"Microsoft needs to defend this patent lest they lose it."
You're confusing Trademark law with Patent law; Trademarks must be defended lest they be abandoned, patents can be enforced against some, all, or none of those infringing on the patent at the patent-holder's whim. The entire practice of "defensive patents" rests on this.
If dynamic linking == deriving...Why wouldn't invoking microcode be deriving? Wouldn't Intel be able to claim that all GPL'ed code compiled for an Intel chip was derivative of Intel's processor instructions and their code? It certainly depends on the presence of code written by Intel in order to function, even if it could be run on a chip without Intel's code (just as a program that relied on a GPL'ed library could be run against a any functionally equivalent library) . I haven't seen any theory that suggests a legal difference...
And, FWIW, Pennsylvania is one of four US states (the others being Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Virginia) that refers to itself as a Commonwealth, for historical reasons. Hence the "Commonwealth" in "Commonwealth Affiliated."
Arbogast's integrity, or even that of Microsoft as a whole, is irrelevant. Despite the high feelings of a lot of the posters in this topic, the problem with Passport isn't that we can't trust Microsoft: the problem with Passport is the scheme itself. Nobody should be trusted with that kind of personal data in a central repository, and nobody should ever be able to suck that kind of data out of a repository (central or not) without the active participation of the user. Automatic authentication and personal data mining is in and of itself a bad thing: one breach, one moment of carelessness by any party to any of the transactions and you're hosed. The very idea is the antithesis of security and privacy, and the only thing that having a person of integrity in that position can do is make it worse by lulling some people into trusting it.
The view that it takes time for a good interface to be designed would make more sense if it weren't for the fact that automobiles, televisions, and radios haven't all gotten harder to use (from the point of view of the interface) as they became more computerized, not easier. There was practically nothing to learn when the interface to the television was an on-off switch, a volume knob, and a channel dial. Now they expect you to walk through menu after menu to configure the damn thing. My mother was seriously considering buying a new TV because "all of a sudden" she stopped being able to see the cable channels on her set...of course once I found the menu to set it back to CATV it worked again.
If you want to read a good rant on this topic, try reading Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum; it's a bit over-the-top in some places, but I think comes much closer to the truth than the OP's view that (l)users are a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings who should be grateful for the technological largesse bestowed upon them.
When possible they release films that they think will get Oscar nods so that they're still in theaters when the nominations are published (second best is to bring it out again for another crack). What kind of proof about national character is that?
You already have goverment employees who are supposed to be representing your interests: they're called your elected representatives. You pay their salaries, and your votes put them in office.
If they don't seem to be doing a good job of that, maybe you should think some about why that is before you advocate hiring another set of goverment employees, not even directly answerable to you the voter, whose job it would be to try to persuade that first set of employees to do their jobs more to your satisfaction. And who's going to decide which side of which issues those goverment lobbyists will work on?
Or you could do what you're supposed to do in order to influence your representatives: get out there and participate in the political process. Donate time and/or money to organizations that are already lobbying for the policies you favor (or if there aren't any, go out and found one).
Since you mention locking down the Registry, you're presumably developing for Windows--but unless you're just writing ASP pages or something, you have to register whatever it is you're developing. That's the Windows model. This sounds exactly like the kind of PHB-think that turns a minor headache (license compliance on the off-chance of an audit) into a major disaster.
Fortunately, it's the kind of policy that's too stupid to stand. We had a similar thing (promulgated by memo from the CIO, rather than enforced at a technical level, though) which held for about twenty-four hours before they quietly exempted all the developers...
No, they're pointing out that Microsoft's claims in their description of their product are contradicted by the actual behavior of their product. They absolutely believe Microsoft when it says that the criterion for being able to participate in Passport is having posted a privacy policy.
Riddle me this: What's the difference between a site with no posted privacy policy and one that states "This site will sell or give away any and all information that it receives about you to anyone at all"?
