When I was dating my wife (who is Mexican), we were on a particularly beautiful vista overlooking the Bay Area in lights, and she mentioned this.
Her: All this used to be ours
Me: So you really want California run by the PRI?
Her: Eeerg.
Believe me when I say that Mexicans don't really covet the U.S. Hell, they'd be glad if they could just have a honest to goodness government running Mexico.
Re:Legitimate ... and a shame
on
Tornado in a Can
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The alternative is even more stifling.
The inventor - seeing that his invention could too easily be copied by a large multinational - decides not to risk money for nothing, but instead goes back to his real job, farming.
No invention. No innovation.
We see a lot of this kind of behavior in the software industry today. Microsoft has made such a business of stealing other people's useful ideas, there isn't much innovation left anymore - outside of the hundreds of freeware grad-student projects that makes up the backbone of Gnu/Open Source/Linux.
Now I am not defending the joke software patents have become either, where adding "...with a computer!" is considered "innovation" by our rubber stamp patent office. But some degree of protection is needed, including both a comment period and a looser pays system for claims.
2] It is too easy for large companies to simply ignore small patents, knowing that judges are very reluctant to enforce the law against them (it's not just Microsoft that gets this kind of special treatment, Intel is famous for this).
And for the Amazon associate who is really smart, that would be a way out of the problem right now.
You just put in an invisible link at the top of your your page and assume anything that follows it must be a robot. But instead of trapping it, you switch to make all your normal links go nowhere.
Everything you said was true, except for the last part. If it happens again next year they probably won't be able to pull the same stunt.
Whatever that judge is who allowed the subpeona to go through on this patently bogus claim must be pretty red-faced right about now. As news of these kinds of shenanigans gets out into the wider legal community, you'll likely start seeing fewer attempts, because judges can come down pretty hard on frivolous lawsuits.
The real question is: do you think G.W. Bush would have been less supportive of these anti-free speech laws? Or would he have been more so? Would there have been even more draconian measures stuck into them?
And which party was pushing the most for these corporate welfare bills? Do you think it was the Democrats? Seriously?
Just because Clinton didn't have a perfect 100% voting record doesn't mean we shouldn't give him credit for the 90% record he did have. Compared to our current President, who seems willing to destroy America's freedoms in order to "save" it, he was a strongly positive influence.
I'm just sorry so many Americans are so inattentive to the issues, they allow their precious liberties to be whittled away.
The latter points out that the GPL allows the charging of a fee for the transfer of source code, but omits the fact that such a fee must cover only the actual cost of distributing said source code.
And who says it doesn't? Actual cost of distribution is a pretty slippery to define, but it certainly doesn't have to just be the cost of the bandwidth. Under any reasonable interpretation, you would also add in the salaries of the people reponsible for setting up the distribution, apportioned costs of machines doing the copying, the physical media (if you were going that route), plus shipping and handling.
Yes, to a college student, a $99 fee may sound abusive. To someone working in industry, where $250/hr corporate consultation fees is the norm, it's nothing.
The starvation issues with symmetric-multithreading can easily be addressed by keeping an instruction count for each virtual thread; perhaps hooked to an interrupt the OS can use to tell when each thread has consumed its allotted processor resource.
That way, threads that have been starved for resources will remain in the process core longer than the any who happen to "hog" a resource. In other words, instead of time slicing, you can use instruction slicing to insure fair use of the scheduler between contending threads.
Volla! Problem solved. (Not counting the dozen man-years it would take to implement.)
It wouldn't work. This is a case of civil copyright infringement, not the penalty phase of a felony conviction.
What the XVid folks really need is some sugar-daddy corporation (FSF, IBM, anyone?) to fund their legal costs going after SD.
But before they do even that, I'd suggest the XVid people just tell Sigma Designs that if they don't conform to the GNU Public License, they'll start contacting their distributors to tell them about the situation - and that they're selling products in violation of someone's copyright.
Believe me when I say that Sigma Designs will fold like a house of cards if they do that. At one time they had such a bad reputation with distributors, they had a terrible time just getting their products out on the shelves. Assuming little has changed (and this episode convinces me it hasn't) it wouldn't take much to have them get dropped completely. And that would hurt them where it hurts the most - in the pocketbook.
1] Describe the technical accomplishment you're most proud of.
2] How did it work?
3] What did you do on it?
4] At our company, we have this general problem X. What are your first thoughts on how to solve it?
5] How would you rate yourself in (language)?
6] A language specific question. For instance in C, what does "volatile" mean? For C++, write code whose meaning would change if you used the keyword "virtual" in front of a base class. (Note: passing the test is nowhere near as important as that it generally matches with the answer under #5).
