This isn't strictly true in most cases. Because of the risk that your retailer goes bankrupt or disappears, EU countries (I think all) recognise that the producer is also responsible if you cannot get satisfaction from the retailer. In some countries you can go directly to the producer without having to contact the retailer; I think in others (UK??) you have to attempt via the retailer first.
Please compare the Wikipedia article on the "American Rule" with that on the "English Rule". basically the English rule is more or less standard in most countries other than the US.
This difference means that mostly the person who loses (and if your justice system is working, that's mostly the person who deserves to lose) ends up paying. Note, that normally, even in the UK, full costs are not awarded, just those costs that were reasonable and needed. Even so, this means that if you are in the right and able to prove it, it becomes much less likely you will let the other party persuade you to take a bad settlement.
This is independent of the efficiency of judgement. US courts tend to be quite inefficient, worse than English, and much much worse than German, but Italian courts, for example, regularly fail to decide (criminal) cases within the limits of their statutes of limitation and I believe their civil cases are also less efficient than those of the USA.
How did freezing the judge's Blackberry disrupt the trial?
I'm assuming he didn't buy his Blackberry for the games. In which case it's a normal method of communication with him which is available to whoever he's given it to. E.g. the court secretary; the lawyers in the court; etc. Spamming it likely stops him getting these messages and you have no idea whether that could disrupt something.
Has he no other computer in his chambers?
Ah; that's a nice hundred dollars you have there. I assume that since you have another hundred dollars in your bank account, I can have the one you have in your wallet and you won't have any complaints?
Or, more likely, EU courts are more likely to award costs where they belong. So, the standard US strategy of extending and extending the court case until the opponent is bankrupt just backfires. The earlier Amazon settles the cheaper it is for them.
What's really interesting about this decision, though, is that this potentially means 20% discounts for everybody who bought a console. Time to start telling your games playing friends about this too. This might get quite expensive for Sony..
Someone else already mentioned that the Germans mostly respected the conventions on their Western front and ignored them on their Eastern front. Part of that was from their racism against Slavs, but a large part was from their expectation that the enemy on the West would reciprocate and their belief that the Eastern enemy would not. If you have a reputation for following the rules, there is much more chance that the other side, even if pretty evil, will give you a little space to do that. Nobody stays invulnerable forever and the time to build up a reputation for fair play is when you are at the top; not when you've already begun to slide.
Something like RSA is certainly more important, more worthy, and in many ways better than an Xbox games controller but that doesn't mean it's more patentable.
There are a number of fundamental things wrong with "software" patents. Firstly, software is fundamentally just ideas that you can do in your head. Anything a computer can do is something you can do but just much quicker. A patent on that is directly a patent on an idea; is a fundamental breach of freedom of thought and through that on freedom of speech. Pure software patents should be eliminated, possibly criminalised.
A second, more practical difference is that software is intangable. Software ls much more malleable and copyable. Many different ideas come up, are used and abandoned. The original and non-obvious tests just leave far too many things that are patentable. Because there's no obvious "thing" which actually achieves a particular physical transformation, software patents end up either far too broad, covering many different variants each of which would have a separate hardware patent, or too narrow, covering a thing which can only be valuable if you force others to use it by incorporating it into some communications standard. There's can be no happy obvious way to define the limits of a software patent.
RSA, is a particular example where a patent is really bad because it is fundamentally a patent on basic mathematics. Mathematics has never been patentable, never should have been patentable and has been proven to advance fine without any need for a patent system. Mathematics is also, in some sense "discovered" rather than invented. There just isn't the right trade off to justify such patents and no real philosophical way to justify ownership of such ideas.
You are probably right that this isn't a patent troll case. An interesting thing not mentioned in the article is that it seems that Datel sued Microsoft first. I guess this is Microsoft's way of saying "don't sue us; we're bigger than you; due process will not apply here".
But that is a "bug" in the storage management of virtualization environments. If blocks are not used they should not be allocated. Allocating them and then saying "but we can reduce the space they use" sounds like a hack at best. It's more of a workaround rather than a solution.