Answer: The latter site can scoop out all the private data from your Passport (except for the Wallet) without your even being aware of it taking place.
Contrary to Microsofts claims, Passport users actually have more control over their personal data when they visit sites that have no privacy policy posted! That's a deceptive trade practice.
I'm pretty sure that Capers Jones has never measured the defect rate of Unit Testing done XP style, with test-first automated testing of every class (and almost every method) in a continuously integrated project. No conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of XP Unit Testing based on the measurements of traditional ad-hoc Unit Tests followed by Big Bang integration. What XP advocates is much closer to what you are calling "Modelling and prototyping" than what you are calling "unit testing."
No need for strong typing. You can do something like this in most modern high-level languages, although how easy it will be depends on the language. It's actually easier in languages with weak, or at least dynamic, typing, since you don't have to declare all those "this is an array of strings" variables.
Here's that pseudo-code translated into a working Python program:
# Program creates a very generic site title
# or project title - "Open Source Development Lab"
# a perennial favourite.
The Supreme Court is always very choosy about what they review. If they had actually upheld the decision, that would be binding on all the courts in the land. As it stands, other circuit courts are free to decide similar cases differently. That's a big difference that saying the law was "essentially upheld" glosses over. It's never safe to infer anything from a decline to review except that the particular case is settled, no matter how tempting it is for the pundits to sound off.
Consumers have a choice of whether to eat at a restaurant that adds to the price of a meal by providing live music. What's being proposed is the equivalent of everyone who eats at any restaurant, even ones that don't provide any music, having to pay that same $4.00 surcharge so that some diners (the ones with fat pipes) can order a table-side command performance by Metallica.
While the proposed scheme bears a superficial resemblance to other things for which people are used to paying a flat rate for access, even though they might not be getting the full benefit (e.g. most dial-up ISP and local calls, at least in the US), it fails in the crucial respect that the price cannot be set by the market. Since the marginal cost of producing extra copies of the content is zero, the clearing price ought to be zero--but the whole scheme is designed to make sure that the price is greater than that, which means that regulators will have to set the "value" of the content based on what they think that people ought to be willing to pay, and then extract that rate from people whether or not they agree to that assessment.
Heck, under the proposal, an unscrupulous content producer with deep pockets could increase its share of the pie simply by setting up a connection to continuously download its own work; furthermore, demonstrating that it was doing so would be illegal (ISPs are forbidden to track individual account usage).
So far the best tool I've found for helping to make sure your site is accessible is Bobby, a free service provided by CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) to check websites versus usability standards. It can be run online, or there's a downloadable version, and generates a prioritized report of everything that you have to look at and potentially fix to help special browsers (such as text-to-speech) function better.
Linking is transitive...that's the whole point of the Web. If it is illegal to link to illegal material, then the page that contains that link is itself illegal material, and any pages that link to it, and any pages that link to those pages, and so on.
That's the way software engineers wish it worked. What actually happens is this:
Gather Requirements
Make a Design Spec
Discover ambiguities in Spec, goto 1
Model the project (i.e. UML)
argue incessantly about the one true way to model the project, goto 4
Code
discover what the model requires is either unecessary, impossible, or both, goto 1
Test
discover requirements have changed, because either conditions have changed or what you were asking the users to do (come up with a complete definition of how the software is supposed to work without any software in front of them to poke at), goto 1
Attempt to Goto 3, but discover that the code has drifted from the model and nobody kept the model up-to-date
This is why I'm no longer very interested in CMM Level 3-style Software Engineering. Some of the disfunctional behavior in the second list is avoidable, but some of it is inevitable as death and taxes. Venting at the stupid users for changing their minds once they see the software working (or sort of working), or at the stupid managers for letting them, doesn't actually accomplish anything. Even if you "win" the political battle of getting the users to accept the software as written to the spec, it's a Pyrrhic victory.
