Wow... am I glad I'm not at the mercy of Microsoft anymore. I'm sure there used to be both upgrade and fresh purchase options for operating systems in their open license programs, but they seem to have eliminated all evidence of this. It seems to still be possible to get server operating systems as fresh installation licenses in the volume programs, but I guess for the desktop the expect to own you from day 1.
But I do hate it for the gamers, man. What are they going to do?
Install Wine. It's made great strides in D3D support lately so that a hell of a lot of advanced games run out of the box. These days I'm more surprised when it doesn't work than when it does.
according to Microsoft, all volume license agreements for Windows are upgrade only
Where did you get that from? It certainly hasn't been true historically - if somebody at Microsoft is saying that now then I suspect they're an ignorant twit (which I find easy to believe) or a liar (which I find equally easy to believe).
I've had some bad experiences with "dictatorial" projects; you typically have to go through a lot of red tape in order to get simple fixes in.
This is not so much a problem with the project being dictatorial as with the style of dictatorship and the dictator(s). A dictator who does not trust others at all will have a project that turns off new developers and ends up with much slower progress than a dictator who gathers more trusted people and seeks to nurture new developers.
Back in the 80s and early 90s open source project managers used to be highly responsive, and the irony is they were often using more primitive tools at the time. This was something that came from attitude. We were all contributors working towards common - or at least compatible - goals. Lack of responsiveness comes from an attitude that says only the project manager is providing a service, ignoring the fact that somebody offering a patch is also providing a service.
You can still find projects with the older - cooperative - attitude. My recommendation is that if the project you are trying to contribute to does not appreciate you, you find one that does. You should not have to put up with being treated like crap when you are trying to help a project out.
Where project dictatorship becomes a problem, it is because of a failure in the dictatorial model used or in its application - fundamentally it comes down to project management failures. The biggest project management failures are these:
The absolute biggest failure is when those managing the project allow patches to go without application and without any response. Quite frankly a project manager who allows this to happen regularly should be shot, or at least replaced in short order. This never seemed to happen in the 80s and we should not accept it now.
Second on my list of project management failures is when the project has strict requirements for patches that are not clearly documented. Take a look at the original GNU coding standards and patch submission standards - these spelled out exactly what you needed to do to get the patch accepted. If the dictators respond to a patch pointing out failure to comply with a rule (or drop it due to such failure) and they cannot point to the rule in the project's patch submission instructions, then they have failed to plan to maximise the value of labour going into the project. They are valuing the time of other contributors at nothing instead of looking at the right way to allocate their own efforts to support the efforts of contributors to get the highest output volume.
Third on my list of OSS project management failures is when the dictator fails to recognise or adequately comprehend the legitimate existence of different audiences for their product. Such a dictator will reject features because they either do not see the need for them for their own uses, or they do not understand how the feature or its implementation relates to the different audience. Frankly it's idiotic for a dictator with no experience in and understanding of an alternative use domain to tell a developer who is experienced in that use domain what features they need.
Fourth is not so much a project management failure as a failure of attitude. Some communities become insular and start to treat contributions from outsiders as being unworthy. If you are unwilling to treat new contributors as being as worthy as long term contributors, then you will have fewer new contributors willing to put in the time to become long term contributors.
There are others, but these would probably cover 95% of cases where OSS project management is being conducted in a way that hurts the progress of the project.
Most of the patents we see today are stupid... They're granted because the examiners have -zero- clue what they're doing in most case
Which raises an interesting possibility and maybe a US lawyer can indicate if it's ever been tried or is for some reason infeasible. If the patent examiner had no basis on which to conclude the patent is valid, it may be open to an administrative law challenge setting aside the decision of the examiner in granting the patent as ultra vires (beyond powers) on one of several very pedestrian rules of administrative law. It wouldn't even be necessary to show the decision was wrong to do this - only that the decision of the patent examiner flawed for reasons such as taking into account irrelevant considerations, failure to take into account relevant considerations, did not have any rational basis, or was so unreasonable that no person acting reasonably would have granted the patent in such circumstances. Unless these administrative law rules have been overridden by statute somewhere, then if patent examiners are really that clueless about the patents they are examining almost every patent granted in recent years could be blown away by applications for certiorari against the original decision to grant the patent and the patentee would have to go back to the application process.