Well spotted; your comment finally made me think. The allocation of blocks for VMs is optional (VMs, under Linux can use sparse files with the zero blocks unallocated). You do it because you want the disk storage to be more contiguous and faster to allocate. De-duplication in this case is pretty much against the entire intent of actually allocating the blocks.
But there are many applications and areas which are not appropriate to shoehorn into the decimal system. Binary computer memory sizes are one such application. It is not appropriate to grou>p base 2 numbers using a base 10 units.
Which is why we have kibibytes and other binary prefixis, . What's the problem? I'm sorry, but you are going to end up like the hackers trying to reclaim their name from the media. Just as long as it suits hard disk manufacturers to correctly use the SI prefix and you can't call them out on it because they are unfortunately right there is no hope for kB == 1025 bytes. Give it up; you don't even have the hacker's claim to be right.
Wrong way round. It's like saying that "the USA is a rebel part of Canada". The only difference is that when you re-submit to Her Majesty's imperial rule your governance will actually improve.
(Scotty: engage asbestos shields; divert all power from the main engine)
There's pretty clear evidence that "Western" companies that hang around China long term tend to develop local competition. It may be that for the next year or two Google will make less profit, but quite likely, after that they will make more profit since the Chinese competition will find it more difficult to steal knowledge from Google if they aren't present in the country.
P.S. your implicit assumption that countries are simply successful in everything they choose to do is just wrong.
Actually he doesn't have to be an insider. It's all in the documents related to the lawsuits, which backs him up... except that he forgot to mention that Nokia did, in fact, first offer the normal terms that it offers to all other handset vendors, including a patent exchange, and Apple refused. So he's not ignorant; just lyi^H^H^H^H slightly deceptive.
First, [has been dealt with above] and second the "supergerms" are found in hospitals, not on farms.
I find it very suprising that most of the supergerms are found in an environment with laboratories for detecting supergerms, a very heavy need to treat patients and extreme supervision and not in an environment where, if it turns out the antibiotics are failing, you can just kill off the "patients" and start again. Duhh.
Or perhaps your post was a more subtle form of scarcasm than even I am used to; I'm already ducking to avoid the lowflying jokes.
X: They are shooting little children.
Y: So what? Under the last administration they shot little children too.
X: oh; that's okay then. Sorry I mentioned it.
Innocent until proven guilty. You can't prove either one so you let them both off. However, you now have reason to suspect so you make sure that if either one cheats again you catch them.
If one was a serious cheat, they won't be able to continue without cheating.
The thing that scares me is that you find this a difficult case.
Google is just as unable to control export as Firefox is.
almost.
And banned persons are impossible to detect without requiring every downloader somehow prove their identity, which is impossible without using strong encryption...
But in this case google has no reason to believe and no way to discover that they are dealing with a banned person so they are pretty much in the clear. You can get done for deliberately dealing with a banned person. You can get done for not taking care to avoid dealing with banned people. You can't get done for dealing with a banned person when you believed and had some reason to believe that you were not dealing with a banned person.
I'd even say that this example is almost reasonable. A private person in a banned country could still get to chromium. However a big international corporation would probably find these rules a complete pain since they would clash with all sorts of other internal security rules.
Just to be a little clearer about the grandparent's points about chrome. Google could probably get a similar exception for Chromium to the firefox one and still have to export control Chrome. The use of Windows crypto functions also won't help since software which uses crypt functions is just as much controlled as software which implements them.
Controls on use of crypt (as well as implementations) actually kind of make sense. a) it's very easy to mess up a use and use a secure crypto function insecurely b) the actual value of a crypto function is in your use of it. In terms of the crazy world of crypto embargos, a typical wish would be to allow the Iranians to do cryptographic signatures, but not to encrypt. However, it can be shown that any signature algorithm can be used to encrypt (well actually hash algorithm). This means that the only control that could possibly be effective is on delivery of software, not delivery of algorithms.
Of course none of the embargo stuff actually is very effective since there are plenty of people (e.g. China) who are more than happy to treat unilateral US embargoes as a business opportunity.
