OK... here's an odd question that popped into my head:
The DMCA explicitly allows for reverse engineering for compatability purposes. What if I am interested in reverse engineering a circuit design, piece of code, etc. not for compatibility purposes, but in order to determine if they designer/implementor is infringing on a patent that I or my company holds?
Now, according to the DMCA, I'm a criminal - I've engaged in reverse engineering for other purposes than compatibility. No matter that I may have proof, via the reverse engineering, that someone was infriging on a patent; according the the DMCA, I committed a crime in order to obtain that information.
Am I missing something here? Or does the DMCA - which it's advocates touted as being essential to protecting intellectual property in today's digital world - allow someone to essentially ignore patents under the right circumstances?
You have to consider that the products they ship are intended to be "black boxes" and may contain trade secrets, which are legally protected.
Any of you lawyer types, feel free to correct this - but from what I understand, there are no legal protections for a trade secret. However, there are legal protections for a person or company that decides to disclose a trade secret to another person or company, if they identify it as a trade secret.
In other words - if they tell you what the trade secret is, and that it is a trade secret, they they can hold you accountable if you disclose it to someone else without their permission. If you lie or comit breach of contract in order to gain the secret, then you're right - that's essentially theft; but then again, there's no reverse engineering involved there. If they never tell you what the trade secret is, and you discover it on your own, then it's game over - their secret is no longer a secret, and you have every right to make use of it.
There's a tradeoff here - if a company gets a patent on an invention, process, or what have you, then they have a legal monopoly on it for a few dozen years in return for disclosing their secret. If they don't get a patent, then they can keep their secret as long as nobody discovers it, which might be a good long time (for example, Coke) or might not last more than a few years.
Yes... unfortunately. If men were held responsible for their actions - instead of shifting responsibility onto their partners - then maybe there would be less of this sort of thing going on.
So women whose contraceptives happen to fail when they are in high school or college all just made a "bad life decision"?
Yes. They choose to have intercourse when they weren't prepared to deal with all the possible consequences in full... IIRC, the primary reason for contraceptive failure is improper use; so again, there's another incidence of a "bad life decision" - deciding to have intercourse with a contraceptive, without bothering to learn how to use a contraceptive properly.
There are few things in your life that you are not responsible for, despite what modern society would like you to believe. Claiming that you're a weak-willed coward unwilling to stand up to peer pressure or are so intellectually lazy that you are unwilling to make the mental effort to understand your actions does not absolve you; it just makes you an outstanding candidate for a Darwin award.
Blaming someone else for a problem doesn't help you solve it, and merely helps to obscure those instances where you truly are not in control of your life for one reason or another. The teenage kid who was conceived and born next to a toxic waste dump, and is dying from leukemia... A child living on life support because they were born with AIDS... neither of these folks had any control over their life. You want to tell me that there is some way they could have avoided their sitations? There isn't.
When you have a way to avoid living a life you'd rather not have, and you make a decision that takes you closer to that type of life... at that point, saying that someone else was responsible or that "life dealt you a bad hand" just isn't really true, is it? If you're unwilling to admit that your own choices and efforts, good or bad, brought you the life your living, then you're spending each and every day lying to yourself... so I guess it's no wonder that you wouldn't trust anyone else, either.
OS/2 and Windows NT both originated out of a joint project between MS and IBM to develop a new operating system. Given how well the two companies have gotten along in the past, it's no surprise the effort went nowhere... it did result in MS producing WinNT and IBM producing OS/2, though.
Windows COM/ADO/OLE, which are the basic infraestructure of.net together with their over hyped XML compliance.
While.NET supports COM interoperability, it is definitely not based on COM... it's hard to believe that so many people either ignore this, or decide that they just missed something, and.NET is just another name for the latest flavor of COM coming out of MS.
Nope. I has a taste of what that's like when I was a junior officer in the Navy. I can manage, and I can do a decent job of managing both people and materials, but it's a draining and uncreative job.
The problem is, managers are interrupt driven. Every 15 minutes or so, then need to shift focus to a new task. I think just about anyone can be taught to think that way, but for most people, it's not natural, and eventually wears on them... and wears them down.
I'm a software developer now; it's more fun, and it lets me work in a way that suits me better (concentrating for 4-5 hours, go home and take a few hours off, work another 4-5 hours.) Most companies larger than 50 people will have some sort of technical expert/architect/prima donna development track that lets senior technical folks avoid having to go into management. I think this is a solid sign that a good company understands what drives and motivates some of their best technical workers.
