But what case does RedHat have? The way I see it, SCO has violated the GPL by claiming proprietary ownership of parts of it. Therefore, they seem so be distributing Linux without a license, and therefore violating the copyright of Mr. Torvalds and Mr. Stallman and a few hundred others.
Actually RedHat has directly or indirectly contributed a very nontrivial amount of code to linux. Alan Cox was actually a Redhat employee for a longish time, and as far as I'm aware he still is. They also for a long time provided partial financing to a decent number of open-source projects, including at least GNOME.
RedHat really is probably one of the best examples of a company to sue SCO over something like this, which is why I mentioned them. They own some linux code, and they were responsible for a decent bit more (they could maybe even file suit on behalf of Alan Cox?), and they also have a significant financial investment in linux, meaning defamation of linux hurts them directly.
Given this whole wireless thing, how difficult would it be to rig a device that just checks to see how many WozNet devices there are in the immediate area-- say, 10 feet-- and where they are?
That way paranoids or children could just scan their cars/backpacks/whatever for WozNet trackers, and if they find one present, they can pinpoint its location for removal.
I wondered the same thing about RFID tags-- i wouldn't care at all about the privacy problems if once i'd bought it i could take it home and use some handscan device to scan to see where the RFID is, then barrage it with microwaves or something until it stops responding.
However, I am pretty sure with RFID that there's no way an RFID could be designed such that it would have any choice but to broadcast its presence-- it just discharges energy collected from radio waves, so it seems like there's no way you could tag something with an RFID such that the purchaser would be unable to find the RFID just by sending out hellos on low-frequency radio, but the tagger can talk to the RFID by sending out a secret code or something. Right?
I don't know if the same applies to WozNet. They haven't really given much information on how these devices work and talk to each other. Is there info somewhere on how they communicate? Would just rigging something up to a laptop that universally identifies what all the nearby woznet devices are be easy? I don't see anything on their site that would indicate either way...
1) this is really, really evil and scary. i'm terrified by the idea of parents implanting these in their kids feet or something when they're tiny and knowing everything they do from that point forward. i'm even more terrified by the idea of corporations requiring the same of their employees, since that's something that could concievably, in an imperfect world, happen to me. i'm scared of vigilantes and criminals and government agencies secretly doing this to people they are targetting, leading to scenes like the one in the elevator in Enemy of the State.
2) But Steve Wozniak did this! Steve Wozniak is really cool and non-evil!
**head explodes**
Re:Are they reinventing the wheel ?
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Eclipse in Action
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· Score: 2, Funny
Just remember:
"The greatest thing about vi is that you can find some version of it that runs on literally any OS that you can think of. Any OS, including EMACS."
SCO doesn't care whether you license their UNIXWARY thing or not. They care about two things:
Convincing brain-dead and/or paranoid middle managers in random companies who don't understand enough of 'source code' or copyright law to understand this is bullshit to just toss off however much money SCO wants because it seems easier than fighting a lawsuit later. These are the only people SCO is targetting right now. It doesn't matter if 99.5% of linux users, including you, realize SCO is speaking utter nonsense; if the remaining 0.5% pay SCO $1500 each, SCO gets huge enough gobs of money to have made the entire exercise more than worthwhile. (Of course, maybe they'll use that money to buy more lawyers, and come for you and me and sue us later. Who knows. But we don't necessarily matter.)
Continuuing to have fuel for their process of making more outlandish claims every week than the week before, so they can stay constantly in the news and their stock price will keep rising.
As to the last bit of your post, though:
I will, however, point it out to my Missouri Attorney State General, for his consideration. In fact, the RICO statute comes to mind.
This is a fantastic idea. Please do so, and we should all follow your example.
I would like to try to do so, but I do not really know enough about "real law" to make a letter I am sure will be convincing. Can anyone give me recommendations for how I could write a letter to the Indiana state attourney general complaining about SCO's actions in light of whatever the RICO laws are around here?
If, on the other hand they say, "your existing license is invalid, here have another." Then they are in the right.
Then never mind licensing for a momen. It seems to me that if they are explicitly saying "if you run linux you are in violation and need to buy a license from us", that is a libellous statement.
It seems to me that the FSF, or Linus, or any major Linux vendor is now free to sue SCO, for either libel or barratry or whatever laws govern deceptive harrassment of your competitor's customers, at the least.
In fact, I'm shocked they haven't already. I cannot imagine why the FSF and/or Redhat would stand by and let this happen. It made sense to just stand and wait when everything SCO did fell under the heading of making insinuatious about Linux while discussing their IBM case, but this is something of a wholly and totally different order. This is publicly making attacks on Linux itself, and publicly stating that (for example) Redhat does not have the legal right to sell their own product, and that if you buy a product from Redhat you owe SCO money. I can't imagine that's legal, and I'm certain it's damaging to Redhat.
Why don't the linux distros just file suit, now that SCO has crossed the line, and subpeona what exactly the line numbers of these fabled bits of SCO code in the linux kernel are?
They will not under any circumstances be able to forcibly charge for its use. The nature of the GPL is such that if Linux is found to be infringing on the SysV copyrights, the only options will be:
Convince SCO to freely license the copyrights to everyone.
Change the Linux code to no longer be in violation of the copyright.
Stop distributing linux.
The GPL quite clearly states that if you will not provide source code to a GPLed binary you distribute, and if you will not allow someone you give GPLed source/binary to to redistribute it under the GPL, it is a GPL violation to distribute it at all. SCO can claim Linux in violation of their copyrights but they can't remove Linux from the GPL.
Quite simply: is what way is this illegal, and can someone (redhat? linus?) sue SCO for this?
This seems to me that this is probably either barratry, racketeering, or libel. Mostly the third.
Going around saying "linux has stolen code" is a simple allegation relating to a lawsuit you've made. However, if you're going around sending letters to redhat customers saying they owe you money because they use redhat.. I can't imagine that being legal. They are stating in a public, commercial context that they own what is rightfully RedHat's. That seems to be deceptive trade practices, at the least, and most likely like I said some sort of libel against Redhat.
