It does not prevent reverse-engineering of patents,
As far as I know, patents don't need to be reverse engineered, since their implementation is public (it's in the patent application). But knowing how it works doesn't give you the right to use it yourself (that's what patents do, after all), so there's no big profit in reverse engineering them anyway.
Perhaps you are confused yourself, with trade secrets in this case?
Imagine how much easier Linux advocacy would be if we could say: "SPAM? - I thought that was a Windows problem?..."
Of all the reasons for implementing a secure, spam-free alternative to the current version of SMTP, I think "acting smug towards Windows users" must come last.
Sheesh, since when is easy advocacy a goal by itself?
Please note that the German copyright law (Urheberrecht, as it is called) is quite different from the US copyright.
That makes it extra cool. The GPL was crafted for US copyright law. It is in very plain English, written by extremely competent lawyers, giving only extra rights to users. At least, in the US. It's pretty much inconceivable to me that it could be invalid there.
However, other countries have other laws - for instance, what happens when a country has a law that says everything must be in the local language? Are people downloading GPLed software from there in violation of copyright, because the GPL isn't really a license there? And the German system is pretty different anyway. That it's even valid there means it must be very strong.
it's obvious that in the distant past, Mars had water and very likely some form of lower-level lifeforms.
Please remember that so far we have found absolutely no evidence of life on Mars. None. Not a shred.
Yes, there is water, yes it does have an atmosphere, yes, there used to be much more water in the past. None of those are evidence of life, they're just things we believe are needed for life to exist. But that doesn't mean we have any reason to believe that life ever did exist there.
Except that he's an "unpleasant person", you give no examples, no further information that could tell us what the problem is like.
So I can only give the default answer, which is to behave like a grown up, tell him that you have these problems, and that you want to talk them out because work is affected. That's usually the only way to actually have a chance at solving them anyway, I believe.
Or perhaps you already tried that, or you know he actively wants these problems, or there's some other reason why that certainly won't work, or whatever, but you didn't tell us that.
What protection does Oracle have from Chinese workers stealing their intellectual property and using it in China, or worse, in a Chinese company coming back to compete against Oracle in the States?
I don't know.
What protection does Oracle have from American workers stealing their intellectual property and using it in the US, or worse, in another American country competing against Oracle in the US, if they don't outsource?
Face it: Outside of the stuff that's run by the autonomic nervous system, everything people do is learned.
Common mistake, from the old social sciences idea where everything must be either "innate" or "learned": just that you can't do it at birth doesn't mean it is "learned".
Pubic hair isn't "learned", it's just something your body starts doing later. Also consider linguistics and Chomsky's famous observation, that children simply do not get enough information to learn language the way they do. Some structure must already be there. But clearly that's not functional yet at birth.
So in general you really can't say that this thing is clearly learned, and that thing is clearly "instinctive". It's all a gray area.
I may be totally mistaken, but I thought that using a catch-all address means no "55x no such user" errors are sent anymore? There is such a user, and it's mapped to the catchall address.
That hurts. I knew it was bad, but these two articles really drove it home. Compared to that, Iraq must have been rather good. How will we ever end it?
They're so brain washed, their army would probably put up a fight if a coalition of nations were to try to liberate them. And the army isn't small - millions would die. But a peaceful way to end it doesn't seem likely.:-(
That sort of article makes me ashamed to score a +5 Funny on the fact that their website has a 404 page...
Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error. Error 404 ...
Yeah, the average mac user probably is smarter than the average pc user. The 4% of mac users are also in the upper 4% of the income scale. Guess what? Well educated smart people tend to have more money than others, your average BMW owner is probably "smarter" than your average kia owner.
It's not that easy. For instance, Linux is cheaper than Windows, but (obviously) Linux users are way smarter.
Also, stupid people are more likely to buy overpriced crap. Buying shiny solid Unix-based Macs is better than buying crap, but they're still overpriced.
(I don't usually join flame wars. How am I doing?)
