Sorry. Wrong. Patents are useful because of the threat of liability. Large companies with more money are more at risk from Patent infringement cases, not less.
But the threat of liability doesn't really exist if the patent holder doesn't have the resources to sue. If an average suit costs over $1 million, a little guy probably does not have the resources to make a credible threat to sue. Meanwhile, there are limits on damages in a patent infringement case. Damages are limited to profits for lost sales, plus a reasonable royalty on sales that the holder couldn't have made. Proof of a deliberate violation can give treble damages, but there aren't the kind of unlimited punative damages that exist in areas like personal injury. If a big company starts infringing before the little guy has the resources to produce much product, he may be able to run the little guy out of business and only be liable for three times a court named reasonable royalty- if the little guy can even bring a successful suit.
You might be surprised at which schools are not accredited. Accreditation is most useful for schools without great reputations. After all, everyone knows about Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and similarly presigious places. They know that those schools aren't just handing out degrees to anyone with a big enough stack of cash, so who cares what some agency says? Some of those schools, though, might not want to do everything that whatever accrediting group claims is important, so they may give up formal accreditation to maintain their academic independence. In fact, when I got my degree, Caltech was not accredited as an institution for exactly that reason. Individual departments and programs were accredited by appropriate professional groups, but not the school as a whole.
OTOH, the average man on the street has probably never heard of Backwater State and doesn't know if they have a real program there or not. The only thing they have to go on is what the accrediting agencies say. If they want anyone to take their degrees seriously, they need the accreditation.
"This shows us that the genetic code, and therefore, evolution is much more plastic than people might have thought."
"I think this work will cause researchers to start looking at genetic sequences that they might have thought at first were simply aberrations," he said. "Instead, they might signal discoveries like ours."
Or maybe people already know that. It's already well established that different organisms use different translation tables when synthesizing proteins. The NCBI lists 17 such tables in their section on gene transltation. Heck, the human nucleus and mitochondria use different translatation tables! Is it really such a surprise that those differences might occasionally include an additional amino acid?
How come our laws are structured so that the guy who cures cancer has to make back his entire investment in 14 years, but RIAA and MPAA get to sponge for 90 [sic] years plus the life of the creator?
I presume that the practical reason is that there's a much stronger lobby for extending copyright terms than for extending patent terms. Although there are some companies and individuals who make a living building on newly expired copyrights, there isn't a huge industry doing so, so there isn't a powerful lobby trying to enforce strict limits on the length of copyright. OTOH, the holders of current copyrights have a strong interest in seeing them extended, making for a powerful pro-extension lobby.
In contrast, the patent system is much more even. Just about every big company that depends heavily on patents to protect its inventions also struggles against other companies that hold patents on inventions it wants to use. That means that they can see both sides of the patent issue and are less likely to be strongly in favor of extending patent terms. Of course this isn't true of every business. My impression is that Big Pharma is much less dependent on the availability of others' patents, so they're one of the few industries that lobbies strongly in favor of longer patent terms.
Does anyone know whether the various acts extending copyright have severability clauses in them? If not, does that mean that the extensions might be struck down entirely? That could be a bombshell.
That's what Eldred et. al. are arguing. To quote from their brief:
... This Court should therefore strike down the retroactive aspect of the CTEA under the First Ammendment as well. And because the retroactive aspect of CTEA is inseverable from its prospective aspect, CTEA's entire extension should be set aside.
I'm personally a bit dubious about this argument. It seems perfectly reasonable that the rules for future copyrights could be different from those for past copyrights. After all, the arguments being made are all about the unconstitutionality of extending copyrights retroactively, so future extensions should not be affected. Even if the law does not specifically include a severability clause, there's no fundamental reason that the prospective aspects can't be severable from the retrospective ones. I strongly doubt that the Supreme Court would strike down the whole law based on this idea.
Why is anyone bothering to fight against the copyright extension, anyway? If you listen to the copyright holders, you'd know that everying under the sun is just going to be stolen by copyright thieves anyway. Of course then you also have to wonder why they're so worried about extending the term of copyright if they believe that it's impossible to publish anything without having it stolen. Something doesn't add up here...
This is saying that cars are broken because there are car theifs.
