Maybe in a court of law with high powered attourneys arguing the case, it will be indistiguishable. But to those of us with common sense, I can't think of the last time I bought any music from Apple Corps
Note though that this is about trademarks, and Apple Corps clearly has had trademarks well before Apple Computer even started. That Apple was ever apple to be named that was based on them not being in music business. Now they are extending there, and getting into trademark problem. In this case you either believe trademark law makes sense, or you don't; and only in latter case you can consider this case frivolous.
Easiest thing for Apple should be just spinning off their music download business to another fully owned company, names, say, iTunes? Problem solved.
If the UN wants to ban depleted weapons, then ipso facto they are illegal,
No. If UN gets international agreements passed, and its member countries ratify them, THEN they would become illegal.
You are frustrated at people laughing at those "UN wants to rule the world" nutcases? Then stop making ridiculous claims where you equate trying to stop using certain subset of weaponry considered harmful for humanity (in case of depleted uranium I let you try to guess why it is considered bad...) with trying to gain global dominance. It's not like UN has its own army and wants to have uberweapons and superpowers. Only power it has comes from member countries, power they are willing to hand. Which right now is not that much.
How true. Faux News, like it's called. I found it amazing that during Iraq War even other (fairly gung-ho go America all of them) broadcast channels seemed less biased than Fox. Of course to get something resembling objectivity you'd need to go to BBC, or a big european news channel.
It's sad if that is underreported, because such initiatives should be discussed, and then (in this case), found idiotic laws-against-laws stupidity, and promptly rejected.
The main point here is why the hell is someone trying to make a law preventing others from being made? Why not just directly try to prevent the law you are opposing, instead of outlawing certain kinds of laws? Who needs to be slapped with a cluestick?
And furthermore, why on earth should just idiocy be included in THE CONSTITUTION? You consider "purity" and "sacredness" of marriage to warrant this special protection? Jeez, that's just one of practical institutions most societies have that's evolving over time. Compare that to actual fundamental important rights like freedom of speech, fair and impartial trials and such.
Many corporations in the US give 12 to 18 months severence pay. Plus there is governmental unemployment aid, so long as you are "looking" for a job.
I mostly agreed with your replies, but this is just not right. I'm sure there may be a company here and another there have long severances, but please, even claiming many corps give 2 or 3 months severance is stretching it. Many more basically give you current 2 weeks salary and wish you best ("don't let the door won't hit you on your way out").
And as to unemployment aid, that's also very limited for specific duration. Nothing compared to Germany or any other north/west european countries.
Now, it's worth noting that general salary levels for high-education careers are about 2x as high in US as in most above-mentioned european countries. It's just that one HAS to be much better prepared for job loss, because the consequences are much much more drastic:
You lose your health insurance, eventually; CORBA is very expensive, but after that it just gets outrageously expensive AND bad (individuals in general just can't get same deals as corps do)
Both severance (if you get any) and gov. unemployment benefits last in general only for couple of months (say, up to 6 - 9 months if you are lucky)
After falling out of those money sources, you will be screwed; social security system is strictly reserved for really poor people, not for highly educated unemployed. Everyone is expected to go flipping burgers, no matter what degree they have (note: I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong... it's just very different from they way many europeans think)
Essentially it is a trade-off. In US life is a roller-coaster; students are piss-poor and have to work double-shifts (unless you have rich or sacrificing parents); retirees have sky-high medical costs. In-between, however, (many) people earn nicely, and can become affluent... as long as they keep in mind the low points and prepare accordingly. In Europe it's different; state usually pays for studies, pensions are less dependant on your job, health care is often state-run and comprehensive. But during your "peak earning time" your salaries are not quite as high, and tax rates are plenty high. On the other hand, you don't NEED to save for your kids college education or for your medical bills in future.
Please don't complain when you actually are making more money each year. Please.
ITNANAL (I Try Not to be ANAL) but one has
to count in inflation... so there is the difference between nominal raises and real salary increases. Of course in your case it just
means you get even bigger decrease.
