I agree that's what he said. But what he says is less important than how he runs the corporation.
DRM is one end of a... I want to say continuum, but it isn't continuous... which has plain text at the other end.
When Apple released disk drives for the Apple ][ that were incompatible with all other extant disk drives, and protected by patented techniques, was this DRM? When Apple saved it's Basic programs (in files with the.bas extension) in a form that were unreadable by other programs, was this DRM?
DRM is, in essence, any technical measures that restrict access to programs or data under the control of the publisher and not under the control of the end user. EULAs can be considered a legal technique for controlling access under the control of the publisher and not of the end-user.
Yes, Apple does lots of things that are technically good. That isn't sufficient to justify their other actions. (Mind you, I prefer a recent KDE to a recent OSX desktop...I'm not an unbiased observer, I use both systems. Rather than unbiased I'm moderately experienced.)
The owner can only apply the restrictions, e.g. the GPL, because they own it. It is proprietary, because the owner is imposing restrictions on how it can be used.
Technically an owner *could* release a program without conditions, but then they can be sued over problems. Originally this was solved by releasing things without copyrights, which removed ownership. The laws were changed, however, and this no longer works. Releasing public domain might work. (This isn't the same concept as not being owned, this is a distributed ownership.)
OTOH, IANAL. I might have the legalities wrong here. But I don't think so.
This is overly generous to Apple. I'd like it if it were true, but it isn't.
Apple is in favor of THEIR property being controlled by DRM to the extent that is advantageous to them. They are against others being able to use DRM when it causes them either expense or risk of future expense.
Read the recemt EULA's from Apple. They've added that "We reserve the right to add, copy, move, or delete any file on your computer" to the last one that I've looked at. Since then I've been rejecting upgrades and updates. And I'm campaigning to get the computer disconnected from the internet. (Backups won't deal with everything.)
Apple is in favor of DRM when they're the one using it...and they can choose how much or how little to use.
Proprietary would imply that independent implementations cannot be made or cannot be made easily without violating patents or reverse engineering or whatever.
It's blatantly silly that this would be correct. (I'm not denying that it is, only that it's reasonable.)
Proprietary means that it's somebody's property. GPL is proprietary. It only works because somebody owns the code. The opposite of proprietary is either public domain or "unownable". (Theoretically public domain is also proprietary, only with a distributed ownership. So perhaps the opposite is something that just can't be owned. Given our legal system I suspect that of being an empty set. [I'd say "the null set", but I suspect that our legal system would allow the null set itself to be owned. Perhaps not until some of the few remaining restrictions are lifted, but the system isn't a particular set of laws, but also any {or every?} legal development from the current framework + laws.])
Note that the current legal system is not itself consistent, so inconsistency is not an argument that something won't happen.
It's the kind of thing it's hard to be certain of, but it looks to me that the comments are being "shaped" by astroturfers.
This makes me more suspicious of Seagate than the story itself did. Perhaps the guy saying that they should be sued was correct? I don't know if the USB-2 has an official standard that they could be sued for violating...but that might be why they are being so defensive.
If I'm right about the astroturfers, then Seagate clearly knows it's doing SOMETHING very wrong. Just what, I'm not certain, but it sounds like this is a product, and perhaps a company, to avoid. (The "perhaps" is because of what an earlier poster said...which company should one choose? Hitatchi? Expensive, but perhaps the only reasonable choice. But is it?)
An important point would be if they say in their advertisements that the drive is only compatible with MSWind. I don't know what the truth is here. If they do, then it's reasonable that you would need to hack *something* to get the drive to work on Linux. If they just say USB-2, then it's a very different story. I haven't read the ads. I don't think I've seen them.
You don't understand. Hillary may be an unusual candidate, but she's been bought. I'm not certain about Obama, but I very very strongly suspect so. (He's already in congress, after all.)
A reform would require something like instant runoff or condorcet(sp?) voting. Condorcet is the better of the two choices, but instant runoff isn't that bad. Both give voters the chance to vote for a ranking order of preferences on their ballot. Then the ranking orders are compared with multiple steps of elimination of the least desireable candidate until a single candidate gets more than 50% of the remaining vote. (They differ in the precise order of candidate eliminations.)