In today's job market, particularly in the technology sectors, there's no reason why anyone should feel the need to stay with an ouright abusive, stupid, or otherwise damanged company/employer/manager. It's like tying a sack of bricks to your back before you go for a few laps in the pool. Sure, there are some people who can do it; but the majority of people would struggle for a bit and then end up at the bottom. So why swim with a bag of bricks when you don't really have to?
then maybe you should try spending some time in the shoes of an engineer in corporate America
I have "spent some time in those shoes" as you put it (unlicensed engineer, having never gotten my PE cert.) I work in the software industry now, which is (probably) even more... interesting. The again, you should know that.
The majority of the situations in Dilbert are unreal. When was the last time you had one coworker kill another in a meeting, or had give yourself a sponge bath at the office water fountain because your funding had been cut, or... you get the picture. Adams, like other cartoonists, sometimes exaggerates in order to find humor.
I'm not saying that Dilbert doesn't show any "real" situations. Adams takes reader suggestions for strips, after all:-) And I've heard (and read) various horror stories about PHBs and PHCs (pointy-haired companies). Maybe part of my enjoyment comes from knowing that there are such clueless companies and people out there, and thankfulness that I have (so far) been able to avoid them (/. excepted, of course:-)
Whoa. If you're getting to the point where you're living in the same world as Dilbert, that's definitely like seeing the canary keel over - time to move on. The most absurd (and funny) thing about Dilbert is that no matter how bad things get, they never even think about finding something even marginally better.
Dilbert tends to be a revelation to right wingers who always thought capitalism was just the bee's knees
Hardly. The majority of the "right wingers" I know (including myself) think Dilbert is hilarious. Before you get off on a tangent, no, we're not amused at the pain of The Workers of The World. Dilbert is just plain funny, mostly because the situations in the comic are so freakin' unreal that it's impossible to imagine yourself putting up with them... but Dilbert, Alice and Wally do, day after day, and that ol' congnitive dissonance kicks in and you laught yourself silly because when all is said and done, no matter how bad things are, hell! - at least you're not one of those loosers!
My wife and I have several Windows machines at home - she's a technical writer, specializing in MS Exchange, I do Windows development. I don't believe (with the exception of my laptop) that we have any machine that isn't slated to eventually have multiple OS installations... generally some mixture of Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, and Win2K.
I have also set up multiple dual-boot systems for various small businesses with a dual-boot configuration of DOS 6 and Win9x... typically, DOS in order to run legacy applications that blow up under Win9x, Win9x for email and more modern apps. Never mind that we've gotten to the point where Win95 is a "legacy" OS as well... anyone yet had to install DOS, Win95 and WinME in order to support legacy apps?
When I ask a dealer for a naked system, it's not because I'm planning on pirating software; it's because the tradiational, AOL-using, consumer view of "one computer == one OS" doesn't always hold true.
IIRC, there's something in the rules Congress follows that states that a vote on an issue can only be challenged/reopened by someone voting against the outcome... so, if you (potentially) want to debate an issue further after a vote, you must vote against the final outcome. In practce, this means you will find very few unanimous votes - in fact, I was suprprised at the 96-1 vote; I would have expected 95-2, with one member of each major party (Democratic and Republican) voting against the (perceived) majority just in case...
Oh, I agree with you... I just don't think that the political ambitions of Gore and Bush are different enough to influence the outcome of something like this.
...as an industry in the United States, we deliver, on average, between four and six defects per 1,000 LOC.
So, If Windows 2000 was 30 million LOC, you can expect there to be, on average, between 120,000 and 180,000 bugs in the shipping code.
Let's be generous to MS, and say that they have an outstanding development process as decribed in the above paper. Because of this, they manage to reduce the number of bugs by a factor of 50%; so they're only shipping with 60,000 - 90,000 bugs.
Now, let's be even more generous, and assume that only 10% of the bugs actually present in a system is actually ever noticed and reported (BTW, a ridiculously low estimate, IMHO...) This means that W2K should have on the order of 6,000 to 9,000 reported bugs.
Now, contrast that with the latest Red Hat release; buggy as all git out, you know. 2000 reported bugs. You'd have to go back and compare LOC to get a comparable estimate, but I'm guessing that if you count all the various and sundry packages, Red Hat ships at least 30 million LOC in a distro... which would mean that their code, buggy as all sin and scorned by open source hackers everywhere, would contain about one-third of the bugs that W2K contains.
Or Gore... doesn't matter who ends up in the oval office; it'll be a new face, and another chance at gaining the sympathies of the head of the executive branch.