7] (Note: several questions may be done in this area - again, it is more important that skills are accurate on the resume than everything is done exactly right.)
8] Say you have a technical disagreement with a fellow programmer, and you really think you're right. What are the steps you'd take to resolve it?
9] What sort of software tools are you familiar with? How to you coordinate development with other engineers?
10] What are the things you expect from the company for us to make you happy?
I have noticed in interviewing that engineers can easily spot other good engineers. If you can't, it's because you can't program yourself. So go get someone with the skills to do your interviewing for you.
The shareholders can and should sue them for far more than they stole.
This would be an excellent excuse if lawyers worked for free. They don't.
Also, shareholder do sue boards. The political result? Tort "reform" - presently being pushed by our current U.S. President - which aims to make it effectively impossible to get court review of nearly any malfeasance, short of the CEO holding up the corporate treasury at gunpoint.
Finally, boards are protected by the corporate "veil" which shields them from liability. In the above case, they simply say "look - it's another form of compensating our critical people" and they're off scott free.
What they don't say is that the real reason why they're scratching the CEO's back with absurd compensation is that he is scratching theirs as a board member in the company they head up. (Yes, CEOs routinely make up large percentages of the board members in the US.) This "crony capitalism" is extremely obvious - but nearly impossible to prove in a court of law.
No wonder self-dealing is the norm.
The simple truth is that civil liability isn't worth the paper it's written on. Unless there is a law to prevent a form of corporate malfeasance, you can expect people will practice it. How do you think we got the financial disclosure laws in the first place?
Special-Prosecutor: "Would you agree your lawyer is horrible at math because he actually believes 9 is NOT prime?"
Ex-President: "Is horrible at math?"
Special-Prosecutor: "YES! Is horrible! Nine not being prime? What a joke!"
Ex-President: "Well, I guess it depends on what your definition of IS is."
It came out sounding like Clinton was trying to twist the word "is" into something it wasn't, but in reality he was defending the word's clear meaning from the GOP special-prosecutor's attempt to twist it into something it's not (a.k.a "was").
Maybe I am missing something, but how is it bye bye GPL if altered redistribution is established as legal? Isnt the GPL all about allowing altered distribution (with the caveat that you must also include source)?
Because it is redistribution without the original creators permission to alter it.
The equivalent behavior for open source would be to redistribute, but stripping out all that nasty GPL license stuff. After all, it's just content that my customer doesn't want, right?
For your own personal use does not include renting it out to other people. And while setting up specific edit-points may very well pass court scrutiny (because it's adding what effectively amounts to "opinion"), this isn't what the stores are doing.
You people had better be upset about this, because if somehow this altered-redistribution is somehow established as legal - it's bye bye GPL.
The US is not without its international supporters. But you (and that moron moderator who modded my comment "Flamebait") still miss the point: Legalities are what come as a result of the work of armies. If the US military hadn't "illegally" (according to the Hirohito government) killed Japaneese soldiers, you probably wouldn't be alive today.
Imprisonment without trial is generally consider a bad thing - and they are saying that he is not actually a prisoner of war.
Imprisonment of civilians in a non-war setting is generally considered a bad thing. Imprisonment of an enemy-combatant (as opposed to what you usually do to them) is generally considered a good thing. Note that to recieve the benefits of being a prisoner of war, a combatant must have satisfied four very specific conditions.
David Hicks is probably as guilty as hell, but we won't really know until he gets a trial will we?
I believe that it would be in the US's best long-term interest to eventually release Hicks to his government. But that does not mean the US doesn't have a right to hold him under the Geneva convention.
Only first-world armies such as the US actually follow the Geneva convention.
But the USA didn't agree to the Geneva convention, and doesn't follow it. You've been watching too much "Hogan's Heroes", it's not the 1940's anymore - things (like the Geneva convention) have changed.
Oh really? Funny, with a two minute search on google, I found a direct refutation. Furthermore, while Congress never ratified the 1977 additional protocols, the administration and every subsequent one agreed to follow it. Maybe you should do a little research before you go making false assertions.
a) If an Australian broke a US law, in Australia, the Australian courts would happily agree that the USA has jurisdiction if someone actually bothered to prosecute.
Really? Do you see the Dutch being pressured to turn over drug addicts to US courts?
Maybe you mean someone committing a crime in the US and fleeing to Australia? In that case you're correct - the US and Australia have an extradition treaty, effective since 1976.
b) If a US person with money/political power broke an Australian law *and came to Australia/or while in Australia* you can bet your sweet ass that the USA would block any such attempt or our own USA-ass-kissing govt would interfere and kill off any such action.