This means that if you would really prefer a Vegetarian, next the Libertarian candidate, and after that the Democrat, then Republican, then Fascist you can vote in that order without losing your vote. This would make it much more expensive to buy an election by buying all of the candidates, however indirectly. It would become more cost-effective for corporations to campaign for policies rather than for specific candidates.
Another change that needs to be made is that the corporations controlling "the public airwaves" need to be forced to provide a certain amount of free access to every candidate. This used to be the rule before the FCC sold out. (Actually, I believe the rule was "equal access", so that if one candidate bought some time, the other candidates. This has it's points, but if many candidates are running, then it might wipe out all media campaigning, by making airtime too expensive, unless a certain amount were mandated.)
Also, now that billboards, newspapers, etc. are monopolies, those should fall under the same kind of regulation that I'm proposing for the airwaves. Exceptions should require that any particular corporation for a particular mode of media (say billboards) should be required to prove that it owns or controls less than 50% of the penetration in it's area of service.
The two party system stymies any attempt to reform it. And it's desireable to the "vested interests" because this means that they only need to buy two [candidates | parties], yet people can still be fooled into believing that they have been given a choice.
It's been proven that no election system can be fair. This doesn't imply that some aren't worse than others, and the two party system is one of the worst. (One party is, technically, worse, but if there are only two parties, and both are corrupt, then you effectively HAVE a one party system.)
There are nuanced differences between the Democrats and the Republicans that generally cause me to prefer Democrats...but there can be overlap. Some Democrats are worse than some Republicans, even though the means are such that I prefer Democrats. And, of course, on a large raft of issues neither comes close to representing my viewpoint, but voting for any other party is even more of a waste of the ballot. The system is rigged. It has been *designed* to be corrupt.
N.B.: Political parties aren't mentioned in the constitution (or at least not in the basic document plus the original tem ammendments). Their effect was either overlooked, or considered desireable. You choose which you believe, I don't think there's much in the way of evidence. I consider, however, the lack of mention to be a serious design flaw. Possibly they were considered, but no agreement on how to deal with them could be reached. Possibly nobody saw the need to deal with them (though this is hard to believe after the example of Byzantium...these were well educated men).
Such things may well be specifications, but they can never be standards. A standard is the way that everyone should do something (in some context). If it requires legal agreements on a per implementor or per customer basis, then it is incapable of satisfying that definition.
People have been talking about clothes, so I don't think a layer of sand is a good choice.
How about: 1) outer layer of kelvar netting (prevent punctures, cuts, etc.) 2) second layer of "this stuff" 3) third layer of foam 4) fourth layer of ?? canvas? kelvar? 5) fifth layer of spacers. dead air, mainly, with just enough stuff the loft the other layers. 5.5) Possibly need a layer to spread the impression of the pillars of the spacer stuff, but probably not. (Just make the smaller and more frequent.) 6) inner layer of something that feels decent against the skin.
Note that for this to be wearable each layer would need to be fairly thin. But it's armor, so not too thin (or, possibly, multiple layers of this sandwich in different orientations).
Part of the goal is that the armor should breathe. If it can't, nobody will be able to wear it (unless is comes with it's own air conditioner/air circulation system).
It's a big deal because the traditional popular sources of information have become centrally controlled, and then began running campaigns of disinformation against anything they found inconvenient. This often meant science (which is hard enough for specialists to understand...so it's easy to get non-specialists to misunderstand and distrust it).
It's a big deal because governments have been revealed to be liars so often that people don't trust them, except in desperation. It's a big deal because large corporations have been revealed to be liars so often that people have started to distrust them. (Started? I think they were only trusted for a brief period of time in the 50's and 60's.) It's a big deal because the news media have been revealed to be liars so often that people don't trust them any longer.
When all of your sources of information are of dubious quality, how do you make decisions? One easy way is to latch onto the most convenient belief and cling to it. (I didn't say it was a good way, just that it was easy.) Lot's of people seem to choose easy, particularly when they can't easily check what is good.