Lawyers can be disbarred for criminal conduct, but they're bound by law to represent their clients to the best of their ability.
Certainly outside the US lawyers can be sanctioned for conducting a case that had no real prospect of success. In New South Wales they even have to swear - on penalty for perjury - on filing a case that the case has a real prospect of success. The right to representation does not go as far as allowing people to use lawyers to harass people in court in cases entirely without merit.
What is wrong with using nVidia's drivers for nVidia's cards?
Everything. They're poor quality. Prior to 1.0-8774 they were embarrassingly poor and would often crash X. Now they're just unacceptably poor. If you run multiple X servers on one device the driver will often leave the video in an unusable state from which there is no apparent way to recover. If we had source code we could fix these sorts of problems, but we don't so we can't.
Having the system become unusable because of a bug in the nVidia drivers is a regular occurrence for me. I can't remember the last time the system became unusable because of a bug elsewhere in the system.
What does "notorious proprietary" mean?
Notorious for their bugs, proprietary because you can't look at the source code. The latter leads to the former, because if the source were open those of us who have the skills could diagnose and fix the problems in the environments where they occur. As it is, try reporting the problems to nVidia and if you're lucky enough to get a response it's most likely to be along the lines of "works here".
Do you have a caselaw reference to support your argument
First principles applicable to copyright in general apply here - there is nothing that is unique to photography. However you could take a look at Rogers v. Koons 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992) to see the way photography is protected by copyright - most notably that it does not require verbatim copying of the original image to infringe.
IAAL - it is correct. If he used the original photo as the basis for his photo which is substantially the same, even if he reproduced it by means other than directly imaging the original photo, that is legally copying. Literal imaging is one way to copy, but not the only way.
But just because somebody photographs something doesn't give them the right to keep others from taking an identical photograph.
No, as long as the second photographer hasn't copied they can take an identical photo, but if you have seen the original photo and then arranged subject matter to look like the original, you have copied.
On the other hand you may run into a situation where what is copied is not a "substantial part" of the original. For instance, when imaging a natural landscape, the photographer has not arranged any subject matter and a person who takes an identical photo would not have copied a "substantial" (having substance) part of the original work. Or the original photograph might have been a portrait of a person, the fact that the person is in the photo is not in itself a "substantial" part and another person can take a portrait, but they cannot ask the person to wear the same clothing and adopt the same position they had in the original or there will be copying of a substantial part. Where what is copied is not a substantial part it will not breach copyright, but this issue is not what the OP was asking about with the example.
A photographer buys a Hamburger at a popular fast-food chain. Takes it home and opens it up and takes a photograph of it.
OK, that photographer has copyright in the image
A 2nd photographer see this photo (on the 1st photographers website) takes a hamburger from the same food-chain, and shoots a drastically similar photograph (the pickle is on the other side).
There has been actual copying and this is a breach of the first photographer's copyright.
A 3rd photographer cooked his own hamburger, and decided to take a photo of it, and has never seen photographer 1 or 2's photos, and his photo turns out to be almost the exact same image of the 1st photographer.
This is not a breach of copyright since there was no copying. Proving that there was no copying may be difficult though. When there's a design patent, the equivalent of this 3rd photographer's actions would be illegal for violating the patent, even though in no possible objective sense could you suggest the 3rd photographer has done something wrong.
Design patents are evil like any other patent - the very concept of exclusivity even when somebody else independently invents the same thing amounts to perpetrating an injustice. It makes conduct illegal when the person engaging in that conduct has no knowledge of the circumstances making it illegal. Such laws can only be justified where independent invention is very unlikely and proving copying very difficult - factors which sadly do not apply for most patents.
Fortunately design patents have much shorter duration than invention patents./p>
Sorry you got moderated as Troll (It seems the moderators are very thin-skinned of late). Anyway...
Paying twice as much for the same product you enjoyed many years ago
It's more than twice as much, but I'm not sure even at that rate that they're making much more profit per square foot than they'd make on a regular cinema. It's more a case of recognising that there's more than one market and catering differently for the different markets.
Please explain, what is this gold class? Never seen that here in NY.
