With lots of people suggesting other forms might be just as likely to develop as an intelligent, spacefaring race as the humanoid form, perhaps a challenge is in order. Call it the "intelligent design challenge". The challenge is this:
Design the most non-humanoid life-form that is at least as well adapted to spacefaring tool use as the humanoid form, together with a plausible evolutionary path that would be favoured by natural selection. Designs should include not only the externally visible human form but should include information on the placement of organs and passages so as to assist in evaluating evolutionary viability.
The winner is the life form that is at least as well adapted to tool use and spacefaring technology as the humanoid form, has a reasonably likely evolutionary pathway, and is furthest from humanoid.
Perhaps we could prevail on Paramount to provide the prize by including the winning life form as a major guest character in the next Star Trek movie.
Not so - you just need to show that you used it and sold it to someone else BEFORE the patent application date. At that point it is not patentable.
This is not true in the US. Prior use will get you immunity from a lawsuit, but it won't invalidate the patent and others who had no such prior use will still be vulnerable. To invalidate the patent the prior used "invention" has to have been "known" in the general body or knowledge in the field, which requires that the patented mechanism be described. On the other hand widespread prior use may be relevant to a consideration of obviousness.
The first thing they will do is drop one on the site admin to get the IP addresses and registration information on the defendants.
Note that while the administrator claims she is not keeping IP address logs, odds on she is and doesn't know it. She's not likely to have coded those forums herself and the application is likely to have recorded the information in the underlying database. There are also likely to be web server logs containing this information.
One of the biggest legal problems with privacy is that there are no really good definitions of what privacy is.
That's not really true - privacy is "the right to be let alone". Essentially privacy is about other people not interfering with you (it is not about secrecy although it is commonly confused with secrecy, and violations of secrecy often will amount to or lead to breaches of privacy). Former Supreme Court Justices Brandeis and O'Douglas wrote a lot about this. Now the extent of the legal right to privacy is somewhat narrower, and varies to a large degree depending on where you are.
IANAL, but honestly, I can't see how this could move forward unless the identities are revealed. How else are you going to serve a summons to "LawGuy69" and "LegallyBlonde11111one"?
Once you have filed a case in a superior court you can drop subpoenas on anybody who is likely to have information identifying (even unnamed) defendants. The first thing they will do is drop one on the site admin to get the IP addresses and registration information on the defendants. Then they'll drop some on the ISPs indicated by the IP addresses. Eventually they are likely to catch up with the anonymous dimwits.
I also have it on good authority that they are terrible students who neglect their studies, sleep around, take drugs and will no doubt become awful lawyers not fit to pass the bar.
You jest, but the fact that they have named the administrator of the site as a defendant suggests they would be awful lawyers. Unless there is something more to the case they are in line for a 47 USC 230 smackdown against that defendant.
What's even worse, is the EULA on an actual victrola. Yes.. I do actually own an RCA victrola and the EULA on it says that you can only play RCA records on it.
Note that the license on the vinyl disk mentioned in TFA is relying on patent law, not copyright law. Presumably the license on your device is doing the same. Since the patents on these items have long since expired, you do not need to rely on the license to use the product. As long as you are not performing acts comprised in the copyright, such as making copies of the music or playing ("performing") them to "the public", you can do whatever you like with the record.
So what if Shuttleworth says he won't allow Canonical to parttake of the Microsoft plan. Microsoft will just buy him out. It's not as if Shuttleworth has a history of taking the moral high ground when an evil competitor comes offering cash for his equity.
Visual Studio is less a "deceptive comfort", as the author chooses to put it, and more of a what a modern, productive, and efficient IDE *should* be
Curiously, in my team the developers who work without an IDE are significantly more productive, and produce code of much higher quality, than those who use Visual Studio.
Imagine you have multipld different changes. Now imagine you have to backout one particular change without affecting any others. That's where changesets come in.
I use both git and Subversion, with branched development in both. I don't see how either is any better than the other at the task you describe.
A user can't modify his local checkout, add files, move files, do stuff, then do a "svn diff" and mail the result to a maintainer who then would "svn patch" his repository and commit the changes, since what "svn diff" produces isn't a complete set of changes, but only a small subset of the changes and there isn't a "svn patch" to begin with.
The problem is, is that there is no one true answer to those questions. What does that newbie want to do, what does he expect from his system?