And saying that we shouldn't fix obvious problems with the current mail system is like saying that there's no need to install locks, because theft is caused by criminals and not lack of adequate safeguards. If you want to fix a problem rather than simply assign blame, you can't work on just one side of the problem. You have to address every part, or at least as many parts of the problem as you can.
It's true that there would be no spam if there were no spammers. It's also true that there would be much less spam if it weren't so easy to send. Addressing the technical issues may actually be easier than the legal ones just because of the difficulties of legal jurisdiction, difficulty in getting legislation passed, etc.
Maybe you should read better reviewers, then. One of the things that I really like about the reviewers for the LA Times is that they actually understand that not everyone shares their taste in movies. They're capable of saying things like "I didn't really like this one, but I know that fans of this kind of movie will love it." I recall a review of a movie where the reviewer said something along the lines of, "I don't know why I'm even bothering to review this movie. The people who will like it aren't going to pay attention to my review anyway, and the people who won't like it don't need me to tell them that." It's not quite as good as having a reviewer who perfectly shares my taste, but it's a lot better than having ones who will complain about any movie that is comprehensible and praise anything subtitled.
One of the things that everyone seems to miss when people make this kind of comparison is that toilet seats are actually remarkably clean. They're engineered to be a very bad place for bacteria to grow, and people routinely clean them with strong antiseptic solutions. In fact, a typical toilet seat has fewer bacteria than a typical kitchen counter. Your toilet seat may very well be the cleanest place in your house.
That's why the Constitution only grants those rights to Authors and Inventors. Thoday, the holders of copyrights and patents are, almost always, corporations.
This is pretty much unavoidable. Inventions and literary works are rarely done singlehanded. Copyright and patent law must allow the possiblity that works are a joint effort of more than one creator, and that opens the door to corporate ownership. I've seen this objection a lot, but I have yet to see a practical alternative that preserves the rights of groups of creators while preventing corporations from being able to own patents or copyrights.
Another distortion of the basic idea came when they started granting copyrights to people who performed the works. Actors are not authors, singers are not authors. They are just doing a job, and should be paid - just once - for doing it, like all other workers. Why should Britney Spears or any other singer be paid millions for singing a song that someone else, probably a 9-to-5 office worker, wrote?
This is a much less significant change than you make it out to be. If you aren't going to grant copyright for a specific recorded performance of a work, you're left with two options.
Option 1 is that the copyright to specific recordings is held by the author of the script, score, or whatnot. The result of that approach is going to be essentially the same as the current system, just with all of the money going to the original author rather than to the performers. I fail to see how this is dramatically more equitable than the current system. Your complaint that Britney Spears makes millions for performing a song is just as readily applied to the author of the song. Why should he make millions of dollars for writing the song just once?
Option 2 is that there be no copyright protection at all for recordings of performances. This seems even less equitable than Option 1, because under that system neither the author nor the performers get anything.
The current system seems more fair than either of those two options. Authors of scripts, scores, etc. do get author's royalties today, so they are fairly compensated for their writings. At the same time, performers can copyright their specific performances, so they receive compensation for their efforts.
It's a floor model MALDI-TOF. I has a ~2 m flight tube, and the whole thing is built into a very sturdy metal frame that contains all of the electronics, pumps, data system, etc. It's by no means the largest instrument I've seen, though. We used to have large magnetic sector instruments that had to be shipped in pieces and assembled on site because they couldn't be moved in one piece. We also have a number of the smaller types that you describe, but the big research instruments are big.
It wasn't computer big iron, but my employer had a somewhat similar problem with a piece of scientific equipment- a mass spectrometer. The mass spec weighed close to a ton and was not properly secured in the truck while shipping. It didn't tip over, but actually burst through the end of the shipping crate and was about a third out of the crate on delivery. For some reason, our people decided to sign for it, but with the notation about its condition on receipt. This was a mistake.
The shipping company claims that it was signed for and thus isn't their responsibility, probably because they decided to insure the shipment by weight, so it wound up being insured for about 1/1000 of its value. We were eventually shipped a replacement, but the original is still sitting in our warehouse. It's almost 3 years later, and our lawyers, the manufacturer's lawyers, the shipping company's lawyers, and the insurance company's lawyers are still fighting about what's going to happen to the thing.
