The OEM license key is tied to the machine, not to the customer.
As long as it is the original equipment, you can re-sell that machine and re-install that OS as many times as you like.
What you CAN'T do with an OEM license, is use that license on a different machine, even if you removed it (and the license) on the old machine.
Retail boxes of Windows are transferable from PC to PC provided you remove the software from the old PC first; OEM licenses are tied to the machine itself and not transferrable to a new PC.
Get it? Who owns the PC has no bearing on whether the license is valid or not. If it did, the majority of the used PC market would be illegal and would have been shut down long ago, and that is certainly the case.
It might be a good idea to know a little bit about how licensing works before telling someone they will end up in jail for a non-existant license transgression.
The patent is on storing the XML tags in one file and the raw text with pointers in another file, then combining the two on the fly. The two files are stored in a container that the software knows what to do with (obviously).
This is supposed to make saving large documents significantly more efficient, and makes conversion to other formats simpler and quicker. The OO format apparently doesn't operate in this specific way, perhaps it uses a similar but different methodology that does not infringe the patent, because it seems they are not affected by it.
Maybe that's why it's saved as a.docx? Maybe? I dunno, I'm just throwing things out here...
Retard, ooxml is XML based, as in, it uses standard XML tags and should you want to do a conversion to.xml would be very simple and straightforward.
The problem is, someone already thought of that, and patented it. If it's novel and better than what is out there, it does not matter that someone else COULD have thought of it, what matters is that i4i DID think of it, and thought of it first, and got a patent on it.
Software patents are always dubious, but this is a novel process that nobody was doing before i4i was doing it. That nobody on SlashDot knew they were doing it does not mean they weren't, and they've got the patent to prove it. The patent has also been held up in court. Bad software patents generally get nullified when they go to court, because the other party can bring up prior art that nullifies the patent. Apparently, that was not the case here, and the patent is legit.
Always remember, hindsight is 20/20, and just because the solution is simple does not mean anybody had thought of it before.
The only thing stoping Microsoft from having a complete monopoly is the closest we have to subverting copyright: the GPL.
BZZZZZT! Wrong, you've got it backwards. The only thing keeping GPL'd OSs alive are anti-trust laws which have consistantly smacked Microsoft down when they get heavy-handed. Without them Microsoft would have crushed the competition years ago.
Linux and Mac OS would not stand a chance without these laws, and even with them only Mac OS offers any sort of competition, and that's primarily proprietary on top of a small BSD core.
So your argument for the heroic GPL is a little off-kilter. Break it down - Proprietary (Windows) Dominates > Mostly Proprietary (Mac OSX) holds its own > GPL (Linux) is dominated by every measure possible. Seems like the GPL software is doing the worst of the bunch.
I'm not an MS fan, and I like Linux, but I'm tired of people singing the glories of the heroic Linux when it's just not true.
God, do any of you own a house? I'm worried if you do, because you obviously have no idea how property tax works, or how the value is assessed.
Property value is based on market value, and it is assessed not determined with any arbitrarily set at whatever the owner says it is worth. If THAT were the case, everyone would claim their house is worth ~$1, and nobody would pay property tax. The individual sale price for the property is only one factor in the equation, and just because you offer something for $10 million does not mean the tax value is $10 million.
For example, if a house sells for $10 million, but over the last decade it only sold for between $80k-100k, the assessed tax value is definitely not going to be $10 million. If every other house on the block is only worth $100k as well, it factors in. If nothing has been added to the house to increase its value, then obviously this is the off case of someone who really really wanted a property for a reason likely unrelated to the property value, and someone who really did not want to sell for likely the same reason. Therefor the $10 million sale probably does not represent the true market value of the house, and you'd probably only see a bump in the assessed tax value of 50-100%.
In this case with Microsoft, some manager was probably unwilling to pony up the cash and tried to steamroll them, with a "go on, sue the mighty Microsoft, I dare ya" and this little company called their bluff. They went into "Oh Shit" mode, couldn't reach an agreement (they probably pissed the hell out of this company), and lost the court case.
This is very clearly NOT a case where a patent troll was biding their time to strike an unsuspecting victim - they sold the product and Microsoft tried to steal it. Microsoft is in the wrong, and they only ways they can make it right is by either removing the functionality altogether, creating NEW functionality that does not infringe the patent, or ponying up the cash. The third option may no longer be available, it sounds like they burned that bridge pretty well.
All of the information, including the picture she posted, was public record. It is perfectly legal to follow anybody you want around anywhere you want, so long as it is in public. Ever heard of the Paparrazi? Celebs can't even get restraining orders to stick on those people, why the hell should Police be able to restrict a reporter?
While I would certainly call it a dirtback move, it's definitely not illegal.
Stalking is also not illegal, though you do have the right to request a restraining order on a stalker under certain circumstances. I.e. you can show they intend you physical harm, or are tresspassing on your property, etc. Otherwise the judge generally tells you to stuff it, since they aren't breaking any laws you have no right to impose your will upon them.
Same thing here, even if there WERE a restraining order against her, I doubt anything she was doing would have violated it. She was following them around and researching public records. That is 100% legal. She should not have been arrested unless she was threatening them, or they have reason to believe she was doing this on behalf of someone who intended them physical harm.
Look at what they charged her with, it's pretty frickin flimsy.
This is probably going to backfire on the PD if they push it too far, as it looks very much like harassment and restriction of the journalist's freedom of the press and freedom of speech rights.
Public employees on public business have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
There, fixed that for you.
Also:
That logic is sort of like it is OK to use my digital VCR to record the music channel but it is somehow wrong to download music from the net.
The two are very different - in the first, someone has paid for a license to broadcast. You receive it because someone paid to let you receive it - HOW you receive it is up to you, i.e. "time shifting" is ok - so you can store it in your VCR or DVR for later viewing. Downloading from the net, however, unless it is from an authorized distributor nobody has paid the license for you to receive the file.