Well, I don't think it's very beneficial for Microsoft in the long run to do this; to get nailed and pay. If they keep on doing that, they'll just make it so much easier for next small company to win their retirement money. I mean, just like common criminals, companies do get reputation, and after couple of settlements (or worse, convictions), what happens is:
It becomes more tempting for smaller companies to sue (based on track record of MS losing or settling similar cases)
Judges will find it easier to trust the evidence based on the fact Microsoft has done
similar contract infringements (etc) previously
I don't believe they really get out totally squeaky clean; although in theory settlement with "no acknowledgement of wrongdoing" is what it says, in practice it gives impression of just saving your face from actually losing the case. It may not be admissible as any kind of evidence (ie. in court one can not directly use dismissed cases to support a case), but don't think for a moment they have no impact indirectly.
On the other hand, most all corporations nowadays seem to concentrate on short term prospects, so perhaps I'm wrong in assuming companies would think along above lines. Perhaps Microsoft thinks short term benefits of unfair play and potential later settlement make sense.
Your reply unfortunately didn't make much sense. You seem to think that there exists some kind of absolute ownership for non-physical things such as content, and "owning" what you write is natural. That's strange; once words are shared via written medium they are "out there". Only thing approximating your wishes is copyright, but even that just tries to regulate creation of hard copies. Closest to ownership
one can get is recognized authorship; general
agreement of who exactly created the work,
wrote the words, composed a song and so forth.
And of course there's once again word "stealing", used in a way that would not have made much sense for great authors of centuries past. Making copies of your work was not considered stealing, nor should it. Copyright violation yes, steling no. This goes back to general understanding of stealing as an act causing someone to lose something tangible; in this case it would at most losing an opportunity to sell a hard-copy yourself (via publisher and retailers). This does not say anything about
goodness/badness (or practicality) of copyrights and violations thereof, just that hi-jacking and overloading existing words is wrong.
Finally, in general ownership just means controlling use of some thing, and that is much more relevant (as well as practical) for physical goods than abstract things. There's no way (nor should there be reason) to limit use of ideas (non-concrete thing), since there are no limited number of physical instances. Same applies to formulas, compositions, and yes, textual works. Ownership can only be claimed on physical manifestations, copies; in this case books.
Perhaps, but one should not use words one does not understand. So, if you want to mean "where", use word "where", not "wherefore". Especially when latter means something else than what you naively assumed.
Without copyright, a larger more influential publisher could publish your work without attribution and profit from it.
Yes and no. They could publish it, but copyright is not in itself necessary for proving authorship. That is, they wouldn't necessarily
be able to claim someone else wrote it.
Now, having copyright makes enforcing such attributions easier (practical),
but like its name says, "copyright" just defines mechanism for granting right to copy (publish) such works, it does not define rules of authorship. They just acknowledge the fact works generally have authors.
I agree in that most fundamental right regarding artistic works is the right for recognized authorship, and further that that's fundamentally more valuable than monetary opportunities regarding copyright, at least for many/most authors.
It's good to point the difference between idea, implementation, and relationship of those with various "IP" laws. However, unlike in your idealistic world, some of the tools -- especially patents -- are used to monopolize little more than vague ideas.
It's hardly a coincidence that of major "intellectual property" related tools (patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets), patents are the ones most commonly considered problematic. The second one in the list, copyrights, are mostly frowned upon because of extensive coverage period (due to Mickey Mouse law). The unpopularity of patents generally really boils down to the fact that most talented people can easily come up with ideas, but also understand difficulties in implementation. And these garbage patents -- which are the tip of the iceberg -- outline the fundamental incompatibility between TEMPORARY monopoly for PRODUCTION of CONCRETE artifacts (implementation) and current reality.
And finally, regarding your "IP is NOT ideas"; the vague concept of "intellectual property" is, little more than artificial concept with which some entities try to create and enforce
unnatural "scarcity" of abstract things like ideas. So one could as well say "IP is NOT ideas, IP is nothing".
And you imply that abolishing "intellectual property" laws would be a significant kick? That suddenly no company would design new products, no singer would write (much less record) new songs, authors would never write another book?
With all the doomsday projectors and scaremongerers claiming Armageddong, if IP laws are loosened or even just gotten rid of, I just think of chicken little and sky falling story. I really, really, have hard time believing individuals and companies would somehow just stop innovating, inventing and creating. There would no doubt be increase in things that are now labelled as copyright (and patent) violations, but that does not automatically equate to huge harm. It would be bad for some; even cases where things would be unfair. But as likely there would be more progress, as biggest of corporations would have less weaponry against their smaller nimbler competitors.