Yah... So some were just too lazy to research the story they decided to write. (The NDAs didn't keep things too secret for more than about six months. After that it was possible to tell that SCO had no case. There were strong indications after 3 months.)
OTOH, some of the ones who signed NDAs were "journalists" who later wrote stories about it. Strangely those stories always favored SCO, despite SCO having NO evidence. They *still* haven't shown any evidence.
One result of this has been to strongly reinforce my distrust of every story that appears in the news. This is unfortunate as some journalists *do* try to do a good job. Unfortunately, their number, as a percentage of all journalists, appears to be decreasing. And their number as a percentage of "journalists that one is likely to encounter" (i.e., employed by networks or major newspapers) seems to be decreasing even more severely.
To be fair, the number of honest journalists has always been small. In prior generations, however, major media didn't exist to present a unified lie. You had lots of small lies pointing in different directions and lots of small truths pointing in the same direction. Now the liars have been unified (not all of them) behind a unifying voice controlled by corporate "morality". This makes it quite difficult to resolve truth from lies, though it's still occasionally possible with reduced certainty.
Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity.
In general, that's a good practice. In certain contexts, however, it becomes unreasonable optimism. There probably are analysts and journalists who were just being stupid. Others, however, appear to be corrupt. Granted, since I'm not trying to bring them before a court of law I don't have a high bar, but some of them would actually pass even that bar were "Intentionally lying to the public for personal gain" a tryable offense.
MSOOXML should become a standard IFF it is freely implementable by third parties without paying copyright, trademark or patent fees.
1) It's unimplementable. I don't believe that even MS can implement it. But even if they could that wouldn't suffice. Only part of the reason that it's unimplementable has to do with vagueness. Other parts are very specific, but by reference to other sources which, themselves, aren't open. The classic example is "implement word formatting the same way MSWind95 does"(paraphrase). That's not very ambiguous (there were only a few versions of MSWind95), but it's definitely not an open specification.
2) Patent fees. MS has been waving a "We'll sue you" flag around claiming patent rights. Which it has failed to specify. WRT OOXML, I believe that MS promissed that it would not assert patent rights against "fully compliant implementations". This seems to mean that one bug can cost you your company, even if you had an approximately compliant implementation. (But see 1, abouve.)
3) Copyrights and trademarks. This is a big question. Possibly these wouldn't be a problem. In a normal case I'd presume that these wouldn't be a problem in a standard, but this is MS we're talking about here, so the normal rules of decent conduct are suspended.
4) RAND. Sometimes "standards" contain provision for RAND licensing. This basically means that commercial software can use it, but free software can't. I have a personal problem with this, and so do many others. I won't consider such specifications to be standards no matter WHAT board or committee says that they are. They are, at best, specifications.
It's a loophole, but not all that large of one. And it's one that will cause you an immense amount of work over time if you choose to use it...especially if the kernel developers object, as they can cause small changes in any area they feel like, so long as the code ends up doing the same thing...but binary patching doesn't work on what code does, but on bit pattern matching. Even if they just ignore you changes are likely to occur.
Also different distributions patch their kernels differently. Some people compile their own kernels (with non-spec options), etc.
It's one thing for a distributor to ship a binary patch to their kernel version. That's a reasonable effort, with a bounded amount of work required. To try to ship a binary patch that applies to "Linux kernels" is probably hopeless.
I don't think robots.txt has EVER been interpreted that way. Robots.txt is instructions to robots (i.e. web spiders) on how to behave. It says little to nothing about what information will be presented to a person who browses to there.
Well, the person who browses there should be able to see at least all that the robot can see...so that's a limitation, of sorts. Robots.txt is purely intended to restrict how robot web searches act.
If you meant that the end-user should be able to see at least as much as the web spider, then I misunderstand you. That's just occured to me as a potential meaning of what you wrote.
Yeah, they want it all. Of course. Who doesn't. What's wrong is that they feel entitled to have what they want even if it hurts others.
