You are comparing the surrender of one nation to another with the occupation of an enemy state.
No. I am comparing the invasion of one nation by another with the obverse situation. The last time I looked California was part of America and the state most likely to be first invaded by the Japanese (Alaska and Hawaii not being states at the time. I've recently discovered that young people have a hard time grasping that a merely middle aged person can be older than some American states).
My premise is that America would resist such invasion, including the civilian populace, including women and children, by force of arms, and that such civilians who did so would be hailed as patriots. Molly Pitcher did not say, "I'm sorry, I'm an ununiformed noncombatant." She took the place of her fallen husband at his cannon. She is hailed as the stuff Americans are made of.
The converse situation would apply to Japan. They would not have simply allowed America to "take over" without a pitched battle, hedgerow to hedgerow. In fact, more inclined to do so, the very concept of surrender being rather foreign to them, hence the brutal treatment of American POWs because in Japanese eyes these men were without honor, and thus something less than human. Rules of "humane" behavior did not exist for nonhumans.
This gets combined with the fact that the Japanese of the time simply didn't know what rules to apply outside of Japan to nonjapanese, and thus often acted as if there weren't any.
Bereft of a cultural code of conduct, which was the central feature of their lives, they conducted themselves arbitrarily.
They still have some trouble with this issue, as any "gaijin" who has ever taken a Japanese bath with Japanese has experienced, or perhaps just dealt with them as tourists outside of Japan.
Our political gaff was to demand unconditional surrender when the Japanese people were simply incapable of doing so by their native constitutions. Honor meant something to them, more than life.
Their political gaff was to not sue for terms of surrender when they were still a military power to be reckond with, making it more valuable to us to be willing to negotiate terms than to continue to prosecute the way.
But their native constitution made them incapable of doing so.
It was a lose/lose situation for the Japanese until faced with an irresistable force in which there was no dishonor, at least in the eyes of the majority, surrendering to.
This is certainly correct. There were alternatives, but they were all bad and all would have brought death and misery to the Japanese people until the time of their surrender, which might well have taken years, and even those in favor of surrender almost to a man refused the idea of doing so unconditionally.
And we did have to make them surrender.
After the bombing, that was changed to an unconditional surrender . ..
This is incorrect. The demand for unconditional surrender was made before the bombings, which was possibly the largest political gaff of the shooting war. Had that demand included a statement that the Emperor would be allowed to remain then there is some possibility that those in favor of surrender might have gained ascendency, although I find this idea somewhat doubtful as speaking publicly for surrender put their lives very much at risk. After the bombings they were able to conclude that their lives were now very much at risk either way and it was better to speak out, indeed that doing so was imperitive for the very survival of the Japanese people.
Wether that ideology has been good or bad for Japan is up for debate. ..
Indeed it is. I'm of the view that it has been, overall, a bad thing (people are now arrested for practicing traditional religion based wholly on American morality and those doing the arresting aren't even aware anymore what their own traditions were) but perhaps even more damage was done to Japanese culture by the Japanese militarists themselves who foisted a fictitious history and traditional mythology upon the Japanese people from which they have yet to, and may never, recover.
And I don't see initimidation as a good enough reason for nuking two cities.
a) We had been at war for years and doing all sorts of nasty acts of destruction and intimidation in the act of prosecuting that war, as had they. Had we not dropped nukes we would have dropped equal, and perhaps more, destructive force upon them anyway. We certainly continued to bomb them conventionally after the nukes were dropped. I find the idea of divorcing war and intimidation a rather peculiar one. Even chess players make good use of intimidation from time to time. Properly done winning through intimidation is almost always the most desirable end as it obviates unnecessary conflict for all parties. It gets things over with. Getting things over with saves lives and misery.