Also, the law seems to be coming down against the distributor, not the distributee. So while it is technically illegal to download music off the net without the copyright to do so, only re-distributing that download will get you into any trouble.
Contrived and nothing at all like what happened in this case.
She was fined $1.92 million for distributing somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 songs, or right around $20-30 worth of music. Even if she shared each of those songs 10,000 times, it's still only worth about $300,000 at the most, well below the judgement.
And they did NOT argue that she shared the songs 10,000 times, they argued that she shared about 25 songs. Period.
What they got her for are these things called statutes, which put the penalty at a minimum of $750 per work, and a maximum of $150,000. If I remember right they hit her with statuory penalties of between $50,000 and $100,000 per song.
These particular statutes have not, as far as I know, gone before the SCOTUS which has the final say of the constitutionality of a law.
Just because the statute has not been tested by the SCOTUS does not mean the constitution is somehow irrelevant. Our system is very flexible but slow moving by design. The $1.92mil fine is only the initial judgement. If the court of appeals agrees that it is excessive it will set the standard by which judges decide the statutory damages in these cases. If they don't agree with us that the damages are excessive, then the case can eventually make its way all the way to the SCOTUS and the matter of the constitutionality of these outrageous statutes will be decided.
Because it has never happened before? You do realize that an 18 year old is 30% older than a 14 year old, and that entire 30% is in the higher developement - the stuff like programming.
Would you not be surprised that an engineer fresh out of school is a better engineer than all the other engineers at the firm that hired him? Of course you would. Raw talent usually means you're better than the worst to start with, experience counts for a lot and it takes both to be the best. Being young and having a lot of experience don't mesh well, but it's not unheard of.
Hence, the surprise win of the 14 year old over thousands of competitors with more experience.
It would be far more interesting if a 14-year-old won an international contest whose participants included college students studying CS at an advanced level:)
Why? Most of them are shit, and he'd probably beat all but the best. The reason the 14 year old wining the contest for the first time in history is surprising is the same reason him beating CS undergrad students would be surprising: he'd be beating people with significantly more experience.
You're the kind of guy who, when someone says "Hey, check it out! I just got back from the moon!", says "Yawn, wake me up when you get back from Mars."
You know, that has to be the worst website design I've seen in a while. It's actually a lot like the websites I used to make when I was a kid and into programming them by hand, I mean does nobody there look at this thing and go "My god, that's ugly!"?. I suppose it is fine functionally, but frames haven't been a good idea from a design perspective since the 90's, and the font choice and color choice are horrible.
I mean, come on people, is it really that hard to have someone with an eye for good design look your website over? I was actually thinking about trying the training resources, to improve my programming skills (which are pretty basic), but I can't get over how horrible that website is.
Real life is free; it's humans who add a cover charge.
That really depends on what you consider "free". In real life we evolved ways to free up people from the task of hunting/gathering for their own personal needs. Smaller and smaller groups of people were needed to supply food and materials for the entire community, which meant everybody else was free to do something to make their slice of the world better for the community. Thus, the modern world was born, and eventually grew into what it is today.
That things may have gotten out of hand a little bit does not suggest in any way that devolving culture by 10,000 years is going to make life better. In fact, if you ever listen to archaeologists or read books about what things were like back then, it really sucked. Life was hard, most people died early. Convenience was a piece of flint chipped to the shape of a spear, which meant you might actually get that buffalo this time and be able to feed your family for the month.
But in real life, apart from landlords and capitalists, food actually, literally, grows on trees. As does fuel for cooking and heating, and a wonderful building material called "wood". The sun shines for free; the photosynthesis that makes the oxygen you breathe is provided free of charge.
You've got an odd idea of what living in nature is like, have you ever actually tried it? I know people who have, and it's no walk in the park, as you seem to suggest. Why the hell do you think we developed away from it?
The fact is, all of you people who claim life would be better if we all just "got back to nature" are nothing more than a bunch of hypocrites. You could do it now, as you say everything is free, so all you have to do is leave, find some place secluded, and live. But nobody from Burning Man, or any of these other "freedom" parties ever does, because nobody wants to give up the luxuries the modern world provides. It's really nothing more than an excuse to have a raucous party.
The difference in the number of buttons is, let's see... you have no home button, but you always have a tab bar, even if there's only one tab, even score there.
You should try maximizing Chrome, especially if you want the most viewable web space. Tabs move up to the title bar, and out of their own tab bar then, eliminating a row. Home can be added back also, if you want it. I personally like it, because the default chrome home page (which can be changed) keeps track of what pages I go to most, so I don't have to configure anything - Chrome already knows where I want to go, and since you have to open the web page anyway, why not save a step?
The new Safari layout is apparently almost exactly like Chrome's, but their design has a few flaws Chrome's doesn't.
And of course on a Mac I don't count the menu bar because it's always there... on Linux, I recall, there's a global menu on both Gnome and KDE taking up space, so no savings there. On Windows, the task bar. Honors are even.
The menu bar on a Mac is always there, why the hell wouldn't you count it? The taskbar in windows can auto-hide, and the menu bar in Gnome at least (and I'm pretty sure KDE too) can be truncated to a little bar that floats on top allowing the window to be maximised to the entire screen real-estate, or slid to a button on the right or left side of the screen, again allowing the windows to use the entire screen.
In chrome also the page options as well as the file menu is incorporated into a button to the right of the address bar. With the incorporated address/search (which works flawlessly, unlike the IE version I've used) saving space, the two buttons for page options and file menu are very unobtrusive, usefull, and save space. Score one for Chrome.
ALSO, Chrome eliminated the status bar, instead showing a small translucent popup at the bottom whenever status information - like where links are pointing or page load progress. It disappears when there is nothing to display. The new Safari eliminates the status bar by showing page load progress in the address bar, but it does not display links. This is rather important given the number of phishing scams out there. No points for Safari if the space savings comes at the cost of functionality. Score one from Chrome.
