My father is a defense attorney, and he sees all sorts of criminals walk into his office. Most of them have some experience with drugs, but most are NOT on drug charges. Most have NEVER been charged with drug crimes. Most of them are charged with stuff having nothing to do with drugs. Our city has a drug problem, but still, I would guess from what I hear over the dinner table that it's about eh other way around, maybe 10% of crimes are related to the illegality of drugs. MANY more cases are people who habitually inhabit the legal system because they can't get their lives straight, due to many problems, often including alcohol and drug addiction. When these people get help, they usually get straightened out. Yes, there are some people who handle drugs responsibly (or relatively so), and they are probably disproportionately represented among the technically skilled, but there are plenty of rednecks and homies out there who have the talent to rise beyond their surroundings, but they keep getting tripped up by these distractions that ruin their lives.
*GASP*
Does the system need to be changed? Yes, and it IS being changed in many places, to reduce the criminality and increase focus on treatment for those who truly need it. Does the system need to be removed? No.
Why the answers were fed from outside...
on
RNA Computer
·
· Score: 1
Yes, it's true that the computer had to have all of the possible answers pre-generated and fed to it. This is a terribly inefficient system, but you have to keep in mind the scope and purpose of the project. This technology is very new and very experimental. Therefore, they wanted to limit the scope of their experiment, as any good experimenter should. A real implementation would undoubtedly generate possible answers on the fly, and check them much like the way temporary variables are used to consider possibilities in most current programs. So, while this may not have been as good from a computing standpoint, it is better from a scientific standpoint, because it lets them see more accurately where the errors are.
The Soyuz craft has been the workhorse of the Russian space fleet for quite a while now. A Soyuz capsule served as the lifeboat on Mir, and was even able to stabilize Mir when they had their little accident.
My fear is that they may simply have borrowed the design of the orbit capsule. China has NOT been known for their successful launch vehicles. I remember reading last year that 3 out of 9 launch attempts on their large launch vehicle, the one they use for large sattelites, which this would probably fit, failed. I don't mean they had to abort, I mean great balls of fire, and I think maybe one crashed into the sea, I can't remember. In fact, Lloyd's of London declared any payload of that launch vehicle to be uninsurable at any cost (assuming they wouldn't pay more than it's worth to insure it).
If they make it into space, they should be fine, given the time-tested design they're using for an orbital capsule. I just hope they're not in too big of a rush to make it there.
"No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed."
If the previous law allowed a license that would allow the original creator to give up responsibility and authority to that product, such that it would no longer be under his or her domain after transmission, then any law that retroactively placed responsibility on the creator for a product the previous law had allowed him or her to give up the ability to prevent redistribution of would necessarily be an ex post facto law.
Under current U.S. intellectual property laws, the only thing you need to do to copyright something is to declare it copyrighted, and you generally don't even need to do that. Now, your copyright may be challenged, but it is valid. Ever wonder how they manage to copyright all those custom-generated pages on your search engine or online encyclopedia of choice? It doesn't happen by mailing off applications and getting responses in the half second between transmitting your request and the page appearing on your screen. It is very difficult to prove evidence in many of these cases, unless the quotation is verbatim, but it's as close as the system can get.
By the way, if you've ever wondered about the difference between TM and R, the difference is that R has been registered, making it easier to prove prior use in court, but TM still has the same legal weight. I could theoretically trademark any phrase I please, though most judges would throw anything stupid out. But I digress...
The real thing of interest in these laws is not what will be protected, since everything is already, but HOW everything will be protected. I do not have the greatest faith in Congress's understanding of matters digital, so this could be a problem.
Ok, people, we all know this sucks and all, and we'd hate to see Linus deported and blah, blah, blah.
How about we do something about it? The legislature has the power to reform the system, but they won't do it if they think it's more important to be declaring a national standing-on-your-head-and-blowing-bubbles-out-your -ass day. Tell them about the problem. Yes, you red-blooded Americans who can or will soon be able to vote. Even you skilled immigrants who can not yet vote have some influence, since most politicians like to have friends with the tech crowd (people with money) and besides, you could be voting before too long if all this paperwork gets cleared, should you desire to become full citizens.