The way you phrase it makes it sound like we just bombed someone for no reason other than intimidation.
b) You say that with a wholly modern sensibility of what "nuking" is, which no one at the time had, including the Japanese who were in the process of developing their own nuclear bomb and I don't see any reason to suppose that had they done so successfully they would have declined to use it, perhaps as a payload in one of those balloons (whose only value was intimidation) floating over the west coast. I rather suspect that they would have done so with a certain amount of joy and verve for the glory of Japan and the Emperor.
So far as anyone thought of it at the time it was just a bomb. A really, really big bomb, but just a bomb, not a "nuke."
There is plenty of shame to go around, and the continued refusal of the Japanese to acknowledge the Rape of Nanking continues their own shame to this day, however, please note that I spoke of the Japanese treatment of American civilians after the surrender and not Japanese military treatment of American military personel during that period when the war was still ongoing.
The war was hell. The peace was peacable. There were no hostage takings. The Emperor ordered surrender, and they did.
They would have allowed US troops to occupy their islands, and would have paid reparations, and would have been in no position to continue the war. ..
To about the same extent that had the Japanese gained the ascendency in the war and invaded California America would have allowed the Japanese to occupy its lands and pay "reparations."
Go watch Red Dawn or something. It's a very, very stupid movie, but it gets some ideas of what a proud, armed people might act like if their homeland is invaded right. Or perhaps read a history of the various Afghan wars. Or Vietnam.
On the whole, people do not just roll over when invaded, particularly Asian people (or Americans, the last invasion of America, albiet on a small scale, occured in the 20th century. See also Churchill's speech: "we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. .." Had the Emperor of Japan given that speach instead of the one of surrender that's what would have happened).
It was about propaganda.
It was about many things, but the idea that it was strictly about propaganda is strictly propaganda.
I'm sorry, but while my opinion may well be different than yours it is hardly ignorant. It is based not only on a study of history, but on direct conversation with military and civilian occupiers as well as many Japanese who lived through the conventional firebombings and the nuclear bombs themselves. My family has had strong ties with the Japanese, both social and business, for many decades.
Please note that I did not condone the killing of as much as a single indvidual. I am a Buddhist. I do not condone killing so much as a mouse, although many Asians who profess to be Buddhists have killed other human beings down through the years. The Buddhist Samurai is a cultural icon.
The war is a historical fact. There's nothing I can do about that. I was born after it ended, although my stepfather spent the war years in a forced labor camp as a conciencious objector. My turn came in later wars, in which I had relatives who had "their face melted off" and I miss them. Discussing war is not at all the same thing as condoning it.
I consider it a fact that more civilian Japanese lives would have been lost in the next few weeks after the bombing of Nagasaki (the majority of whom would have burned to death) than were lost due to the nuclear bombings and that the land invasion of the Japanese islands would have cost at least several million Japanese civilian lives. It would have been a holocaust. The Japanese were prepared for such invasion and it would have been the very first time we had actually encountered the main Japanese army, all our "island hopping" was strictly against their navy and expeditionary forces. The very idea of invading Shikoku alone makes my blood run cold.
My sympathies are primarily with the Japanese people. It would be better had the war never happened in the first place, and without American imperialistic encursions into Asia, and even Japan itself, and without having turned them from our ally in WWI into our enemy in WWII it would not have.
They may well disagree, but the fact is the Japanese surrender saved untold millions of Japanese lives that would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese islands, most of whom would have been "civilian" ( as with our other wars in Asia we would have found that women and children were armed combatants quite willing to die to the last "man" to defend their homeland. Guam would have looked like a cakewalk in comparison).
Such an invasion would have also destroyed what is perhaps the most remarkably peaceful post war occupation in world history, American civilians almost universally reporting that they were able to wander freely and alone in perfect safety because the Japanese treated them like honored guests, despite the fact that American military personel were not nearly always so polite.
When was the last time standing in front of the bleeding edge of technological progress and screaming 'Stop!' did anything except get you cut off at the knees?
You have a point, however, your point is worthless unless you can distinguish between the bleeding edge of technological progress and that which is merely new.