Is this the case? Does this "linux licensing" thing mean that SCO has FINALLY stepped over the line from discussing their lawsuit in public into clear-cut slander, and the FSF/redhat/SUSE/mandrake can jump on them now?
After the best buy MSN computer giveaways, and the whole thing with the pricing on the x-box, i was cynically oberving that it wasn't enough to just develop the product for free like with MSIE, Microsoft had to actually essentially pay people to continue using their product.
Now Microsoft is literally paying people to continue using their product.
Well.. it's a good solution to the chicken and egg problem, and I guess that's been MS's mindset all along. Users are something you can buy; you spend money to get users, and then once you have them locked in, you can charge whatever you like from them.
He said "the modern states rights movement". He's not talking about the idea of state's rights, he's talking about the modern version of the "movement" in favor of them, which makes a difference. States Rights have been brought up and then dropped in various ways at various times throughout america's history, and it just happens that the current thrust toward the meme of increasing state's rights has its origin with federal attempts to end racial segregation.
All of these states rights movements have of course had their basis soundly in the tenth amendment. However, in general I think it's safe to say there has not been a time in american history when states rights have been advocated in a generalized way in an organized manner-- every time a states rights advocacy group pops up, it tends to have some kind of specific agenda, for example (as in the 1860s and 1960s) protecting a racist system. Today states rights advocacy groups, if you look, seem mostly to be doing so just as a tool with which to advocate either lesser restrictions on gun possession and use (if they're on the right) or lesser restrictions on pot possession and use (if they're on the left). Of course, a lot of these people seem to be much less enthusiastic about states rights' if "states rights" seems to mean that a federal anti-abortion law would be unconstitutional (if they're on the right) or that a state that doesn't allow same-sex mairrages would be allowed to view as invalid a same-sex mairrage initiated in a state that does allow them (if they're on the left)..
Incidentally, somehow, while I hear people on tv and in the newspaper all the time talking about how the 10th amendment means that rights the federal government doesn't explictly have control over should be in control of the states, I never seem to hear any press time being given to people claiming that the 10th amendment means that rights that the government doesn't explicitly have control over should belong to the people. Funny, that.
This is an outrage! I am going to begin boycotting directtv immediately!*
* except, um... the reason i don't have directtv already is because i don't own a television...... i guess directtv probably isn't very scared by my boycott. phooey.
Now, here's the problem: Will we ever actually see this game in the U.S.? Or, like its brilliant predecessor Vib Ribbon (i still want to find a copy of this, somehow, i've just no idea where to look), will this game never be released to us?
I guess there's really no way of knowing right now.
When it was first revealed in 1984, TRON, which can be modified for use on personal computers, was hailed in Japan as a homemade software which could break the dominance of Microsoft and free Japanese computer firms from the burden of paying for the basic software.
But the dream was shattered in 1989 when the United States threatened to designate TRON as an unfair trade barrier under its Super 301 trade law when it learned of plans by the Japanese government to use the software for computers in schools.
While Washington in the end did not name TRON as a trade barrier, the Japanese government abandoned the plan and many computer firms severed ties with TRON, fearful of angering the United States, their biggest market.
I believe the article submitter's point was not that Microsoft blocked the adoption, but that the U.S. government blocked the adoption essentially on Microsoft's behalf. They may or may not have specifically wanted to benefit Microsoft, but Microsoft was the beneficiary. Their intention, one assumes, would have been "to protect U.S. desktop operating system makers", but in 1989 that meant Microsoft and, well, Microsoft.
This still sounds awfully wierd, i'm surprised the U.S. would be able to get away with something like that and I suspect the cnn.com author *may* be glossing over something, but that's not the article submitters' fault. What's Super 301? Is there any documentation of this act besides this article? I'd go look, but I have to go run to the airport to drop someone off sorry -_-
TSA officers would have to be trained to detect Jedi Mind Tricks.
TSA Officer: Could you please remove your shoes and run them through the machine.
Man in cloak, waving hand: I don't need to remove my shoes and run them through the machine.
TSA Officer: You don't need to remove your shoes and run them through the machine.
Actually, I never liked Napster.
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Except for a very very small block of time RIGHT before they shut down (during which time they were quite enjoyable to use and featured a wide variety of music) Napster always struck me as having shitty, uber-mainstream selection, annoying users, download speeds that seemed to almost always drop to 0.2k/s or just drop altogether once the file was half-downloaded, a total of zero users who were correctly reporting their (modem or cable?) download type, and an absolutely horrid (at least at first) macintosh implementation. Moreover, finding a full album on napster was absolutely impossible, badly encoded mp3s were everywhere, and WELL, WELL over half of all mp3s available on napster were incompletes-- but NONE were labelled as such.
I hated napster.
I spent the entire Napster period downloading mp3s, just as i had for a very very long time before Napster was ever invented-- from search.oth.net and other FTP-search based sources. Yeah, Ratio was a bitch, but at least you KNEW the server was going to stay up for a few hours at least, and you knew nobody was going to put an mp3 in their main collection if it was an incomplete.
Also, there was this convenient thing in that basically, the majority of ftp servers had a 1:5 U/D ratio set; the vast majority of ftp servers had exactly one file that i wanted to download of about 6 or 7 megabytes; and i had an mp3 of cookie monster singing "C is for Cookie, that's good enough for me" that was 1.5 megabytes. So i could zap up cookie monster, grab what i wanted, and get out quick. What was wierd, though, was that i think i started something; once i started doing this, the cookie monster mp3 started spreading quite a bit. I would sign onto mp3 servers i'd never been on before and find my cookie monster mp3 already there-- and not in the upload folder either, in the actual sorted mp3 collection. Hmmmm.. ^_^
Uh, and since i see to be admitting to illegal acts above: i downloaded mp3s solely to sample music which i was considering buying or which was not available in america, i was too young to be legally tried as an adult when the events described above happened, i never downloaded mp3s, this post is fiction posted for humorous purposes, i don't even know what an "mp3" is, and i don't own or know how to use a computer.
Oh, and slashdot claims that this is my 700th post posted with my account, though i notice a lot of my earlier ones aren't in the archive.
