaders to draw customers in, nearly all of whom will then add another $15 worth of profitable merchandise to their carts in order to get free shipping.
Bear in mind that they usually aren't losing money on the sale. Amazon typically buys at a 40% discount. This means that their cost for that $20 book is typically about $12. So they might lose $2 on that one item, plus maybe $3 for the free shipping. The other $15 worth of books, however, assuming they aren't sale items, only costs them about $9, so they make $6 on them. Thus in total, they actually turn a $1 profit even with the free shipping and the loss leader factored in. Now admittedly that doesn't cover their warehousing costs or picking costs, but those are fairly minimal in quantities. I'd imagine that even in the worst case, they break even on those loss leader sales so long as the person buys enough merchandise to qualify for free shipping.
And, of course, if the person doesn't buy enough to get free shipping, there's probably some profit built into the shipping costs to offset part of the loss.
Yeah, but if you don't hire any home-grown workers....
No, you get fired for pointing out that the passenger has no clothes on, but the gun is still hidden by her clothes.
Emphasis mine. I'm not talking about accepting returns because you didn't like something. This thread was about whether retailers had to accept returns of defective goods, and the answer even based on the paragraph you quoted above is yes. BTW, those sections are not just about assistive devices. A little farther down, it talks about electronics in general, there's a section on cars (IIRC), and I think there's also a broad section that covers just about everything (saying that the implied warranty shall be no less than 30 days nor longer than 1 year), but I just skimmed that part, so that might have been specific to assistive devices. EIther way, the implied warranty in California is not just limited to assistive devices.
The rest of the paragraph you quoted is talking about non-defective returns, which is a separate issue.
I hope they were smart enough to write this law fairly broadly. Employers should not be allowed to ask for passwords to any account, social media or otherwise. If they wrote it specifically for social media accounts, then they'll just have to write it all over again the next time some other type of account becomes the target of unscrupulous employers.
Try essentially impossible to investigate. How many people do you walk within twenty feet of in any given week? Any given year? Now imagine that any one of those people might have been the person who injected code that waits a predetermined period of time, does something bad, and then erases the location where the time delay is stored so that the original value cannot be recovered after the fact.... Or worse, overwrites the time delay with a value that implicates someone else.
At least in California, that's not true. Under sections 1792-1795.8 of California Civil Code, unless the seller explicitly disclaims a warranty by attaching something to the product itself that explicitly states that the product is being sold as-is with no warranty. Otherwise, as a general rule, the seller must accept the product back for a minimum of 30 days, by law.
No, I'm saying that nobody in their right minds should have Java even enabled on their computer because it fundamentally breaks the whole security model of the web browsing environment. Therefore, even as a prototype, it is unacceptable.
I would much rather have seen this implemented in JavaScript using the new HTML5 file API. It can provide the required access to local files without requiring testers to significantly increase the potential attack surface of their browsers.
No, it isn't. Not at all. If you had read the article I linked to, you would understand that the attack was only possible because of actual bugs in Java itself. Not because of code written in Java. Because of bugs in Java.
No, influencing government is only a small part of the problem. The bigger problem with allowing any entity (human or corporate) to accumulate too much money is that it can exert excessive control over the free market. For example, a company making electronics that becomes a monopoly in a particular industry could ostensibly pre-purchase inventory at the capacity of every part manufacturer, thus essentially squashing the ability of any new competitor to enter the market. A major retailer with major bulk purchasing power could crush any new competitors by undercutting them, then raise prices again. And so on.
At some point, you become rich enough to eliminate competition. Once that happens, the invisible hand of the free market ceases to function. Not only are customers no longer free to buy the product from someone else, but your employees may no longer have the ability to easily get a job in the field without moving a large distance. And when you decide to consolidate your plants and move them all to Mexico or China or whatever, those employees are screwed because your competitors no longer exist. The U.S. has lost so many manufacturing jobs in large part because we allowed a small number of corporations to grow arbitrarily large instead of insisting that each of those plants be operated as a separate business.
At least when it comes to corporations, the public interest is almost always better served by a larger number of medium-sized companies than by a smaller number of large companies. It stands to reason that this is the case for individuals as well, though an individual is more likely to manipulate the stock market than the components market. Either way, the same basic principle applies.
You know why GC has knowledgeable staff, right? They offer deep discounts on merchandise to employees. Thus, most of the people they hire are musicians who are working to make enough money to buy the gear that they want.
Best Buy could ostensibly do something similar, but because their product offering is not particularly specialized, it would be somewhat harder. Also, even if you cut Best Buy's prices in half on many products, it would still be about what they cost at Fry's or Wal-Mart every day (particularly for DVDs). I doubt they could give discounts deep enough to attract knowledgeable employees. As a rule, my experience has been that unless products are on sale, Best Buy provides some of the worst buys in town. Even if the sales people were helpful, IMO, they would still be a really awful place to shop.
Schrödinger's cockroach just doesn't have the same ring to it.
I jokingly suggested using a bunch of Nook/Kindle tablets instead of paper hymnals just the other day. Instead of having printed copies of two books (one for Spanish, one for English), we could have one device. Even better, with the right software, we could "push" page turn commands to all the devices over Wi-Fi instead of just updating the electronic sign. :-D
Which brings us to my contribution to technology in the liturgy. I go to church in a gothic-style church built in the late 1800s. Attached to the front wall, there is a small LCD screen on which we display the numbers of each song electronically in large numbers so that they will be visible throughout the church. It is surrounded by a wooden box with a magnetic flip-down front panel to allow access to the monitor's controls. Hanging behind that VESA-swivel-mounted screen lies a Mac Mini in a custom mounting bracket, with a custom mechanical linkage that allows the computer's power button to be pressed using a dimpled wooden power button on the underside of the box. (It's an audiophile's dream....)
The software itself is a combination of a full-screen JavaScript-based web application, a small amount of PHP code to read and update a text file, a custom daemon that listens for button presses on a remote control clicker (HID device), and a custom bit of disk arbitration code that allows you to insert a USB stick containing either an updated list of songs or a software update for the device. The background daemon also creates a computer-to-computer Wi-Fi network with a custom DHCP server, allowing it to be controlled using an iPhone or iPod Touch. It provides a full-screen iPhone web app that shows what is on the screen while controlling it, and another full-screen iPhone web app for editing the numbers in the background without affecting what is shown on the screen.
All in all, it's insanely cool under the hood, but you'd never guess how much technology is involved just by looking at. So if you ever catch me doing something with my iPhone in church, I'm probably trying to insert a new number without anyone noticing, not sending an IM.
Of course, it's a security scheme designed using Java just two days after a story about a security hole in Java that allowed automatic installation of a trojan. Thanks, but no thanks. You can keep your security if that's the language you want to use to implement it.
Except that the comma in that picture is wrong unless you put a comma before "Jack" as well. The commas aren't needed anyway. The capitalization is what makes the difference.