The kind of toys that they wanted at age 20 (usually a certian kind of mp3 player, 3D graphics card, or sportscar).
Dude, nobody who's 40 or over ever lusted for an mp3 player or 3D graphics card when they were 20.
As per your own situation, watch yourself, people who rely on faith to get them through usually find that their midlife crisis is sparked by their midlife crisis in faith. You may not believe it's coming now, but odds are it will. Even the Biblical fathers had them. If you accept that and prepare for it now you can come out the other side with a truely mature faith instead of the rather childlike one you have now.
This is high esteem for a man who does well on a game show by showing of his gargantuan brain.
People don't like to play Trivial Pursuit with me. I tend to win in a few turns.
I don't consider this in any way evidence of my having a gargantuan brain. I just know a lot about a lot of things because a lot of things interest me.
I consider my skill at deductive reasoning as a sign of my having a gargantuan brain, and the only trivia answers I've given that I might be somewhat proud of are the ones that I didn't know the answer to but was able to correctly deduce.
Jeopardy is not a good way to measure this sort of reasoning, the same sort of brain function that has given people like Newton, Einstein, Turing and Tesla their reputations for gargantuan brains. It's likely that all of these would have faired fairly poorly on Jeopardy. They liked to think, not fire off "answers" in machine gun fashion.
The country is not run on principle it is run on pragmatism, and that is the way it should be.
It may have escaped your notice, but the one thing that America has always claimed that set it apart from other countries is that it is founded on principle.
Right. But Microsoft and most others put explicit trade-secret clauses in their employment contracts.
Of course.
That wouldn't really be in tune with the more common definition of reverse-engineering.
Sure it would:
For example, one might take the executable code of a computer program, run it to study how it behaved with different input and then attempt to write a program oneself which behaved identically
Reverse engineering is the process of creating a workalike product. Sure, you need to analyze its behavior to do that, but it's not the whole thing. Until you write the code, you havn't reverse engineered it. Just like taking a car apart might tell me how it works, but isn't reverse engineering the car. It's just education about the car.
I'd never use a decompiler/et al to reverse engineer something. I'd do as in the above defintion. I'd analyze its behavior. What input gives what output. To reverse engineer Solitaire, for example, one need only play the game a few times. The same goes for an RTS, FPS or spreadsheet. If you know what the code does you can do it too.
Decompiling is cracking. Bad engineer. No Doritos.
You can get a decent Laptop for less money. Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.
Assuming you spend that time at some job being recompensed, yeah, I guess. If you spend it at home watching Farscape reruns. ..ummmmmmm, no.
I've had three laptops in the past four years, the last two I owned aren't even good enough for my kids anymore.
Ahhhhh, a dream cusotmer, step right this way sir, the web is waiting, and I don't mean the "World Wide."
My ten year old 486 laptop still does serious work, often booting off of a single floppy Linux distro, Mu Linux, which this gentleman could also use, install on his HD and rebuild a system from there, all while watching TV at no out of pocket expense.
Time may not be free, but a good deal of it goes unpaid anyway, unless you care to recompense me for taking out my own trash and watching Farscape?
Re:Linus the writer?
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The difference between a legend and a myth is that legends are, at least in part, verifiable.
George Mallory scaling the tallest mountain in the world is a legendary feat and story.
Atlas standing atop the tallest mountain in the world to hold up the sky is mythical, especially since it doesn't even corespond to fact in the simple matter of the mountain in question being all that tall.
It doesn't read to me like the outside editor/author added remarks, but he may have insterted some here and there that were spoken in another context for conciseness.
Obviously the parenthesis and italics were purely the work of the editing process since the article explicitly states this interview was done as a "chat," not a written response.
It, isn't, however, clear just who did the editing, as it reads as if Mr. Wareham himself may have edited in those comments after the article was written.
Isn't it more proper to ask, "Who created/developed Linux?"....