Before you go running off spamming your local representatives, please remember a few things:
1) Be polite. 2) Write a real letter, don't expect hyperlinks to explain themselves, as a recent story on slashdot revealed that our Senators and Representatives may not be very adroit with e-mail, and they may be seeing it on paper. Or, if you can bring yourself to it, snd it snail-mail. They read those things. 3) Don't dis the U.S. It won't be received kindly.
They said the system was badly overloaded. I remember a little while ago the NSA was complaining that the internet was growing too fast for them to check it all and intercept everything they want to intercept and crack all the encryption they want to crack. Just wait until the standard makers work out universal encryption. I'd like to see the looks on their faces when they finish brute-forcing all the traffic coming from a well-visited site only to discover that it's just a picture of Natalie Portman, naked and petrified.
Yes! Ender's Game! Great book! He's got other nice stuff, too. The first time I met the future love of my life, she loaned me Folk of the Fringe. He's got some great stuff! (Now if only I can find the time to read the copy of Ender's Shadow I got for Christmas.)
Ok, so Dialpad's service is not primarily academic, but it sure could be. Consider a recent judgement by a Virginia court that said that state employees could not be categorically barred from viewing pornographic materials, since this could prevent professors at public universities from viewing any manner of art or historical evidence that might be inappropriate in the eyes of some regulator. Granted, that was a case where the policy was much too broad, and I doubt the court would object to a broad, but not complete, ban on sites that are unquestionably pornographic, and have no academic relevance (basically anything with XXX in the meta.) I believe that may have been a state court ruling, but I think it was based on national law.
In this case, Dialpad does have clear academic uses, and less questionable ones than playboy.com. In addition, many university students live on campus, and getting internet access elsewhere is out of the question. While the University has the right to screen out whatever it wants, to limit access to any site that is not patently illegal is a terrible violation of the spirit of freedom that has made most university campuses such an exciting place to live. (Though personally, I don't think that universities should be in the business of censorship at all.)
You have to give them credit though, because at least they admit that they're trying to protect their own telecommunications funding. Still, they'd probably save the students a lot of money by charging them the extra money needed for the switchboard, the campus locator, and the emergency phones, and letting them use a more cost-efficient method of communication.
It's the fix. It took them this long to produce a patch that breaks something else? The security flaws are an annoyance, but every OS has them. On top of that, these were only read-only problems, yes, theoretically even capable of user password grabbing, or credit-card grabbing, if someone was really stupid, but not as serious as the countless root compromises out there for your favorite POSIX OS. Now, I'm sure Win2k has plenty of these too, but that's not what we're talking about here. Now what IS sad is that they took 2 weeks to patch it and they couldn't do it right.
Yes, it's me again, the guy with two lawyers for parents. The system is very slow for them, too. Where I live, there was not a public defender's office until 2 years ago, and that is still just getting started. For poor defendants, the court would appoint a lawyer from the pool of local attorneys who volunteered, and yes, many DO volunteer. Volunteer is not quite the right word for it, since they do get paid. Usually the maximum is $100 per case. They may spend 20 hours on a case, not including time spent driving to the jail at night, or driving to courts hundreds of miles away, if the case is peculiar enough to require a specialist. Even on billed time alone they could be making less than minimum wage, and they still have to pay secretaries and paralegals, as well as the rent. My parents have their own firm, and until about 4 years ago, it was VERY difficult for them. Even today we drink out of plastic cups we got from university sporting events. (women's matches, they cost much less, but just as good) Sure, you may be pissed at the lawyers who are making the headlines, but look at the people like the EFF lawyers. They are abound as well, though not all of them get mention on/. I would appreciate it if you would stop maligning a profession you likely have very little understanding of. I don't blame you for posting anonymously, I would be a coward, too, if I was going to flame a widely respected profession at large.