An innocent play? There were economic sanctions against Yugoslavia for the civil war and genocide in Bosnia(*) that was supported by the Yugoslavs. Fischer netted $3.5 million for what amounted to a propaganda operation. He was convicted by a US jury, and I can see why.
(*: I'm not 100% sure if it was exactly that part of the war, or another conflict at the time)
VeriSign has defended Site Finder by saying it offers a better way to handle nonexistent or misspelled domain names than the unhelpful error messages that some Web browsers currently provide.
Apparently VeriSign believes that DNS is only used for Web traffic, and/or that the Internet is only the Web.
That's why it's no use talking about advantages of disadvantages of their method - their method just makes no sense. DNS (their thing) works on an entirely different level than the Web, they can't know whether a request has anything to do with anyone's web browser at all. They show a page to people using web browsers and break everything else, that's just stupid.
That's maybe a bit of a oversimplification of what a theory is. To the best of my knowledge theories will never promote to law. Sure it happened for newton, though it shouldn't have.
Exactly. It doesn't matter whether it's called Foo's Law, Bar's Rule of Bla's Theory. Science deals with theories, period.
Apparently, kids learn in US schools that Theories are less "proven" than Laws, etc. That's rather unfortunate, it's nonsense. It leads to non-arguments like "But evolution is just a theory!". Duh. So is the idea that gravity exists...
Last week, right before this news, there was news that a lot of people switched to FireFox because of the vulnerabilities in IE.
Who's going to tell them now that they should upgrade their FireFox to the fixed version, because there was a problem?
It doesn't really matter that it was fixed quickly. The people that didn't install updates for IE, won't install the updates for their brand new FireFox either. Sadly.
They're the most unique and versatile tool ever invented by man, their purpose is whatever we choose it to be at the moment.
I think that's his point - they're the most unique and versatile tool ever invented, we could do anything, but what we use it for is 99% things we basically had before - business documents and simple calculations, games, video and audio replay/recording.
Morrowind on the PC (GOTY-edition) is probably the most buggy piece of software this side of Temple of Elemental Evil.
I never played Morrowind much (not having Windows anymore), but its predecessor Daggerfall was one of the very few bits of software I actually bought. Are you implying they actually managed to make Morrowind more buggy?
(Mind you, in fairness, after the 56th patch or so it was quite possible to solve many little quests in Daggerfall, albeit using the cheat they introduced to teleport yourself to unreachable key locations in a dungeon...)
Oddly enough, because of Slashdot, I know much more about US copyright law than about EU/Dutch law (I am Dutch). So I could be wrong.
But anyway, if the GPL isn't valid for some reason, then I would think that it is just void, no matter where you are. And yes, then the Berne convention applies - you have to get permission from the author to copy any copyrighted work. There's no reason why it would suddenly be free for all, just because there's an invalid license associated with it.
They tried Gentoo, and couldn't get it to work (of course I didn't read the article either, but some other reply says they did:-)).
A friend of mine also recently reported he had problems getting Gentoo to work on an Athlon 64, getting a segmentation fault during a compile in the first big emerge. Unfortunately I don't know any more details, but it does seem there may be some gotchas.
Yeah, I guess we agree. But actually, if there was a good new service that the whole of Usenet moved to, except for the binary users, that'd be perfectly fine. Most of the news servers around the world would be turned off around then, but at least the binaries won't hinder any actual posters anymore then (for a while).
When you have only binary posters left, the "real Usenet" is gone. That's where you hit a nerve, I thought you were suggesting that they were somehow vital for Usenet:-)
Of course shifting it to a centrally controlled system isn't very good, and the fact that at least it's Google (who aren't that evil yet) doesn't really help that much. But what can we do? I don't think a better, anarchistic New Usenet has any chance at this moment in time.
Slashdot Mirror
It does not prevent reverse-engineering of patents,
As far as I know, patents don't need to be reverse engineered, since their implementation is public (it's in the patent application). But knowing how it works doesn't give you the right to use it yourself (that's what patents do, after all), so there's no big profit in reverse engineering them anyway.
Perhaps you are confused yourself, with trade secrets in this case?