It's a smaller cinema with 4 rows each with 6 seats arranged in pairs. The seats are much larger, more comfortable, and include recliners, footrests and a small table in the middle of each pair. They are arranged such that your view of the screen cannot be blocked by a tall person with big hair in the front, and you still have a good view in the back. They serve food and drinks (including alcohol) inside the cinema (you order before you go in and they bring it to you), and there are foods they serve in gold class they don't serve in the candy bar.
But in reality? You pay MORE for your movies?
Yep. Like I said, it's priced out of range of the annoying younger people who like to spoil movies.
Save that money and buy yourself a decent home theater setup.
This is not so effective for things not yet on DVD.
I love paying $9 per ticket, $20 for a drink and popcorn, sit in a theater with some jackass laughing with his friends the entire time, some baby crying, the guy in front of me who takes his shoes off, getting my sit back kicked non-stop...
This is why I only ever see movies in gold class unless I'm taking the kids. In gold class you don't get any kids because everybody has to be old enough to legally drink alcohol, you don't get noisy chatter among a group of friends since it's priced out of range for the sort of people that do that, you won't get the feet in the back of your seat unless the person behind you is at about 12 feet tall since the seats are spaced far enough apart that this can't happen.
The best managers are those that are technically competent but trust their team to make the correct judgements without the managers input.
As a techie manager, I would go even further. Unless one of your staff is about to make a monumental blunder, you should even allow them to make incorrect judgements so they can learn from them.
The worst are managers that are technically competent but want to make every decision for the team.
If your team members are all really junior (just out of university or not even graduated, for instance), such micromanagement might be a good idea, and the staff might even prefer it. Of course if they are micromanaged that much they won't be exercising new skills and get the chance to improve.
The patent ensures the inventor discloses the algorithm being protected. If you rely only on copyright, you won't get access to the algorithm for nearly 100 years! Patents, OTOH, force the inventor to disclose the algorithm in exchange for protection.
You vastly overstate the difficulty of deriving the algorithms that appear in software patents. Once particular requirements are established, techniques that actually have value will be derived by the person implementing the code fairly quickly, and with so much open source software out there, there are not many algorithms around which, by reason of cost of research, are not available to the public.
While you suggest that people "won't get access to the algorithm for nearly 100 years", and so a 15 year term improves access to the algorithm, the truth is that given the same requirements a patented algorithm is likely to be independently re-implemented hundreds, thousands, or even millions of times before the 15 year term expires.
Business method patents (which are effectively a sub-category of software patent) are even worse than this.
ideas on their own cannot be patented. Only implementations can be.
Unfortunately this is not true - and that's the whole problem. These days patents - especially software patents - seek to eliminate anybody from achieving the same goal as the patent holder. You don't patent the implementation of the telephone, the first claim in your application is on the idea of a two way voice communication device. Then you claim (2) "the device in claim 1 wherein the voice is transmitted by modulated electrical signal over a wire; (3) the device in claim 1 wherein the voice is transmitted by modulated electromagnetic waves; (4) the device in claim 3 wherein the electromagnetic waves are radio waves; (5) the device in claim 3 wherein the electromagnetic waves are microwaves; (6) the device in claim 3 wherein the electromagnetic waves are visible light;..."
If you look at a patent they always start with a very generic claim describing the idea as a whole, and if you implement something that matches that idea, you infringe. The patents then go on to claim each detail of the implementation and each combination of sets of details in the implementation, the idea being that if the first claim is knocked out one of the others might be upheld. The full implementation normally comes right at the end of the list of claims.
Companies are going off and trying to patent every idea they can find, not in order to protect their own investment which is usually negligible and almost always entirely irrelevant to the first claim, but in order to shut down or extort money from anybody else who need to use the idea to get something done.
How does this work in these games that someone is ever allowed to inject a code that can run on someone elses session?
Second Life users are able to create objects using a fairly complete scripting language. The scripts run on the servers, and an object can create more objects when somebody interacts with it. It "runs" in other peoples' sessions not because it's running on their system but because they're all viewing the same MMORPG environment.
And to preempt your inevitable comment, yes, it is very lame. I can't believe people are paying ongoing fees (in US dollars) to hold land in this thing.
Some people seriously need to get a grip. This is all ones and zeroes - comparisons with "martial law" are just silly. Second Life needs to be renamed to give its users a much needed message - namely, Get A Life
Precedents only cover the actual jurisdiction of the issuing court.