So the score is so far Chrome - 3, FF/Opera (can you get safari in linux?) on Linux - 1, Safari on Mac - 0 (1 for the new version, they move tabs to the title bar like Chrome).
Score doesn't look too even to me. Also, I'm not sure if this is a bug or not so I won't count it, but on my friends Mac, windows won't maximise all the way to the bottom of the screen if you've used the little pop-up menu bar.
How do you distinguish between a URL and a search string in Chrome? I don't know, but I'll bet you have some kind of rule, something to remember.
Yeah, there is a rule, it's incredibly complicated. It works like this: If I want to go to a URL, say www.somesite.com, then in the address bar I type: http://www.somesite.com/ or even just www.somesite.com.
If I want to search for Harry Potter showtimes near Phillidelphia, then in the address bar I type: Harry Potter showtimes near Phillidelphia
Wow, that's hard. I mean, obscenely hard. Most people won't get it in fact. I can understand why you'd be afraid of something so complicated. Go ahead and stick with your cluttered UI, extra menus that you may actually use once in a blue moon, and keep lying to yourself that it's somehow easier to use because you've got more buttons.
The only time, the ONLY time, when a separate search bar would be slightly better than a combined search bar, is when you want to do a search on a URL. In that case, you have to do something like Search Google www.somewebsite.com. But it's hardly complicated, and the advantages are well worth the small learning curve.
I once saw a browser with the Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, the Stumble upon toolbar (fantastic add-on, btw, but it's own toolbar? couldn't we just have a menu button!), some other search toolbar, and I think a weightwatchers or quilting toolbar or some shit like that.
To top it off the monitor wasn't exactly huge, so less than half the screen was left for web content. I was just like "You've got to be kidding me!".
I recently switched to the beta Chrome and man do I love it. When maximised the tabs are all at the window title, buttons and address bar are all on one row, and if I set the taskbar to auto-hide then almost the entire screen is devoted to the web page content. I love it, plus, as its their specialty, the search-in-the-address-bar works great. I'll admit I haven't tried it in IE7 or IE8, but Chrome's search beats the pants off of IE6's.
The only annoying thing about it is their method of installation to avoid requiring admin rights means Chrome has to be installed on a per-user bases. That's plain annoying. Otherwise it is far and away my favorite browser.
Software companies can always find ways to increase profit margins per unit sold. Some people prefer it come from advertising, rather than coming from price rises or developer lay-offs.
That is blatantly untrue, and it shows how much you (and a lot of other people) know about economics.
Advertisement is not some magic revenue generating device, it is simply a new product. When coupled with another product it affects the demand of that product, and could easily cause a net loss instead of a net gain. Advertising itself is essential, because a person who does not know about a product will never, ever buy it. They must find out somehow, and if not via word of mouth the only way they will know about it and decide whether or not they want it is through advertising.
Layoffs reduce developement costs (at least on paper, they may not in reality due to secondary and tertiary factors), which increases profitability. That is unless the quality suffers and market demand is in turn reduced. Again, layoffs can easilly lead to a net loss instead of a gain, particularly if you are already close to your "sweet spot".
The "sweet spot" that yields the highest profit based on the cost to develop the product, the cost to produce the product, the cost to deliver the product, and the market demand for a product. If you are at this sweet spot, no scheme will ever raise your profit margin unless it can generate more demand or lower the costs to deliver the product. Any changes will lower your profit margin.
The developement cost for a particular product is set in stone, it's all the research and developement that went into creating the product. Once done there is never an additional cost unless you alter the product.
The production cost for software is small, at most it is a dollar or two to burn the disk and create the packaging. It is ongoing but small for software. You'd factor in company overhead post-developement here also.
The delivery costs for software are also small, generally $5-$15 depending on delivery method - shipping physical media or via the web.
So after the developement of the software, the only substantial factor for determining the price of the software is the market demand for the software. This has relatively few primary variables, but a vast number of secondary and tertiary variables making it notoriously difficult to predict. You can only react to the market, you cannot anticipate it with any great accuracy, companies generally "find" it by making a rough guess and reacting to the market. Established markets tend to be set at a certain price for a certain type of product, but not always.
So the real question is, what price gets the market demand that nets the highest profit?
For game software, I think it is pretty clear that it has been overpriced for a while. Case in point is Valve's Left For Dead game. They dropped the price from $50 to $20 and demand shot up, I believe it was in the neighborhood of tenfold but it would not have to be nearly that high to yield a much higher profit.
For an example on the maths, assume 1,000 people buy the software at $50, and it costs you $5 to deliver it. That works out to $5,000 in cost and $50,000 income, for a net return of $45,000. If it cost you $40,000 to develop the software, you only made $5,000 net profit.
Now, assume 5,000 people are willing to buy the software at $20, and it still costs you $5 to deliver it. Now your delivery costs are $25,000, but your income is $100,000. With a net income of $75,000 and development costs of $40,000 your net profit is $35,000. That's seven times what you made at $50.
You can't drop the price forever though, because you run out of people who want your software. For example, if only 5,000 more people will buy the software at $10, but it still costs you $5 to deliver it, you have a problem. Your income is $100,000, but your cost to deliver is $50,000. That leaves you with $50,000 net income, and with $40,000 in pro
I don't buy the premise of TFS at all. First, afaict it's always been hard to not have an edit reverted.
You realize you basically said it is worse than TFS says, not that the premise is invalid. You can't invalidate a premise of "This happens a lot" with "No it doesn't, it happens a lot more than that".
25% reversal rate for new editors is very high, and would definitely lead to experiences you had. In essence, if you aren't buddy buddy with the admins, expect any edits on a popular page to be reverted, regardless of references.
...Like saying that brown people are actually (regular) white people whose skin color turned darker?
You realize that is essentially true, right? The only reason skin color is different is mellanin. Without it everyone would be as pale as the palest redhead, and everybody has the structures to produce it. Black people just have a high base level of melanin, while lighter skinned people require a trigger like exposure to the sun to produce higher levels of melanin.