Actually, you have it quite the reverse. Before an American murderer will be shipped back to the US, the Aussie Attorney-General must be assured that the person will not be subject to the death penalty. The US imposes no such non-reciprocal conditions on the Australians.
c) If an Australian broke an American law while in Afghanistan then the Americans will kidnap the Australian and hold him illegally without representation in a US military base.
Illegally?
According to who, pal?
Legalities are nicities that we all talk about
to deal with civilian misbehavior during peacetime. During wartime (I hope I'm not shattering your worldview) groups of people systematically plot to go find groups of other people and commit what would otherwise be called first degree murder - not only without "representation", without even a trial!.
In war zones, enemy combatantants are lucky to be merely detained. In the real (third) world, they are quite often quietly and unceremoniously killed. Only first-world armies such as the US actually follow the Geneva convention.
Actually, what really takes me back is the email addresses. Notice that everyone just uses them? No mangling, no spam buckets, no nada. There isn't even the THOUGHT they would be abused. The thought sure never occured to me back in those days either - sigh.
According to the Geneva convention, the status of Prisoner Of War requires the combatant (not his capturers) to have adhered to very specific conditions. This is spelled out in the VERY FIRST article of the convention. To wit:
Article 1. The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:
1. To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
2. To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
3. To carry arms openly; and
4. To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
The vast majority of captured Taliban fighers were granted this POW status (and almost immediately released). The relative handful of Al Queida operatives fail multiple aspects of the Geneva convention, and thus cannot claim any protection from it.
Mostly true, but not totally. If it can be shown that prosecution is being selectively applied only to a class of individuals, the courts have been known to toss the entire law.
This comes from a case in the early 1900s in San Francisco where there was a law against laundromats, but only Chinese laundromats were being shut down. The white-owned ones were allowed to operate.
I agree that this wouldn't apply in Mr. Peren's situation. Still, he's totally safe. There's not a prosecutor in the US who would try him unless they wanted the DCMA at least partially invalidated. Academic speech merits the highest form of protection.
Again, speaking as an expert, Forgent Networks patent has NOTHING to do with JPEG. It is quite hard to find prior art for a patent claim that doesn't apply.
One would hope they'd just fight this nusance lawsuit in court.
Slashdot Mirror
Courts routinely do not respect such conventions, especially where damages apply. It's called "piercing the corporate veil".
Yes, it is a roadblock, but not insurmountable.
When I was dating my wife (who is Mexican), we were on a particularly beautiful vista overlooking the Bay Area in lights, and she mentioned this.
Her: All this used to be ours
Me: So you really want California run by the PRI?
Her: Eeerg.
Believe me when I say that Mexicans don't really covet the U.S. Hell, they'd be glad if they could just have a honest to goodness government running Mexico.
The alternative is even more stifling.
The inventor - seeing that his invention could too easily be copied by a large multinational - decides not to risk money for nothing, but instead goes back to his real job, farming.
No invention. No innovation.
We see a lot of this kind of behavior in the software industry today. Microsoft has made such a business of stealing other people's useful ideas, there isn't much innovation left anymore - outside of the hundreds of freeware grad-student projects that makes up the backbone of Gnu/Open Source/Linux.
Now I am not defending the joke software patents have become either, where adding "...with a computer!" is considered "innovation" by our rubber stamp patent office. But some degree of protection is needed, including both a comment period and a looser pays system for claims.
Effectively the problem with patents is twofold:
1] It is too easy to get a bogus patent, with which you can bully people who don't have the legal resources to fight your ludicrous claim.
2] It is too easy for large companies to simply ignore small patents, knowing that judges are very reluctant to enforce the law against them (it's not just Microsoft that gets this kind of special treatment, Intel is famous for this).
And for the Amazon associate who is really smart, that would be a way out of the problem right now.
You just put in an invisible link at the top of your your page and assume anything that follows it must be a robot. But instead of trapping it, you switch to make all your normal links go nowhere.
Voilla! No more robot.
Everything you said was true, except for the last part. If it happens again next year they probably won't be able to pull the same stunt.
Whatever that judge is who allowed the subpeona to go through on this patently bogus claim must be pretty red-faced right about now. As news of these kinds of shenanigans gets out into the wider legal community, you'll likely start seeing fewer attempts, because judges can come down pretty hard on frivolous lawsuits.
This isn't the first game of this type by far.
It looks like a knock off of Samba de Amigo for the Dreamcast. In that game you have to buy maracas and shake them to the music.