I wonder how come Taiwan's economy has been doing fairly well, what with that country's apparent disregard of many international IP laws? And before answering that question, keep in mind that nowadays taiwan-based companies are major innovatros in all kinds of electronics, not just copycats some people still label them.
Even if the code wasn't in there at all, but they examined the original SCO code in order to create their own, that would still be in violation of their IP rights.
This is a common misunderstanding; thinking that there is something fundamentally wrong or illegal with reverse-engineering (be that examining source code or binaries). Like another
poster pointed out, the only mechanism that could protect against "monkey see monkey do" would be trade secret registration.
For patents, it does not matter if you saw something and reimplemented it, or even created it yourself from the scratch. Copyright only protects against unauthorized copying, not against reimplementations.
The whole clean-room reimplementation idea was an overkill created by Compaq lawyers, when they were cloning IBM PC. They wanted to be 150% sure everything was legal, since they were dealing with a high-tech behemoth, with ample resources to use on lawyering. Doing clean-room development is plenty good for avoiding potential trouble, but it is not a requirement of any sort (more like a sterilized man using a condom).
I don't think it's a huge deal either way, to be honest, as long as one knows how likely it is to have some significance. I wouldn't bother, quite frankly. I am in favour of XP-like attitude, applied in this case like "don't type things
you don't consider necessary".
So, I wouldn't bother typing it in, unless I
knew that:
Performance of code I'm working on is not
good enough
Function I'm optimizing is important for performance (tight loop etc)
Keyword matters on at least one environment (platform, compiler) I'm compiling code in.
And if so, I might use register keyword for local var declarations for the function in question, since that might both work and matter for me.
...Or perhaps it's new code written by an old fart who knows through long, bitter experience that there's no such
thing as an optimizing compiler.
That's however missing the main point, namely, that your "non-optimizing compiler" may still just go ahead and ignore you. And the general agreement outside old fart circles is that that's 99% likely to happen (unless something really radical has happened since my taking of compiler's course in mid-90s....).
So, even if you hate
the register allocation your compiler does (with its somewhat incomplete understanding), adding
register keyword may be as useful as buying those expensive gold plated stereo connectors, or wearing a tin-foil hat. If you really want to get allocation the way you consider optimal, you better write it in assembler.
I guess you haven't met these professional students, then. I know it's a stereotype, but one that exists in the wild. People who get all stressed out from getting only 47 points out of 48 (even if grade is still the same), and go to complain, whine and try to biggie size the score. People who mostly talk about exams, preparing for them, whining about "not doing enough reading" (when they have been reading for past week); and usually getting high grades, being persistent perpetual movement machines they are.
For whatever it's worth I did get decent grades myself, without sweating too much about it. But fortunately I never got any of my jobs based on either grades, or even the degree I have. I wouldn't base my hiring decision on either alone either. My thinking is that skilled and talented people generally do get fairly good grades, but that reverse direction isn't quite as linear.
Of course, the stereotypic image only covers some of high-grade-average people; there are some truly smart people who do get straight A s no matter what (have met couple). But there are enough of those whose main skill really is studying and getting grades (one way or the other), without matching technical skills, that I would not rely too much on GPA or related rankings.
...but you can't deny that the execs and shareholders are making a quick buck.
Actually, if it is intentional pump'n dump, it is a risky way to make a quick buck, at least for execs. And I seriously doubt execs would risk their own careers (big risk of litigation) just to help those current shareholders that understood to sell at current peak price, before the slump. If there weren't something in it for them, they wouldn't be doing it; and making a quick buck cynically knowing end is nigh does not sound like a particularly good plan.
So basically I think that the execs really do believe in their chances, at some level. Unless they plan to sell all of their holdings and quietly fly into some country without extradition agreement, that is.:-)
Sure, you can clone Office if you try hard enough. But try to make something that actually requires intellect like managing a 3D pipeline.
Right. And I assume you are more familiar with gfx than office application development. So of course it must be trivial to do latter, but hard to do former.