More to the point, precedents only cover questions of law - it does not cover questions of fact. As between Buffalo and the CSIRO the answers to the questions of fact are set in stone (subject to any appeal) not because of precedent, but because of the principles of res judicata and issue estoppel. As between anybody else (who is not claiming some rights through Buffalo) and the CSIRO, there is nothing to prevent a court from reaching entirely opposite conclusions on the facts, since unlike precedent these two principles only apply between the parties to the original case. A court that reaches different conclusions on the facts may well find the patent is invalid (but note that I have not looked at the patent and have no idea what degree of validity it might have).
From the same dictionary that lists y'all and you-all. It might be in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you won't seem like an uneducated hick if you use it.
I would never trust anything on Wikipedia to be right and would never cite it as a source in a paper
I would never cite it (or link to it) for any purpose at all. Lately a lot of people on/. have been linking to the Wikipedia article on some point to make their argument, like they are some kind of genius for knowing Wikipedia might have something to say about a point. If I want to look at Wikipedia I know where to find it, I don't need people pointing out the link. If you have a better link, produce that. Create links that go to the original sources. Not only are the original sources more useful, but a good link to an original source helps push its page rank up. Don't waste our time with Wikipedia links.
IAAL, in New South Wales (where this happened), but TINLA
The directions about acceptable use do not need to constitute a contract - all they need to do is constitute a reasonable and lawful order given to an employee. Where an employee refuses to follow a reasonable and lawful order, they can be dismissed without notice - this is basic employment law. Of course any employee can be dismissed with notice for any reason or no reason at all. No EULA or contract issues here, move along.
Where the employer ran into problems is with the unfair dismissal rules, which apply in Australia to all employees earning less than around $100,000 per year other than employees of small companies (less than 100 people). These laws require that the employer be fair to the employee when deciding to terminate - that is, that the termination not be harsh, unjust or unreasonable. This means that things like you don't terminate: for breaches of rules not adequately notified; for inadvertent failures unless chronic and the employee has been given notice of their shortcomings and opportunities to improve; for alleged conduct without giving the employee an opportunity to explain themselves; or as in this case, for breaches of rules where there is no real expectation that the rule breached will be enforced.
The public generally has a simpler understanding of the rules than that, and of course the real rules are much more complex and nuanced. However it wouldn't matter if the rules had been tattooed to the employee's forehead and signed in blood - if the company had created an expectation that they wouldn't be enforced, then the court would have found the dismissal for breaches of those rules to be unfair. The manner in which the rules are notified merely affects what would have to happen to create an expectation that the rules would or would not be enforced.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... am I glad I'm not at the mercy of Microsoft anymore. I'm sure there used to be both upgrade and fresh purchase options for operating systems in their open license programs, but they seem to have eliminated all evidence of this. It seems to still be possible to get server operating systems as fresh installation licenses in the volume programs, but I guess for the desktop the expect to own you from day 1.
But I do hate it for the gamers, man. What are they going to do?
Install Wine. It's made great strides in D3D support lately so that a hell of a lot of advanced games run out of the box. These days I'm more surprised when it doesn't work than when it does.
genuine /dnyun/ -adjective
1. possessing the claimed or attributed character 2. descended from the original stock; pure in breed:
I always knew windows was a bastard of an operating system.
according to Microsoft, all volume license agreements for Windows are upgrade only
Where did you get that from? It certainly hasn't been true historically - if somebody at Microsoft is saying that now then I suspect they're an ignorant twit (which I find easy to believe) or a liar (which I find equally easy to believe).
I've had some bad experiences with "dictatorial" projects; you typically have to go through a lot of red tape in order to get simple fixes in.
This is not so much a problem with the project being dictatorial as with the style of dictatorship and the dictator(s). A dictator who does not trust others at all will have a project that turns off new developers and ends up with much slower progress than a dictator who gathers more trusted people and seeks to nurture new developers.
Back in the 80s and early 90s open source project managers used to be highly responsive, and the irony is they were often using more primitive tools at the time. This was something that came from attitude. We were all contributors working towards common - or at least compatible - goals. Lack of responsiveness comes from an attitude that says only the project manager is providing a service, ignoring the fact that somebody offering a patch is also providing a service.