Not if we're discussing the earliest versions of Linux, i.e. the versions relevant at the time of its creation.
Since the time of that legendary first post to usenet, yes, Linux has been developed by many hands who have written code for it, but I believe that in the context of the contest created == written.
Trade secrets have no protection at all except by explicit contract. None.
APIs are inherently nothing more than a logical framework. One does not reverse engineer them. One discovers them.
Reverse engineering means writing code that impliments the API. That, and only that, has to be done "clean room," and only because the code is copyrighted.
You can reverse-engineer an API without any trade-secret knowledge (i.e. 'clean-room') and publish that, that is perfectly legal.
It's simpler than that. You don't even need a clean room to simply describe something, even patented and licensed somethings.
Ever read a Hayne's auto repair manual?
They don't use drawings. They take a car apart and take pictures of the actual parts and proceedures of various repairs, publish full specs, graphs, etc.
They don't need permission from nobody, nohow.
If they need specifications of a patented part they can get them directly from the United States Patent Office because the the design is public information.
God save us all from the day when you can get sued/arrested for telling a friend about a cool movie you saw, which is all this guy is doing.
Slashdot Mirror
You are comparing the surrender of one nation to another with the occupation of an enemy state.
No. I am comparing the invasion of one nation by another with the obverse situation. The last time I looked California was part of America and the state most likely to be first invaded by the Japanese (Alaska and Hawaii not being states at the time. I've recently discovered that young people have a hard time grasping that a merely middle aged person can be older than some American states).
My premise is that America would resist such invasion, including the civilian populace, including women and children, by force of arms, and that such civilians who did so would be hailed as patriots. Molly Pitcher did not say, "I'm sorry, I'm an ununiformed noncombatant." She took the place of her fallen husband at his cannon. She is hailed as the stuff Americans are made of.
The converse situation would apply to Japan. They would not have simply allowed America to "take over" without a pitched battle, hedgerow to hedgerow. In fact, more inclined to do so, the very concept of surrender being rather foreign to them, hence the brutal treatment of American POWs because in Japanese eyes these men were without honor, and thus something less than human. Rules of "humane" behavior did not exist for nonhumans.
This gets combined with the fact that the Japanese of the time simply didn't know what rules to apply outside of Japan to nonjapanese, and thus often acted as if there weren't any.
Bereft of a cultural code of conduct, which was the central feature of their lives, they conducted themselves arbitrarily.
They still have some trouble with this issue, as any "gaijin" who has ever taken a Japanese bath with Japanese has experienced, or perhaps just dealt with them as tourists outside of Japan.
KFG
Our political gaff was to demand unconditional surrender when the Japanese people were simply incapable of doing so by their native constitutions. Honor meant something to them, more than life.
Their political gaff was to not sue for terms of surrender when they were still a military power to be reckond with, making it more valuable to us to be willing to negotiate terms than to continue to prosecute the way.
But their native constitution made them incapable of doing so.
It was a lose/lose situation for the Japanese until faced with an irresistable force in which there was no dishonor, at least in the eyes of the majority, surrendering to.
KFG
America didn't have to invade Japan.
.
.
This is certainly correct. There were alternatives, but they were all bad and all would have brought death and misery to the Japanese people until the time of their surrender, which might well have taken years, and even those in favor of surrender almost to a man refused the idea of doing so unconditionally.
And we did have to make them surrender.
After the bombing, that was changed to an unconditional surrender . .
This is incorrect. The demand for unconditional surrender was made before the bombings, which was possibly the largest political gaff of the shooting war. Had that demand included a statement that the Emperor would be allowed to remain then there is some possibility that those in favor of surrender might have gained ascendency, although I find this idea somewhat doubtful as speaking publicly for surrender put their lives very much at risk. After the bombings they were able to conclude that their lives were now very much at risk either way and it was better to speak out, indeed that doing so was imperitive for the very survival of the Japanese people.