I'd really like to see someone exercise their 5th Ammendment rights on principal alone, forcing it up the chain. I'm reasonably certain it would be struck down.
It would take someone with serious cash and for whom the possibility of a little jail time while the process is under way would not completely destroy their life.
However, they can't prove that the unallocated space on that encrypted file/volume contains any hidden encrypted data...
Of course they can, it's not going to show up as a bunch of 0's decrypted, and when you move it to another volume it will be relatively simple to compare data size differences. There are a dozen other techniques, I'm sure, of recognizing encrypted data. They might miss it if the second encryption is only a few kb in size, but beyond that they'll figure out that you've got more to share.
Personally, I think it's smarter to stick to the 5th amendment and let them take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Well, if you're guilty anyway. Or if you really, really want to prove the point.
The main difference would be that they can't actually prove that you have a second key, so it's a lot harder to convict you for refusing to give it.
Except for the fact that there is still data on the drive that is encrypted after they decrypt it.
Duh.
If the data exists on the drive, there is no way to completely hide it. One simple example I can think of, is if the data is "hidden" and encrypted, they can simply decrypt what is there, move it off to an unencrypted location, and compare the difference in drive size. Unless you somehow figure out a way to encrypt the data as all "0"s (it should be apparent that this is not even remotely possible without leaving significant traces), you will never hide it. They'll just ask about your other layer of encryption, and be doubly suspicious.
This just confirms to me that Palm Executives are just too dumb to live...
Sincerely,
A long-time Palm user (who still uses a Centro)
Who's the stupid one here, the guy who runs the company that does dumb shit, or the guy who keeps using the products of the company run by the guy who does dumb shit to him?
This is why it should be really hard to get a patent.
The effort in getting a patent should reflect the amount of effort that the information in the patent represents.
Patents should be for the "hard stuff" not stuff that any ditz practicing in the field can come up with.
Here's the rub:
Joe Blow inventor has an epiphany, and invents a super cheap, easy method of turning lead into gold. This would revolutionize industry and economy as we know it.
However, because the patent process has been made extremely difficult, it now requires millions of dollars and teams of lawyers in order to get a patent pushed through. The only way he can gather the funds is to start using his invention. Company X finds out about it, realizes what is so simple (but at the same time unique, non-obvious, and extremely useful) and applies for the patent themselves. At this point the inventor cannot patent it. Patent law follows the "first to file wins" rule (a good example is the invention of TeleVision, 2 inventors 1 patent). Since the inventor was trying to keep it a secret while he built the funds to apply, he doesn't have a chance.
He can still use his invention, but only the megacorp with lots of cash can sell it, because they recieved the patent.
Patents should not take difficulty into account at all. They should take into account what they already take into account - is it unique, useful, and non-obvious? The problem as I see it is a number of software patents fail the "non-obvious" test, but patent officers don't realize they do. When a software engineer responds with "Why the fuck would you want to do that?" instead of "Oh, I hadn't thought of that", the patent is obvious but generally thought to be a bad idea, and so not used (aka 1-click shopping). It should not recieve a patent.
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process... may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
From 35 U.S.C 273:
(a) DEFINITIONS.- For purposes of this section-... (3) the term "method" means a method of doing or conducting business...
(3) LIMITATIONS AND QUALIFICATIONS OF DEFENSE.- The defense to infringement under this section is subject to the following:
(A) PATENT.- A person may not assert the defense under this section unless the invention for which the defense is asserted is for a method.
While business methods are not explicitly defined in the patentable inventions code (that's code 101, part of which I posted above), the code itself is very short and doesn't explicitly define anything.
If the criteria you go by regarding what is patentable is whether or not it was specifically defined in the Patent Code, then the lightbulb was not patentable either, because electronic devices are not specifically defined in the Patent Code. See what I'm getting at? We have case law that supports electronic devices, but it can be struck down if determined un-Constitutional.
From the language in code 273, which is specifically for defense to infringement based on an earlier inventor, it seems pretty clear business methods were assumed to be patentable. They went so far as to include specific exclusions for cases when a business method specifically might NOT be patentable. Those exclusions by no means significantly reduce the patentability of business methods.
In other words, if the Bilski decision is determined to infringe over-much on the patentability of business methods, it will be struck down.
This is not a question of whether business methods are patentable, a third grader can read the patent code and see that they are. This is a question of whether or not the Bilski criteria for determining patentability of a business method infringes the U.S. Constitution by excluding a significant portion of business method patents.
My god, this service has existed since they launched IE6, it is simply turned off by default.
Hit the big "Search" button in the toolbar, and hit customize, and you can change what search provider the address bar search uses. You can disable/enable/change the address bar search option in Internet Options/Advanced.
They obviously recently updated the list of service providers to replace Live search with Bing. My guess is they changed the default address bar search behavior also, and anybody who was using the defaults got changed over.
Nobody seems upset that Chrome does this by default, or that FireFox can do this too. Frickin hypocrites.
Seriously, get ahold of yourselves people, you're really getting upset that IE tries to find the website you were looking for instead of saying "Website not found"? And it's somehow DNS hijacking? Get a grip people!
The truth, it looks like, is that MS updated the search service in IE and may have changed the default settings. The old default was disabled with Live search being the first option selected. The new default is probably to have it enabled with Bing as the first option - Bing has definitely replaced Live in the list of search providers.
Calling it "Hijacking" a non-existing domain name is a bit over-the-top. Chances are nobody thought us geeks would be too slow to pick up on what actually happened rather than getting our collective panties in a bunch about a non-issue.
Does anybody really think MS is stupid enough to switch on mass-DNS hijacking? Did everybody get stupid all of a sudden?
Makes the statement from the first MIB movie seem all too true: A person is smart, but people are stupid (paraphrase).
Slashdot Mirror
The OEM license key is tied to the machine, not to the customer.
As long as it is the original equipment, you can re-sell that machine and re-install that OS as many times as you like.