You can still find projects with the older - cooperative - attitude. My recommendation is that if the project you are trying to contribute to does not appreciate you, you find one that does. You should not have to put up with being treated like crap when you are trying to help a project out.
Where project dictatorship becomes a problem, it is because of a failure in the dictatorial model used or in its application - fundamentally it comes down to project management failures. The biggest project management failures are these:
There are others, but these would probably cover 95% of cases where OSS project management is being conducted in a way that hurts the progress of the project.
Most of the patents we see today are stupid... They're granted because the examiners have -zero- clue what they're doing in most case
Which raises an interesting possibility and maybe a US lawyer can indicate if it's ever been tried or is for some reason infeasible. If the patent examiner had no basis on which to conclude the patent is valid, it may be open to an administrative law challenge setting aside the decision of the examiner in granting the patent as ultra vires (beyond powers) on one of several very pedestrian rules of administrative law. It wouldn't even be necessary to show the decision was wrong to do this - only that the decision of the patent examiner flawed for reasons such as taking into account irrelevant considerations, failure to take into account relevant considerations, did not have any rational basis, or was so unreasonable that no person acting reasonably would have granted the patent in such circumstances. Unless these administrative law rules have been overridden by statute somewhere, then if patent examiners are really that clueless about the patents they are examining almost every patent granted in recent years could be blown away by applications for certiorari against the original decision to grant the patent and the patentee would have to go back to the application process.
Lawyers can be disbarred for criminal conduct, but they're bound by law to represent their clients to the best of their ability.
Certainly outside the US lawyers can be sanctioned for conducting a case that had no real prospect of success. In New South Wales they even have to swear - on penalty for perjury - on filing a case that the case has a real prospect of success. The right to representation does not go as far as allowing people to use lawyers to harass people in court in cases entirely without merit.
What is wrong with using nVidia's drivers for nVidia's cards?
Everything. They're poor quality. Prior to 1.0-8774 they were embarrassingly poor and would often crash X. Now they're just unacceptably poor. If you run multiple X servers on one device the driver will often leave the video in an unusable state from which there is no apparent way to recover. If we had source code we could fix these sorts of problems, but we don't so we can't.
Having the system become unusable because of a bug in the nVidia drivers is a regular occurrence for me. I can't remember the last time the system became unusable because of a bug elsewhere in the system.
What does "notorious proprietary" mean?
Notorious for their bugs, proprietary because you can't look at the source code. The latter leads to the former, because if the source were open those of us who have the skills could diagnose and fix the problems in the environments where they occur. As it is, try reporting the problems to nVidia and if you're lucky enough to get a response it's most likely to be along the lines of "works here".
Do you have a caselaw reference to support your argument
First principles applicable to copyright in general apply here - there is nothing that is unique to photography. However you could take a look at Rogers v. Koons 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992) to see the way photography is protected by copyright - most notably that it does not require verbatim copying of the original image to infringe.
Actually, this isn't correct.
IAAL - it is correct. If he used the original photo as the basis for his photo which is substantially the same, even if he reproduced it by means other than directly imaging the original photo, that is legally copying. Literal imaging is one way to copy, but not the only way.
But just because somebody photographs something doesn't give them the right to keep others from taking an identical photograph.
No, as long as the second photographer hasn't copied they can take an identical photo, but if you have seen the original photo and then arranged subject matter to look like the original, you have copied.
On the other hand you may run into a situation where what is copied is not a "substantial part" of the original. For instance, when imaging a natural landscape, the photographer has not arranged any subject matter and a person who takes an identical photo would not have copied a "substantial" (having substance) part of the original work. Or the original photograph might have been a portrait of a person, the fact that the person is in the photo is not in itself a "substantial" part and another person can take a portrait, but they cannot ask the person to wear the same clothing and adopt the same position they had in the original or there will be copying of a substantial part. Where what is copied is not a substantial part it will not breach copyright, but this issue is not what the OP was asking about with the example.
A photographer buys a Hamburger at a popular fast-food chain. Takes it home and opens it up and takes a photograph of it.
OK, that photographer has copyright in the image
A 2nd photographer see this photo (on the 1st photographers website) takes a hamburger from the same food-chain, and shoots a drastically similar photograph (the pickle is on the other side).
There has been actual copying and this is a breach of the first photographer's copyright.