On a side note, while I think Bush might favor big business more than Gore, I also think that Gore would sell his wife to the highest bidder if it meant a campaign contribution. While I'm fairly sure that Bush is probably no more trustworthy or fair minded than Gore, at least he hasn't actually demonstrated himself to be the world-class screwup Clinton-wannabe looser that Gore has.
The following just appeared on the.NET mailing list from Peter Drayton:
The notes from last week's meeting of ECMA TC39 group were just published.
In it there was a discussion of C# and the CLI (is this a new acronym for
the CLR?) that contained some very interesting snippets of information.
Apparently Microsoft (along with HP, Intel & Fujitsu) is intending to submit
C# & the CLI to ECMA for standardization in November. Other interesting
points:
1. Tony (last name not give - was it maybe Goodhew?) said Microsoft has 2
implementations of C# & CLI internally, and that they are working on an open
source implementation.
2. Tony also said that the CLI was available on non-WinTel platforms, but
Microsoft couldn't comment on this at this time.
I am suspcious about.NET, because it looks like another way to make proprietary MS technologies
defacto standards
Yes, this is the standard MS way. As I pointed out elsewhere, though, one of the real business weaknesses of Java is the fact that Sun has refused to submit it to a standards body. Proving that they will do the right thing, if only for the wrong reasons (to kill Java), MS is planning on handing C# and the.NET CLR over to the EMCA. You might be interested in reading The Microsoft.NET Strategy: Risky, Brilliant, or Both? in Dr. Dobbs:
Now here comes the real shine in.NET. When repeatedly asked what prevents C# and CLR being ported to any operating system (say Unix or Linux), often with wry smiles Microsoft officials, often with wry smiles, said "nothing." This means the.NET Framework of C# and CLR makes Microsoft software not only highly interoperable but also portable. So if Linux takes off, Microsoft software will be there. If some.NET appliance software/hardware combination skyrockets -- Microsoft software can quickly move there. And if the DOJ splits up Microsoft, C# and some portions of CLR are already pledged to be standardized through the European organization, ECMA.
.NET is Microsoft's answer to Java. Before dismissing it out of hand, just because it originated from MS, keep this in mind:
It definitely has it's roots in Java, depite what MS marketing hype says. MS couldn't extend-and-embrace Java for legal reasons, so they dropped their efforts and created.NET out of the ashes.
The most important part of.NET is the CLR (common language runtime). Unlike Java, where the VM is tailored to one language, the CLR is designed to support multiple languages, and to make interoperability between languages much less of a hassle than it is now.
As far as I can tell from lurking on the.NET mailing list, MS has been very responsive to feedback from beta testers. It looks like the.NET team has made a commitment to delivering something developers want, not something marketing thinks they can sell.
In true MS fashion, they've identified and are zeroing in on one of the key weakness of Java: it's not standardized. They're putting the primary.NET components (C# and the common language runtime) in the hands of a standards body.
All in all, it sounds like this is MS hedging their bets. Having a version of the.NET runtime available for *nix would mean that MS could start trying to lure shops using Java into the MS fold. If C#/.NET become formally standardized, given the number of open source developers out there, someone, somewhere, will do the hard work for them and make their environment available elsewhere (and everywhere...)
Meanwhile, while no *nix developer would think about corrupting their precious kernel to make.NET run any faster, MS has no such qualms. They will probably be tweaking Win2002 to get every last drop of performance from.NET, so they can point at Linux - and the open source supported versions of.NET - and say "See, you can even run your.NET solutions on these low-end systems; and when you're ready to step up to the big time, you can just move your apps over to a real enterprise OS..."
CoManage, Pittsburgh, PA. Network management; in a young (less than 2 years old) company of over 100 people, I'm on the young side at 32. We have enough parents in the company that children's movie night is a company activity once a month, and working from home one or two days a week is a common occurance. The works challenging; the work's interesting; and the management has a clue.
You gotta remember Open Source is a marketing tool and a weapon against Microsoft, in IBM's eyes. I wouldn't trust them not to then pull the same damn stuff they've done in the past.
But, as you point out, if this happened to Linux,
...the kernel would fork in a heartbeat, but that's not my point, and these folk didn't have that option
But that is the the point, isn't it? IBM can't pull a tricks like OCO, because in order to do so, they would have to violate the GPL. Granted, I'm sure that a company with the resources that IBM has could find a legal loophole (or have one legislated) that would allow them to do an end run around the GPL... but with each piece of software they release to the community under an open source license, they invest a little bit more in the idea that those licenses are valid. It doesn't take long for that investment to reach the point where IBM will rabidly defend open source licenses because a failure to do so would result in their competitors being able to take their software and do something like OCO to them.