Moderate this as flamebait if you want, I'm setting the record straight, and I'm not afraid of the consequences.
Ok, we know the government could brute force it if they wanted to (and may have already), and they are probably allowed to under the warrants they received 5 years ago, and Kevin probably has backups, but this case is about precedents.
With that in mind, I think the courts will extend the traditional rules that have applied to safes and the like. In this case, they have the right to assume that the encrypted data could be some form of contraband, such as stolen phone codes, proprietary source, etc. Granted, it's five years out of date and probably useless, if that's what it is, but that's beside the point. In this case, it does not constitute an unreasonable seizure for the government to hold something that may be illegal. They can require him to give the key before they hand it over, and they can use the new evidence only if it is relevant to the warrants they had at the time the data was seized. If they should suddenly turn up some evidence that he did some other damaging crack, or if they find child porn or state secrets, their hands are tied by the warrant, and all that data would be inadmissable in any case, resulting in a charge that would never even make it to trial. While it is theoretically possible that the government got a warrant to search for any incriminating evidence, such a warrant would routinely be dismissed, and the evidence ruled inadmissable.
The only way Kevin could be damaged by this is if they turn up evidence of some crack that was mentioned in the warrant, but never prosecuted. If there were charges that were not prosecuted, there was most certainly a provision in his plea agreement effectively closing those charges, as that is sort of the whole point of a plea agreement.
We've been screaming this until we're blue in the face, but the media hasn't been listening too much. I consider The Motley Fool to be a lot more mainstream (read: folks who wear suits) than/., so this could mean that our message is finally getting out. It's also good to see they're looking at respectable sources from our sector (Eric Raymond instead of the flaming ACs) for a rundown of the situation. I have a bunch of friends who aren't exactly/. types, and it took a lot of explaining to convince them that DeCSS was legal. I think they'd give it more weight coming from Dan Rather, so it would be good if the message can keep expanding into the rest of the population. The DVDCCA is out to cover their asses, but if they realize that they'll piss off millions of customers by furthering these ridiculous lawsuits, they might back down, saving us all a lot of trouble, and legal bills.
I have two parents who are attorneys, and they will tell you that the system is terribly innefficient, but it does work. Keep in mind that we're dealing with humans, and it's very difficult for a judge to know everything about everything. Justice may be deliberate, but it comes through much more than we give it credit for.
Rocket fuel and explosives are VERY different things. For one thing, advanced liquid rocket fuel is often actually two separate compounds that react together in the reaction chamber. For another thing, rocket fuels don't have the same density requirements, since super-fast shockwave propagation is generally a BAD thing, seeing as how it would blow up the rocket. I don't think they want VentureStar to be another Challenger. One of the more common fuels for things like space shuttles is hydrogen and oxygen, which is not very dense in the combustion chamber. (They just store it as liquid for convenience.) The most common aviation fuel for atmospheric manuevering is Kerosene. If they wanted to add nitrates or something like that, they could, but experience shows that self-powered vehicles need a very different propulsion system than ballistic projectiles.
The idea of a group of companies banding together to push a standard and subsequently hiding that standard from public view, for the purpose of controlling the business of another industry (DVD player makers) sounds a hell of a lot like an illegal trust. Granted, it's not a monopoly, but anti-trust law covers this type of thing as well. If CSS were the product, and they wanted to control access to developers of the product, that would be different (though I believe they'd still have to cough up the specs to anyone willing to pay whatever fee they charged anyone else), but in this case, CSS is NOT the product. The movie is the product. They are trying to control the propagation of the product, but the development of products external to their business, which is clearly illegal. Maybe MS will settle and the DOJ will have the time to look at this. Yeah, that'd be the day.
If you're using a graphical browser, scroll up to the top of this page.
See those pretty logos and ads?