I've come to see that it's far better to grant the users the right to change their minds as their needs (or just their understanding of those needs) change in return for the right to use processes like Extreme Programming that will help me as a developer to meet those changing needs without running myself ragged, than dumping a year or more of my life down a rathole producing software that only makes people unhappy (if it gets used at all) because it was coded exactly to a completely outdated snapshot of what the users thought they needed before they and the world moved on.
Software development ought to be an ongoing conversation between the developers and the customers, not a one-way order from the customers to the engineers to produce a widget machined to the following specifications for delivery on such-and-such a date. Software development isn't there yet as an engineering discipline, and it's not even clear to me that's the direction that we ought to be going, since it gives up one of the most valuable and interesting properties of software (that it's "soft" and flexible).
So the newbie is temporarily paralyzed by the whole wide wonderful world of choices he has available. Let him get over it and learn how to make choices. It's good for him, and will make him a better person. I mean, for heaven's sake, if he can't decide on which text editor to use, how's he going to learn to make important decisions, like which clothes to put on in the morning?
Why should we care that it's natural for a company to do X or Y, because it's only out to make money? It may be a scorpion's nature to sting--but does knowing that mean that we ought to go ahead and pet it anyway?
If corporations like DC can't help themselves when it comes to things like trying to bully reverse engineers (something I doubt, since there are other companies--also only interested in making money--who shrug off or even encourage reverse engineering), all the more reason that we should be wary of them and attempt to curb their abuses.
Be sure to read
Curtis Ganz' testimony before you make up your mind that direct elections are more desirable. If you feel that minority opinions are too easily ignored now, or that the "tyranny of the majority" is something genuinely worth worrying about (as did the Founders when they wrote the Bill of Rights), direct winner-take-all elections aren't the way to go. They sound good, because simple, but in this case they are (to quote Mencken), the solution that's "simple, neat, and wrong."
When your relatives came over from Italy at the turn of the century, it is a virtual certainty that they settled in a neighborhood full of Italian immigrants, and that their day-to-day interactions with their neighbors and merchants were carried out in Italian. It was almost always the kids who learned English--many older immigrants never did fully master the language.
Your electricity provider has enough customers who speak other languages that it's worth their while to go to all the trouble of programming and recording all their telephone scripts in multiple languages. Get over it.
Personally, what annoys me no end is people who would make others lives more difficult (or even dangerous) just so they can avoid having to punch an extra button on the phone.
Patents aren't about rewarding innovation--the benefit to the inventor is the invention itself. (E.g., if the innovation has no commercial value, the Patent Office doesn't give the inventor a cash grant.) Patents are about rewarding inventors with a limited temporary monopoly for sharing the details of their inventions with the rest of the world, so that science and industry can progress faster.
The fact that someone is first with an idea is not the only consideration when granting a patent. The invention is supposed also to be something that isn't obvious to someone "skilled in the art", which is to say there's supposed to be a real cost to having others reinvent that particular wheel that society is saved by the process of patents and licenses.
Something like one-click is obvious to anyone skilled in the art. There are no details that need to be shared to prevent duplicate effort--the only way that Amazon could prevent a competitor from reimplementing one-click within a few hours of hearing about it would be to not use it (or even mention it) themselves. But that's not the kind of thing that's supposed to be protected by patents.
For someone not trying to be racist or a troll, you're doing a pretty good job. Imagine what you could accomplish if you really tried.
Sarcasm aside, the only way to become a citizen (other than by birth or marriage) is to first reside in the U.S. For students seeking a legal way to do so, who are you to deny them? Consider that if people with your viewpoint had prevailed in the past, in all probability the U.S. would not be "your" country.
Unless your ancestors came to the U.S. as slaves or transported criminals, they too came here with an ulterior motive, seeking a better life for themselves and their descendants. You are the beneficiary of this, and you might want to consider how it looks for you to want to deny others the opportunities that your ancestors had.
Give us your poor and huddled masses, yearning to breathe free...
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft needs to defend this patent lest they lose it."