This guy interprets Microsoft's "improving IE any more will require changes to the operating system" as meaning that the IE codebase is so bloated and stuffed that they can't fix bugs anymore without a major rewrite.
Here's a different theory for you: Microsoft isn't fixing the IE6 css bugs because they don't care, and the "operating system" comment means that IE7 is going to try to move away from HTML and into web-based embedded windows ".Net" (or whatever) applications. Microsoft has from their perspective won the browser wars, and they are finally ready for their long-awaited "Make The Web = Microsoft" step that that whole "open standard" thing has prevented them from for so long.
Just a thought. But probably not all that paranoid.
What really interests me is, what happens now that IE has dumped the whole cross-platform-y ness thing? IE's big strength right now is that everyone targets it. IE HTML is standard HTML. What really interests me is the idea that at some point in the future, the idea of targeting Konqueror will begin to begin to look increasingly attractive. After all, there are a nontrivial amount of web designers who use the mac. I'm sure Microsoft is hoping that these web designers will be willing to switch to Windows just so that they can see what their web pages look like for 90% of the customers.
However, unless things reach the point where (say) Banks can afford to totally ignore all Macintosh and Linux customers (instead of just giving them substandard service), we may start to see the ubiquity of "optimized for IE only" disappear. Big sites like targeting only one browser. If someone comes up with a windows version of Konqueror in the near future (and preferably finds a way to make it muscle into the file browser in IE's place), that browser may well become Konqueror. Konqueror already has a pretty decent amount of mindshare in both Linux and Mac (I don't know any mac users at this point that don't use Safari over IE) and the potentiality that Konqueror could become the one browser that's actually *the same* across *all* platforms might start to look very attractive to web developers at some point-- the sort of thing that Mozilla/Gecko might have at some point fufilled if it had ever become, you know, not painful to use. (Galeon/Phoenix and similar projects may still someday allow Gecko to take on that role.)
At the least, which sounds more attractive; tell your windows base, some of which have a KHTML-based browser, "you have to have KHTML to view my site", or tell EVERYONE except those with the brand new IE8.NET2WINDOWS2007WEB "you can't use my site at all".
Well, from personal experience I can say that unsubscribing is a bitch. The customer service people have been instructed to hassle anyone who comes in saying they want to unsubscribe until they agree to stay; I know people who say they unsubscribed previously, only to find later that they were still being billed; and all the user interfaces through which you can have your account deleted are just plain user unfriendly. (I am beginning to suspect the "slit wrists" module, which is the one most of the help files direct you toward, is designed just plain not have any way to make it work at all. "Down not across" indeed, what rubbish.)
It seems to me that most people who want to quit eventually just get so frustrated by this sort of run-around that they eventually just give up and keep playing.
Apple patents everything they can imaginably think of, right down to the skins on their OSes, and they never use a single one of these patents. (OK, they bitchslap people who make themes similar to aqua, but based on trademark law, not patents.)
If they give any indication they'd ever use this patent, ever, I'll bitch and moan about it with the rest of you. But they never will, and anyway, this idea is SO obvious I can't concievably imagine them ever winning a lawsuit based on this patent even if they tried.
In the meantime, i want to see how long it takes someone to make a serviceable Virtual Desktop implementation based on faking out the fast user switching implementation. Also, I find the Register's last paragraph a bit odd:
Will Apple use its new-found intellectual property rights? Maybe not, but like its use of QuickTime patents to win a $150 million investment from Microsoft demonstrated some years back, it may now have the opportunity to do so if it ever hears the words 'cancelled' and 'Microsoft Office' in the same sentence.
Patents? Hmm, I seem to remember that particular lawsuit being over several tens of thousands of lines of actual source code that slipped directly out of the Quicktime codebase and into the Microsoft Media Player codebase, through the intermediary of a third party contractor that both Apple and Microsoft hired at different points. I could have missed something, though.
My solution was trying to be effectively to relink the client executable when necessary. I was intending for accesses of instance variables to be tracked by selectors as well so that the memory location accessed in the client executable would change when the library classes changed (which isn't the same as relinking, i guess.. maybe i'm being unclear. blah.), though now that i think about it that really would be a tremendous amount of bloat.
I had forgotten about function inlining, though. That breaks my suggestion and I'm not sure how to get around it. Oh well.
There is a way to overcome the FBC problem [snip] Java meets all these requirements, so it probably uses a mechanism very similar to this.
Okay, interesting.
Anyway, I still suspect there's some way to overcome the FBC problem without scaring off the performance nazis, I'm just not sure what it would be:)
The fragile base class problem is only an issue for those using closed source libraries.
It is an issue unless you have the source code to every single executable on your system, and access to that source code such that you can recompile any executable at will if a library it's based on changes. That means, basically, everyone, unless you're running Gentoo Linux and never install anything outside the package system. Even in the open source world, sometimes people like to distribute binaries.
It is an issue because the fragile base class problem is something that every API you use was limited by having to work around unless they require you to open-source your program if you link against them. Not a lot of libraries do this. This trickles down to you in the form of worsened code quality.
There is no way to get rid of the fragile basic class issue without making classes *much* slower and breaking the semantics of the C memory model.
Oh, I'm sure there's a number of ways. Here's one I thought of just sitting here. It's probably not even the best one. It's a bit complex from the implementation point of view, but certainly doable:
Delay linking. Rip off objective-c. For each compiled class, embed in the executable a table of "selectors" that lists as a string each variable and method and records its offset and public/private status. (Objective-c does something like this, except instead of calling functions it just passes the selector desired to a function called objc_msgsend(), which dynamically locates the desired hunk of code and executes it. This has a very large number of very very cool effects in terms of the dynamic abilities it gives objc, but it does impact speed, which would not be acceptable here, so a little bit more complexity is needed:) Since some people aren't comfortable with everyone knowing the names of the methods in their products, maybe there can be the option of saving the selector table as some sort of hash rather than as strings, or something.