What you CAN'T do with an OEM license, is use that license on a different machine, even if you removed it (and the license) on the old machine.
Retail boxes of Windows are transferable from PC to PC provided you remove the software from the old PC first; OEM licenses are tied to the machine itself and not transferrable to a new PC.
Get it? Who owns the PC has no bearing on whether the license is valid or not. If it did, the majority of the used PC market would be illegal and would have been shut down long ago, and that is certainly the case.
It might be a good idea to know a little bit about how licensing works before telling someone they will end up in jail for a non-existant license transgression.
The patent is on storing the XML tags in one file and the raw text with pointers in another file, then combining the two on the fly. The two files are stored in a container that the software knows what to do with (obviously).
This is supposed to make saving large documents significantly more efficient, and makes conversion to other formats simpler and quicker. The OO format apparently doesn't operate in this specific way, perhaps it uses a similar but different methodology that does not infringe the patent, because it seems they are not affected by it.
Maybe that's why it's saved as a .docx? Maybe? I dunno, I'm just throwing things out here...
Retard, ooxml is XML based, as in, it uses standard XML tags and should you want to do a conversion to .xml would be very simple and straightforward.
The problem is, someone already thought of that, and patented it. If it's novel and better than what is out there, it does not matter that someone else COULD have thought of it, what matters is that i4i DID think of it, and thought of it first, and got a patent on it.
Software patents are always dubious, but this is a novel process that nobody was doing before i4i was doing it. That nobody on SlashDot knew they were doing it does not mean they weren't, and they've got the patent to prove it. The patent has also been held up in court. Bad software patents generally get nullified when they go to court, because the other party can bring up prior art that nullifies the patent. Apparently, that was not the case here, and the patent is legit.
Always remember, hindsight is 20/20, and just because the solution is simple does not mean anybody had thought of it before.
The only thing stoping Microsoft from having a complete monopoly is the closest we have to subverting copyright: the GPL.
BZZZZZT! Wrong, you've got it backwards. The only thing keeping GPL'd OSs alive are anti-trust laws which have consistantly smacked Microsoft down when they get heavy-handed. Without them Microsoft would have crushed the competition years ago.
Linux and Mac OS would not stand a chance without these laws, and even with them only Mac OS offers any sort of competition, and that's primarily proprietary on top of a small BSD core.
So your argument for the heroic GPL is a little off-kilter. Break it down - Proprietary (Windows) Dominates > Mostly Proprietary (Mac OSX) holds its own > GPL (Linux) is dominated by every measure possible. Seems like the GPL software is doing the worst of the bunch.
I'm not an MS fan, and I like Linux, but I'm tired of people singing the glories of the heroic Linux when it's just not true.
God, do any of you own a house? I'm worried if you do, because you obviously have no idea how property tax works, or how the value is assessed.
Property value is based on market value, and it is assessed not determined with any arbitrarily set at whatever the owner says it is worth. If THAT were the case, everyone would claim their house is worth ~$1, and nobody would pay property tax. The individual sale price for the property is only one factor in the equation, and just because you offer something for $10 million does not mean the tax value is $10 million.
For example, if a house sells for $10 million, but over the last decade it only sold for between $80k-100k, the assessed tax value is definitely not going to be $10 million. If every other house on the block is only worth $100k as well, it factors in. If nothing has been added to the house to increase its value, then obviously this is the off case of someone who really really wanted a property for a reason likely unrelated to the property value, and someone who really did not want to sell for likely the same reason. Therefor the $10 million sale probably does not represent the true market value of the house, and you'd probably only see a bump in the assessed tax value of 50-100%.
In this case with Microsoft, some manager was probably unwilling to pony up the cash and tried to steamroll them, with a "go on, sue the mighty Microsoft, I dare ya" and this little company called their bluff. They went into "Oh Shit" mode, couldn't reach an agreement (they probably pissed the hell out of this company), and lost the court case.
This is very clearly NOT a case where a patent troll was biding their time to strike an unsuspecting victim - they sold the product and Microsoft tried to steal it. Microsoft is in the wrong, and they only ways they can make it right is by either removing the functionality altogether, creating NEW functionality that does not infringe the patent, or ponying up the cash. The third option may no longer be available, it sounds like they burned that bridge pretty well.
All of the information, including the picture she posted, was public record. It is perfectly legal to follow anybody you want around anywhere you want, so long as it is in public. Ever heard of the Paparrazi? Celebs can't even get restraining orders to stick on those people, why the hell should Police be able to restrict a reporter?
While I would certainly call it a dirtback move, it's definitely not illegal.
Stalking is also not illegal, though you do have the right to request a restraining order on a stalker under certain circumstances. I.e. you can show they intend you physical harm, or are tresspassing on your property, etc. Otherwise the judge generally tells you to stuff it, since they aren't breaking any laws you have no right to impose your will upon them.
Same thing here, even if there WERE a restraining order against her, I doubt anything she was doing would have violated it. She was following them around and researching public records. That is 100% legal. She should not have been arrested unless she was threatening them, or they have reason to believe she was doing this on behalf of someone who intended them physical harm.
Look at what they charged her with, it's pretty frickin flimsy.
This is probably going to backfire on the PD if they push it too far, as it looks very much like harassment and restriction of the journalist's freedom of the press and freedom of speech rights.
Public employees on public business have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
There, fixed that for you.
Also:
That logic is sort of like it is OK to use my digital VCR to record the music channel but it is somehow wrong to download music from the net.
The two are very different - in the first, someone has paid for a license to broadcast. You receive it because someone paid to let you receive it - HOW you receive it is up to you, i.e. "time shifting" is ok - so you can store it in your VCR or DVR for later viewing. Downloading from the net, however, unless it is from an authorized distributor nobody has paid the license for you to receive the file.
Also, the law seems to be coming down against the distributor, not the distributee. So while it is technically illegal to download music off the net without the copyright to do so, only re-distributing that download will get you into any trouble.