Imagine how much easier Linux advocacy would be if we could say: "SPAM? - I thought that was a Windows problem?..."
Of all the reasons for implementing a secure, spam-free alternative to the current version of SMTP, I think "acting smug towards Windows users" must come last.
Sheesh, since when is easy advocacy a goal by itself?
Please note that the German copyright law (Urheberrecht, as it is called) is quite different from the US copyright.
That makes it extra cool. The GPL was crafted for US copyright law. It is in very plain English, written by extremely competent lawyers, giving only extra rights to users. At least, in the US. It's pretty much inconceivable to me that it could be invalid there.
However, other countries have other laws - for instance, what happens when a country has a law that says everything must be in the local language? Are people downloading GPLed software from there in violation of copyright, because the GPL isn't really a license there? And the German system is pretty different anyway. That it's even valid there means it must be very strong.
Are you sure there is no alternative? That's either an alternative to the very toxic product, or to removing them?
it's obvious that in the distant past, Mars had water and very likely some form of lower-level lifeforms.
Please remember that so far we have found absolutely no evidence of life on Mars. None. Not a shred.
Yes, there is water, yes it does have an atmosphere, yes, there used to be much more water in the past. None of those are evidence of life, they're just things we believe are needed for life to exist. But that doesn't mean we have any reason to believe that life ever did exist there.
No. Life did or did not exist on Mars, but either way, its chances are over.
Welcome to Bayesian probability (some more links).
Except that he's an "unpleasant person", you give no examples, no further information that could tell us what the problem is like.
So I can only give the default answer, which is to behave like a grown up, tell him that you have these problems, and that you want to talk them out because work is affected. That's usually the only way to actually have a chance at solving them anyway, I believe.
Or perhaps you already tried that, or you know he actively wants these problems, or there's some other reason why that certainly won't work, or whatever, but you didn't tell us that.
What protection does Oracle have from Chinese workers stealing their intellectual property and using it in China, or worse, in a Chinese company coming back to compete against Oracle in the States?
I don't know.
What protection does Oracle have from American workers stealing their intellectual property and using it in the US, or worse, in another American country competing against Oracle in the US, if they don't outsource?
Face it: Outside of the stuff that's run by the autonomic nervous system, everything people do is learned.
Common mistake, from the old social sciences idea where everything must be either "innate" or "learned": just that you can't do it at birth doesn't mean it is "learned".
Pubic hair isn't "learned", it's just something your body starts doing later. Also consider linguistics and Chomsky's famous observation, that children simply do not get enough information to learn language the way they do. Some structure must already be there. But clearly that's not functional yet at birth.
So in general you really can't say that this thing is clearly learned, and that thing is clearly "instinctive". It's all a gray area.
I may be totally mistaken, but I thought that using a catch-all address means no "55x no such user" errors are sent anymore? There is such a user, and it's mapped to the catchall address.
That hurts. I knew it was bad, but these two articles really drove it home. Compared to that, Iraq must have been rather good. How will we ever end it?
They're so brain washed, their army would probably put up a fight if a coalition of nations were to try to liberate them. And the army isn't small - millions would die. But a peaceful way to end it doesn't seem likely. :-(
That sort of article makes me ashamed to score a +5 Funny on the fact that their website has a 404 page...
I suggest moderators mod you up.
Click "One Country":
Kinda figures.
Yeah, the average mac user probably is smarter than the average pc user. The 4% of mac users are also in the upper 4% of the income scale. Guess what? Well educated smart people tend to have more money than others, your average BMW owner is probably "smarter" than your average kia owner.
It's not that easy. For instance, Linux is cheaper than Windows, but (obviously) Linux users are way smarter.
Also, stupid people are more likely to buy overpriced crap. Buying shiny solid Unix-based Macs is better than buying crap, but they're still overpriced.
(I don't usually join flame wars. How am I doing?)
An innocent play? There were economic sanctions against Yugoslavia for the civil war and genocide in Bosnia(*) that was supported by the Yugoslavs. Fischer netted $3.5 million for what amounted to a propaganda operation. He was convicted by a US jury, and I can see why.