Also embed a table for each externally used class and each externally derived class (each compiled class which has somewhere in its inheritance heirarchy a class defined outside of the current executable) that records the exact location within the compiled executable of every instance where an instance variable or method of that class is referred to, and points to whichever entry in the selector table that is being referred to at that exact spot in code.
Lastly, embed a table that for each externally linked or externally derived class that records what external libraries that class depends on or is found in, and what version the current executable was linked against.
When the program runs-- hopefully the operating system could be made to handle this-- the program quickly checks the third (library) table above against the libraries on disk and checks to see if any of the libraries on disk are differently-versioned than the version the executable is expecting. If there's a difference, it runs through the set of second (uses of external classes) tables above, and alters the executable so that the offset for each instance variable and method is accurate according to the first (selector) tables located in the external classes.
See? That neither breaks the C memory model nor has a speed impact (though i'm not convinced breaking the C memory model is altogether a bad thing). All it does is add metadata. It bloats executables, but not much more than templates or base-class 'padding' variables already do. It plays havoc with established systems for patches and virus protection, but that just means patch and virus protection systems would have to be rewritten. And the best part is, once those selector tables exist they can be used for the basis of class introspection and "does this class support this delegate method?" programming, like selectors do in Objective-C. It probably isn't the best solution, but it at least indicates solving the fragile base class problem in a static-method-binding language is *possible*, and that's what matters.
(Actually.. now that i've written this post, i just realized, isn't Java statically method-bound yet free of the fragile base class problem? How does it do that?)
In what way do you not regard std::string as a standard string class?
I've never met a single person who uses it?
That means that, while it may be a standard string class, it is, at least according to the limited data sample of "everyone i know", a failed standard.
Also, std::string largely works with the STL, which is a bit of a minefield to use becuase of the subtle incompatibilities between different STL implementations, and other C++ libraries besides the STL ones (that i have seen, at least) tend to implement their own sort of string class or just use cstrings.
So, are they ever going to do anything about the Fragile Base Class problem? I don't see anything related in those proposals.
I'm tired, so forgive me if i explain this poorly, but C++ has this issue where, since object methods are really just function pointers, if you have class A that is shipped as a library or API, and class B which inherits from class A and is part of some third-party program, and the people who make class A add a private method or private variable to class A and then re-ship their libraries, every existing binary containing class B breaks becuase C++ just slaps a struct containing Bs methods and variables at the end of A, and becuase the size of A has changed the offsets have all changed.
This is horrible. This completely negates the purposes of encapsulization and information hiding, which is the entire reason you'd be writing an OO API in the first place, and leads to anyone attempting to create a C++ API doing horrible workarounds like sticking a whole bunch of dead space in the form of methods named, for example, "reserved_23" at the end of every class they make, just so that in case later they have to add a method or instance variable they'll have a little bit of room to do so without breaking everyone who's ever inherited from them.
Until they fix this, and until they reach the point where there is some kind of standard String class that everyone uses (as is, there are an untold number of String classes, one for just about every major C++ API, and so from what i've seen people rarely if ever store their strings as anything other than c-strings just because in the end, all they're going to do with their strings is pass them to other c or c++ libraries.. who expect to be given c-strings..), I will continue to consider C++ to be more or less a huge joke that can be used as a high-level oo programming language, but only by coincidence.
Also note that they still are not even considering adding any sort of real reflection into the language, nor are they considering adding a real, robust macro system despite the fact people clearly want one (or else they wouldn't be trying to metaprogram the C++ template system to be a macro system!). It would be nice to be able to typedef a single variable type that acts as a template, though.. that's a good innovation, if i'm reading that right. Anything that minimizes the contact I have with the C++ template system makes me happy. (If it were up to me, they would add ML-like syntax where you can say something like 'typedef myinttype = int | long | IntegerClass | BigInt;' and it would automatically generate the templates for me whenever i used a myinttype in a function.) Of course, considering how long the major compiler makers took to all implement C++ in a standard fashion (the STL doesn't really even seem standard across all the platforms i use, yet), it will probably be a long time before i can safely use any C++0x features:P
I will, however, support the spread of C++0x, just becuase that will make it the first major language whose name is written in leetspeak.
Actually, my original thought upon seeing Taco's "it would be cool to point my cell phone at a CD in a store and get a review" was "yeah, it's too bad that RFID has been so universally condemned it's more or less been scrapped, or that might have been possible sometime soon".
(Of course, I am naively assuming that the RFID-lookup-get-review thing would be controlled somehow by the consumer and not Erricson Mobile (a subsidiary of Sony). In my dream, though, phones eventually begin to resemble PDAs more and more, and when I point my phone at a CD in a store it checks to see if there's some kind of wireless product-information server in the store, talks to it, and gives whatever information about that CD the store wants me to see.. but then I press some other button I've configured to do something special, and the phone blips off and talks to some kind of perl script i have off on a website somewhere, which takes the information from the RFID and queries the Web Services of various online stores and tells me what the prices for that cd are online, and what the amazon listener reviews are, so I know if i'm getting ripped off...
Of course, hoping I'd have that much control over my phone isn't unrealistic.. I'm *told* that with my Sprint/Samsung phone, there's some way I can write programs for it and install them on the phone.. I, um, just haven't figured out what that actually *is*..)
But, of course, step one of that isn't going to happen unless RFIDs, or something like them, are actually installed in all those CD cases. And we all know how well the adoption for that is going.
Either way, I think europe's really onto something with the way that cell phones there are turning from phones into little personal digital.. gadgets. I don't know what the utility is of paying for a coke machine with my phone or looking at LXG's webpage when i pass by the movie theater, but I like where they seem to be going with this:)
I think having a half-assed law would be not at all a bad thing, as long as it was too weak rather than too strong.
If it's too strong, it does damage while it's in effect. If it's too weak, though, then things are at least a little bit better than before, no damage has been done, and the bill can always be amended later. Taking as long as needed to debate the bill is of course as you said a good and necessary thing, but for my part, I think if the bill wound up being passed without the class-action option, i'd be happy. If it turned out the class-action option was needed later on, that will become clear and Congress can always amend this..