Firefox exceptions apply because their (source) code is freely available for download (and so impossible to control). Google doesn't have this excuse especially for their services or even software which are generally used with an ongoing connection to their servers (where they can easily use geo-location to pick on particular Iranian IP addresses). The situation is not comparable.
The crypto code from FireFox would probably be sufficient to make google's software a controlled item if it was integrated to their proprietary software.
In my experience there seem to be (INAL and ICNYL) specific exceptions for systems which are publically available for free download. That should apply to most of sourceforge.
Now, I have to admit, that I'm one of the first mods to moderate insightful when I think it's deeply funny (people who can't get a joke deserve all the low flying fighter jets that pass over them). However, I still find moderating this insightful extremely scary. What if the other mods aren't joking??
The PDF doesn't specifically say that. The PDF says:
"Microsoft will grant, on a non-discriminatory basis, to any party requesting it, licenses on commercially reasonable terms and conditions, for its patent(s), if any, deemed to be necessary for the implementation of the Ecma Standard"
To me this sounds like a typical piece of legalese, most likely to satisfy some ECMA rule that published standards must have such a RAND promise.
The problem is that you are reading this as a programmer when it needs to be read when you need to read it as a lawyer (since it's a legal statement).
Furthermore, the very same PDF, in its P.S., says that any patent claims relevant to Ecma-334 are also covered by Microsoft Community Promise.
Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation, to the extent it conforms to one of the Covered Specifications, and is compliant with all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of that specification ("Covered Implementation")
In order to interpret this we need to a) compare with a normal license grand and b) identify what they aren't saying. A normal patent grant would say something like "we have patents A,B and C related to this, we won't assert these patents against you for any implementation of this standard; contact us if you think any other patents we have may be needed and we'll be glad to assist". This "promise not to assert" avoids that. E.g. they plan to be able to sue you over any patent which covers your implementation but is not "Necessary". That's quite dangerous; they could have a patent on the fast way of doing something, allowing you only to implement the slow way. They could even have a separate patent on every single way of doing something but since no single one is "Necessary" they could, in principle sue you over that.
Going further to that; have you ever seen a large piece of software with no bugs? Of course not. It is simply impossible that software is "compliant with all of the required parts" (my emphasis). If they wanted to have a clear and safe definition they would have said something such as "passes the latest or last but one conformance test suite at the time of it's release and is sold no longer than a year after it ceases to pass the latest test suite for it's standards version". As currently phrased there is no way to prove to yourself that you are covered by this promise.
Compare these with standard patent licenses used almost everywhere and you will see that Microsoft's promises not to assert are full of holes. This isn't an accident caused by a small company that can't afford any lawyers.
My guess? This is simply a way of saying: 'If you are our friend we have an excuse not to sue you, so don't worry as long as it stays that way. If you ever step out of line, you are dead, so don't even think about it.' Working with Microsoft is a bit like working with Sauron. You had better stay servile and useful.
Who said anything about moving away from MS software? MS Office supports ODF.
MS Office supports only ODF version 1.0 (the up to date version of ODF is 2.0). Also, it has many features which aren't going to convert into ODF 1.0 correctly so it's not really suitable. What's the point of using MS Office as an ODF editor when you can get Open Office for free? Even if you do have MS Office, you'll be better off having OpenOffice.org installed on your computer as well.
No, SUN was well aware that MS pulls tricks like this, they thought that they would be clever and they put in a requirement in the Java licenses to stick to the standard. Microsoft's Java system was stopped by an actual court decision. Unfortunately for SUN, it turned out that Microsoft had used their work with Java to learn and they created a Java copy called.NET. Basically a lesson. It is never worth cooperating with MS even if you think you are much cleverer than they are.
I'd agree, except it might help to a) not post Anonymously b) include a link to the project in the posting c) say what it does and why it would be good for us.
If you do none of the above, then the reason why your project is unheard of becomes obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
What Sparr0 said; except.
You have no consumer relationship with Sony.