Setting up a competing ISP with lines, etc. isn't cheap, it takes megabucks. AND political handles on people.
If you just want to set up an ISP, and use someone else's lines, then it's relatively cheap and easy. You just can't make any money at it. Access fees will see to that.
In *your* opinion variable width fonts don't have that problem. In my opinion it's just that because their spaces are arbitrarily narrow, multi-spacing doesn't do any good. There *should* be extra spaces at the ends of sentences, but not after abbreviations. The only way to handle this is with significant multiple spaces.... Either that or having a context checker that can detect whether a period represents a decimal point, the end of a sentence, or an abbreviation (or some combination of the preceeding). The context checker is a heavy and error prone solution. Multiple spaces at the ends of sentences are lightweight and adaptable to the desire of the author. Unfortunately, they are sensitive to the choice of font...and fonts with zero width (or very narrow) spaces defeat this option. (Not all variable width fonts decided to use extremely small spaces...and some use normal width only for the non-breaking spaces, which makes for interesting compositional problems.)
let's face it: the vast majority of traffic there is generated by people downloading movies, music and warez
This may well be true, and I've often heard it asserted. But I don't *know* that an even significant amount of transmission is for such purposes. What I've heard people who work for ISPs complain about is spam. I've got no personal evidence that it's *ever* used to download illegal media. I take it on faith that it happens, accept that it happens frequently. But I find "...the vast majority of traffic..." difficult to believe. I suspect that it's convenient FUD that's just quite difficult to refute.
I mentioned that trademarks weren't a serious threat. I didn't claim that the GPL addressed this.
It's true that you can't be certain that any piece of code is patent free, but that isn't quite what I said. What I said was that if a piece of code was released public domain that any patents on it held by the releaser might well be deemed licensed for use AS LONG AS YOU DON'T MODIFY THE CODE.
I tried to hedge around this a lot, because I am not a lawyer.
Public domain code isn't licensed to "do whatever you want with this". I isn't licensed at all. The GPL licenses explicitly say that you can modify and distribute modifications, so even if patents weren't mentioned this would probably be counted as a license to use the patent (from the chain of distributors) to (all subsequent distributors).
As such, in the current legal context, this is an example of "What can't you do with public domain code?", which was the question I was answering.
I'll admit that a direct answer wouldn't have mentioned the GPL, but this is meant as an example of contrast. Any license the provided the explicit right to further modification and distribution would have served as well, and the GPL is well known.
Yes, and I consider it a pity that they lost the case. If they had been hard-cases at the beginning they would have won...think what that says about the behaviour our legal system encourages.
Even that overstates the case. The GPL only comes into effect when you distribute executables (or source code, but that's trivial). You can custome modify GPL software all you want without sharing it back...but you can't distribute it outside of your organization, be that organization a person or a corporation. If you do, then the distribution must be in compliance with the GPL.
OTOH, yes, you can be sued if you violate the license...for copyright infringement. If you don't adhere to the terms of the GPL, then you don't have the rights granted you by the GPL. And in that case, if you distribute it you are infringing copyright law. The FSF generally prefers to negotiate a settlement that avoids a lawsuit, but there's no legal requirement that it do so, and the policies of the non-FSF developers are up to the authors (well, copyright holders).
So if you just want to grab code and turn it proprietary, your best choices are public domain or BSD. There's a fair amount of code licensed BSD, but for some reason GPL is more popular with developers (in general, not necessarily you in particular).
Alternatively, you could buy non-GPL licenses from the authors or copyright holders. Most of them would be quite willing to deal for a reasonable price. Many would even contribute under a BSD license for free if it were for a project that they respected. You just wouldn't get an exclusive license.
Those whom none of the above satisfy, then I consider freeloaders. I don't see any reason to alter my behaviors to satisfy *them*. Let them steal from MS if they can; it's no less moral.
Public domain code (i.e., a copyright freedom) doesn't say anything about whether the code contains patents. I'll grant that if the person who released it tried to assert patent restrictions, they woud probably fall afoul of the doctrine of latches, this doesn't imply that the same is true for modifications that you make to the code.