The article made numerous references to an almost heroic face-egging of the elite pork-barrelists in their ivory towers, but why? Kind of funny how the transit authority agreed with him...kind of cheapens the whole thing. Maybe they understand it.
The egg in the face aspect comes from the fact that nobody noticed the fact that the sign had been added. You'd think that the people in charge of the signs would notice that there was an addition that hadn't been authorized. Instead, Caltrans is apparently a big enough beaurocracy that nobody noticed the change, or if they did they assumed that somebody else had authorized it. Of course part of that is simply that he was right; there should have been a sign there all along, so people who saw it tended to view it as the bozos getting their act together rather than an obvious hack.
Does the fact that he was very careful in making this sign make it art?
It seemed to work for Andy Warhol with the soup cans and other copies of ordinary household products. It may not be super-duper, ivory tower elite art, but it qualifies as art. FWIW, I've seen some of the guy's other artwork- the artists' colony where he lives has periodic open houses where anyone can come in and see the work of artists who want to show it off- and he does some interesting stuff. It isn't brilliant, but he's certainly a very competent artist.
If that's the case, you should use a known invalid address. Just use something like nobody@127.0.0.1, which is guaranteed not to go to anyone who doesn't deserve it. ISTR that there are even some reserved names that are guaranteed not to work, and I seriously doubt that most software actually checks for address validity before letting you proceed. Or you could always use something like postmaster@theirname, so they wind up bombarding themselves with spam if they try to use it.
As far as I know, though, you can't claim that once somebody has opted in they may no longer opt out. If the email administrator sends a message to Flowgo asking them to stop sending email, those people have now been opted out. At that point, further email from Flowgo is definitely spam, whether the users originally asked to be put on the list or not. That's why keeping records of the time that you asked them to stop sending the company email is so important.
About the only way I could get Flowgo to stop SPAMMING my mail server is to call up a buddy of Tony Soprano to break their knees because Flowgo doesn't care and I have never, ever, ever been able to get one of my elected officials or law enforcement agency to pay any interest in Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail.
Have you considered threatening a lawsuit? I realize that they're not the most popular thing on Slashdot, but when somebody is doing something illegal and annoying they're about your only recourse. Many states now have at least some kind of anit-spam laws, so if you've kept a record of your email asking them to stop sending mail to your users and the mail they've kept sending, you'd have a pretty good case. A nice, polite cease and desist letter sent by registered mail would likely get their attention, and if it didn't a lawsuit for the applicable statutory damages per message certainly would. If your company already has a legal counsel, it wouldn't even cost you anything.
You're obviously asking the wrong person. What would Alan Cox know about making it big as a Unix guru without a beard? It's not like he has great personal experience in the area. No, the clear expert in this area is Linus Torvalds. He appears to know not just how to become a guru without growing a beard, but also how to avoid being reduced to a pulp by a potentially disapproving wife.
Of course the projects you've mentioned are things that Gates is doing with his personal money, not things that Microsoft is doing with its giant cash reserves. That is, of course, the way that things should go. Gates's personal cash is his own to do with as he pleases, but it would be a violation of his duties as an officer of the company to spend the corporate reserves on his personal philanthropic interests.
Re:Charlatans Exist Because We Love Them
on
The Magic Box Hoax
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· Score: 2
The problem with Bittle's view is that it is absolutist, while skepticism is almost inherently a relativist position. I don't require a "valid" reason for my beliefs in the sense that Bittle seems to suggest, i.e. something that is absolutely true. I'm actually strongly skeptical of the possibility of absolute knowledge. Instead, I accept that absolute truth is probably not attainable, and the best we can do is to look at the available evidence. I hold this view based on my own experience, which suggests that it is more reasonable than the alternative. Bittle's comments seem to be more indicative of his own difficulty accepting the idea of a world without absolute truth than any inherent difficulty with the concept of skepticism.
I have to disagree. It is the complexity that allows loopholes.