Wether that ideology has been good or bad for Japan is up for debate. .
Indeed it is. I'm of the view that it has been, overall, a bad thing (people are now arrested for practicing traditional religion based wholly on American morality and those doing the arresting aren't even aware anymore what their own traditions were) but perhaps even more damage was done to Japanese culture by the Japanese militarists themselves who foisted a fictitious history and traditional mythology upon the Japanese people from which they have yet to, and may never, recover.
And I don't see initimidation as a good enough reason for nuking two cities.
a) We had been at war for years and doing all sorts of nasty acts of destruction and intimidation in the act of prosecuting that war, as had they. Had we not dropped nukes we would have dropped equal, and perhaps more, destructive force upon them anyway. We certainly continued to bomb them conventionally after the nukes were dropped. I find the idea of divorcing war and intimidation a rather peculiar one. Even chess players make good use of intimidation from time to time. Properly done winning through intimidation is almost always the most desirable end as it obviates unnecessary conflict for all parties. It gets things over with. Getting things over with saves lives and misery.
The way you phrase it makes it sound like we just bombed someone for no reason other than intimidation.
b) You say that with a wholly modern sensibility of what "nuking" is, which no one at the time had, including the Japanese who were in the process of developing their own nuclear bomb and I don't see any reason to suppose that had they done so successfully they would have declined to use it, perhaps as a payload in one of those balloons (whose only value was intimidation) floating over the west coast. I rather suspect that they would have done so with a certain amount of joy and verve for the glory of Japan and the Emperor.
So far as anyone thought of it at the time it was just a bomb. A really, really big bomb, but just a bomb, not a "nuke."
KFG
There is plenty of shame to go around, and the continued refusal of the Japanese to acknowledge the Rape of Nanking continues their own shame to this day, however, please note that I spoke of the Japanese treatment of American civilians after the surrender and not Japanese military treatment of American military personel during that period when the war was still ongoing.
The war was hell. The peace was peacable. There were no hostage takings. The Emperor ordered surrender, and they did.
KFG
They would have allowed US troops to occupy their islands, and would have paid reparations, and would have been in no position to continue the war. . .
." Had the Emperor of Japan given that speach instead of the one of surrender that's what would have happened).
To about the same extent that had the Japanese gained the ascendency in the war and invaded California America would have allowed the Japanese to occupy its lands and pay "reparations."
Go watch Red Dawn or something. It's a very, very stupid movie, but it gets some ideas of what a proud, armed people might act like if their homeland is invaded right. Or perhaps read a history of the various Afghan wars. Or Vietnam.
On the whole, people do not just roll over when invaded, particularly Asian people (or Americans, the last invasion of America, albiet on a small scale, occured in the 20th century. See also Churchill's speech: "we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. .
It was about propaganda.
It was about many things, but the idea that it was strictly about propaganda is strictly propaganda.
KFG
I'm sorry, but while my opinion may well be different than yours it is hardly ignorant. It is based not only on a study of history, but on direct conversation with military and civilian occupiers as well as many Japanese who lived through the conventional firebombings and the nuclear bombs themselves. My family has had strong ties with the Japanese, both social and business, for many decades.
Please note that I did not condone the killing of as much as a single indvidual. I am a Buddhist. I do not condone killing so much as a mouse, although many Asians who profess to be Buddhists have killed other human beings down through the years. The Buddhist Samurai is a cultural icon.
The war is a historical fact. There's nothing I can do about that. I was born after it ended, although my stepfather spent the war years in a forced labor camp as a conciencious objector. My turn came in later wars, in which I had relatives who had "their face melted off" and I miss them. Discussing war is not at all the same thing as condoning it.