It also doesn't say anything about trademarks, but since those need to be actively defended you would probably hear rather quickly if that was being used for a stealth attack. Patents are different. This is why most people intending stealth attacks prefer patents. Even then there are limits, but you don't want the expense of being on the wrong end of a patent suit, no matter how frivolous.
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I agree that's what he said. But what he says is less important than how he runs the corporation.
... I want to say continuum, but it isn't continuous ... which has plain text at the other end.
.bas extension) in a form that were unreadable by other programs, was this DRM?
DRM is one end of a
When Apple released disk drives for the Apple ][ that were incompatible with all other extant disk drives, and protected by patented techniques, was this DRM? When Apple saved it's Basic programs (in files with the
DRM is, in essence, any technical measures that restrict access to programs or data under the control of the publisher and not under the control of the end user. EULAs can be considered a legal technique for controlling access under the control of the publisher and not of the end-user.
Yes, Apple does lots of things that are technically good. That isn't sufficient to justify their other actions. (Mind you, I prefer a recent KDE to a recent OSX desktop...I'm not an unbiased observer, I use both systems. Rather than unbiased I'm moderately experienced.)
The owner can only apply the restrictions, e.g. the GPL, because they own it. It is proprietary, because the owner is imposing restrictions on how it can be used.
Technically an owner *could* release a program without conditions, but then they can be sued over problems. Originally this was solved by releasing things without copyrights, which removed ownership. The laws were changed, however, and this no longer works. Releasing public domain might work. (This isn't the same concept as not being owned, this is a distributed ownership.)
OTOH, IANAL. I might have the legalities wrong here. But I don't think so.
This is overly generous to Apple. I'd like it if it were true, but it isn't.
Apple is in favor of THEIR property being controlled by DRM to the extent that is advantageous to them. They are against others being able to use DRM when it causes them either expense or risk of future expense.
Read the recemt EULA's from Apple. They've added that "We reserve the right to add, copy, move, or delete any file on your computer" to the last one that I've looked at. Since then I've been rejecting upgrades and updates. And I'm campaigning to get the computer disconnected from the internet. (Backups won't deal with everything.)
Apple is in favor of DRM when they're the one using it...and they can choose how much or how little to use.
odt probably *IS* proprietary. It's owned. It's also licensed. The license is only possible because it's owned, i.e., proprietary.
Proprietary would imply that independent implementations cannot be made or cannot be made easily without violating patents or reverse engineering or whatever.
It's blatantly silly that this would be correct. (I'm not denying that it is, only that it's reasonable.)
Proprietary means that it's somebody's property. GPL is proprietary. It only works because somebody owns the code. The opposite of proprietary is either public domain or "unownable". (Theoretically public domain is also proprietary, only with a distributed ownership. So perhaps the opposite is something that just can't be owned. Given our legal system I suspect that of being an empty set. [I'd say "the null set", but I suspect that our legal system would allow the null set itself to be owned. Perhaps not until some of the few remaining restrictions are lifted, but the system isn't a particular set of laws, but also any {or every?} legal development from the current framework + laws.])
Note that the current legal system is not itself consistent, so inconsistency is not an argument that something won't happen.
It's the kind of thing it's hard to be certain of, but it looks to me that the comments are being "shaped" by astroturfers.
This makes me more suspicious of Seagate than the story itself did. Perhaps the guy saying that they should be sued was correct? I don't know if the USB-2 has an official standard that they could be sued for violating...but that might be why they are being so defensive.
If I'm right about the astroturfers, then Seagate clearly knows it's doing SOMETHING very wrong. Just what, I'm not certain, but it sounds like this is a product, and perhaps a company, to avoid. (The "perhaps" is because of what an earlier poster said...which company should one choose? Hitatchi? Expensive, but perhaps the only reasonable choice. But is it?)
An important point would be if they say in their advertisements that the drive is only compatible with MSWind. I don't know what the truth is here. If they do, then it's reasonable that you would need to hack *something* to get the drive to work on Linux. If they just say USB-2, then it's a very different story. I haven't read the ads. I don't think I've seen them.