Most of those are GIFs, and that technology is the intellectual property of Compuserve, now owned by AOL. The web runs on GIFs, and it does it very well because Compuserve gave developers a free hand to make products using their technology. It was a reasonably efficient method of serving a need that was at the time unserved, and it was developed by a respected company in the field with a vested interest in its success. Compuserve knew that making the technology free would enable growth of their own business.
Now imagine this:
AOL, ego-inflated from its latest acquisition of a competent business, decides to demand licensing fees for all websites that use GIFs, but giving an exemption to those who offer content in their own network. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out what havoc this would cause.
If Compuserve had elected to extract licensing fees like this when they first developed GIFs, we'd have all had the chance to develop our own free standard, but now we're locked in. I seriously doubt that it would be even legal for AOL to demand payment now, and they certainly would have a rough time in a reverse-class action lawsuit, suing some tens of millions of people with GIFs on their pages. The case of WAP should be no different. If they wanted a licensing fee, they should have said so up front, and given the opportunity for a competing standard to develop. I don't know the exact legal process, but I'm sure this could be challenged.
I thought that the whole idea of a finding of fact is that you CAN'T rebut it. It's not a conviction or a finding of guilt. The Judge has not ruled the outcome of the case yet, this is just a statement of his opinion of the status of MicroSoft's business methods. Any rebuttal is just a bunch of hot air. They can't appeal this anyway. I don't think very many people are going to be swayed by their posturing, either.
I know this is a bit offtopic, but there is actually a very small company called Macrosoft in Charlottesville, VA. It must be a tiny company, since it operates out of a very small house, kind of like a doctor's office. So, Microsoft is the behemoth, and Macrosoft isn't even on the map. There's irony for you.
See their website http://www.linuxone.net/. They do have a product. Apparently they have some sort of Linux-in-Windows shell. So much for shoddy business practices, their technology is idiotic. As far as I can see, that's not an OS, that's an emulator. It would seem that they're deceiving the public left and right. I don't like the looks of this.
Slashdot Mirror
My father is a defense attorney, and he sees all sorts of criminals walk into his office. Most of them have some experience with drugs, but most are NOT on drug charges. Most have NEVER been charged with drug crimes. Most of them are charged with stuff having nothing to do with drugs. Our city has a drug problem, but still, I would guess from what I hear over the dinner table that it's about eh other way around, maybe 10% of crimes are related to the illegality of drugs. MANY more cases are people who habitually inhabit the legal system because they can't get their lives straight, due to many problems, often including alcohol and drug addiction. When these people get help, they usually get straightened out. Yes, there are some people who handle drugs responsibly (or relatively so), and they are probably disproportionately represented among the technically skilled, but there are plenty of rednecks and homies out there who have the talent to rise beyond their surroundings, but they keep getting tripped up by these distractions that ruin their lives.
*GASP*
Does the system need to be changed? Yes, and it IS being changed in many places, to reduce the criminality and increase focus on treatment for those who truly need it. Does the system need to be removed? No.
Yes, it's true that the computer had to have all of the possible answers pre-generated and fed to it. This is a terribly inefficient system, but you have to keep in mind the scope and purpose of the project. This technology is very new and very experimental. Therefore, they wanted to limit the scope of their experiment, as any good experimenter should. A real implementation would undoubtedly generate possible answers on the fly, and check them much like the way temporary variables are used to consider possibilities in most current programs. So, while this may not have been as good from a computing standpoint, it is better from a scientific standpoint, because it lets them see more accurately where the errors are.
The Soyuz craft has been the workhorse of the Russian space fleet for quite a while now. A Soyuz capsule served as the lifeboat on Mir, and was even able to stabilize Mir when they had their little accident.
My fear is that they may simply have borrowed the design of the orbit capsule. China has NOT been known for their successful launch vehicles. I remember reading last year that 3 out of 9 launch attempts on their large launch vehicle, the one they use for large sattelites, which this would probably fit, failed. I don't mean they had to abort, I mean great balls of fire, and I think maybe one crashed into the sea, I can't remember. In fact, Lloyd's of London declared any payload of that launch vehicle to be uninsurable at any cost (assuming they wouldn't pay more than it's worth to insure it).