The real question is: do you think G.W. Bush would have been less supportive of these anti-free speech laws? Or would he have been more so? Would there have been even more draconian measures stuck into them?
And which party was pushing the most for these corporate welfare bills? Do you think it was the Democrats? Seriously?
Just because Clinton didn't have a perfect 100% voting record doesn't mean we shouldn't give him credit for the 90% record he did have. Compared to our current President, who seems willing to destroy America's freedoms in order to "save" it, he was a strongly positive influence.
I'm just sorry so many Americans are so inattentive to the issues, they allow their precious liberties to be whittled away.
And who says it doesn't? Actual cost of distribution is a pretty slippery to define, but it certainly doesn't have to just be the cost of the bandwidth. Under any reasonable interpretation, you would also add in the salaries of the people reponsible for setting up the distribution, apportioned costs of machines doing the copying, the physical media (if you were going that route), plus shipping and handling.
Yes, to a college student, a $99 fee may sound abusive. To someone working in industry, where $250/hr corporate consultation fees is the norm, it's nothing.
Just so that it won't be later patented...
The starvation issues with symmetric-multithreading can easily be addressed by keeping an instruction count for each virtual thread; perhaps hooked to an interrupt the OS can use to tell when each thread has consumed its allotted processor resource.
That way, threads that have been starved for resources will remain in the process core longer than the any who happen to "hog" a resource. In other words, instead of time slicing, you can use instruction slicing to insure fair use of the scheduler between contending threads.
Volla! Problem solved. (Not counting the dozen man-years it would take to implement.)
You forgot what makes your patent really unique:
...on a Computer .
It wouldn't work. This is a case of civil copyright infringement, not the penalty phase of a felony conviction.
What the XVid folks really need is some sugar-daddy corporation (FSF, IBM, anyone?) to fund their legal costs going after SD.
But before they do even that, I'd suggest the XVid people just tell Sigma Designs that if they don't conform to the GNU Public License, they'll start contacting their distributors to tell them about the situation - and that they're selling products in violation of someone's copyright.
Believe me when I say that Sigma Designs will fold like a house of cards if they do that. At one time they had such a bad reputation with distributors, they had a terrible time just getting their products out on the shelves. Assuming little has changed (and this episode convinces me it hasn't) it wouldn't take much to have them get dropped completely. And that would hurt them where it hurts the most - in the pocketbook.
...all I can say is that I'm not one bit surprised. Many companies are morally flawed somehow, but not all of them revel in it quite so obviously.
1] Describe the technical accomplishment you're most proud of.
2] How did it work?
3] What did you do on it?
4] At our company, we have this general problem X. What are your first thoughts on how to solve it?
5] How would you rate yourself in (language)?
6] A language specific question. For instance in C, what does "volatile" mean? For C++, write code whose meaning would change if you used the keyword "virtual" in front of a base class. (Note: passing the test is nowhere near as important as that it generally matches with the answer under #5).
7] (Note: several questions may be done in this area - again, it is more important that skills are accurate on the resume than everything is done exactly right.)
8] Say you have a technical disagreement with a fellow programmer, and you really think you're right. What are the steps you'd take to resolve it?
9] What sort of software tools are you familiar with? How to you coordinate development with other engineers?
10] What are the things you expect from the company for us to make you happy?
I have noticed in interviewing that engineers can easily spot other good engineers. If you can't, it's because you can't program yourself. So go get someone with the skills to do your interviewing for you.
This would be an excellent excuse if lawyers worked for free. They don't.
Also, shareholder do sue boards. The political result? Tort "reform" - presently being pushed by our current U.S. President - which aims to make it effectively impossible to get court review of nearly any malfeasance, short of the CEO holding up the corporate treasury at gunpoint.
Finally, boards are protected by the corporate "veil" which shields them from liability. In the above case, they simply say "look - it's another form of compensating our critical people" and they're off scott free.
What they don't say is that the real reason why they're scratching the CEO's back with absurd compensation is that he is scratching theirs as a board member in the company they head up. (Yes, CEOs routinely make up large percentages of the board members in the US.) This "crony capitalism" is extremely obvious - but nearly impossible to prove in a court of law.
No wonder self-dealing is the norm.
The simple truth is that civil liability isn't worth the paper it's written on. Unless there is a law to prevent a form of corporate malfeasance, you can expect people will practice it. How do you think we got the financial disclosure laws in the first place?
A better equivalent is this:
Special-Prosecutor: "Would you agree your lawyer is horrible at math because he actually believes 9 is NOT prime?"
Ex-President: "Is horrible at math?"
Special-Prosecutor: "YES! Is horrible! Nine not being prime? What a joke!"