You don't understand. Hillary may be an unusual candidate, but she's been bought. I'm not certain about Obama, but I very very strongly suspect so. (He's already in congress, after all.)
A reform would require something like instant runoff or condorcet(sp?) voting. Condorcet is the better of the two choices, but instant runoff isn't that bad. Both give voters the chance to vote for a ranking order of preferences on their ballot. Then the ranking orders are compared with multiple steps of elimination of the least desireable candidate until a single candidate gets more than 50% of the remaining vote. (They differ in the precise order of candidate eliminations.)
This means that if you would really prefer a Vegetarian, next the Libertarian candidate, and after that the Democrat, then Republican, then Fascist you can vote in that order without losing your vote. This would make it much more expensive to buy an election by buying all of the candidates, however indirectly. It would become more cost-effective for corporations to campaign for policies rather than for specific candidates.
Another change that needs to be made is that the corporations controlling "the public airwaves" need to be forced to provide a certain amount of free access to every candidate. This used to be the rule before the FCC sold out. (Actually, I believe the rule was "equal access", so that if one candidate bought some time, the other candidates. This has it's points, but if many candidates are running, then it might wipe out all media campaigning, by making airtime too expensive, unless a certain amount were mandated.)
Also, now that billboards, newspapers, etc. are monopolies, those should fall under the same kind of regulation that I'm proposing for the airwaves. Exceptions should require that any particular corporation for a particular mode of media (say billboards) should be required to prove that it owns or controls less than 50% of the penetration in it's area of service.
The two party system stymies any attempt to reform it. And it's desireable to the "vested interests" because this means that they only need to buy two [candidates | parties], yet people can still be fooled into believing that they have been given a choice.
It's been proven that no election system can be fair. This doesn't imply that some aren't worse than others, and the two party system is one of the worst. (One party is, technically, worse, but if there are only two parties, and both are corrupt, then you effectively HAVE a one party system.)
There are nuanced differences between the Democrats and the Republicans that generally cause me to prefer Democrats...but there can be overlap. Some Democrats are worse than some Republicans, even though the means are such that I prefer Democrats. And, of course, on a large raft of issues neither comes close to representing my viewpoint, but voting for any other party is even more of a waste of the ballot. The system is rigged. It has been *designed* to be corrupt.
N.B.: Political parties aren't mentioned in the constitution (or at least not in the basic document plus the original tem ammendments). Their effect was either overlooked, or considered desireable. You choose which you believe, I don't think there's much in the way of evidence. I consider, however, the lack of mention to be a serious design flaw. Possibly they were considered, but no agreement on how to deal with them could be reached. Possibly nobody saw the need to deal with them (though this is hard to believe after the example of Byzantium...these were well educated men).
Such things may well be specifications, but they can never be standards. A standard is the way that everyone should do something (in some context). If it requires legal agreements on a per implementor or per customer basis, then it is incapable of satisfying that definition.
People have been talking about clothes, so I don't think a layer of sand is a good choice.
How about:
1) outer layer of kelvar netting (prevent punctures, cuts, etc.)
2) second layer of "this stuff"
3) third layer of foam
4) fourth layer of ?? canvas? kelvar?
5) fifth layer of spacers. dead air, mainly, with just enough stuff the loft the other layers.
5.5) Possibly need a layer to spread the impression of the pillars of the spacer stuff, but probably not. (Just make the smaller and more frequent.)
6) inner layer of something that feels decent against the skin.
Note that for this to be wearable each layer would need to be fairly thin. But it's armor, so not too thin (or, possibly, multiple layers of this sandwich in different orientations).
Part of the goal is that the armor should breathe. If it can't, nobody will be able to wear it (unless is comes with it's own air conditioner/air circulation system).
It's a big deal because the traditional popular sources of information have become centrally controlled, and then began running campaigns of disinformation against anything they found inconvenient. This often meant science (which is hard enough for specialists to understand...so it's easy to get non-specialists to misunderstand and distrust it).