True, however provided the user's application needs can be served by Linux (ruling out a diminishing number of gains as WINE improves and some obscure domain-specific uses), and provided the somebody knowledgable performs the installation (which is what happens with most end-user configurations of Windows) then at the moment any Linux edition with KDE provides a user experience that is actually better than the user experience under any version of Windows, including (or perhaps especially) Vista. We've been in this frame of mind that "Linux has to catch up with the Windows user experience" so long now it's become habit. The fact is, Linux with KDE passed the Windows user experience some time in the last couple of years. Now it's all about installation and applications.
The question isn't whether water exists, but either or not it is in the free-flowing liquid form.
Still the chances of a planet with a 4 billion year history having had, at some stage, temperatures and pressures suitable for liquid water, are not so remote that evidence of this having happened should be particularly startling.
I don't get why people keep being surprised that there's water on other planets. I would be surprised if there wasn't. With hydrogen and oxygen being two of the three most common elements in the universe with only helium in the middle, you have a simple compound made up of the two most abundant reactive elements in the universe. Given that hydrogen is so abundant, oxygen stands a good chance of finding hydrogen to bond with, and if it finds hydrogen it doesn't take much to get them to bond.
Earth really isn't as special as people seem to want to make it out to be.
If MS has knowledge that their patents are being violated, yet refuses to tell the violators exactly what patents they are violating and how, aren't the patent claims automatically nullified
Not so much "nullified" as unenforceable. It still exists, the law recognises it still exists, it's just that the court will tell them they are not allowed to seek the assistance of the court to enforce it.
...(Microsoft SVP and general counsel) Smith was having Microsoft's lawyers figure out how many of its patents were being infringed by free and open-source software. Gutierrez refuses to identify specific patents or explain how they're being infringed, lest FOSS advocates start filing challenges to them... But he does break down the total number allegedly violated - 235 - into categories. He says that the Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68.
Apparently Smith didn't pay much attention in his equity classes in law school (not surprising since most people find equity boring and difficult - I on the other hand topped my year so:-P to Smith). This behaviour is going to give rise to a proprietary estoppel against Microsoft, and he has now publicly stated the hardest things a defendant would have to prove to get the estoppel. This is just about rule #1 of equity - if you know somebody is violating your property rights, and you let them expend time, effort and resources building something in violation of those rights without them having knowledge of the breach of your rights, the courts will not let you enforce your rights against those people or anybody who claims through them.
It would be a different matter if Microsoft had no knowledge of the breach, but having investigated it and found the breach, if they don't tell the projects affected what the alleged breach is in fairly short order, they are not going to be able to enforce their rights at all.
Even if he did not pay a lot of attention in his equity classes it seems unlikely Smith would not have some awareness of this. This suggests to me that Microsoft have no intention whatsoever of using the patents to pursue open source projects or even users who are building businesses based around open source products. If they did intend to do this, they would give specific notice. This leaves them with only intimidation as a strategy for exploiting their patents against open source.
It is a shame we have no examples of another company that turned to using unspecified intellectual property violations as an intimidation strategy against open source. Such an example might give us an indication of the ultimate result.
Re:Obligatory Planet of the Apes
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
Politicians have been around a lot longer than that.
No no, this is about replacing the gene that expresses chimpanzee intelligence with the one expressing human intelligence so that chimpanzees are more intelligent. In Bush they did exactly the opposite.
Third, disclosure only requires enough information to enable the claims. Essentially, enough disclosure to tell the fictional person having ordinary skill in the art the steps to get from A to B.
Although in practice patents are rarely disclosed in a way sufficient to duplicate the original invention - they are disclosed in a manner so obfuscated that it is usually far easier to duplicate the invention inadvertently starting with the market need than to do so deliberately based on the patent description.
Yet copyright exists only for items that are published.
This is not correct. Copyright can subsist in unpublished works. The location of first publication (if any) may affect the nature of the protection, but not in ways most people would care about.
What about backwards engineering a software product and implementing the same (patented) algorithms via different language? Still a copyright violation, or no?
If it is a literal translation of the code into a different language, then yes, it's a copyright violation. On the other hand if the original code is an implementation of a known mathematical algorithm, and in the process of reverse engineering you derive that original algorithm and the new implementation only uses the algorithm rather than the code, then there's no copying of the expression in the code and so no violation.
Slashdot Mirror
We've had 132-column terminals for a long time
I'm still coding on an Apple II without an 80 column card you insensitive clod.