It's true that complexity leads to loopholes, but it's not the complexity in wording that causes the problems but the complexity in what the wording tries to achieve. If your licensing concept is very simple, you can use a very simple license. Take the BSD license, for instance, which is very simple. The goal is that users can use the software for anything they please but mayn't sue the authors if it breaks. That really only takes two sentences: a disclaimer of liability and a grant of redistribution rights.
The problem is when you want to do something more complex than that. The GPL allows redistribution with one big catch; if you redistribute you have to make the code available and pass on the right to redistribute to users further down the line. But in practice, you can't just say that because it leaves in too many loopholes. What happens if somebody tries to distribute the source deliberately obfuscated? How about if the make a leech program that derives almost all of its functions from your code, but with a few added details managed by a nominally separate proprietary program? How about if they deliberately avoid telling users that it's their right to get access to the source? Maybe you could write a simple license and win in court when somebody tries funny business like that, but it's probably a better idea to write it so that various dodges are clearly not allowed.
In a sense, it's rather like programming. As long as a program is doing something very simple the code can be equally simple. But when you start having to worry about malformed or deliberately malicious input, checking for marginal cases, dealing with low memory, etc. things get much more complex. ISTR that a common estimate is that 90% of large programs is devoted not to their primary function but to avoiding potential bugs. Legal documents tend to be rather similar. Even if the goal is simple, they have to be written so that their intent will stand up even when somebody is trying very hard to avoid doing what they say is required. Taking that into account is what makes them complex and nasty.
Does there exist EULA that gives you, the user the right to distribute binary-only copies of a program?
Yes. The BSD/MIT style licenses give you this right, for which reason advocates of those licenses claim that they're "more free" than the GPL. I'm not sure if I agree with the point, but there are licenses that give the first-generation user more rights than the GPL. The argument is then over whether those rights are more valuable than the GPL's protection of second and later generation users.
It seems to me that one point that's been missed in the hubbub about whether KDE and GNOME are desktop environments or part of the operating system is that the witness was wrong about the web browsers' removability. It's quite possible to pull remove the web browser from either KDE or GNOME. If I decide that Konqueror is taking up valuable space that should be saved for Mozilla, I can just rpm -e kdeaddons-konqueror and it's gone. Similarly I can remove galeon with rpm -e galeon. I'll lose some functionality by doing so, true, but neither one is so deeply entwined into the system that it's unremovable.
That's an Agilent part in those mice, not a Hewlett Packard part. And actually Microsoft has even started making some of the sensors themselves rather than buying them from Agilent. I'm actually surprised by the situation. My father, who worked on the design team for the optical sensor chip, told me that Microsoft had the chance to get an exclusive contract for the optical mouse chips but turned it down. Seems like a big mistake.
Nuclear rockets have been proposed in the past and always shot down by the enviro-Nazi, anti-nuke crowd.
You do realize that opposition to nuclear propulsion comes from rational concerns about its safety as well as irrational hatred of everything nuclear, don't you? I don't have particular problems with nuclear energy in general, but I have serious reservations about any flying nuclear system. A nuclear powered spacecraft is not like the radiothermal generators that have been used in spacecraft so far. It would require a large amount of quite hot material, so any accident could spread a lot of radiactive contamination over a very wide area. I'd want to be damn sure that there were adequate safeguards against that before signing off on such a thing.
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But the threat of liability doesn't really exist if the patent holder doesn't have the resources to sue. If an average suit costs over $1 million, a little guy probably does not have the resources to make a credible threat to sue. Meanwhile, there are limits on damages in a patent infringement case. Damages are limited to profits for lost sales, plus a reasonable royalty on sales that the holder couldn't have made. Proof of a deliberate violation can give treble damages, but there aren't the kind of unlimited punative damages that exist in areas like personal injury. If a big company starts infringing before the little guy has the resources to produce much product, he may be able to run the little guy out of business and only be liable for three times a court named reasonable royalty- if the little guy can even bring a successful suit.
You might be surprised at which schools are not accredited. Accreditation is most useful for schools without great reputations. After all, everyone knows about Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and similarly presigious places. They know that those schools aren't just handing out degrees to anyone with a big enough stack of cash, so who cares what some agency says? Some of those schools, though, might not want to do everything that whatever accrediting group claims is important, so they may give up formal accreditation to maintain their academic independence. In fact, when I got my degree, Caltech was not accredited as an institution for exactly that reason. Individual departments and programs were accredited by appropriate professional groups, but not the school as a whole.