A 3rd photographer cooked his own hamburger, and decided to take a photo of it, and has never seen photographer 1 or 2's photos, and his photo turns out to be almost the exact same image of the 1st photographer.
This is not a breach of copyright since there was no copying. Proving that there was no copying may be difficult though. When there's a design patent, the equivalent of this 3rd photographer's actions would be illegal for violating the patent, even though in no possible objective sense could you suggest the 3rd photographer has done something wrong.
Design patents are evil like any other patent - the very concept of exclusivity even when somebody else independently invents the same thing amounts to perpetrating an injustice. It makes conduct illegal when the person engaging in that conduct has no knowledge of the circumstances making it illegal. Such laws can only be justified where independent invention is very unlikely and proving copying very difficult - factors which sadly do not apply for most patents.
Fortunately design patents have much shorter duration than invention patents./p>
Sorry you got moderated as Troll (It seems the moderators are very thin-skinned of late). Anyway...
Paying twice as much for the same product you enjoyed many years ago
It's more than twice as much, but I'm not sure even at that rate that they're making much more profit per square foot than they'd make on a regular cinema. It's more a case of recognising that there's more than one market and catering differently for the different markets.
Please explain, what is this gold class? Never seen that here in NY.
It's a smaller cinema with 4 rows each with 6 seats arranged in pairs. The seats are much larger, more comfortable, and include recliners, footrests and a small table in the middle of each pair. They are arranged such that your view of the screen cannot be blocked by a tall person with big hair in the front, and you still have a good view in the back. They serve food and drinks (including alcohol) inside the cinema (you order before you go in and they bring it to you), and there are foods they serve in gold class they don't serve in the candy bar.
But in reality? You pay MORE for your movies?
Yep. Like I said, it's priced out of range of the annoying younger people who like to spoil movies.
Save that money and buy yourself a decent home theater setup.
This is not so effective for things not yet on DVD.
I love paying $9 per ticket, $20 for a drink and popcorn, sit in a theater with some jackass laughing with his friends the entire time, some baby crying, the guy in front of me who takes his shoes off, getting my sit back kicked non-stop ...
This is why I only ever see movies in gold class unless I'm taking the kids. In gold class you don't get any kids because everybody has to be old enough to legally drink alcohol, you don't get noisy chatter among a group of friends since it's priced out of range for the sort of people that do that, you won't get the feet in the back of your seat unless the person behind you is at about 12 feet tall since the seats are spaced far enough apart that this can't happen.
The best managers are those that are technically competent but trust their team to make the correct judgements without the managers input.
As a techie manager, I would go even further. Unless one of your staff is about to make a monumental blunder, you should even allow them to make incorrect judgements so they can learn from them.
The worst are managers that are technically competent but want to make every decision for the team.
If your team members are all really junior (just out of university or not even graduated, for instance), such micromanagement might be a good idea, and the staff might even prefer it. Of course if they are micromanaged that much they won't be exercising new skills and get the chance to improve.
The patent ensures the inventor discloses the algorithm being protected. If you rely only on copyright, you won't get access to the algorithm for nearly 100 years! Patents, OTOH, force the inventor to disclose the algorithm in exchange for protection.
You vastly overstate the difficulty of deriving the algorithms that appear in software patents. Once particular requirements are established, techniques that actually have value will be derived by the person implementing the code fairly quickly, and with so much open source software out there, there are not many algorithms around which, by reason of cost of research, are not available to the public.
While you suggest that people "won't get access to the algorithm for nearly 100 years", and so a 15 year term improves access to the algorithm, the truth is that given the same requirements a patented algorithm is likely to be independently re-implemented hundreds, thousands, or even millions of times before the 15 year term expires.
Business method patents (which are effectively a sub-category of software patent) are even worse than this.
ideas on their own cannot be patented. Only implementations can be.
Unfortunately this is not true - and that's the whole problem. These days patents - especially software patents - seek to eliminate anybody from achieving the same goal as the patent holder. You don't patent the implementation of the telephone, the first claim in your application is on the idea of a two way voice communication device. Then you claim (2) "the device in claim 1 wherein the voice is transmitted by modulated electrical signal over a wire; (3) the device in claim 1 wherein the voice is transmitted by modulated electromagnetic waves; (4) the device in claim 3 wherein the electromagnetic waves are radio waves; (5) the device in claim 3 wherein the electromagnetic waves are microwaves; (6) the device in claim 3 wherein the electromagnetic waves are visible light; ..."