With lots of people suggesting other forms might be just as likely to develop as an intelligent, spacefaring race as the humanoid form, perhaps a challenge is in order. Call it the "intelligent design challenge". The challenge is this:
Design the most non-humanoid life-form that is at least as well adapted to spacefaring tool use as the humanoid form, together with a plausible evolutionary path that would be favoured by natural selection. Designs should include not only the externally visible human form but should include information on the placement of organs and passages so as to assist in evaluating evolutionary viability.
The winner is the life form that is at least as well adapted to tool use and spacefaring technology as the humanoid form, has a reasonably likely evolutionary pathway, and is furthest from humanoid.
Perhaps we could prevail on Paramount to provide the prize by including the winning life form as a major guest character in the next Star Trek movie.
Not so - you just need to show that you used it and sold it to someone else BEFORE the patent application date. At that point it is not patentable.
This is not true in the US. Prior use will get you immunity from a lawsuit, but it won't invalidate the patent and others who had no such prior use will still be vulnerable. To invalidate the patent the prior used "invention" has to have been "known" in the general body or knowledge in the field, which requires that the patented mechanism be described. On the other hand widespread prior use may be relevant to a consideration of obviousness.
The first thing they will do is drop one on the site admin to get the IP addresses and registration information on the defendants.
Note that while the administrator claims she is not keeping IP address logs, odds on she is and doesn't know it. She's not likely to have coded those forums herself and the application is likely to have recorded the information in the underlying database. There are also likely to be web server logs containing this information.
One of the biggest legal problems with privacy is that there are no really good definitions of what privacy is.
That's not really true - privacy is "the right to be let alone". Essentially privacy is about other people not interfering with you (it is not about secrecy although it is commonly confused with secrecy, and violations of secrecy often will amount to or lead to breaches of privacy). Former Supreme Court Justices Brandeis and O'Douglas wrote a lot about this. Now the extent of the legal right to privacy is somewhat narrower, and varies to a large degree depending on where you are.
IANAL, but honestly, I can't see how this could move forward unless the identities are revealed. How else are you going to serve a summons to "LawGuy69" and "LegallyBlonde11111one"?
Once you have filed a case in a superior court you can drop subpoenas on anybody who is likely to have information identifying (even unnamed) defendants. The first thing they will do is drop one on the site admin to get the IP addresses and registration information on the defendants. Then they'll drop some on the ISPs indicated by the IP addresses. Eventually they are likely to catch up with the anonymous dimwits.
I also have it on good authority that they are terrible students who neglect their studies, sleep around, take drugs and will no doubt become awful lawyers not fit to pass the bar.
You jest, but the fact that they have named the administrator of the site as a defendant suggests they would be awful lawyers. Unless there is something more to the case they are in line for a 47 USC 230 smackdown against that defendant.
What's even worse, is the EULA on an actual victrola. Yes.. I do actually own an RCA victrola and the EULA on it says that you can only play RCA records on it.
Note that the license on the vinyl disk mentioned in TFA is relying on patent law, not copyright law. Presumably the license on your device is doing the same. Since the patents on these items have long since expired, you do not need to rely on the license to use the product. As long as you are not performing acts comprised in the copyright, such as making copies of the music or playing ("performing") them to "the public", you can do whatever you like with the record.
So what if Shuttleworth says he won't allow Canonical to parttake of the Microsoft plan. Microsoft will just buy him out. It's not as if Shuttleworth has a history of taking the moral high ground when an evil competitor comes offering cash for his equity.
I think the moral of this story is that archiving anything, even if it seems durable
Nah, their real problem is that they chose the wrong tool for the job. From TFA:
Obviously the vault should have been made out of Tupperware
Its what we in the programming field would call the Data Segment.
Overlapping, independent sequences? It's quite obviously spaghetti code.
Visual Studio is less a "deceptive comfort", as the author chooses to put it, and more of a what a modern, productive, and efficient IDE *should* be
Curiously, in my team the developers who work without an IDE are significantly more productive, and produce code of much higher quality, than those who use Visual Studio.
Imagine you have multipld different changes. Now imagine you have to backout one particular change without affecting any others. That's where changesets come in.
I use both git and Subversion, with branched development in both. I don't see how either is any better than the other at the task you describe.
A user can't modify his local checkout, add files, move files, do stuff, then do a "svn diff" and mail the result to a maintainer who then would "svn patch" his repository and commit the changes, since what "svn diff" produces isn't a complete set of changes, but only a small subset of the changes and there isn't a "svn patch" to begin with.