IANAL, but I play one on SlashDot. :)
Contrived and nothing at all like what happened in this case.
She was fined $1.92 million for distributing somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 songs, or right around $20-30 worth of music. Even if she shared each of those songs 10,000 times, it's still only worth about $300,000 at the most, well below the judgement.
And they did NOT argue that she shared the songs 10,000 times, they argued that she shared about 25 songs. Period.
What they got her for are these things called statutes, which put the penalty at a minimum of $750 per work, and a maximum of $150,000. If I remember right they hit her with statuory penalties of between $50,000 and $100,000 per song.
These particular statutes have not, as far as I know, gone before the SCOTUS which has the final say of the constitutionality of a law.
Just because the statute has not been tested by the SCOTUS does not mean the constitution is somehow irrelevant. Our system is very flexible but slow moving by design. The $1.92mil fine is only the initial judgement. If the court of appeals agrees that it is excessive it will set the standard by which judges decide the statutory damages in these cases. If they don't agree with us that the damages are excessive, then the case can eventually make its way all the way to the SCOTUS and the matter of the constitutionality of these outrageous statutes will be decided.
Because it has never happened before? You do realize that an 18 year old is 30% older than a 14 year old, and that entire 30% is in the higher developement - the stuff like programming.
Would you not be surprised that an engineer fresh out of school is a better engineer than all the other engineers at the firm that hired him? Of course you would. Raw talent usually means you're better than the worst to start with, experience counts for a lot and it takes both to be the best. Being young and having a lot of experience don't mesh well, but it's not unheard of.
Hence, the surprise win of the 14 year old over thousands of competitors with more experience.
It would be far more interesting if a 14-year-old won an international contest whose participants included college students studying CS at an advanced level :)
Why? Most of them are shit, and he'd probably beat all but the best. The reason the 14 year old wining the contest for the first time in history is surprising is the same reason him beating CS undergrad students would be surprising: he'd be beating people with significantly more experience.
You're the kind of guy who, when someone says "Hey, check it out! I just got back from the moon!", says "Yawn, wake me up when you get back from Mars."
In other words, you're an asshole.
You know, that has to be the worst website design I've seen in a while. It's actually a lot like the websites I used to make when I was a kid and into programming them by hand, I mean does nobody there look at this thing and go "My god, that's ugly!"?. I suppose it is fine functionally, but frames haven't been a good idea from a design perspective since the 90's, and the font choice and color choice are horrible.
I mean, come on people, is it really that hard to have someone with an eye for good design look your website over? I was actually thinking about trying the training resources, to improve my programming skills (which are pretty basic), but I can't get over how horrible that website is.
Maybe I'll try it anyway.
Real life is free; it's humans who add a cover charge.
That really depends on what you consider "free". In real life we evolved ways to free up people from the task of hunting/gathering for their own personal needs. Smaller and smaller groups of people were needed to supply food and materials for the entire community, which meant everybody else was free to do something to make their slice of the world better for the community. Thus, the modern world was born, and eventually grew into what it is today.
That things may have gotten out of hand a little bit does not suggest in any way that devolving culture by 10,000 years is going to make life better. In fact, if you ever listen to archaeologists or read books about what things were like back then, it really sucked. Life was hard, most people died early. Convenience was a piece of flint chipped to the shape of a spear, which meant you might actually get that buffalo this time and be able to feed your family for the month.
But in real life, apart from landlords and capitalists, food actually, literally, grows on trees. As does fuel for cooking and heating, and a wonderful building material called "wood". The sun shines for free; the photosynthesis that makes the oxygen you breathe is provided free of charge.
You've got an odd idea of what living in nature is like, have you ever actually tried it? I know people who have, and it's no walk in the park, as you seem to suggest. Why the hell do you think we developed away from it?
The fact is, all of you people who claim life would be better if we all just "got back to nature" are nothing more than a bunch of hypocrites. You could do it now, as you say everything is free, so all you have to do is leave, find some place secluded, and live. But nobody from Burning Man, or any of these other "freedom" parties ever does, because nobody wants to give up the luxuries the modern world provides. It's really nothing more than an excuse to have a raucous party.
Your idealism is faked.
The difference in the number of buttons is, let's see... you have no home button, but you always have a tab bar, even if there's only one tab, even score there.
You should try maximizing Chrome, especially if you want the most viewable web space. Tabs move up to the title bar, and out of their own tab bar then, eliminating a row. Home can be added back also, if you want it. I personally like it, because the default chrome home page (which can be changed) keeps track of what pages I go to most, so I don't have to configure anything - Chrome already knows where I want to go, and since you have to open the web page anyway, why not save a step?
The new Safari layout is apparently almost exactly like Chrome's, but their design has a few flaws Chrome's doesn't.
And of course on a Mac I don't count the menu bar because it's always there... on Linux, I recall, there's a global menu on both Gnome and KDE taking up space, so no savings there. On Windows, the task bar. Honors are even.
The menu bar on a Mac is always there, why the hell wouldn't you count it? The taskbar in windows can auto-hide, and the menu bar in Gnome at least (and I'm pretty sure KDE too) can be truncated to a little bar that floats on top allowing the window to be maximised to the entire screen real-estate, or slid to a button on the right or left side of the screen, again allowing the windows to use the entire screen.
In chrome also the page options as well as the file menu is incorporated into a button to the right of the address bar. With the incorporated address/search (which works flawlessly, unlike the IE version I've used) saving space, the two buttons for page options and file menu are very unobtrusive, usefull, and save space. Score one for Chrome.
ALSO, Chrome eliminated the status bar, instead showing a small translucent popup at the bottom whenever status information - like where links are pointing or page load progress. It disappears when there is nothing to display. The new Safari eliminates the status bar by showing page load progress in the address bar, but it does not display links. This is rather important given the number of phishing scams out there. No points for Safari if the space savings comes at the cost of functionality. Score one from Chrome.