OTOH, the average man on the street has probably never heard of Backwater State and doesn't know if they have a real program there or not. The only thing they have to go on is what the accrediting agencies say. If they want anyone to take their degrees seriously, they need the accreditation.
Don't forget to include complete source code for both while you're at it- GPL compliance and all.
Or maybe people already know that. It's already well established that different organisms use different translation tables when synthesizing proteins. The NCBI lists 17 such tables in their section on gene transltation. Heck, the human nucleus and mitochondria use different translatation tables! Is it really such a surprise that those differences might occasionally include an additional amino acid?
I presume that the practical reason is that there's a much stronger lobby for extending copyright terms than for extending patent terms. Although there are some companies and individuals who make a living building on newly expired copyrights, there isn't a huge industry doing so, so there isn't a powerful lobby trying to enforce strict limits on the length of copyright. OTOH, the holders of current copyrights have a strong interest in seeing them extended, making for a powerful pro-extension lobby.
In contrast, the patent system is much more even. Just about every big company that depends heavily on patents to protect its inventions also struggles against other companies that hold patents on inventions it wants to use. That means that they can see both sides of the patent issue and are less likely to be strongly in favor of extending patent terms. Of course this isn't true of every business. My impression is that Big Pharma is much less dependent on the availability of others' patents, so they're one of the few industries that lobbies strongly in favor of longer patent terms.
That's what Eldred et. al. are arguing. To quote from their brief:
I'm personally a bit dubious about this argument. It seems perfectly reasonable that the rules for future copyrights could be different from those for past copyrights. After all, the arguments being made are all about the unconstitutionality of extending copyrights retroactively, so future extensions should not be affected. Even if the law does not specifically include a severability clause, there's no fundamental reason that the prospective aspects can't be severable from the retrospective ones. I strongly doubt that the Supreme Court would strike down the whole law based on this idea.
Why is anyone bothering to fight against the copyright extension, anyway? If you listen to the copyright holders, you'd know that everying under the sun is just going to be stolen by copyright thieves anyway. Of course then you also have to wonder why they're so worried about extending the term of copyright if they believe that it's impossible to publish anything without having it stolen. Something doesn't add up here...
And saying that we shouldn't fix obvious problems with the current mail system is like saying that there's no need to install locks, because theft is caused by criminals and not lack of adequate safeguards. If you want to fix a problem rather than simply assign blame, you can't work on just one side of the problem. You have to address every part, or at least as many parts of the problem as you can.
It's true that there would be no spam if there were no spammers. It's also true that there would be much less spam if it weren't so easy to send. Addressing the technical issues may actually be easier than the legal ones just because of the difficulties of legal jurisdiction, difficulty in getting legislation passed, etc.
Maybe you should read better reviewers, then. One of the things that I really like about the reviewers for the LA Times is that they actually understand that not everyone shares their taste in movies. They're capable of saying things like "I didn't really like this one, but I know that fans of this kind of movie will love it." I recall a review of a movie where the reviewer said something along the lines of, "I don't know why I'm even bothering to review this movie. The people who will like it aren't going to pay attention to my review anyway, and the people who won't like it don't need me to tell them that." It's not quite as good as having a reviewer who perfectly shares my taste, but it's a lot better than having ones who will complain about any movie that is comprehensible and praise anything subtitled.
One of the things that everyone seems to miss when people make this kind of comparison is that toilet seats are actually remarkably clean. They're engineered to be a very bad place for bacteria to grow, and people routinely clean them with strong antiseptic solutions. In fact, a typical toilet seat has fewer bacteria than a typical kitchen counter. Your toilet seat may very well be the cleanest place in your house.
This is pretty much unavoidable. Inventions and literary works are rarely done singlehanded. Copyright and patent law must allow the possiblity that works are a joint effort of more than one creator, and that opens the door to corporate ownership. I've seen this objection a lot, but I have yet to see a practical alternative that preserves the rights of groups of creators while preventing corporations from being able to own patents or copyrights.