I consider it a fact that more civilian Japanese lives would have been lost in the next few weeks after the bombing of Nagasaki (the majority of whom would have burned to death) than were lost due to the nuclear bombings and that the land invasion of the Japanese islands would have cost at least several million Japanese civilian lives. It would have been a holocaust. The Japanese were prepared for such invasion and it would have been the very first time we had actually encountered the main Japanese army, all our "island hopping" was strictly against their navy and expeditionary forces. The very idea of invading Shikoku alone makes my blood run cold.
My sympathies are primarily with the Japanese people. It would be better had the war never happened in the first place, and without American imperialistic encursions into Asia, and even Japan itself, and without having turned them from our ally in WWI into our enemy in WWII it would not have.
KFG
They may well disagree, but the fact is the Japanese surrender saved untold millions of Japanese lives that would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese islands, most of whom would have been "civilian" ( as with our other wars in Asia we would have found that women and children were armed combatants quite willing to die to the last "man" to defend their homeland. Guam would have looked like a cakewalk in comparison).
Such an invasion would have also destroyed what is perhaps the most remarkably peaceful post war occupation in world history, American civilians almost universally reporting that they were able to wander freely and alone in perfect safety because the Japanese treated them like honored guests, despite the fact that American military personel were not nearly always so polite.
KFG
When was the last time standing in front of the bleeding edge of technological progress and screaming 'Stop!' did anything except get you cut off at the knees?
You have a point, however, your point is worthless unless you can distinguish between the bleeding edge of technological progress and that which is merely new.
They aren't the same thing at all.
KFG
Welcome to the world of hypocrisy.
Yeah, all those people who used to say that Windows is insecure sure look silly now saying that, ummmmmmm, Windows is insecure.
KFG
The kind of toys that they wanted at age 20 (usually a certian kind of mp3 player, 3D graphics card, or sportscar).
Dude, nobody who's 40 or over ever lusted for an mp3 player or 3D graphics card when they were 20.
As per your own situation, watch yourself, people who rely on faith to get them through usually find that their midlife crisis is sparked by their midlife crisis in faith. You may not believe it's coming now, but odds are it will. Even the Biblical fathers had them. If you accept that and prepare for it now you can come out the other side with a truely mature faith instead of the rather childlike one you have now.
Dona nobis pacem, brother.
KFG
Trebek: Oooh, sorry! "What does America claim sets it apart from other countries?" was the question in question.
KFG
get over yourself already.
Thank you for that counterpoint example to gargantuan brain function.
KFG
This is high esteem for a man who does well on a game show by showing of his gargantuan brain.
People don't like to play Trivial Pursuit with me. I tend to win in a few turns.
I don't consider this in any way evidence of my having a gargantuan brain. I just know a lot about a lot of things because a lot of things interest me.
I consider my skill at deductive reasoning as a sign of my having a gargantuan brain, and the only trivia answers I've given that I might be somewhat proud of are the ones that I didn't know the answer to but was able to correctly deduce.
Jeopardy is not a good way to measure this sort of reasoning, the same sort of brain function that has given people like Newton, Einstein, Turing and Tesla their reputations for gargantuan brains. It's likely that all of these would have faired fairly poorly on Jeopardy. They liked to think, not fire off "answers" in machine gun fashion.
KFG
The country is not run on principle it is run on pragmatism, and that is the way it should be.
It may have escaped your notice, but the one thing that America has always claimed that set it apart from other countries is that it is founded on principle.
KFG
Right. But Microsoft and most others put explicit trade-secret clauses in their employment contracts.
Of course.
That wouldn't really be in tune with the more common definition of reverse-engineering.
Sure it would:
For example, one might take the executable code of a computer program, run it to study how it behaved with different input and then attempt to write a program oneself which behaved identically
Reverse engineering is the process of creating a workalike product. Sure, you need to analyze its behavior to do that, but it's not the whole thing. Until you write the code, you havn't reverse engineered it. Just like taking a car apart might tell me how it works, but isn't reverse engineering the car. It's just education about the car.