If you use SVK on top of svn you can do this.
Now, my Volvo uses chipped keys (2002 V70) but the keys are also mechanically complex. It costs $1000 more to insure annually than the Mercedes.
That's obviously based on empirical evidence that people in Volvos are crap drivers :-)
The problem is, is that there is no one true answer to those questions. What does that newbie want to do, what does he expect from his system?
True, however provided the user's application needs can be served by Linux (ruling out a diminishing number of gains as WINE improves and some obscure domain-specific uses), and provided the somebody knowledgable performs the installation (which is what happens with most end-user configurations of Windows) then at the moment any Linux edition with KDE provides a user experience that is actually better than the user experience under any version of Windows, including (or perhaps especially) Vista. We've been in this frame of mind that "Linux has to catch up with the Windows user experience" so long now it's become habit. The fact is, Linux with KDE passed the Windows user experience some time in the last couple of years. Now it's all about installation and applications.
This is about large quanities of liquid water existing for extended periods of time on the martian surface.
Again I find nothing even remotely surprising in this.
The question isn't whether water exists, but either or not it is in the free-flowing liquid form.
Still the chances of a planet with a 4 billion year history having had, at some stage, temperatures and pressures suitable for liquid water, are not so remote that evidence of this having happened should be particularly startling.
I don't get why people keep being surprised that there's water on other planets. I would be surprised if there wasn't. With hydrogen and oxygen being two of the three most common elements in the universe with only helium in the middle, you have a simple compound made up of the two most abundant reactive elements in the universe. Given that hydrogen is so abundant, oxygen stands a good chance of finding hydrogen to bond with, and if it finds hydrogen it doesn't take much to get them to bond. Earth really isn't as special as people seem to want to make it out to be.
If MS has knowledge that their patents are being violated, yet refuses to tell the violators exactly what patents they are violating and how, aren't the patent claims automatically nullified
Not so much "nullified" as unenforceable. It still exists, the law recognises it still exists, it's just that the court will tell them they are not allowed to seek the assistance of the court to enforce it.
Apparently Smith didn't pay much attention in his equity classes in law school (not surprising since most people find equity boring and difficult - I on the other hand topped my year so :-P to Smith). This behaviour is going to give rise to a proprietary estoppel against Microsoft, and he has now publicly stated the hardest things a defendant would have to prove to get the estoppel. This is just about rule #1 of equity - if you know somebody is violating your property rights, and you let them expend time, effort and resources building something in violation of those rights without them having knowledge of the breach of your rights, the courts will not let you enforce your rights against those people or anybody who claims through them.
It would be a different matter if Microsoft had no knowledge of the breach, but having investigated it and found the breach, if they don't tell the projects affected what the alleged breach is in fairly short order, they are not going to be able to enforce their rights at all.
Even if he did not pay a lot of attention in his equity classes it seems unlikely Smith would not have some awareness of this. This suggests to me that Microsoft have no intention whatsoever of using the patents to pursue open source projects or even users who are building businesses based around open source products. If they did intend to do this, they would give specific notice. This leaves them with only intimidation as a strategy for exploiting their patents against open source.
It is a shame we have no examples of another company that turned to using unspecified intellectual property violations as an intimidation strategy against open source. Such an example might give us an indication of the ultimate result.
Politicians have been around a lot longer than that.
No no, this is about replacing the gene that expresses chimpanzee intelligence with the one expressing human intelligence so that chimpanzees are more intelligent. In Bush they did exactly the opposite.
Third, disclosure only requires enough information to enable the claims. Essentially, enough disclosure to tell the fictional person having ordinary skill in the art the steps to get from A to B.
Although in practice patents are rarely disclosed in a way sufficient to duplicate the original invention - they are disclosed in a manner so obfuscated that it is usually far easier to duplicate the invention inadvertently starting with the market need than to do so deliberately based on the patent description.
Yet copyright exists only for items that are published.
This is not correct. Copyright can subsist in unpublished works. The location of first publication (if any) may affect the nature of the protection, but not in ways most people would care about.
What about backwards engineering a software product and implementing the same (patented) algorithms via different language? Still a copyright violation, or no?
If it is a literal translation of the code into a different language, then yes, it's a copyright violation. On the other hand if the original code is an implementation of a known mathematical algorithm, and in the process of reverse engineering you derive that original algorithm and the new implementation only uses the algorithm rather than the code, then there's no copying of the expression in the code and so no violation.