So the score is so far Chrome - 3, FF/Opera (can you get safari in linux?) on Linux - 1, Safari on Mac - 0 (1 for the new version, they move tabs to the title bar like Chrome).
Score doesn't look too even to me. Also, I'm not sure if this is a bug or not so I won't count it, but on my friends Mac, windows won't maximise all the way to the bottom of the screen if you've used the little pop-up menu bar.
How do you distinguish between a URL and a search string in Chrome? I don't know, but I'll bet you have some kind of rule, something to remember.
Yeah, there is a rule, it's incredibly complicated. It works like this:
If I want to go to a URL, say www.somesite.com, then in the address bar I type: http://www.somesite.com/ or even just www.somesite.com.
If I want to search for Harry Potter showtimes near Phillidelphia, then in the address bar I type: Harry Potter showtimes near Phillidelphia
Wow, that's hard. I mean, obscenely hard. Most people won't get it in fact. I can understand why you'd be afraid of something so complicated. Go ahead and stick with your cluttered UI, extra menus that you may actually use once in a blue moon, and keep lying to yourself that it's somehow easier to use because you've got more buttons.
The only time, the ONLY time, when a separate search bar would be slightly better than a combined search bar, is when you want to do a search on a URL. In that case, you have to do something like Search Google www.somewebsite.com. But it's hardly complicated, and the advantages are well worth the small learning curve.
If I sound like a fanboy, well, maybe I
I once saw a browser with the Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, the Stumble upon toolbar (fantastic add-on, btw, but it's own toolbar? couldn't we just have a menu button!), some other search toolbar, and I think a weightwatchers or quilting toolbar or some shit like that.
To top it off the monitor wasn't exactly huge, so less than half the screen was left for web content. I was just like "You've got to be kidding me!".
I recently switched to the beta Chrome and man do I love it. When maximised the tabs are all at the window title, buttons and address bar are all on one row, and if I set the taskbar to auto-hide then almost the entire screen is devoted to the web page content. I love it, plus, as its their specialty, the search-in-the-address-bar works great. I'll admit I haven't tried it in IE7 or IE8, but Chrome's search beats the pants off of IE6's.
The only annoying thing about it is their method of installation to avoid requiring admin rights means Chrome has to be installed on a per-user bases. That's plain annoying. Otherwise it is far and away my favorite browser.
You're on a Linux/BSD website.
Huh?
Software companies can always find ways to increase profit margins per unit sold. Some people prefer it come from advertising, rather than coming from price rises or developer lay-offs.
That is blatantly untrue, and it shows how much you (and a lot of other people) know about economics.
Advertisement is not some magic revenue generating device, it is simply a new product. When coupled with another product it affects the demand of that product, and could easily cause a net loss instead of a net gain. Advertising itself is essential, because a person who does not know about a product will never, ever buy it. They must find out somehow, and if not via word of mouth the only way they will know about it and decide whether or not they want it is through advertising.
Layoffs reduce developement costs (at least on paper, they may not in reality due to secondary and tertiary factors), which increases profitability. That is unless the quality suffers and market demand is in turn reduced. Again, layoffs can easilly lead to a net loss instead of a gain, particularly if you are already close to your "sweet spot".
The "sweet spot" that yields the highest profit based on the cost to develop the product, the cost to produce the product, the cost to deliver the product, and the market demand for a product. If you are at this sweet spot, no scheme will ever raise your profit margin unless it can generate more demand or lower the costs to deliver the product. Any changes will lower your profit margin.
The developement cost for a particular product is set in stone, it's all the research and developement that went into creating the product. Once done there is never an additional cost unless you alter the product.
The production cost for software is small, at most it is a dollar or two to burn the disk and create the packaging. It is ongoing but small for software. You'd factor in company overhead post-developement here also.
The delivery costs for software are also small, generally $5-$15 depending on delivery method - shipping physical media or via the web.
So after the developement of the software, the only substantial factor for determining the price of the software is the market demand for the software. This has relatively few primary variables, but a vast number of secondary and tertiary variables making it notoriously difficult to predict. You can only react to the market, you cannot anticipate it with any great accuracy, companies generally "find" it by making a rough guess and reacting to the market. Established markets tend to be set at a certain price for a certain type of product, but not always.
So the real question is, what price gets the market demand that nets the highest profit?
For game software, I think it is pretty clear that it has been overpriced for a while. Case in point is Valve's Left For Dead game. They dropped the price from $50 to $20 and demand shot up, I believe it was in the neighborhood of tenfold but it would not have to be nearly that high to yield a much higher profit.
For an example on the maths, assume 1,000 people buy the software at $50, and it costs you $5 to deliver it. That works out to $5,000 in cost and $50,000 income, for a net return of $45,000. If it cost you $40,000 to develop the software, you only made $5,000 net profit.
Now, assume 5,000 people are willing to buy the software at $20, and it still costs you $5 to deliver it. Now your delivery costs are $25,000, but your income is $100,000. With a net income of $75,000 and development costs of $40,000 your net profit is $35,000. That's seven times what you made at $50.
You can't drop the price forever though, because you run out of people who want your software. For example, if only 5,000 more people will buy the software at $10, but it still costs you $5 to deliver it, you have a problem. Your income is $100,000, but your cost to deliver is $50,000. That leaves you with $50,000 net income, and with $40,000 in pro
I don't buy the premise of TFS at all. First, afaict it's always been hard to not have an edit reverted.
You realize you basically said it is worse than TFS says, not that the premise is invalid. You can't invalidate a premise of "This happens a lot" with "No it doesn't, it happens a lot more than that".
25% reversal rate for new editors is very high, and would definitely lead to experiences you had. In essence, if you aren't buddy buddy with the admins, expect any edits on a popular page to be reverted, regardless of references.
...Like saying that brown people are actually (regular) white people whose skin color turned darker?
You realize that is essentially true, right? The only reason skin color is different is mellanin. Without it everyone would be as pale as the palest redhead, and everybody has the structures to produce it. Black people just have a high base level of melanin, while lighter skinned people require a trigger like exposure to the sun to produce higher levels of melanin.