This isn't strictly true in most cases. Because of the risk that your retailer goes bankrupt or disappears, EU countries (I think all) recognise that the producer is also responsible if you cannot get satisfaction from the retailer. In some countries you can go directly to the producer without having to contact the retailer; I think in others (UK??) you have to attempt via the retailer first.
Please compare the Wikipedia article on the "American Rule" with that on the "English Rule". basically the English rule is more or less standard in most countries other than the US.
This difference means that mostly the person who loses (and if your justice system is working, that's mostly the person who deserves to lose) ends up paying. Note, that normally, even in the UK, full costs are not awarded, just those costs that were reasonable and needed. Even so, this means that if you are in the right and able to prove it, it becomes much less likely you will let the other party persuade you to take a bad settlement.
This is independent of the efficiency of judgement. US courts tend to be quite inefficient, worse than English, and much much worse than German, but Italian courts, for example, regularly fail to decide (criminal) cases within the limits of their statutes of limitation and I believe their civil cases are also less efficient than those of the USA.
How did freezing the judge's Blackberry disrupt the trial?
I'm assuming he didn't buy his Blackberry for the games. In which case it's a normal method of communication with him which is available to whoever he's given it to. E.g. the court secretary; the lawyers in the court; etc. Spamming it likely stops him getting these messages and you have no idea whether that could disrupt something.
Has he no other computer in his chambers?
Ah; that's a nice hundred dollars you have there. I assume that since you have another hundred dollars in your bank account, I can have the one you have in your wallet and you won't have any complaints?
Or, more likely, EU courts are more likely to award costs where they belong. So, the standard US strategy of extending and extending the court case until the opponent is bankrupt just backfires. The earlier Amazon settles the cheaper it is for them.
What's really interesting about this decision, though, is that this potentially means 20% discounts for everybody who bought a console. Time to start telling your games playing friends about this too. This might get quite expensive for Sony..
Someone else already mentioned that the Germans mostly respected the conventions on their Western front and ignored them on their Eastern front. Part of that was from their racism against Slavs, but a large part was from their expectation that the enemy on the West would reciprocate and their belief that the Eastern enemy would not. If you have a reputation for following the rules, there is much more chance that the other side, even if pretty evil, will give you a little space to do that. Nobody stays invulnerable forever and the time to build up a reputation for fair play is when you are at the top; not when you've already begun to slide.
Something like RSA is certainly more important, more worthy, and in many ways better than an Xbox games controller but that doesn't mean it's more patentable.
There are a number of fundamental things wrong with "software" patents. Firstly, software is fundamentally just ideas that you can do in your head. Anything a computer can do is something you can do but just much quicker. A patent on that is directly a patent on an idea; is a fundamental breach of freedom of thought and through that on freedom of speech. Pure software patents should be eliminated, possibly criminalised.
A second, more practical difference is that software is intangable. Software ls much more malleable and copyable. Many different ideas come up, are used and abandoned. The original and non-obvious tests just leave far too many things that are patentable. Because there's no obvious "thing" which actually achieves a particular physical transformation, software patents end up either far too broad, covering many different variants each of which would have a separate hardware patent, or too narrow, covering a thing which can only be valuable if you force others to use it by incorporating it into some communications standard. There's can be no happy obvious way to define the limits of a software patent.
RSA, is a particular example where a patent is really bad because it is fundamentally a patent on basic mathematics. Mathematics has never been patentable, never should have been patentable and has been proven to advance fine without any need for a patent system. Mathematics is also, in some sense "discovered" rather than invented. There just isn't the right trade off to justify such patents and no real philosophical way to justify ownership of such ideas.
You are probably right that this isn't a patent troll case. An interesting thing not mentioned in the article is that it seems that Datel sued Microsoft first. I guess this is Microsoft's way of saying "don't sue us; we're bigger than you; due process will not apply here".
But that is a "bug" in the storage management of virtualization environments. If blocks are not used they should not be allocated. Allocating them and then saying "but we can reduce the space they use" sounds like a hack at best. It's more of a workaround rather than a solution.