Of course, maybe i'm just naive in expecting Congress to act like anything other than a 6-year old with ADD, but this does look like the kind of thing that they could be talked into looking at again in two years time..
Slashdot Mirror
But what case does RedHat have? The way I see it, SCO has violated the GPL by claiming proprietary ownership of parts of it. Therefore, they seem so be distributing Linux without a license, and therefore violating the copyright of Mr. Torvalds and Mr. Stallman and a few hundred others.
Actually RedHat has directly or indirectly contributed a very nontrivial amount of code to linux. Alan Cox was actually a Redhat employee for a longish time, and as far as I'm aware he still is. They also for a long time provided partial financing to a decent number of open-source projects, including at least GNOME.
RedHat really is probably one of the best examples of a company to sue SCO over something like this, which is why I mentioned them. They own some linux code, and they were responsible for a decent bit more (they could maybe even file suit on behalf of Alan Cox?), and they also have a significant financial investment in linux, meaning defamation of linux hurts them directly.
Given this whole wireless thing, how difficult would it be to rig a device that just checks to see how many WozNet devices there are in the immediate area-- say, 10 feet-- and where they are?
That way paranoids or children could just scan their cars/backpacks/whatever for WozNet trackers, and if they find one present, they can pinpoint its location for removal.
I wondered the same thing about RFID tags-- i wouldn't care at all about the privacy problems if once i'd bought it i could take it home and use some handscan device to scan to see where the RFID is, then barrage it with microwaves or something until it stops responding.
However, I am pretty sure with RFID that there's no way an RFID could be designed such that it would have any choice but to broadcast its presence-- it just discharges energy collected from radio waves, so it seems like there's no way you could tag something with an RFID such that the purchaser would be unable to find the RFID just by sending out hellos on low-frequency radio, but the tagger can talk to the RFID by sending out a secret code or something. Right?
I don't know if the same applies to WozNet. They haven't really given much information on how these devices work and talk to each other. Is there info somewhere on how they communicate? Would just rigging something up to a laptop that universally identifies what all the nearby woznet devices are be easy? I don't see anything on their site that would indicate either way...
1) this is really, really evil and scary. i'm terrified by the idea of parents implanting these in their kids feet or something when they're tiny and knowing everything they do from that point forward. i'm even more terrified by the idea of corporations requiring the same of their employees, since that's something that could concievably, in an imperfect world, happen to me. i'm scared of vigilantes and criminals and government agencies secretly doing this to people they are targetting, leading to scenes like the one in the elevator in Enemy of the State.
2) But Steve Wozniak did this! Steve Wozniak is really cool and non-evil!
**head explodes**
Just remember:
"The greatest thing about vi is that you can find some version of it that runs on literally any OS that you can think of. Any OS, including EMACS."
- Convincing brain-dead and/or paranoid middle managers in random companies who don't understand enough of 'source code' or copyright law to understand this is bullshit to just toss off however much money SCO wants because it seems easier than fighting a lawsuit later. These are the only people SCO is targetting right now. It doesn't matter if 99.5% of linux users, including you, realize SCO is speaking utter nonsense; if the remaining 0.5% pay SCO $1500 each, SCO gets huge enough gobs of money to have made the entire exercise more than worthwhile. (Of course, maybe they'll use that money to buy more lawyers, and come for you and me and sue us later. Who knows. But we don't necessarily matter.)
- Continuuing to have fuel for their process of making more outlandish claims every week than the week before, so they can stay constantly in the news and their stock price will keep rising.
As to the last bit of your post, though:I will, however, point it out to my Missouri Attorney State General, for his consideration. In fact, the RICO statute comes to mind.
This is a fantastic idea. Please do so, and we should all follow your example.
I would like to try to do so, but I do not really know enough about "real law" to make a letter I am sure will be convincing. Can anyone give me recommendations for how I could write a letter to the Indiana state attourney general complaining about SCO's actions in light of whatever the RICO laws are around here?
If, on the other hand they say, "your existing license is invalid, here have another." Then they are in the right.
Then never mind licensing for a momen. It seems to me that if they are explicitly saying "if you run linux you are in violation and need to buy a license from us", that is a libellous statement.
It seems to me that the FSF, or Linus, or any major Linux vendor is now free to sue SCO, for either libel or barratry or whatever laws govern deceptive harrassment of your competitor's customers, at the least.
In fact, I'm shocked they haven't already. I cannot imagine why the FSF and/or Redhat would stand by and let this happen. It made sense to just stand and wait when everything SCO did fell under the heading of making insinuatious about Linux while discussing their IBM case, but this is something of a wholly and totally different order. This is publicly making attacks on Linux itself, and publicly stating that (for example) Redhat does not have the legal right to sell their own product, and that if you buy a product from Redhat you owe SCO money. I can't imagine that's legal, and I'm certain it's damaging to Redhat.
Why don't the linux distros just file suit, now that SCO has crossed the line, and subpeona what exactly the line numbers of these fabled bits of SCO code in the linux kernel are?
- Convince SCO to freely license the copyrights to everyone.
- Change the Linux code to no longer be in violation of the copyright.
- Stop distributing linux.
The GPL quite clearly states that if you will not provide source code to a GPLed binary you distribute, and if you will not allow someone you give GPLed source/binary to to redistribute it under the GPL, it is a GPL violation to distribute it at all. SCO can claim Linux in violation of their copyrights but they can't remove Linux from the GPL.Quite simply: is what way is this illegal, and can someone (redhat? linus?) sue SCO for this?
This seems to me that this is probably either barratry, racketeering, or libel. Mostly the third.
Going around saying "linux has stolen code" is a simple allegation relating to a lawsuit you've made. However, if you're going around sending letters to redhat customers saying they owe you money because they use redhat.. I can't imagine that being legal. They are stating in a public, commercial context that they own what is rightfully RedHat's. That seems to be deceptive trade practices, at the least, and most likely like I said some sort of libel against Redhat.
Is this the case? Does this "linux licensing" thing mean that SCO has FINALLY stepped over the line from discussing their lawsuit in public into clear-cut slander, and the FSF/redhat/SUSE/mandrake can jump on them now?