If they make it into space, they should be fine, given the time-tested design they're using for an orbital capsule. I just hope they're not in too big of a rush to make it there.
Article 1, Section 9, U.S. Constitution:
"No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed."
If the previous law allowed a license that would allow the original creator to give up responsibility and authority to that product, such that it would no longer be under his or her domain after transmission, then any law that retroactively placed responsibility on the creator for a product the previous law had allowed him or her to give up the ability to prevent redistribution of would necessarily be an ex post facto law.
Under current U.S. intellectual property laws, the only thing you need to do to copyright something is to declare it copyrighted, and you generally don't even need to do that. Now, your copyright may be challenged, but it is valid. Ever wonder how they manage to copyright all those custom-generated pages on your search engine or online encyclopedia of choice? It doesn't happen by mailing off applications and getting responses in the half second between transmitting your request and the page appearing on your screen. It is very difficult to prove evidence in many of these cases, unless the quotation is verbatim, but it's as close as the system can get.
By the way, if you've ever wondered about the difference between TM and R, the difference is that R has been registered, making it easier to prove prior use in court, but TM still has the same legal weight. I could theoretically trademark any phrase I please, though most judges would throw anything stupid out. But I digress...
The real thing of interest in these laws is not what will be protected, since everything is already, but HOW everything will be protected. I do not have the greatest faith in Congress's understanding of matters digital, so this could be a problem.
Ok, people, we all know this sucks and all, and we'd hate to see Linus deported and blah, blah, blah.
r -ass day. Tell them about the problem. Yes, you red-blooded Americans who can or will soon be able to vote. Even you skilled immigrants who can not yet vote have some influence, since most politicians like to have friends with the tech crowd (people with money) and besides, you could be voting before too long if all this paperwork gets cleared, should you desire to become full citizens.
How about we do something about it? The legislature has the power to reform the system, but they won't do it if they think it's more important to be declaring a national standing-on-your-head-and-blowing-bubbles-out-you
Before you go running off spamming your local representatives, please remember a few things:
1) Be polite.
2) Write a real letter, don't expect hyperlinks to explain themselves, as a recent story on slashdot revealed that our Senators and Representatives may not be very adroit with e-mail, and they may be seeing it on paper. Or, if you can bring yourself to it, snd it snail-mail. They read those things.
3) Don't dis the U.S. It won't be received kindly.
Now, here are your links:
To find and contact your Congressional district representative, go to http://www.house.gov/writerep/
For a full list of Senators and their websites/e-mail addresses, go to http://www.senate.gov/contacting/index.c fm
So let's stop standing on our heads, blowing bubbles out our asses, and help these people out.
They said the system was badly overloaded. I remember a little while ago the NSA was complaining that the internet was growing too fast for them to check it all and intercept everything they want to intercept and crack all the encryption they want to crack. Just wait until the standard makers work out universal encryption. I'd like to see the looks on their faces when they finish brute-forcing all the traffic coming from a well-visited site only to discover that it's just a picture of Natalie Portman, naked and petrified.
Yes! Ender's Game! Great book! He's got other nice stuff, too. The first time I met the future love of my life, she loaned me Folk of the Fringe. He's got some great stuff! (Now if only I can find the time to read the copy of Ender's Shadow I got for Christmas.)
Ok, so Dialpad's service is not primarily academic, but it sure could be. Consider a recent judgement by a Virginia court that said that state employees could not be categorically barred from viewing pornographic materials, since this could prevent professors at public universities from viewing any manner of art or historical evidence that might be inappropriate in the eyes of some regulator. Granted, that was a case where the policy was much too broad, and I doubt the court would object to a broad, but not complete, ban on sites that are unquestionably pornographic, and have no academic relevance (basically anything with XXX in the meta.) I believe that may have been a state court ruling, but I think it was based on national law.