Grow up kid. There are any number of things that are challenging to implement properly (cleanly, efficiently, within time limits etc. etc.); implement a full Office suite happens to be one such task. And creating full-blown commercial quality game (or just components needed by one, such as rendering sub-systems) is another one. No need to underestimate either task.
Not really the only one; the one I preferred was Applixware (is that still around?)... and there was (is?) also WordPerfect port. But it definitely had most complete feature set (to the point many considered it bloated).
StarOffice probably was also available on other Unixes, Linux wasn't (at least originally) its primary target platform, for whatever that's worth.
Openoffice and projects like it have trouble competing with MS because of installed userbase, support, and mainstream awareness.
You probably just forgot to mention it, but surely there is a fairly big company that has a supported office suite based on OOo. So should someone choose to pay for the product and support, there is a viable option. Now, OOo and SO are reasonably compatible (Mozilla vs. Netscape 7 kind of situation), most importantly of course having same file format and core codebase... so switching between the two is fairly painless.
Well, OO as a _project_ is fairly recent development in same way as Mozilla is, but
both have much longer history regarding
application itself. And in case of OpenOffice, it's not even a rewrite of StarOffice, but a cleaned-up (ie. proprietary components refactored out) subset of functionality.
Anyone know when first version of StarOffice was released? It has been around for a while (think I used it in 1997 or so, but I know it's been around for much longer). It's just that it's become more widely known after Sun purchased it from its creating company (german co).
Slashdot Mirror
Note though that this is about trademarks, and Apple Corps clearly has had trademarks well before Apple Computer even started. That Apple was ever apple to be named that was based on them not being in music business. Now they are extending there, and getting into trademark problem. In this case you either believe trademark law makes sense, or you don't; and only in latter case you can consider this case frivolous.
Easiest thing for Apple should be just spinning off their music download business to another fully owned company, names, say, iTunes? Problem solved.
No. If UN gets international agreements passed, and its member countries ratify them, THEN they would become illegal.
You are frustrated at people laughing at those "UN wants to rule the world" nutcases? Then stop making ridiculous claims where you equate trying to stop using certain subset of weaponry considered harmful for humanity (in case of depleted uranium I let you try to guess why it is considered bad...) with trying to gain global dominance. It's not like UN has its own army and wants to have uberweapons and superpowers. Only power it has comes from member countries, power they are willing to hand. Which right now is not that much.
I assume that part was widely published before the war as well... so what's the problem? :-)
How true. Faux News, like it's called. I found it amazing that during Iraq War even other (fairly gung-ho go America all of them) broadcast channels seemed less biased than Fox. Of course to get something resembling objectivity you'd need to go to BBC, or a big european news channel.
The main point here is why the hell is someone trying to make a law preventing others from being made? Why not just directly try to prevent the law you are opposing, instead of outlawing certain kinds of laws? Who needs to be slapped with a cluestick?
And furthermore, why on earth should just idiocy be included in THE CONSTITUTION? You consider "purity" and "sacredness" of marriage to warrant this special protection? Jeez, that's just one of practical institutions most societies have that's evolving over time. Compare that to actual fundamental important rights like freedom of speech, fair and impartial trials and such.
I mostly agreed with your replies, but this is just not right. I'm sure there may be a company here and another there have long severances, but please, even claiming many corps give 2 or 3 months severance is stretching it. Many more basically give you current 2 weeks salary and wish you best ("don't let the door won't hit you on your way out").
And as to unemployment aid, that's also very limited for specific duration. Nothing compared to Germany or any other north/west european countries.