This is a much less significant change than you make it out to be. If you aren't going to grant copyright for a specific recorded performance of a work, you're left with two options. Option 1 is that the copyright to specific recordings is held by the author of the script, score, or whatnot. The result of that approach is going to be essentially the same as the current system, just with all of the money going to the original author rather than to the performers. I fail to see how this is dramatically more equitable than the current system. Your complaint that Britney Spears makes millions for performing a song is just as readily applied to the author of the song. Why should he make millions of dollars for writing the song just once?
Option 2 is that there be no copyright protection at all for recordings of performances. This seems even less equitable than Option 1, because under that system neither the author nor the performers get anything.
The current system seems more fair than either of those two options. Authors of scripts, scores, etc. do get author's royalties today, so they are fairly compensated for their writings. At the same time, performers can copyright their specific performances, so they receive compensation for their efforts.
It's a floor model MALDI-TOF. I has a ~2 m flight tube, and the whole thing is built into a very sturdy metal frame that contains all of the electronics, pumps, data system, etc. It's by no means the largest instrument I've seen, though. We used to have large magnetic sector instruments that had to be shipped in pieces and assembled on site because they couldn't be moved in one piece. We also have a number of the smaller types that you describe, but the big research instruments are big.
It wasn't computer big iron, but my employer had a somewhat similar problem with a piece of scientific equipment- a mass spectrometer. The mass spec weighed close to a ton and was not properly secured in the truck while shipping. It didn't tip over, but actually burst through the end of the shipping crate and was about a third out of the crate on delivery. For some reason, our people decided to sign for it, but with the notation about its condition on receipt. This was a mistake.
The shipping company claims that it was signed for and thus isn't their responsibility, probably because they decided to insure the shipment by weight, so it wound up being insured for about 1/1000 of its value. We were eventually shipped a replacement, but the original is still sitting in our warehouse. It's almost 3 years later, and our lawyers, the manufacturer's lawyers, the shipping company's lawyers, and the insurance company's lawyers are still fighting about what's going to happen to the thing.
The egg in the face aspect comes from the fact that nobody noticed the fact that the sign had been added. You'd think that the people in charge of the signs would notice that there was an addition that hadn't been authorized. Instead, Caltrans is apparently a big enough beaurocracy that nobody noticed the change, or if they did they assumed that somebody else had authorized it. Of course part of that is simply that he was right; there should have been a sign there all along, so people who saw it tended to view it as the bozos getting their act together rather than an obvious hack.
It seemed to work for Andy Warhol with the soup cans and other copies of ordinary household products. It may not be super-duper, ivory tower elite art, but it qualifies as art. FWIW, I've seen some of the guy's other artwork- the artists' colony where he lives has periodic open houses where anyone can come in and see the work of artists who want to show it off- and he does some interesting stuff. It isn't brilliant, but he's certainly a very competent artist.
If that's the case, you should use a known invalid address. Just use something like nobody@127.0.0.1, which is guaranteed not to go to anyone who doesn't deserve it. ISTR that there are even some reserved names that are guaranteed not to work, and I seriously doubt that most software actually checks for address validity before letting you proceed. Or you could always use something like postmaster@theirname, so they wind up bombarding themselves with spam if they try to use it.
As far as I know, though, you can't claim that once somebody has opted in they may no longer opt out. If the email administrator sends a message to Flowgo asking them to stop sending email, those people have now been opted out. At that point, further email from Flowgo is definitely spam, whether the users originally asked to be put on the list or not. That's why keeping records of the time that you asked them to stop sending the company email is so important.
Have you considered threatening a lawsuit? I realize that they're not the most popular thing on Slashdot, but when somebody is doing something illegal and annoying they're about your only recourse. Many states now have at least some kind of anit-spam laws, so if you've kept a record of your email asking them to stop sending mail to your users and the mail they've kept sending, you'd have a pretty good case. A nice, polite cease and desist letter sent by registered mail would likely get their attention, and if it didn't a lawsuit for the applicable statutory damages per message certainly would. If your company already has a legal counsel, it wouldn't even cost you anything.
You're obviously asking the wrong person. What would Alan Cox know about making it big as a Unix guru without a beard? It's not like he has great personal experience in the area. No, the clear expert in this area is Linus Torvalds. He appears to know not just how to become a guru without growing a beard, but also how to avoid being reduced to a pulp by a potentially disapproving wife.