(*: I'm not 100% sure if it was exactly that part of the war, or another conflict at the time)
VeriSign has defended Site Finder by saying it offers a better way to handle nonexistent or misspelled domain names than the unhelpful error messages that some Web browsers currently provide.
Apparently VeriSign believes that DNS is only used for Web traffic, and/or that the Internet is only the Web.
That's why it's no use talking about advantages of disadvantages of their method - their method just makes no sense. DNS (their thing) works on an entirely different level than the Web, they can't know whether a request has anything to do with anyone's web browser at all. They show a page to people using web browsers and break everything else, that's just stupid.
That's maybe a bit of a oversimplification of what a theory is. To the best of my knowledge theories will never promote to law. Sure it happened for newton, though it shouldn't have.
Exactly. It doesn't matter whether it's called Foo's Law, Bar's Rule of Bla's Theory. Science deals with theories, period.
Apparently, kids learn in US schools that Theories are less "proven" than Laws, etc. That's rather unfortunate, it's nonsense. It leads to non-arguments like "But evolution is just a theory!". Duh. So is the idea that gravity exists...
(Sorry, pet peeve)
Gravity is instantaneous? What the hell did I miss?
He probably meant "Gravity is instantaneous... in Japan!"
(it does seem to work somewhat)
Last week, right before this news, there was news that a lot of people switched to FireFox because of the vulnerabilities in IE.
Who's going to tell them now that they should upgrade their FireFox to the fixed version, because there was a problem?
It doesn't really matter that it was fixed quickly. The people that didn't install updates for IE, won't install the updates for their brand new FireFox either. Sadly.
They're the most unique and versatile tool ever invented by man, their purpose is whatever we choose it to be at the moment.
I think that's his point - they're the most unique and versatile tool ever invented, we could do anything, but what we use it for is 99% things we basically had before - business documents and simple calculations, games, video and audio replay/recording.
They could be so much more.
Good point. I knew something was odd when I wrote that, but couldn't put my finger on it...
Morrowind on the PC (GOTY-edition) is probably the most buggy piece of software this side of Temple of Elemental Evil.
I never played Morrowind much (not having Windows anymore), but its predecessor Daggerfall was one of the very few bits of software I actually bought. Are you implying they actually managed to make Morrowind more buggy?
(Mind you, in fairness, after the 56th patch or so it was quite possible to solve many little quests in Daggerfall, albeit using the cheat they introduced to teleport yourself to unreachable key locations in a dungeon...)
Just be careful to cut them in half first, sending the north half to the north pole and vice versa, because otherwise it wouldn't work of course.
Oddly enough, because of Slashdot, I know much more about US copyright law than about EU/Dutch law (I am Dutch). So I could be wrong.
But anyway, if the GPL isn't valid for some reason, then I would think that it is just void, no matter where you are. And yes, then the Berne convention applies - you have to get permission from the author to copy any copyrighted work. There's no reason why it would suddenly be free for all, just because there's an invalid license associated with it.
They tried Gentoo, and couldn't get it to work (of course I didn't read the article either, but some other reply says they did :-)).
A friend of mine also recently reported he had problems getting Gentoo to work on an Athlon 64, getting a segmentation fault during a compile in the first big emerge. Unfortunately I don't know any more details, but it does seem there may be some gotchas.
Yeah, I guess we agree. But actually, if there was a good new service that the whole of Usenet moved to, except for the binary users, that'd be perfectly fine. Most of the news servers around the world would be turned off around then, but at least the binaries won't hinder any actual posters anymore then (for a while).
When you have only binary posters left, the "real Usenet" is gone. That's where you hit a nerve, I thought you were suggesting that they were somehow vital for Usenet :-)
Of course shifting it to a centrally controlled system isn't very good, and the fact that at least it's Google (who aren't that evil yet) doesn't really help that much. But what can we do? I don't think a better, anarchistic New Usenet has any chance at this moment in time.