After the best buy MSN computer giveaways, and the whole thing with the pricing on the x-box, i was cynically oberving that it wasn't enough to just develop the product for free like with MSIE, Microsoft had to actually essentially pay people to continue using their product.
Now Microsoft is literally paying people to continue using their product.
Well.. it's a good solution to the chicken and egg problem, and I guess that's been MS's mindset all along. Users are something you can buy; you spend money to get users, and then once you have them locked in, you can charge whatever you like from them.
He said "the modern states rights movement". He's not talking about the idea of state's rights, he's talking about the modern version of the "movement" in favor of them, which makes a difference. States Rights have been brought up and then dropped in various ways at various times throughout america's history, and it just happens that the current thrust toward the meme of increasing state's rights has its origin with federal attempts to end racial segregation.
All of these states rights movements have of course had their basis soundly in the tenth amendment. However, in general I think it's safe to say there has not been a time in american history when states rights have been advocated in a generalized way in an organized manner-- every time a states rights advocacy group pops up, it tends to have some kind of specific agenda, for example (as in the 1860s and 1960s) protecting a racist system. Today states rights advocacy groups, if you look, seem mostly to be doing so just as a tool with which to advocate either lesser restrictions on gun possession and use (if they're on the right) or lesser restrictions on pot possession and use (if they're on the left). Of course, a lot of these people seem to be much less enthusiastic about states rights' if "states rights" seems to mean that a federal anti-abortion law would be unconstitutional (if they're on the right) or that a state that doesn't allow same-sex mairrages would be allowed to view as invalid a same-sex mairrage initiated in a state that does allow them (if they're on the left)..
Incidentally, somehow, while I hear people on tv and in the newspaper all the time talking about how the 10th amendment means that rights the federal government doesn't explictly have control over should be in control of the states, I never seem to hear any press time being given to people claiming that the 10th amendment means that rights that the government doesn't explicitly have control over should belong to the people. Funny, that.
This is an outrage! I am going to begin boycotting directtv immediately!*
.. i guess directtv probably isn't very scared by my boycott. phooey.
* except, um... the reason i don't have directtv already is because i don't own a television....
This game looks absolutely awesome.
Now, here's the problem: Will we ever actually see this game in the U.S.? Or, like its brilliant predecessor Vib Ribbon (i still want to find a copy of this, somehow, i've just no idea where to look), will this game never be released to us?
I guess there's really no way of knowing right now.
From the article:
When it was first revealed in 1984, TRON, which can be modified for use on personal computers, was hailed in Japan as a homemade software which could break the dominance of Microsoft and free Japanese computer firms from the burden of paying for the basic software.
But the dream was shattered in 1989 when the United States threatened to designate TRON as an unfair trade barrier under its Super 301 trade law when it learned of plans by the Japanese government to use the software for computers in schools.
While Washington in the end did not name TRON as a trade barrier, the Japanese government abandoned the plan and many computer firms severed ties with TRON, fearful of angering the United States, their biggest market.
I believe the article submitter's point was not that Microsoft blocked the adoption, but that the U.S. government blocked the adoption essentially on Microsoft's behalf. They may or may not have specifically wanted to benefit Microsoft, but Microsoft was the beneficiary. Their intention, one assumes, would have been "to protect U.S. desktop operating system makers", but in 1989 that meant Microsoft and, well, Microsoft.
This still sounds awfully wierd, i'm surprised the U.S. would be able to get away with something like that and I suspect the cnn.com author *may* be glossing over something, but that's not the article submitters' fault. What's Super 301? Is there any documentation of this act besides this article? I'd go look, but I have to go run to the airport to drop someone off sorry -_-
TSA officers would have to be trained to detect Jedi Mind Tricks.
TSA Officer: Could you please remove your shoes and run them through the machine.
Man in cloak, waving hand: I don't need to remove my shoes and run them through the machine.
TSA Officer: You don't need to remove your shoes and run them through the machine.
Except for a very very small block of time RIGHT before they shut down (during which time they were quite enjoyable to use and featured a wide variety of music) Napster always struck me as having shitty, uber-mainstream selection, annoying users, download speeds that seemed to almost always drop to 0.2k/s or just drop altogether once the file was half-downloaded, a total of zero users who were correctly reporting their (modem or cable?) download type, and an absolutely horrid (at least at first) macintosh implementation. Moreover, finding a full album on napster was absolutely impossible, badly encoded mp3s were everywhere, and WELL, WELL over half of all mp3s available on napster were incompletes-- but NONE were labelled as such.
I hated napster.
I spent the entire Napster period downloading mp3s, just as i had for a very very long time before Napster was ever invented-- from search.oth.net and other FTP-search based sources. Yeah, Ratio was a bitch, but at least you KNEW the server was going to stay up for a few hours at least, and you knew nobody was going to put an mp3 in their main collection if it was an incomplete.
Also, there was this convenient thing in that basically, the majority of ftp servers had a 1:5 U/D ratio set; the vast majority of ftp servers had exactly one file that i wanted to download of about 6 or 7 megabytes; and i had an mp3 of cookie monster singing "C is for Cookie, that's good enough for me" that was 1.5 megabytes. So i could zap up cookie monster, grab what i wanted, and get out quick. What was wierd, though, was that i think i started something; once i started doing this, the cookie monster mp3 started spreading quite a bit. I would sign onto mp3 servers i'd never been on before and find my cookie monster mp3 already there-- and not in the upload folder either, in the actual sorted mp3 collection. Hmmmm.. ^_^
Uh, and since i see to be admitting to illegal acts above: i downloaded mp3s solely to sample music which i was considering buying or which was not available in america, i was too young to be legally tried as an adult when the events described above happened, i never downloaded mp3s, this post is fiction posted for humorous purposes, i don't even know what an "mp3" is, and i don't own or know how to use a computer.
Oh, and slashdot claims that this is my 700th post posted with my account, though i notice a lot of my earlier ones aren't in the archive.
This guy interprets Microsoft's "improving IE any more will require changes to the operating system" as meaning that the IE codebase is so bloated and stuffed that they can't fix bugs anymore without a major rewrite.