In this case, Dialpad does have clear academic uses, and less questionable ones than playboy.com. In addition, many university students live on campus, and getting internet access elsewhere is out of the question. While the University has the right to screen out whatever it wants, to limit access to any site that is not patently illegal is a terrible violation of the spirit of freedom that has made most university campuses such an exciting place to live. (Though personally, I don't think that universities should be in the business of censorship at all.)
You have to give them credit though, because at least they admit that they're trying to protect their own telecommunications funding. Still, they'd probably save the students a lot of money by charging them the extra money needed for the switchboard, the campus locator, and the emergency phones, and letting them use a more cost-efficient method of communication.
Just because it's legal, doesn't make it right.
It's the fix. It took them this long to produce a patch that breaks something else? The security flaws are an annoyance, but every OS has them. On top of that, these were only read-only problems, yes, theoretically even capable of user password grabbing, or credit-card grabbing, if someone was really stupid, but not as serious as the countless root compromises out there for your favorite POSIX OS. Now, I'm sure Win2k has plenty of these too, but that's not what we're talking about here. Now what IS sad is that they took 2 weeks to patch it and they couldn't do it right.
Yes, it's me again, the guy with two lawyers for parents. The system is very slow for them, too. Where I live, there was not a public defender's office until 2 years ago, and that is still just getting started. For poor defendants, the court would appoint a lawyer from the pool of local attorneys who volunteered, and yes, many DO volunteer. Volunteer is not quite the right word for it, since they do get paid. Usually the maximum is $100 per case. They may spend 20 hours on a case, not including time spent driving to the jail at night, or driving to courts hundreds of miles away, if the case is peculiar enough to require a specialist. Even on billed time alone they could be making less than minimum wage, and they still have to pay secretaries and paralegals, as well as the rent. My parents have their own firm, and until about 4 years ago, it was VERY difficult for them. Even today we drink out of plastic cups we got from university sporting events. (women's matches, they cost much less, but just as good) Sure, you may be pissed at the lawyers who are making the headlines, but look at the people like the EFF lawyers. They are abound as well, though not all of them get mention on /. I would appreciate it if you would stop maligning a profession you likely have very little understanding of. I don't blame you for posting anonymously, I would be a coward, too, if I was going to flame a widely respected profession at large.
Moderate this as flamebait if you want, I'm setting the record straight, and I'm not afraid of the consequences.
Ok, we know the government could brute force it if they wanted to (and may have already), and they are probably allowed to under the warrants they received 5 years ago, and Kevin probably has backups, but this case is about precedents.
With that in mind, I think the courts will extend the traditional rules that have applied to safes and the like. In this case, they have the right to assume that the encrypted data could be some form of contraband, such as stolen phone codes, proprietary source, etc. Granted, it's five years out of date and probably useless, if that's what it is, but that's beside the point. In this case, it does not constitute an unreasonable seizure for the government to hold something that may be illegal. They can require him to give the key before they hand it over, and they can use the new evidence only if it is relevant to the warrants they had at the time the data was seized. If they should suddenly turn up some evidence that he did some other damaging crack, or if they find child porn or state secrets, their hands are tied by the warrant, and all that data would be inadmissable in any case, resulting in a charge that would never even make it to trial. While it is theoretically possible that the government got a warrant to search for any incriminating evidence, such a warrant would routinely be dismissed, and the evidence ruled inadmissable.
The only way Kevin could be damaged by this is if they turn up evidence of some crack that was mentioned in the warrant, but never prosecuted. If there were charges that were not prosecuted, there was most certainly a provision in his plea agreement effectively closing those charges, as that is sort of the whole point of a plea agreement.
We've been screaming this until we're blue in the face, but the media hasn't been listening too much. I consider The Motley Fool to be a lot more mainstream (read: folks who wear suits) than /., so this could mean that our message is finally getting out. It's also good to see they're looking at respectable sources from our sector (Eric Raymond instead of the flaming ACs) for a rundown of the situation. I have a bunch of friends who aren't exactly /. types, and it took a lot of explaining to convince them that DeCSS was legal. I think they'd give it more weight coming from Dan Rather, so it would be good if the message can keep expanding into the rest of the population. The DVDCCA is out to cover their asses, but if they realize that they'll piss off millions of customers by furthering these ridiculous lawsuits, they might back down, saving us all a lot of trouble, and legal bills.