You're confusing Trademark law with Patent law; Trademarks must be defended lest they be abandoned, patents can be enforced against some, all, or none of those infringing on the patent at the patent-holder's whim. The entire practice of "defensive patents" rests on this.
If dynamic linking == deriving...Why wouldn't invoking microcode be deriving? Wouldn't Intel be able to claim that all GPL'ed code compiled for an Intel chip was derivative of Intel's processor instructions and their code? It certainly depends on the presence of code written by Intel in order to function, even if it could be run on a chip without Intel's code (just as a program that relied on a GPL'ed library could be run against a any functionally equivalent library) . I haven't seen any theory that suggests a legal difference ...
And, FWIW, Pennsylvania is one of four US states (the others being Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Virginia) that refers to itself as a Commonwealth, for historical reasons. Hence the "Commonwealth" in "Commonwealth Affiliated."
Arbogast's integrity, or even that of Microsoft as a whole, is irrelevant. Despite the high feelings of a lot of the posters in this topic, the problem with Passport isn't that we can't trust Microsoft: the problem with Passport is the scheme itself. Nobody should be trusted with that kind of personal data in a central repository, and nobody should ever be able to suck that kind of data out of a repository (central or not) without the active participation of the user. Automatic authentication and personal data mining is in and of itself a bad thing: one breach, one moment of carelessness by any party to any of the transactions and you're hosed. The very idea is the antithesis of security and privacy, and the only thing that having a person of integrity in that position can do is make it worse by lulling some people into trusting it.
The view that it takes time for a good interface to be designed would make more sense if it weren't for the fact that automobiles, televisions, and radios haven't all gotten harder to use (from the point of view of the interface) as they became more computerized, not easier. There was practically nothing to learn when the interface to the television was an on-off switch, a volume knob, and a channel dial. Now they expect you to walk through menu after menu to configure the damn thing. My mother was seriously considering buying a new TV because "all of a sudden" she stopped being able to see the cable channels on her set...of course once I found the menu to set it back to CATV it worked again.
If you want to read a good rant on this topic, try reading Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum; it's a bit over-the-top in some places, but I think comes much closer to the truth than the OP's view that (l)users are a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings who should be grateful for the technological largesse bestowed upon them.
As usual, Cecil explains it better than I can:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/000225.html
When possible they release films that they think will get Oscar nods so that they're still in theaters when the nominations are published (second best is to bring it out again for another crack). What kind of proof about national character is that?
You already have goverment employees who are supposed to be representing your interests: they're called your elected representatives. You pay their salaries, and your votes put them in office.
If they don't seem to be doing a good job of that, maybe you should think some about why that is before you advocate hiring another set of goverment employees, not even directly answerable to you the voter, whose job it would be to try to persuade that first set of employees to do their jobs more to your satisfaction. And who's going to decide which side of which issues those goverment lobbyists will work on?
Or you could do what you're supposed to do in order to influence your representatives: get out there and participate in the political process. Donate time and/or money to organizations that are already lobbying for the policies you favor (or if there aren't any, go out and found one).
Since you mention locking down the Registry, you're presumably developing for Windows--but unless you're just writing ASP pages or something, you have to register whatever it is you're developing. That's the Windows model. This sounds exactly like the kind of PHB-think that turns a minor headache (license compliance on the off-chance of an audit) into a major disaster.
Fortunately, it's the kind of policy that's too stupid to stand. We had a similar thing (promulgated by memo from the CIO, rather than enforced at a technical level, though) which held for about twenty-four hours before they quietly exempted all the developers...
No, they're pointing out that Microsoft's claims in their description of their product are contradicted by the actual behavior of their product. They absolutely believe Microsoft when it says that the criterion for being able to participate in Passport is having posted a privacy policy.
Riddle me this: What's the difference between a site with no posted privacy policy and one that states "This site will sell or give away any and all information that it receives about you to anyone at all"?
Answer: The latter site can scoop out all the private data from your Passport (except for the Wallet) without your even being aware of it taking place.