Here's a different theory for you: Microsoft isn't fixing the IE6 css bugs because they don't care, and the "operating system" comment means that IE7 is going to try to move away from HTML and into web-based embedded windows ".Net" (or whatever) applications. Microsoft has from their perspective won the browser wars, and they are finally ready for their long-awaited "Make The Web = Microsoft" step that that whole "open standard" thing has prevented them from for so long.
Just a thought. But probably not all that paranoid.
What really interests me is, what happens now that IE has dumped the whole cross-platform-y ness thing? IE's big strength right now is that everyone targets it. IE HTML is standard HTML. What really interests me is the idea that at some point in the future, the idea of targeting Konqueror will begin to begin to look increasingly attractive. After all, there are a nontrivial amount of web designers who use the mac. I'm sure Microsoft is hoping that these web designers will be willing to switch to Windows just so that they can see what their web pages look like for 90% of the customers.
However, unless things reach the point where (say) Banks can afford to totally ignore all Macintosh and Linux customers (instead of just giving them substandard service), we may start to see the ubiquity of "optimized for IE only" disappear. Big sites like targeting only one browser. If someone comes up with a windows version of Konqueror in the near future (and preferably finds a way to make it muscle into the file browser in IE's place), that browser may well become Konqueror. Konqueror already has a pretty decent amount of mindshare in both Linux and Mac (I don't know any mac users at this point that don't use Safari over IE) and the potentiality that Konqueror could become the one browser that's actually *the same* across *all* platforms might start to look very attractive to web developers at some point-- the sort of thing that Mozilla/Gecko might have at some point fufilled if it had ever become, you know, not painful to use. (Galeon/Phoenix and similar projects may still someday allow Gecko to take on that role.)
At the least, which sounds more attractive; tell your windows base, some of which have a KHTML-based browser, "you have to have KHTML to view my site", or tell EVERYONE except those with the brand new IE8.NET2WINDOWS2007WEB "you can't use my site at all".
Well, from personal experience I can say that unsubscribing is a bitch. The customer service people have been instructed to hassle anyone who comes in saying they want to unsubscribe until they agree to stay; I know people who say they unsubscribed previously, only to find later that they were still being billed; and all the user interfaces through which you can have your account deleted are just plain user unfriendly. (I am beginning to suspect the "slit wrists" module, which is the one most of the help files direct you toward, is designed just plain not have any way to make it work at all. "Down not across" indeed, what rubbish.)
It seems to me that most people who want to quit eventually just get so frustrated by this sort of run-around that they eventually just give up and keep playing.
Apple patents everything they can imaginably think of, right down to the skins on their OSes, and they never use a single one of these patents. (OK, they bitchslap people who make themes similar to aqua, but based on trademark law, not patents.)
If they give any indication they'd ever use this patent, ever, I'll bitch and moan about it with the rest of you. But they never will, and anyway, this idea is SO obvious I can't concievably imagine them ever winning a lawsuit based on this patent even if they tried.
In the meantime, i want to see how long it takes someone to make a serviceable Virtual Desktop implementation based on faking out the fast user switching implementation. Also, I find the Register's last paragraph a bit odd:
Will Apple use its new-found intellectual property rights? Maybe not, but like its use of QuickTime patents to win a $150 million investment from Microsoft demonstrated some years back, it may now have the opportunity to do so if it ever hears the words 'cancelled' and 'Microsoft Office' in the same sentence.
Patents? Hmm, I seem to remember that particular lawsuit being over several tens of thousands of lines of actual source code that slipped directly out of the Quicktime codebase and into the Microsoft Media Player codebase, through the intermediary of a third party contractor that both Apple and Microsoft hired at different points. I could have missed something, though.
My solution was trying to be effectively to relink the client executable when necessary. I was intending for accesses of instance variables to be tracked by selectors as well so that the memory location accessed in the client executable would change when the library classes changed (which isn't the same as relinking, i guess.. maybe i'm being unclear. blah.), though now that i think about it that really would be a tremendous amount of bloat.
:)
I had forgotten about function inlining, though. That breaks my suggestion and I'm not sure how to get around it. Oh well.
There is a way to overcome the FBC problem [snip] Java meets all these requirements, so it probably uses a mechanism very similar to this.
Okay, interesting.
Anyway, I still suspect there's some way to overcome the FBC problem without scaring off the performance nazis, I'm just not sure what it would be
Wow. It's just like an M.Doughty poem when you format it like that.
The fragile base class problem is only an issue for those using closed source libraries.
It is an issue unless you have the source code to every single executable on your system, and access to that source code such that you can recompile any executable at will if a library it's based on changes. That means, basically, everyone, unless you're running Gentoo Linux and never install anything outside the package system. Even in the open source world, sometimes people like to distribute binaries.
It is an issue because the fragile base class problem is something that every API you use was limited by having to work around unless they require you to open-source your program if you link against them. Not a lot of libraries do this. This trickles down to you in the form of worsened code quality.
There is no way to get rid of the fragile basic class issue without making classes *much* slower and breaking the semantics of the C memory model.
Oh, I'm sure there's a number of ways. Here's one I thought of just sitting here. It's probably not even the best one. It's a bit complex from the implementation point of view, but certainly doable:
Delay linking. Rip off objective-c. For each compiled class, embed in the executable a table of "selectors" that lists as a string each variable and method and records its offset and public/private status. (Objective-c does something like this, except instead of calling functions it just passes the selector desired to a function called objc_msgsend(), which dynamically locates the desired hunk of code and executes it. This has a very large number of very very cool effects in terms of the dynamic abilities it gives objc, but it does impact speed, which would not be acceptable here, so a little bit more complexity is needed:) Since some people aren't comfortable with everyone knowing the names of the methods in their products, maybe there can be the option of saving the selector table as some sort of hash rather than as strings, or something.
Also embed a table for each externally used class and each externally derived class (each compiled class which has somewhere in its inheritance heirarchy a class defined outside of the current executable) that records the exact location within the compiled executable of every instance where an instance variable or method of that class is referred to, and points to whichever entry in the selector table that is being referred to at that exact spot in code.