I have two parents who are attorneys, and they will tell you that the system is terribly innefficient, but it does work. Keep in mind that we're dealing with humans, and it's very difficult for a judge to know everything about everything. Justice may be deliberate, but it comes through much more than we give it credit for.
Rocket fuel and explosives are VERY different things. For one thing, advanced liquid rocket fuel is often actually two separate compounds that react together in the reaction chamber. For another thing, rocket fuels don't have the same density requirements, since super-fast shockwave propagation is generally a BAD thing, seeing as how it would blow up the rocket. I don't think they want VentureStar to be another Challenger. One of the more common fuels for things like space shuttles is hydrogen and oxygen, which is not very dense in the combustion chamber. (They just store it as liquid for convenience.) The most common aviation fuel for atmospheric manuevering is Kerosene. If they wanted to add nitrates or something like that, they could, but experience shows that self-powered vehicles need a very different propulsion system than ballistic projectiles.
The idea of a group of companies banding together to push a standard and subsequently hiding that standard from public view, for the purpose of controlling the business of another industry (DVD player makers) sounds a hell of a lot like an illegal trust. Granted, it's not a monopoly, but anti-trust law covers this type of thing as well. If CSS were the product, and they wanted to control access to developers of the product, that would be different (though I believe they'd still have to cough up the specs to anyone willing to pay whatever fee they charged anyone else), but in this case, CSS is NOT the product. The movie is the product. They are trying to control the propagation of the product, but the development of products external to their business, which is clearly illegal. Maybe MS will settle and the DOJ will have the time to look at this. Yeah, that'd be the day.
If you're using a graphical browser, scroll up to the top of this page.
See those pretty logos and ads?
Most of those are GIFs, and that technology is the intellectual property of Compuserve, now owned by AOL. The web runs on GIFs, and it does it very well because Compuserve gave developers a free hand to make products using their technology. It was a reasonably efficient method of serving a need that was at the time unserved, and it was developed by a respected company in the field with a vested interest in its success. Compuserve knew that making the technology free would enable growth of their own business.
Now imagine this:
AOL, ego-inflated from its latest acquisition of a competent business, decides to demand licensing fees for all websites that use GIFs, but giving an exemption to those who offer content in their own network. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out what havoc this would cause.
If Compuserve had elected to extract licensing fees like this when they first developed GIFs, we'd have all had the chance to develop our own free standard, but now we're locked in. I seriously doubt that it would be even legal for AOL to demand payment now, and they certainly would have a rough time in a reverse-class action lawsuit, suing some tens of millions of people with GIFs on their pages. The case of WAP should be no different. If they wanted a licensing fee, they should have said so up front, and given the opportunity for a competing standard to develop. I don't know the exact legal process, but I'm sure this could be challenged.
I thought that the whole idea of a finding of fact is that you CAN'T rebut it. It's not a conviction or a finding of guilt. The Judge has not ruled the outcome of the case yet, this is just a statement of his opinion of the status of MicroSoft's business methods. Any rebuttal is just a bunch of hot air. They can't appeal this anyway. I don't think very many people are going to be swayed by their posturing, either.
I know this is a bit offtopic, but there is actually a very small company called Macrosoft in Charlottesville, VA. It must be a tiny company, since it operates out of a very small house, kind of like a doctor's office. So, Microsoft is the behemoth, and Macrosoft isn't even on the map. There's irony for you.
See their website http://www.linuxone.net/. They do have a product. Apparently they have some sort of Linux-in-Windows shell. So much for shoddy business practices, their technology is idiotic. As far as I can see, that's not an OS, that's an emulator. It would seem that they're deceiving the public left and right. I don't like the looks of this.