That one should go to the SCOTUS.
I'd really like to see someone exercise their 5th Ammendment rights on principal alone, forcing it up the chain. I'm reasonably certain it would be struck down.
It would take someone with serious cash and for whom the possibility of a little jail time while the process is under way would not completely destroy their life.
However, they can't prove that the unallocated space on that encrypted file/volume contains any hidden encrypted data...
Of course they can, it's not going to show up as a bunch of 0's decrypted, and when you move it to another volume it will be relatively simple to compare data size differences. There are a dozen other techniques, I'm sure, of recognizing encrypted data. They might miss it if the second encryption is only a few kb in size, but beyond that they'll figure out that you've got more to share.
Personally, I think it's smarter to stick to the 5th amendment and let them take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Well, if you're guilty anyway. Or if you really, really want to prove the point.
The main difference would be that they can't actually prove that you have a second key, so it's a lot harder to convict you for refusing to give it.
Except for the fact that there is still data on the drive that is encrypted after they decrypt it.
Duh.
If the data exists on the drive, there is no way to completely hide it. One simple example I can think of, is if the data is "hidden" and encrypted, they can simply decrypt what is there, move it off to an unencrypted location, and compare the difference in drive size. Unless you somehow figure out a way to encrypt the data as all "0"s (it should be apparent that this is not even remotely possible without leaving significant traces), you will never hide it. They'll just ask about your other layer of encryption, and be doubly suspicious.
This just confirms to me that Palm Executives are just too dumb to live...
Sincerely,
A long-time Palm user (who still uses a Centro)
Who's the stupid one here, the guy who runs the company that does dumb shit, or the guy who keeps using the products of the company run by the guy who does dumb shit to him?
Think about it.
This is why it should be really hard to get a patent.
The effort in getting a patent should reflect the amount of effort that the information in the patent represents.
Patents should be for the "hard stuff" not stuff that any ditz practicing in the field can come up with.
Here's the rub:
Joe Blow inventor has an epiphany, and invents a super cheap, easy method of turning lead into gold. This would revolutionize industry and economy as we know it.
However, because the patent process has been made extremely difficult, it now requires millions of dollars and teams of lawyers in order to get a patent pushed through. The only way he can gather the funds is to start using his invention. Company X finds out about it, realizes what is so simple (but at the same time unique, non-obvious, and extremely useful) and applies for the patent themselves. At this point the inventor cannot patent it. Patent law follows the "first to file wins" rule (a good example is the invention of TeleVision, 2 inventors 1 patent). Since the inventor was trying to keep it a secret while he built the funds to apply, he doesn't have a chance.
He can still use his invention, but only the megacorp with lots of cash can sell it, because they recieved the patent.
Patents should not take difficulty into account at all. They should take into account what they already take into account - is it unique, useful, and non-obvious? The problem as I see it is a number of software patents fail the "non-obvious" test, but patent officers don't realize they do. When a software engineer responds with "Why the fuck would you want to do that?" instead of "Oh, I hadn't thought of that", the patent is obvious but generally thought to be a bad idea, and so not used (aka 1-click shopping). It should not recieve a patent.
From 35 U.S.C 101:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process... may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
From 35 U.S.C 273:
(a) DEFINITIONS.- For purposes of this section- ...
(3) the term "method" means a method of doing or conducting business...
(3) LIMITATIONS AND QUALIFICATIONS OF DEFENSE.- The defense to infringement under this section is subject to the following:
(A) PATENT.- A person may not assert the defense under this section unless the invention for which the defense is asserted is for a method.
While business methods are not explicitly defined in the patentable inventions code (that's code 101, part of which I posted above), the code itself is very short and doesn't explicitly define anything.
If the criteria you go by regarding what is patentable is whether or not it was specifically defined in the Patent Code, then the lightbulb was not patentable either, because electronic devices are not specifically defined in the Patent Code. See what I'm getting at? We have case law that supports electronic devices, but it can be struck down if determined un-Constitutional.
From the language in code 273, which is specifically for defense to infringement based on an earlier inventor, it seems pretty clear business methods were assumed to be patentable. They went so far as to include specific exclusions for cases when a business method specifically might NOT be patentable. Those exclusions by no means significantly reduce the patentability of business methods.
In other words, if the Bilski decision is determined to infringe over-much on the patentability of business methods, it will be struck down.
This is not a question of whether business methods are patentable, a third grader can read the patent code and see that they are. This is a question of whether or not the Bilski criteria for determining patentability of a business method infringes the U.S. Constitution by excluding a significant portion of business method patents.
Here here!
My god, this service has existed since they launched IE6, it is simply turned off by default.
Hit the big "Search" button in the toolbar, and hit customize, and you can change what search provider the address bar search uses. You can disable/enable/change the address bar search option in Internet Options/Advanced.
They obviously recently updated the list of service providers to replace Live search with Bing. My guess is they changed the default address bar search behavior also, and anybody who was using the defaults got changed over.
Nobody seems upset that Chrome does this by default, or that FireFox can do this too. Frickin hypocrites.
Seriously, get ahold of yourselves people, you're really getting upset that IE tries to find the website you were looking for instead of saying "Website not found"? And it's somehow DNS hijacking? Get a grip people!
Bingo.
The truth, it looks like, is that MS updated the search service in IE and may have changed the default settings. The old default was disabled with Live search being the first option selected. The new default is probably to have it enabled with Bing as the first option - Bing has definitely replaced Live in the list of search providers.
Calling it "Hijacking" a non-existing domain name is a bit over-the-top. Chances are nobody thought us geeks would be too slow to pick up on what actually happened rather than getting our collective panties in a bunch about a non-issue.
Does anybody really think MS is stupid enough to switch on mass-DNS hijacking? Did everybody get stupid all of a sudden?
Makes the statement from the first MIB movie seem all too true: A person is smart, but people are stupid (paraphrase).