Well spotted; your comment finally made me think. The allocation of blocks for VMs is optional (VMs, under Linux can use sparse files with the zero blocks unallocated). You do it because you want the disk storage to be more contiguous and faster to allocate. De-duplication in this case is pretty much against the entire intent of actually allocating the blocks.
But there are many applications and areas which are not appropriate to shoehorn into the decimal system. Binary computer memory sizes are one such application. It is not appropriate to grou>p base 2 numbers using a base 10 units.
Which is why we have kibibytes and other binary prefixis, . What's the problem? I'm sorry, but you are going to end up like the hackers trying to reclaim their name from the media. Just as long as it suits hard disk manufacturers to correctly use the SI prefix and you can't call them out on it because they are unfortunately right there is no hope for kB == 1025 bytes. Give it up; you don't even have the hacker's claim to be right.
{{citation needed}}
Wrong way round. It's like saying that "the USA is a rebel part of Canada". The only difference is that when you re-submit to Her Majesty's imperial rule your governance will actually improve.
(Scotty: engage asbestos shields; divert all power from the main engine)
There's pretty clear evidence that "Western" companies that hang around China long term tend to develop local competition. It may be that for the next year or two Google will make less profit, but quite likely, after that they will make more profit since the Chinese competition will find it more difficult to steal knowledge from Google if they aren't present in the country.
P.S. your implicit assumption that countries are simply successful in everything they choose to do is just wrong.
Actually he doesn't have to be an insider. It's all in the documents related to the lawsuits, which backs him up... except that he forgot to mention that Nokia did, in fact, first offer the normal terms that it offers to all other handset vendors, including a patent exchange, and Apple refused. So he's not ignorant; just lyi^H^H^H^H slightly deceptive.
First, [has been dealt with above] and second the "supergerms" are found in hospitals, not on farms.
I find it very suprising that most of the supergerms are found in an environment with laboratories for detecting supergerms, a very heavy need to treat patients and extreme supervision and not in an environment where, if it turns out the antibiotics are failing, you can just kill off the "patients" and start again. Duhh.
Or perhaps your post was a more subtle form of scarcasm than even I am used to; I'm already ducking to avoid the lowflying jokes.
X: They are shooting little children.
Y: So what? Under the last administration they shot little children too.
X: oh; that's okay then. Sorry I mentioned it.
Innocent until proven guilty. You can't prove either one so you let them both off. However, you now have reason to suspect so you make sure that if either one cheats again you catch them.
If one was a serious cheat, they won't be able to continue without cheating.
The thing that scares me is that you find this a difficult case.
Google is just as unable to control export as Firefox is.
almost.
And banned persons are impossible to detect without requiring every downloader somehow prove their identity, which is impossible without using strong encryption...
But in this case google has no reason to believe and no way to discover that they are dealing with a banned person so they are pretty much in the clear. You can get done for deliberately dealing with a banned person. You can get done for not taking care to avoid dealing with banned people. You can't get done for dealing with a banned person when you believed and had some reason to believe that you were not dealing with a banned person.
I'd even say that this example is almost reasonable. A private person in a banned country could still get to chromium. However a big international corporation would probably find these rules a complete pain since they would clash with all sorts of other internal security rules.
Just to be a little clearer about the grandparent's points about chrome. Google could probably get a similar exception for Chromium to the firefox one and still have to export control Chrome. The use of Windows crypto functions also won't help since software which uses crypt functions is just as much controlled as software which implements them.
Controls on use of crypt (as well as implementations) actually kind of make sense. a) it's very easy to mess up a use and use a secure crypto function insecurely b) the actual value of a crypto function is in your use of it. In terms of the crazy world of crypto embargos, a typical wish would be to allow the Iranians to do cryptographic signatures, but not to encrypt. However, it can be shown that any signature algorithm can be used to encrypt (well actually hash algorithm). This means that the only control that could possibly be effective is on delivery of software, not delivery of algorithms.