Now, it's worth noting that general salary levels for high-education careers are about 2x as high in US as in most above-mentioned european countries. It's just that one HAS to be much better prepared for job loss, because the consequences are much much more drastic:
- You lose your health insurance, eventually; CORBA is very expensive, but after that it just gets outrageously expensive AND bad (individuals in general just can't get same deals as corps do)
- Both severance (if you get any) and gov. unemployment benefits last in general only for couple of months (say, up to 6 - 9 months if you are lucky)
- After falling out of those money sources, you will be screwed; social security system is strictly reserved for really poor people, not for highly educated unemployed. Everyone is expected to go flipping burgers, no matter what degree they have (note: I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong... it's just very different from they way many europeans think)
Essentially it is a trade-off. In US life is a roller-coaster; students are piss-poor and have to work double-shifts (unless you have rich or sacrificing parents); retirees have sky-high medical costs. In-between, however, (many) people earn nicely, and can become affluent... as long as they keep in mind the low points and prepare accordingly. In Europe it's different; state usually pays for studies, pensions are less dependant on your job, health care is often state-run and comprehensive. But during your "peak earning time" your salaries are not quite as high, and tax rates are plenty high. On the other hand, you don't NEED to save for your kids college education or for your medical bills in future.ITNANAL (I Try Not to be ANAL) but one has to count in inflation... so there is the difference between nominal raises and real salary increases. Of course in your case it just means you get even bigger decrease.
Ok, here goes...
I, for one, welcome our new ubergeek scripting overlord!
- It becomes more tempting for smaller companies to sue (based on track record of MS losing or settling similar cases)
- Judges will find it easier to trust the evidence based on the fact Microsoft has done
similar contract infringements (etc) previously
I don't believe they really get out totally squeaky clean; although in theory settlement with "no acknowledgement of wrongdoing" is what it says, in practice it gives impression of just saving your face from actually losing the case. It may not be admissible as any kind of evidence (ie. in court one can not directly use dismissed cases to support a case), but don't think for a moment they have no impact indirectly.On the other hand, most all corporations nowadays seem to concentrate on short term prospects, so perhaps I'm wrong in assuming companies would think along above lines. Perhaps Microsoft thinks short term benefits of unfair play and potential later settlement make sense.
And of course there's once again word "stealing", used in a way that would not have made much sense for great authors of centuries past. Making copies of your work was not considered stealing, nor should it. Copyright violation yes, steling no. This goes back to general understanding of stealing as an act causing someone to lose something tangible; in this case it would at most losing an opportunity to sell a hard-copy yourself (via publisher and retailers). This does not say anything about goodness/badness (or practicality) of copyrights and violations thereof, just that hi-jacking and overloading existing words is wrong.
Finally, in general ownership just means controlling use of some thing, and that is much more relevant (as well as practical) for physical goods than abstract things. There's no way (nor should there be reason) to limit use of ideas (non-concrete thing), since there are no limited number of physical instances. Same applies to formulas, compositions, and yes, textual works. Ownership can only be claimed on physical manifestations, copies; in this case books.
Perhaps, but one should not use words one does not understand. So, if you want to mean "where", use word "where", not "wherefore". Especially when latter means something else than what you naively assumed.
Yes and no. They could publish it, but copyright is not in itself necessary for proving authorship. That is, they wouldn't necessarily be able to claim someone else wrote it. Now, having copyright makes enforcing such attributions easier (practical), but like its name says, "copyright" just defines mechanism for granting right to copy (publish) such works, it does not define rules of authorship. They just acknowledge the fact works generally have authors.
I agree in that most fundamental right regarding artistic works is the right for recognized authorship, and further that that's fundamentally more valuable than monetary opportunities regarding copyright, at least for many/most authors.
It's hardly a coincidence that of major "intellectual property" related tools (patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets), patents are the ones most commonly considered problematic. The second one in the list, copyrights, are mostly frowned upon because of extensive coverage period (due to Mickey Mouse law). The unpopularity of patents generally really boils down to the fact that most talented people can easily come up with ideas, but also understand difficulties in implementation. And these garbage patents -- which are the tip of the iceberg -- outline the fundamental incompatibility between TEMPORARY monopoly for PRODUCTION of CONCRETE artifacts (implementation) and current reality.
And finally, regarding your "IP is NOT ideas"; the vague concept of "intellectual property" is, little more than artificial concept with which some entities try to create and enforce unnatural "scarcity" of abstract things like ideas. So one could as well say "IP is NOT ideas, IP is nothing".
With all the doomsday projectors and scaremongerers claiming Armageddong, if IP laws are loosened or even just gotten rid of, I just think of chicken little and sky falling story. I really, really, have hard time believing individuals and companies would somehow just stop innovating, inventing and creating. There would no doubt be increase in things that are now labelled as copyright (and patent) violations, but that does not automatically equate to huge harm. It would be bad for some; even cases where things would be unfair. But as likely there would be more progress, as biggest of corporations would have less weaponry against their smaller nimbler competitors.