I'd never use a decompiler/et al to reverse engineer something. I'd do as in the above defintion. I'd analyze its behavior. What input gives what output. To reverse engineer Solitaire, for example, one need only play the game a few times. The same goes for an RTS, FPS or spreadsheet. If you know what the code does you can do it too.
Decompiling is cracking. Bad engineer. No Doritos.
KFG
Nobody's time is free.
.ummmmmmm, no.
You don't know me very well, do you?
You can get a decent Laptop for less money. Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.
Assuming you spend that time at some job being recompensed, yeah, I guess. If you spend it at home watching Farscape reruns. .
I've had three laptops in the past four years, the last two I owned aren't even good enough for my kids anymore.
Ahhhhh, a dream cusotmer, step right this way sir, the web is waiting, and I don't mean the "World Wide."
My ten year old 486 laptop still does serious work, often booting off of a single floppy Linux distro, Mu Linux, which this gentleman could also use, install on his HD and rebuild a system from there, all while watching TV at no out of pocket expense.
Time may not be free, but a good deal of it goes unpaid anyway, unless you care to recompense me for taking out my own trash and watching Farscape?
KFG
Bribes and graft?
KFG
The difference between a legend and a myth is that legends are, at least in part, verifiable.
George Mallory scaling the tallest mountain in the world is a legendary feat and story.
Atlas standing atop the tallest mountain in the world to hold up the sky is mythical, especially since it doesn't even corespond to fact in the simple matter of the mountain in question being all that tall.
KFG
It doesn't read to me like the outside editor/author added remarks, but he may have insterted some here and there that were spoken in another context for conciseness.
Obviously the parenthesis and italics were purely the work of the editing process since the article explicitly states this interview was done as a "chat," not a written response.
It, isn't, however, clear just who did the editing, as it reads as if Mr. Wareham himself may have edited in those comments after the article was written.
KFG
Isn't it more proper to ask, "Who created/developed Linux?"....
Not if we're discussing the earliest versions of Linux, i.e. the versions relevant at the time of its creation.
Since the time of that legendary first post to usenet, yes, Linux has been developed by many hands who have written code for it, but I believe that in the context of the contest created == written.
KFG
Trade secrets have no protection at all except by explicit contract. None.
APIs are inherently nothing more than a logical framework. One does not reverse engineer them. One discovers them.
Reverse engineering means writing code that impliments the API. That, and only that, has to be done "clean room," and only because the code is copyrighted.
KFG
You can reverse-engineer an API without any trade-secret knowledge (i.e. 'clean-room') and publish that, that is perfectly legal.
It's simpler than that. You don't even need a clean room to simply describe something, even patented and licensed somethings.
Ever read a Hayne's auto repair manual?
They don't use drawings. They take a car apart and take pictures of the actual parts and proceedures of various repairs, publish full specs, graphs, etc.
They don't need permission from nobody, nohow.
If they need specifications of a patented part they can get them directly from the United States Patent Office because the the design is public information.
God save us all from the day when you can get sued/arrested for telling a friend about a cool movie you saw, which is all this guy is doing.
KFG
I've worked pretty extensively in retail as well, including owning my own store for some years.
The way I figure it if I don't want my customers buying things at the marked price I should have marked it with a different price.
We're discussing strictly sale items here, not "problem" customers. People who only shop sales aren't problems, they're shrewd. I like shrewd people.
KFG
They're like mini acid flashbacks :)
I guess they really weren't kidding about that brown shit. I thought they just said that to keep all the good stuff for themselves. Go figure.
Anyway, I've got to get back to perfecting my Pocket Protector of Power. I'm trying to tune it to turn gold into strawberry jam.
KFG
If I was running a business, I wouldn't want people like me as customers. I would want people like my mom. It's just plain business sense.
Get rid of you and your mom just might decide to shop elsewhere as well. Get rid of you and your mom and they might just end up with noone.
The idea is to attract cusotomers. You'll like some better than others, but it's better than having none.
KFG