Of course none of the embargo stuff actually is very effective since there are plenty of people (e.g. China) who are more than happy to treat unilateral US embargoes as a business opportunity.
Firefox exceptions apply because their (source) code is freely available for download (and so impossible to control). Google doesn't have this excuse especially for their services or even software which are generally used with an ongoing connection to their servers (where they can easily use geo-location to pick on particular Iranian IP addresses). The situation is not comparable.
The crypto code from FireFox would probably be sufficient to make google's software a controlled item if it was integrated to their proprietary software.
(including putting on an open server)
In my experience there seem to be (INAL and ICNYL) specific exceptions for systems which are publically available for free download. That should apply to most of sourceforge.
Now, I have to admit, that I'm one of the first mods to moderate insightful when I think it's deeply funny (people who can't get a joke deserve all the low flying fighter jets that pass over them). However, I still find moderating this insightful extremely scary. What if the other mods aren't joking??
The PDF doesn't specifically say that. The PDF says:
"Microsoft will grant, on a non-discriminatory basis, to any party requesting it, licenses on commercially reasonable terms and conditions, for its patent(s), if any, deemed to be necessary for the implementation of the Ecma Standard"
To me this sounds like a typical piece of legalese, most likely to satisfy some ECMA rule that published standards must have such a RAND promise.
The problem is that you are reading this as a programmer when it needs to be read when you need to read it as a lawyer (since it's a legal statement).
Furthermore, the very same PDF, in its P.S., says that any patent claims relevant to Ecma-334 are also covered by Microsoft Community Promise.
Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation, to the extent it conforms to one of the Covered Specifications, and is compliant with all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of that specification ("Covered Implementation")
In order to interpret this we need to a) compare with a normal license grand and b) identify what they aren't saying. A normal patent grant would say something like "we have patents A,B and C related to this, we won't assert these patents against you for any implementation of this standard; contact us if you think any other patents we have may be needed and we'll be glad to assist". This "promise not to assert" avoids that. E.g. they plan to be able to sue you over any patent which covers your implementation but is not "Necessary". That's quite dangerous; they could have a patent on the fast way of doing something, allowing you only to implement the slow way. They could even have a separate patent on every single way of doing something but since no single one is "Necessary" they could, in principle sue you over that.
Going further to that; have you ever seen a large piece of software with no bugs? Of course not. It is simply impossible that software is "compliant with all of the required parts" (my emphasis). If they wanted to have a clear and safe definition they would have said something such as "passes the latest or last but one conformance test suite at the time of it's release and is sold no longer than a year after it ceases to pass the latest test suite for it's standards version". As currently phrased there is no way to prove to yourself that you are covered by this promise.
Compare these with standard patent licenses used almost everywhere and you will see that Microsoft's promises not to assert are full of holes. This isn't an accident caused by a small company that can't afford any lawyers.
My guess? This is simply a way of saying: 'If you are our friend we have an excuse not to sue you, so don't worry as long as it stays that way. If you ever step out of line, you are dead, so don't even think about it.' Working with Microsoft is a bit like working with Sauron. You had better stay servile and useful.
Who said anything about moving away from MS software? MS Office supports ODF.
MS Office supports only ODF version 1.0 (the up to date version of ODF is 2.0). Also, it has many features which aren't going to convert into ODF 1.0 correctly so it's not really suitable. What's the point of using MS Office as an ODF editor when you can get Open Office for free? Even if you do have MS Office, you'll be better off having OpenOffice.org installed on your computer as well.
No, SUN was well aware that MS pulls tricks like this, they thought that they would be clever and they put in a requirement in the Java licenses to stick to the standard. Microsoft's Java system was stopped by an actual court decision. Unfortunately for SUN, it turned out that Microsoft had used their work with Java to learn and they created a Java copy called .NET. Basically a lesson. It is never worth cooperating with MS even if you think you are much cleverer than they are.
I'd agree, except it might help to a) not post Anonymously b) include a link to the project in the posting c) say what it does and why it would be good for us. If you do none of the above, then the reason why your project is unheard of becomes obvious.