Lastly, embed a table that for each externally linked or externally derived class that records what external libraries that class depends on or is found in, and what version the current executable was linked against.
When the program runs-- hopefully the operating system could be made to handle this-- the program quickly checks the third (library) table above against the libraries on disk and checks to see if any of the libraries on disk are differently-versioned than the version the executable is expecting. If there's a difference, it runs through the set of second (uses of external classes) tables above, and alters the executable so that the offset for each instance variable and method is accurate according to the first (selector) tables located in the external classes.
See? That neither breaks the C memory model nor has a speed impact (though i'm not convinced breaking the C memory model is altogether a bad thing). All it does is add metadata. It bloats executables, but not much more than templates or base-class 'padding' variables already do. It plays havoc with established systems for patches and virus protection, but that just means patch and virus protection systems would have to be rewritten. And the best part is, once those selector tables exist they can be used for the basis of class introspection and "does this class support this delegate method?" programming, like selectors do in Objective-C. It probably isn't the best solution, but it at least indicates solving the fragile base class problem in a static-method-binding language is *possible*, and that's what matters.
(Actually.. now that i've written this post, i just realized, isn't Java statically method-bound yet free of the fragile base class problem? How does it do that?)
In what way do you not regard std::string as a standard string class?
I've never met a single person who uses it?
That means that, while it may be a standard string class, it is, at least according to the limited data sample of "everyone i know", a failed standard.
Also, std::string largely works with the STL, which is a bit of a minefield to use becuase of the subtle incompatibilities between different STL implementations, and other C++ libraries besides the STL ones (that i have seen, at least) tend to implement their own sort of string class or just use cstrings.
So, are they ever going to do anything about the Fragile Base Class problem? I don't see anything related in those proposals.
:P
I'm tired, so forgive me if i explain this poorly, but C++ has this issue where, since object methods are really just function pointers, if you have class A that is shipped as a library or API, and class B which inherits from class A and is part of some third-party program, and the people who make class A add a private method or private variable to class A and then re-ship their libraries, every existing binary containing class B breaks becuase C++ just slaps a struct containing Bs methods and variables at the end of A, and becuase the size of A has changed the offsets have all changed.
This is horrible. This completely negates the purposes of encapsulization and information hiding, which is the entire reason you'd be writing an OO API in the first place, and leads to anyone attempting to create a C++ API doing horrible workarounds like sticking a whole bunch of dead space in the form of methods named, for example, "reserved_23" at the end of every class they make, just so that in case later they have to add a method or instance variable they'll have a little bit of room to do so without breaking everyone who's ever inherited from them.
Until they fix this, and until they reach the point where there is some kind of standard String class that everyone uses (as is, there are an untold number of String classes, one for just about every major C++ API, and so from what i've seen people rarely if ever store their strings as anything other than c-strings just because in the end, all they're going to do with their strings is pass them to other c or c++ libraries.. who expect to be given c-strings..), I will continue to consider C++ to be more or less a huge joke that can be used as a high-level oo programming language, but only by coincidence.
Also note that they still are not even considering adding any sort of real reflection into the language, nor are they considering adding a real, robust macro system despite the fact people clearly want one (or else they wouldn't be trying to metaprogram the C++ template system to be a macro system!). It would be nice to be able to typedef a single variable type that acts as a template, though.. that's a good innovation, if i'm reading that right. Anything that minimizes the contact I have with the C++ template system makes me happy. (If it were up to me, they would add ML-like syntax where you can say something like 'typedef myinttype = int | long | IntegerClass | BigInt;' and it would automatically generate the templates for me whenever i used a myinttype in a function.) Of course, considering how long the major compiler makers took to all implement C++ in a standard fashion (the STL doesn't really even seem standard across all the platforms i use, yet), it will probably be a long time before i can safely use any C++0x features
I will, however, support the spread of C++0x, just becuase that will make it the first major language whose name is written in leetspeak.
Actually, my original thought upon seeing Taco's "it would be cool to point my cell phone at a CD in a store and get a review" was "yeah, it's too bad that RFID has been so universally condemned it's more or less been scrapped, or that might have been possible sometime soon".
:)
(Of course, I am naively assuming that the RFID-lookup-get-review thing would be controlled somehow by the consumer and not Erricson Mobile (a subsidiary of Sony). In my dream, though, phones eventually begin to resemble PDAs more and more, and when I point my phone at a CD in a store it checks to see if there's some kind of wireless product-information server in the store, talks to it, and gives whatever information about that CD the store wants me to see.. but then I press some other button I've configured to do something special, and the phone blips off and talks to some kind of perl script i have off on a website somewhere, which takes the information from the RFID and queries the Web Services of various online stores and tells me what the prices for that cd are online, and what the amazon listener reviews are, so I know if i'm getting ripped off...
Of course, hoping I'd have that much control over my phone isn't unrealistic.. I'm *told* that with my Sprint/Samsung phone, there's some way I can write programs for it and install them on the phone.. I, um, just haven't figured out what that actually *is*..)
But, of course, step one of that isn't going to happen unless RFIDs, or something like them, are actually installed in all those CD cases. And we all know how well the adoption for that is going.
Either way, I think europe's really onto something with the way that cell phones there are turning from phones into little personal digital.. gadgets. I don't know what the utility is of paying for a coke machine with my phone or looking at LXG's webpage when i pass by the movie theater, but I like where they seem to be going with this
I think having a half-assed law would be not at all a bad thing, as long as it was too weak rather than too strong.
If it's too strong, it does damage while it's in effect. If it's too weak, though, then things are at least a little bit better than before, no damage has been done, and the bill can always be amended later. Taking as long as needed to debate the bill is of course as you said a good and necessary thing, but for my part, I think if the bill wound up being passed without the class-action option, i'd be happy. If it turned out the class-action option was needed later on, that will become clear and Congress can always amend this..
Of course, maybe i'm just naive in expecting Congress to act like anything other than a 6-year old with ADD, but this does look like the kind of thing that they could be talked into looking at again in two years time..
Eh, whatever.