Instead of expanding the program, Clinton could start offering HB-1 veterans residency visas.
Well, first off, it would be Congress that would amend the laws to offer residency visas, not the president. That aside, this is an outstanding idea. I know (and work) with many people trapped in H1-B hell. Even worse off are the poor individuals who are brave enough to try and make it through the tangle of the immigration beauracracy to try and become citizens... that takes 4-5 years, nowadays; and if you change employers, then you need to go back to square one and start from the beginning. Which means that if you come to the US on an H1-B and want to become a naturalized citizen, you had better love your job - because if you leave; or if they fire you; or lay you off; or if the company gets bought out, or goes under... even if you're a day away from getting your green card, you're SOL.
All this makes a mockery of the H1-B and naturalization programs.
Does anyone else see this as obvious? If they want to regulate the import and distribution of devices used for hacking... well, obviously, you're going to have to regulate and monitor internet traffic, world-wide, just to make sure that nothing that violates this treaty is getting through.
"Sorry, folks, just passing through looking for suspicious data... really, we hate the idea of doing this; it's just so much more work for us, but hey! - it's in that damn treaty we signed. Now... your papers, please."
Slashdot Mirror
OK... here's an odd question that popped into my head:
The DMCA explicitly allows for reverse engineering for compatability purposes. What if I am interested in reverse engineering a circuit design, piece of code, etc. not for compatibility purposes, but in order to determine if they designer/implementor is infringing on a patent that I or my company holds?
Now, according to the DMCA, I'm a criminal - I've engaged in reverse engineering for other purposes than compatibility. No matter that I may have proof, via the reverse engineering, that someone was infriging on a patent; according the the DMCA, I committed a crime in order to obtain that information.
Am I missing something here? Or does the DMCA - which it's advocates touted as being essential to protecting intellectual property in today's digital world - allow someone to essentially ignore patents under the right circumstances?
Any of you lawyer types, feel free to correct this - but from what I understand, there are no legal protections for a trade secret. However, there are legal protections for a person or company that decides to disclose a trade secret to another person or company, if they identify it as a trade secret.
In other words - if they tell you what the trade secret is, and that it is a trade secret, they they can hold you accountable if you disclose it to someone else without their permission. If you lie or comit breach of contract in order to gain the secret, then you're right - that's essentially theft; but then again, there's no reverse engineering involved there. If they never tell you what the trade secret is, and you discover it on your own, then it's game over - their secret is no longer a secret, and you have every right to make use of it.
There's a tradeoff here - if a company gets a patent on an invention, process, or what have you, then they have a legal monopoly on it for a few dozen years in return for disclosing their secret. If they don't get a patent, then they can keep their secret as long as nobody discovers it, which might be a good long time (for example, Coke) or might not last more than a few years.
Yes... unfortunately. If men were held responsible for their actions - instead of shifting responsibility onto their partners - then maybe there would be less of this sort of thing going on.
Yes. They choose to have intercourse when they weren't prepared to deal with all the possible consequences in full... IIRC, the primary reason for contraceptive failure is improper use; so again, there's another incidence of a "bad life decision" - deciding to have intercourse with a contraceptive, without bothering to learn how to use a contraceptive properly.
There are few things in your life that you are not responsible for, despite what modern society would like you to believe. Claiming that you're a weak-willed coward unwilling to stand up to peer pressure or are so intellectually lazy that you are unwilling to make the mental effort to understand your actions does not absolve you; it just makes you an outstanding candidate for a Darwin award.
Blaming someone else for a problem doesn't help you solve it, and merely helps to obscure those instances where you truly are not in control of your life for one reason or another. The teenage kid who was conceived and born next to a toxic waste dump, and is dying from leukemia... A child living on life support because they were born with AIDS... neither of these folks had any control over their life. You want to tell me that there is some way they could have avoided their sitations? There isn't.
When you have a way to avoid living a life you'd rather not have, and you make a decision that takes you closer to that type of life... at that point, saying that someone else was responsible or that "life dealt you a bad hand" just isn't really true, is it? If you're unwilling to admit that your own choices and efforts, good or bad, brought you the life your living, then you're spending each and every day lying to yourself... so I guess it's no wonder that you wouldn't trust anyone else, either.