Contrary to Microsofts claims, Passport users actually have more control over their personal data when they visit sites that have no privacy policy posted! That's a deceptive trade practice.
"Use cases" is compatible with normal English, while "stories" is jargon? Somebody's been spending way too much time in meetings, methinks...
I'm pretty sure that Capers Jones has never measured the defect rate of Unit Testing done XP style, with test-first automated testing of every class (and almost every method) in a continuously integrated project. No conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of XP Unit Testing based on the measurements of traditional ad-hoc Unit Tests followed by Big Bang integration. What XP advocates is much closer to what you are calling "Modelling and prototyping" than what you are calling "unit testing."
No need for strong typing. You can do something like this in most modern high-level languages, although how easy it will be depends on the language. It's actually easier in languages with weak, or at least dynamic, typing, since you don't have to declare all those "this is an array of strings" variables.
Here's that pseudo-code translated into a working Python program:
# Program creates a very generic site title
' ,'User','PHB','Engineer','Guru','Wizard')i lder','Shack','Hangout','Project','Foundation','As sociation')
# or project title - "Open Source Development Lab"
# a perennial favourite.
from random import choice
PreWordArray = ('GNU','g','k','Linux','OSS','Open Source','Free Software')
MainWordArray = ('Developer','Development','Programmer','Designer
PostWordArray = ('Lab','Site','Homepage','.com','.net','.org','Bu
ProjectName = choice(PreWordArray) + choice(MainWordArray) + choice(PostWordArray)
print ProjectName
Python has often been compared to executable pseudo-code. Now you can see why.<wink>
The Supreme Court is always very choosy about what they review. If they had actually upheld the decision, that would be binding on all the courts in the land. As it stands, other circuit courts are free to decide similar cases differently. That's a big difference that saying the law was "essentially upheld" glosses over. It's never safe to infer anything from a decline to review except that the particular case is settled, no matter how tempting it is for the pundits to sound off.
Consumers have a choice of whether to eat at a restaurant that adds to the price of a meal by providing live music. What's being proposed is the equivalent of everyone who eats at any restaurant, even ones that don't provide any music, having to pay that same $4.00 surcharge so that some diners (the ones with fat pipes) can order a table-side command performance by Metallica.
While the proposed scheme bears a superficial resemblance to other things for which people are used to paying a flat rate for access, even though they might not be getting the full benefit (e.g. most dial-up ISP and local calls, at least in the US), it fails in the crucial respect that the price cannot be set by the market. Since the marginal cost of producing extra copies of the content is zero, the clearing price ought to be zero--but the whole scheme is designed to make sure that the price is greater than that, which means that regulators will have to set the "value" of the content based on what they think that people ought to be willing to pay, and then extract that rate from people whether or not they agree to that assessment.
Heck, under the proposal, an unscrupulous content producer with deep pockets could increase its share of the pie simply by setting up a connection to continuously download its own work; furthermore, demonstrating that it was doing so would be illegal (ISPs are forbidden to track individual account usage).
So far the best tool I've found for helping to make sure your site is accessible is Bobby, a free service provided by CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) to check websites versus usability standards. It can be run online, or there's a downloadable version, and generates a prioritized report of everything that you have to look at and potentially fix to help special browsers (such as text-to-speech) function better.
Linking is transitive...that's the whole point of the Web. If it is illegal to link to illegal material, then the page that contains that link is itself illegal material, and any pages that link to it, and any pages that link to those pages, and so on.
That's the way software engineers wish it worked. What actually happens is this:
This is why I'm no longer very interested in CMM Level 3-style Software Engineering. Some of the disfunctional behavior in the second list is avoidable, but some of it is inevitable as death and taxes. Venting at the stupid users for changing their minds once they see the software working (or sort of working), or at the stupid managers for letting them, doesn't actually accomplish anything. Even if you "win" the political battle of getting the users to accept the software as written to the spec, it's a Pyrrhic victory.