Ex-President: "Well, I guess it depends on what your definition of IS is."
It came out sounding like Clinton was trying to twist the word "is" into something it wasn't, but in reality he was defending the word's clear meaning from the GOP special-prosecutor's attempt to twist it into something it's not (a.k.a "was").
Because it is redistribution without the original creators permission to alter it. The equivalent behavior for open source would be to redistribute, but stripping out all that nasty GPL license stuff. After all, it's just content that my customer doesn't want, right?
Get it?
For your own personal use does not include renting it out to other people. And while setting up specific edit-points may very well pass court scrutiny (because it's adding what effectively amounts to "opinion"), this isn't what the stores are doing.
You people had better be upset about this, because if somehow this altered-redistribution is somehow established as legal - it's bye bye GPL.
The US is not without its international supporters. But you (and that moron moderator who modded my comment "Flamebait") still miss the point: Legalities are what come as a result of the work of armies. If the US military hadn't "illegally" (according to the Hirohito government) killed Japaneese soldiers, you probably wouldn't be alive today.
Imprisonment of civilians in a non-war setting is generally considered a bad thing. Imprisonment of an enemy-combatant (as opposed to what you usually do to them) is generally considered a good thing. Note that to recieve the benefits of being a prisoner of war, a combatant must have satisfied four very specific conditions.
I believe that it would be in the US's best long-term interest to eventually release Hicks to his government. But that does not mean the US doesn't have a right to hold him under the Geneva convention.
Oh really? Funny, with a two minute search on google, I found a direct refutation. Furthermore, while Congress never ratified the 1977 additional protocols, the administration and every subsequent one agreed to follow it. Maybe you should do a little research before you go making false assertions.
Really? Do you see the Dutch being pressured to turn over drug addicts to US courts?
Maybe you mean someone committing a crime in the US and fleeing to Australia? In that case you're correct - the US and Australia have an extradition treaty, effective since 1976.
You mean, like this?
Actually, you have it quite the reverse. Before an American murderer will be shipped back to the US, the Aussie Attorney-General must be assured that the person will not be subject to the death penalty. The US imposes no such non-reciprocal conditions on the Australians.
Illegally?
According to who, pal?
Legalities are nicities that we all talk about to deal with civilian misbehavior during peacetime. During wartime (I hope I'm not shattering your worldview) groups of people systematically plot to go find groups of other people and commit what would otherwise be called first degree murder - not only without "representation", without even a trial!.
In war zones, enemy combatantants are lucky to be merely detained. In the real (third) world, they are quite often quietly and unceremoniously killed. Only first-world armies such as the US actually follow the Geneva convention.
No. It will kill spam from legit businesses. The frauds and hucksters will still be at it.
IF SPAM IS OUTLAWED, ONLY OUTLAWS WILL USE SPAM!
(sorry - had to)
You took the words right out of my mouth.
Actually, what really takes me back is the email addresses. Notice that everyone just uses them? No mangling, no spam buckets, no nada. There isn't even the THOUGHT they would be abused. The thought sure never occured to me back in those days either - sigh.
Somebody needs to hit you with a clue bat.
According to the Geneva convention, the status of Prisoner Of War requires the combatant (not his capturers) to have adhered to very specific conditions. This is spelled out in the VERY FIRST article of the convention. To wit:
Article 1. The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:
1. To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
2. To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
3. To carry arms openly; and
4. To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
The vast majority of captured Taliban fighers were granted this POW status (and almost immediately released). The relative handful of Al Queida operatives fail multiple aspects of the Geneva convention, and thus cannot claim any protection from it.
Mostly true, but not totally. If it can be shown that prosecution is being selectively applied only to a class of individuals, the courts have been known to toss the entire law.
This comes from a case in the early 1900s in San Francisco where there was a law against laundromats, but only Chinese laundromats were being shut down. The white-owned ones were allowed to operate.
I agree that this wouldn't apply in Mr. Peren's situation. Still, he's totally safe. There's not a prosecutor in the US who would try him unless they wanted the DCMA at least partially invalidated. Academic speech merits the highest form of protection.
Again, speaking as an expert, Forgent Networks patent has NOTHING to do with JPEG. It is quite hard to find prior art for a patent claim that doesn't apply.
One would hope they'd just fight this nusance lawsuit in court.
Gun's don't kill people - guns make it very very easy to kill people, so that people who otherwise wouldn't have killed do so. Often by accident.
DVR's don't commit piracy - neither do the people who use them. You have the right to record anything you are sent. PERIOD.
You claim there's some sort of similarity between the two situations. There isn't.