I wonder how come Taiwan's economy has been doing fairly well, what with that country's apparent disregard of many international IP laws? And before answering that question, keep in mind that nowadays taiwan-based companies are major innovatros in all kinds of electronics, not just copycats some people still label them.
And exactly how is FreeBSD lowering its bar here? Allowing easier use of one of dominant modern programming languages?
Hmmh. Good point. Back to ye ole drawing board with me analogies!
This is a common misunderstanding; thinking that there is something fundamentally wrong or illegal with reverse-engineering (be that examining source code or binaries). Like another poster pointed out, the only mechanism that could protect against "monkey see monkey do" would be trade secret registration.
For patents, it does not matter if you saw something and reimplemented it, or even created it yourself from the scratch. Copyright only protects against unauthorized copying, not against reimplementations.
The whole clean-room reimplementation idea was an overkill created by Compaq lawyers, when they were cloning IBM PC. They wanted to be 150% sure everything was legal, since they were dealing with a high-tech behemoth, with ample resources to use on lawyering. Doing clean-room development is plenty good for avoiding potential trouble, but it is not a requirement of any sort (more like a sterilized man using a condom).
So, I wouldn't bother typing it in, unless I knew that:
- Performance of code I'm working on is not
good enough
- Function I'm optimizing is important for performance (tight loop etc)
- Keyword matters on at least one environment (platform, compiler) I'm compiling code in.
And if so, I might use register keyword for local var declarations for the function in question, since that might both work and matter for me.That's however missing the main point, namely, that your "non-optimizing compiler" may still just go ahead and ignore you. And the general agreement outside old fart circles is that that's 99% likely to happen (unless something really radical has happened since my taking of compiler's course in mid-90s....).
So, even if you hate the register allocation your compiler does (with its somewhat incomplete understanding), adding register keyword may be as useful as buying those expensive gold plated stereo connectors, or wearing a tin-foil hat. If you really want to get allocation the way you consider optimal, you better write it in assembler.
For whatever it's worth I did get decent grades myself, without sweating too much about it. But fortunately I never got any of my jobs based on either grades, or even the degree I have. I wouldn't base my hiring decision on either alone either. My thinking is that skilled and talented people generally do get fairly good grades, but that reverse direction isn't quite as linear.
Of course, the stereotypic image only covers some of high-grade-average people; there are some truly smart people who do get straight A s no matter what (have met couple). But there are enough of those whose main skill really is studying and getting grades (one way or the other), without matching technical skills, that I would not rely too much on GPA or related rankings.
Actually, if it is intentional pump'n dump, it is a risky way to make a quick buck, at least for execs. And I seriously doubt execs would risk their own careers (big risk of litigation) just to help those current shareholders that understood to sell at current peak price, before the slump. If there weren't something in it for them, they wouldn't be doing it; and making a quick buck cynically knowing end is nigh does not sound like a particularly good plan.
So basically I think that the execs really do believe in their chances, at some level. Unless they plan to sell all of their holdings and quietly fly into some country without extradition agreement, that is. :-)
Right. And I assume you are more familiar with gfx than office application development. So of course it must be trivial to do latter, but hard to do former.
Grow up kid. There are any number of things that are challenging to implement properly (cleanly, efficiently, within time limits etc. etc.); implement a full Office suite happens to be one such task. And creating full-blown commercial quality game (or just components needed by one, such as rendering sub-systems) is another one. No need to underestimate either task.
StarOffice probably was also available on other Unixes, Linux wasn't (at least originally) its primary target platform, for whatever that's worth.
You probably just forgot to mention it, but surely there is a fairly big company that has a supported office suite based on OOo. So should someone choose to pay for the product and support, there is a viable option. Now, OOo and SO are reasonably compatible (Mozilla vs. Netscape 7 kind of situation), most importantly of course having same file format and core codebase... so switching between the two is fairly painless.
Anyone know when first version of StarOffice was released? It has been around for a while (think I used it in 1997 or so, but I know it's been around for much longer). It's just that it's become more widely known after Sun purchased it from its creating company (german co).