OS/2 and Windows NT both originated out of a joint project between MS and IBM to develop a new operating system. Given how well the two companies have gotten along in the past, it's no surprise the effort went nowhere... it did result in MS producing WinNT and IBM producing OS/2, though.
While .NET supports COM interoperability, it is definitely not based on COM... it's hard to believe that so many people either ignore this, or decide that they just missed something, and .NET is just another name for the latest flavor of COM coming out of MS.
The overhyped XML compliance, I'll agree with :-)
Nope. I has a taste of what that's like when I was a junior officer in the Navy. I can manage, and I can do a decent job of managing both people and materials, but it's a draining and uncreative job.
The problem is, managers are interrupt driven. Every 15 minutes or so, then need to shift focus to a new task. I think just about anyone can be taught to think that way, but for most people, it's not natural, and eventually wears on them... and wears them down.
I'm a software developer now; it's more fun, and it lets me work in a way that suits me better (concentrating for 4-5 hours, go home and take a few hours off, work another 4-5 hours.) Most companies larger than 50 people will have some sort of technical expert/architect/prima donna development track that lets senior technical folks avoid having to go into management. I think this is a solid sign that a good company understands what drives and motivates some of their best technical workers.
In today's job market, particularly in the technology sectors, there's no reason why anyone should feel the need to stay with an ouright abusive, stupid, or otherwise damanged company/employer/manager. It's like tying a sack of bricks to your back before you go for a few laps in the pool. Sure, there are some people who can do it; but the majority of people would struggle for a bit and then end up at the bottom. So why swim with a bag of bricks when you don't really have to?
I have "spent some time in those shoes" as you put it (unlicensed engineer, having never gotten my PE cert.) I work in the software industry now, which is (probably) even more... interesting. The again, you should know that.
The majority of the situations in Dilbert are unreal. When was the last time you had one coworker kill another in a meeting, or had give yourself a sponge bath at the office water fountain because your funding had been cut, or... you get the picture. Adams, like other cartoonists, sometimes exaggerates in order to find humor.
I'm not saying that Dilbert doesn't show any "real" situations. Adams takes reader suggestions for strips, after all :-) And I've heard (and read) various horror stories about PHBs and PHCs (pointy-haired companies). Maybe part of my enjoyment comes from knowing that there are such clueless companies and people out there, and thankfulness that I have (so far) been able to avoid them (/. excepted, of course :-)
Whoa. If you're getting to the point where you're living in the same world as Dilbert, that's definitely like seeing the canary keel over - time to move on. The most absurd (and funny) thing about Dilbert is that no matter how bad things get, they never even think about finding something even marginally better.
Hardly. The majority of the "right wingers" I know (including myself) think Dilbert is hilarious. Before you get off on a tangent, no, we're not amused at the pain of The Workers of The World. Dilbert is just plain funny, mostly because the situations in the comic are so freakin' unreal that it's impossible to imagine yourself putting up with them... but Dilbert, Alice and Wally do, day after day, and that ol' congnitive dissonance kicks in and you laught yourself silly because when all is said and done, no matter how bad things are, hell! - at least you're not one of those loosers!
I may be completely wrong here - but I thought the DMCA was, at least indirectly, the result of an international treaty that the US entered into?
My wife and I have several Windows machines at home - she's a technical writer, specializing in MS Exchange, I do Windows development. I don't believe (with the exception of my laptop) that we have any machine that isn't slated to eventually have multiple OS installations... generally some mixture of Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, and Win2K.
I have also set up multiple dual-boot systems for various small businesses with a dual-boot configuration of DOS 6 and Win9x... typically, DOS in order to run legacy applications that blow up under Win9x, Win9x for email and more modern apps. Never mind that we've gotten to the point where Win95 is a "legacy" OS as well... anyone yet had to install DOS, Win95 and WinME in order to support legacy apps?
When I ask a dealer for a naked system, it's not because I'm planning on pirating software; it's because the tradiational, AOL-using, consumer view of "one computer == one OS" doesn't always hold true.
So, Dell is claiming that an Apache server running on their hardware is only capable of serving up about one page per second, max?
IIRC, there's something in the rules Congress follows that states that a vote on an issue can only be challenged/reopened by someone voting against the outcome... so, if you (potentially) want to debate an issue further after a vote, you must vote against the final outcome. In practce, this means you will find very few unanimous votes - in fact, I was suprprised at the 96-1 vote; I would have expected 95-2, with one member of each major party (Democratic and Republican) voting against the (perceived) majority just in case...