If you look at a patent they always start with a very generic claim describing the idea as a whole, and if you implement something that matches that idea, you infringe. The patents then go on to claim each detail of the implementation and each combination of sets of details in the implementation, the idea being that if the first claim is knocked out one of the others might be upheld. The full implementation normally comes right at the end of the list of claims.
Companies are going off and trying to patent every idea they can find, not in order to protect their own investment which is usually negligible and almost always entirely irrelevant to the first claim, but in order to shut down or extort money from anybody else who need to use the idea to get something done.
dork - a stupid or ridiculous person; jerk; nerd
Damn. I thought people were calling me dork because my penis is 9 feet long.
"Real Life" is all 1's and 0's at a fundamental level, as well... so what is your point, besides the one on top of your head?
That paragraph at least proves the existence of real life (human) zeroes.
How does this work in these games that someone is ever allowed to inject a code that can run on someone elses session?
Second Life users are able to create objects using a fairly complete scripting language. The scripts run on the servers, and an object can create more objects when somebody interacts with it. It "runs" in other peoples' sessions not because it's running on their system but because they're all viewing the same MMORPG environment.
And to preempt your inevitable comment, yes, it is very lame. I can't believe people are paying ongoing fees (in US dollars) to hold land in this thing.
Linden Labs had to invoke martial law...
Some people seriously need to get a grip. This is all ones and zeroes - comparisons with "martial law" are just silly. Second Life needs to be renamed to give its users a much needed message - namely, Get A Life
Precedents only cover the actual jurisdiction of the issuing court.
More to the point, precedents only cover questions of law - it does not cover questions of fact. As between Buffalo and the CSIRO the answers to the questions of fact are set in stone (subject to any appeal) not because of precedent, but because of the principles of res judicata and issue estoppel. As between anybody else (who is not claiming some rights through Buffalo) and the CSIRO, there is nothing to prevent a court from reaching entirely opposite conclusions on the facts, since unlike precedent these two principles only apply between the parties to the original case. A court that reaches different conclusions on the facts may well find the patent is invalid (but note that I have not looked at the patent and have no idea what degree of validity it might have).
So is irregardless
From the same dictionary that lists y'all and you-all. It might be in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you won't seem like an uneducated hick if you use it.
I would never trust anything on Wikipedia to be right and would never cite it as a source in a paper
I would never cite it (or link to it) for any purpose at all. Lately a lot of people on /. have been linking to the Wikipedia article on some point to make their argument, like they are some kind of genius for knowing Wikipedia might have something to say about a point. If I want to look at Wikipedia I know where to find it, I don't need people pointing out the link. If you have a better link, produce that. Create links that go to the original sources. Not only are the original sources more useful, but a good link to an original source helps push its page rank up. Don't waste our time with Wikipedia links.
IAAL, in New South Wales (where this happened), but TINLA
The directions about acceptable use do not need to constitute a contract - all they need to do is constitute a reasonable and lawful order given to an employee. Where an employee refuses to follow a reasonable and lawful order, they can be dismissed without notice - this is basic employment law. Of course any employee can be dismissed with notice for any reason or no reason at all. No EULA or contract issues here, move along.
Where the employer ran into problems is with the unfair dismissal rules, which apply in Australia to all employees earning less than around $100,000 per year other than employees of small companies (less than 100 people). These laws require that the employer be fair to the employee when deciding to terminate - that is, that the termination not be harsh, unjust or unreasonable. This means that things like you don't terminate: for breaches of rules not adequately notified; for inadvertent failures unless chronic and the employee has been given notice of their shortcomings and opportunities to improve; for alleged conduct without giving the employee an opportunity to explain themselves; or as in this case, for breaches of rules where there is no real expectation that the rule breached will be enforced.
The public generally has a simpler understanding of the rules than that, and of course the real rules are much more complex and nuanced. However it wouldn't matter if the rules had been tattooed to the employee's forehead and signed in blood - if the company had created an expectation that they wouldn't be enforced, then the court would have found the dismissal for breaches of those rules to be unfair. The manner in which the rules are notified merely affects what would have to happen to create an expectation that the rules would or would not be enforced.