I've come to see that it's far better to grant the users the right to change their minds as their needs (or just their understanding of those needs) change in return for the right to use processes like Extreme Programming that will help me as a developer to meet those changing needs without running myself ragged, than dumping a year or more of my life down a rathole producing software that only makes people unhappy (if it gets used at all) because it was coded exactly to a completely outdated snapshot of what the users thought they needed before they and the world moved on.
Software development ought to be an ongoing conversation between the developers and the customers, not a one-way order from the customers to the engineers to produce a widget machined to the following specifications for delivery on such-and-such a date. Software development isn't there yet as an engineering discipline, and it's not even clear to me that's the direction that we ought to be going, since it gives up one of the most valuable and interesting properties of software (that it's "soft" and flexible).
So the newbie is temporarily paralyzed by the whole wide wonderful world of choices he has available. Let him get over it and learn how to make choices. It's good for him, and will make him a better person. I mean, for heaven's sake, if he can't decide on which text editor to use, how's he going to learn to make important decisions, like which clothes to put on in the morning?
Why should we care that it's natural for a company to do X or Y, because it's only out to make money? It may be a scorpion's nature to sting--but does knowing that mean that we ought to go ahead and pet it anyway?
If corporations like DC can't help themselves when it comes to things like trying to bully reverse engineers (something I doubt, since there are other companies--also only interested in making money--who shrug off or even encourage reverse engineering), all the more reason that we should be wary of them and attempt to curb their abuses.
Be sure to read Curtis Ganz' testimony before you make up your mind that direct elections are more desirable. If you feel that minority opinions are too easily ignored now, or that the "tyranny of the majority" is something genuinely worth worrying about (as did the Founders when they wrote the Bill of Rights), direct winner-take-all elections aren't the way to go. They sound good, because simple, but in this case they are (to quote Mencken), the solution that's "simple, neat, and wrong."
When your relatives came over from Italy at the turn of the century, it is a virtual certainty that they settled in a neighborhood full of Italian immigrants, and that their day-to-day interactions with their neighbors and merchants were carried out in Italian. It was almost always the kids who learned English--many older immigrants never did fully master the language.
Your electricity provider has enough customers who speak other languages that it's worth their while to go to all the trouble of programming and recording all their telephone scripts in multiple languages. Get over it.
Personally, what annoys me no end is people who would make others lives more difficult (or even dangerous) just so they can avoid having to punch an extra button on the phone.
Patents aren't about rewarding innovation--the benefit to the inventor is the invention itself. (E.g., if the innovation has no commercial value, the Patent Office doesn't give the inventor a cash grant.) Patents are about rewarding inventors with a limited temporary monopoly for sharing the details of their inventions with the rest of the world, so that science and industry can progress faster.
The fact that someone is first with an idea is not the only consideration when granting a patent. The invention is supposed also to be something that isn't obvious to someone "skilled in the art", which is to say there's supposed to be a real cost to having others reinvent that particular wheel that society is saved by the process of patents and licenses.
Something like one-click is obvious to anyone skilled in the art. There are no details that need to be shared to prevent duplicate effort--the only way that Amazon could prevent a competitor from reimplementing one-click within a few hours of hearing about it would be to not use it (or even mention it) themselves. But that's not the kind of thing that's supposed to be protected by patents.
For someone not trying to be racist or a troll, you're doing a pretty good job. Imagine what you could accomplish if you really tried.
Sarcasm aside, the only way to become a citizen (other than by birth or marriage) is to first reside in the U.S. For students seeking a legal way to do so, who are you to deny them? Consider that if people with your viewpoint had prevailed in the past, in all probability the U.S. would not be "your" country.
Unless your ancestors came to the U.S. as slaves or transported criminals, they too came here with an ulterior motive, seeking a better life for themselves and their descendants. You are the beneficiary of this, and you might want to consider how it looks for you to want to deny others the opportunities that your ancestors had.
Give us your poor and huddled masses, yearning to breathe free...