Of course the projects you've mentioned are things that Gates is doing with his personal money, not things that Microsoft is doing with its giant cash reserves. That is, of course, the way that things should go. Gates's personal cash is his own to do with as he pleases, but it would be a violation of his duties as an officer of the company to spend the corporate reserves on his personal philanthropic interests.
The problem with Bittle's view is that it is absolutist, while skepticism is almost inherently a relativist position. I don't require a "valid" reason for my beliefs in the sense that Bittle seems to suggest, i.e. something that is absolutely true. I'm actually strongly skeptical of the possibility of absolute knowledge. Instead, I accept that absolute truth is probably not attainable, and the best we can do is to look at the available evidence. I hold this view based on my own experience, which suggests that it is more reasonable than the alternative. Bittle's comments seem to be more indicative of his own difficulty accepting the idea of a world without absolute truth than any inherent difficulty with the concept of skepticism.
It's true that complexity leads to loopholes, but it's not the complexity in wording that causes the problems but the complexity in what the wording tries to achieve. If your licensing concept is very simple, you can use a very simple license. Take the BSD license, for instance, which is very simple. The goal is that users can use the software for anything they please but mayn't sue the authors if it breaks. That really only takes two sentences: a disclaimer of liability and a grant of redistribution rights.
The problem is when you want to do something more complex than that. The GPL allows redistribution with one big catch; if you redistribute you have to make the code available and pass on the right to redistribute to users further down the line. But in practice, you can't just say that because it leaves in too many loopholes. What happens if somebody tries to distribute the source deliberately obfuscated? How about if the make a leech program that derives almost all of its functions from your code, but with a few added details managed by a nominally separate proprietary program? How about if they deliberately avoid telling users that it's their right to get access to the source? Maybe you could write a simple license and win in court when somebody tries funny business like that, but it's probably a better idea to write it so that various dodges are clearly not allowed.
In a sense, it's rather like programming. As long as a program is doing something very simple the code can be equally simple. But when you start having to worry about malformed or deliberately malicious input, checking for marginal cases, dealing with low memory, etc. things get much more complex. ISTR that a common estimate is that 90% of large programs is devoted not to their primary function but to avoiding potential bugs. Legal documents tend to be rather similar. Even if the goal is simple, they have to be written so that their intent will stand up even when somebody is trying very hard to avoid doing what they say is required. Taking that into account is what makes them complex and nasty.
Yes. The BSD/MIT style licenses give you this right, for which reason advocates of those licenses claim that they're "more free" than the GPL. I'm not sure if I agree with the point, but there are licenses that give the first-generation user more rights than the GPL. The argument is then over whether those rights are more valuable than the GPL's protection of second and later generation users.
It seems to me that one point that's been missed in the hubbub about whether KDE and GNOME are desktop environments or part of the operating system is that the witness was wrong about the web browsers' removability. It's quite possible to pull remove the web browser from either KDE or GNOME. If I decide that Konqueror is taking up valuable space that should be saved for Mozilla, I can just rpm -e kdeaddons-konqueror and it's gone. Similarly I can remove galeon with rpm -e galeon. I'll lose some functionality by doing so, true, but neither one is so deeply entwined into the system that it's unremovable.
That's an Agilent part in those mice, not a Hewlett Packard part. And actually Microsoft has even started making some of the sensors themselves rather than buying them from Agilent. I'm actually surprised by the situation. My father, who worked on the design team for the optical sensor chip, told me that Microsoft had the chance to get an exclusive contract for the optical mouse chips but turned it down. Seems like a big mistake.
You do realize that opposition to nuclear propulsion comes from rational concerns about its safety as well as irrational hatred of everything nuclear, don't you? I don't have particular problems with nuclear energy in general, but I have serious reservations about any flying nuclear system. A nuclear powered spacecraft is not like the radiothermal generators that have been used in spacecraft so far. It would require a large amount of quite hot material, so any accident could spread a lot of radiactive contamination over a very wide area. I'd want to be damn sure that there were adequate safeguards against that before signing off on such a thing.