Oh, I agree with you... I just don't think that the political ambitions of Gore and Bush are different enough to influence the outcome of something like this.
Bugs per line of code (LOC).
See Emphasizing Software Test Process Improvement... in it, they say:
So, If Windows 2000 was 30 million LOC, you can expect there to be, on average, between 120,000 and 180,000 bugs in the shipping code.
Let's be generous to MS, and say that they have an outstanding development process as decribed in the above paper. Because of this, they manage to reduce the number of bugs by a factor of 50%; so they're only shipping with 60,000 - 90,000 bugs.
Now, let's be even more generous, and assume that only 10% of the bugs actually present in a system is actually ever noticed and reported (BTW, a ridiculously low estimate, IMHO...) This means that W2K should have on the order of 6,000 to 9,000 reported bugs.
Now, contrast that with the latest Red Hat release; buggy as all git out, you know. 2000 reported bugs. You'd have to go back and compare LOC to get a comparable estimate, but I'm guessing that if you count all the various and sundry packages, Red Hat ships at least 30 million LOC in a distro... which would mean that their code, buggy as all sin and scorned by open source hackers everywhere, would contain about one-third of the bugs that W2K contains.
That's why you're buying Linux.
Or Gore... doesn't matter who ends up in the oval office; it'll be a new face, and another chance at gaining the sympathies of the head of the executive branch.
On a side note, while I think Bush might favor big business more than Gore, I also think that Gore would sell his wife to the highest bidder if it meant a campaign contribution. While I'm fairly sure that Bush is probably no more trustworthy or fair minded than Gore, at least he hasn't actually demonstrated himself to be the world-class screwup Clinton-wannabe looser that Gore has.No doubt this will get moderated into oblivion...
.NET is Microsoft's answer to Java. Before dismissing it out of hand, just because it originated from MS, keep this in mind:
All in all, it sounds like this is MS hedging their bets. Having a version of the .NET runtime available for *nix would mean that MS could start trying to lure shops using Java into the MS fold. If C#/.NET become formally standardized, given the number of open source developers out there, someone, somewhere, will do the hard work for them and make their environment available elsewhere (and everywhere...)
Meanwhile, while no *nix developer would think about corrupting their precious kernel to make .NET run any faster, MS has no such qualms. They will probably be tweaking Win2002 to get every last drop of performance from .NET, so they can point at Linux - and the open source supported versions of .NET - and say "See, you can even run your .NET solutions on these low-end systems; and when you're ready to step up to the big time, you can just move your apps over to a real enterprise OS..."
..for a buisiness method patent yet? Once that's approved, you could give Rambus a taste of their own medicine...
CoManage, Pittsburgh, PA. Network management; in a young (less than 2 years old) company of over 100 people, I'm on the young side at 32. We have enough parents in the company that children's movie night is a company activity once a month, and working from home one or two days a week is a common occurance. The works challenging; the work's interesting; and the management has a clue.
But, as you point out, if this happened to Linux,
But that is the the point, isn't it? IBM can't pull a tricks like OCO, because in order to do so, they would have to violate the GPL. Granted, I'm sure that a company with the resources that IBM has could find a legal loophole (or have one legislated) that would allow them to do an end run around the GPL... but with each piece of software they release to the community under an open source license, they invest a little bit more in the idea that those licenses are valid. It doesn't take long for that investment to reach the point where IBM will rabidly defend open source licenses because a failure to do so would result in their competitors being able to take their software and do something like OCO to them.
Well, first off, it would be Congress that would amend the laws to offer residency visas, not the president. That aside, this is an outstanding idea. I know (and work) with many people trapped in H1-B hell. Even worse off are the poor individuals who are brave enough to try and make it through the tangle of the immigration beauracracy to try and become citizens... that takes 4-5 years, nowadays; and if you change employers, then you need to go back to square one and start from the beginning. Which means that if you come to the US on an H1-B and want to become a naturalized citizen, you had better love your job - because if you leave; or if they fire you; or lay you off; or if the company gets bought out, or goes under... even if you're a day away from getting your green card, you're SOL.
All this makes a mockery of the H1-B and naturalization programs.
Does anyone else see this as obvious? If they want to regulate the import and distribution of devices used for hacking... well, obviously, you're going to have to regulate and monitor internet traffic, world-wide, just to make sure that nothing that violates this treaty is getting through.
"Sorry, folks, just passing through looking for suspicious data... really, we hate the idea of doing this; it's just so much more work for us, but hey! - it's in that damn treaty we signed. Now... your papers, please."