It's a big deal because governments have been revealed to be liars so often that people don't trust them, except in desperation. It's a big deal because large corporations have been revealed to be liars so often that people have started to distrust them. (Started? I think they were only trusted for a brief period of time in the 50's and 60's.) It's a big deal because the news media have been revealed to be liars so often that people don't trust them any longer.
When all of your sources of information are of dubious quality, how do you make decisions?
One easy way is to latch onto the most convenient belief and cling to it. (I didn't say it was a good way, just that it was easy.) Lot's of people seem to choose easy, particularly when they can't easily check what is good.
YooTube is easy.
Yah... So some were just too lazy to research the story they decided to write. (The NDAs didn't keep things too secret for more than about six months. After that it was possible to tell that SCO had no case. There were strong indications after 3 months.)
OTOH, some of the ones who signed NDAs were "journalists" who later wrote stories about it. Strangely those stories always favored SCO, despite SCO having NO evidence. They *still* haven't shown any evidence.
One result of this has been to strongly reinforce my distrust of every story that appears in the news. This is unfortunate as some journalists *do* try to do a good job. Unfortunately, their number, as a percentage of all journalists, appears to be decreasing. And their number as a percentage of "journalists that one is likely to encounter" (i.e., employed by networks or major newspapers) seems to be decreasing even more severely.
To be fair, the number of honest journalists has always been small. In prior generations, however, major media didn't exist to present a unified lie. You had lots of small lies pointing in different directions and lots of small truths pointing in the same direction. Now the liars have been unified (not all of them) behind a unifying voice controlled by corporate "morality". This makes it quite difficult to resolve truth from lies, though it's still occasionally possible with reduced certainty.
Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity.
In general, that's a good practice. In certain contexts, however, it becomes unreasonable optimism. There probably are analysts and journalists who were just being stupid. Others, however, appear to be corrupt. Granted, since I'm not trying to bring them before a court of law I don't have a high bar, but some of them would actually pass even that bar were "Intentionally lying to the public for personal gain" a tryable offense.
MSOOXML should become a standard IFF it is freely implementable by third parties without paying copyright, trademark or patent fees.
1) It's unimplementable. I don't believe that even MS can implement it. But even if they could that wouldn't suffice. Only part of the reason that it's unimplementable has to do with vagueness. Other parts are very specific, but by reference to other sources which, themselves, aren't open. The classic example is "implement word formatting the same way MSWind95 does"(paraphrase). That's not very ambiguous (there were only a few versions of MSWind95), but it's definitely not an open specification.
2) Patent fees. MS has been waving a "We'll sue you" flag around claiming patent rights. Which it has failed to specify. WRT OOXML, I believe that MS promissed that it would not assert patent rights against "fully compliant implementations". This seems to mean that one bug can cost you your company, even if you had an approximately compliant implementation. (But see 1, abouve.)
3) Copyrights and trademarks. This is a big question. Possibly these wouldn't be a problem. In a normal case I'd presume that these wouldn't be a problem in a standard, but this is MS we're talking about here, so the normal rules of decent conduct are suspended.
4) RAND. Sometimes "standards" contain provision for RAND licensing. This basically means that commercial software can use it, but free software can't. I have a personal problem with this, and so do many others. I won't consider such specifications to be standards no matter WHAT board or committee says that they are. They are, at best, specifications.
It's a loophole, but not all that large of one. And it's one that will cause you an immense amount of work over time if you choose to use it...especially if the kernel developers object, as they can cause small changes in any area they feel like, so long as the code ends up doing the same thing...but binary patching doesn't work on what code does, but on bit pattern matching. Even if they just ignore you changes are likely to occur.
Also different distributions patch their kernels differently. Some people compile their own kernels (with non-spec options), etc.
It's one thing for a distributor to ship a binary patch to their kernel version. That's a reasonable effort, with a bounded amount of work required. To try to ship a binary patch that applies to "Linux kernels" is probably hopeless.
I don't think robots.txt has EVER been interpreted that way. Robots.txt is instructions to robots (i.e. web spiders) on how to behave. It says little to nothing about what information will be presented to a person who browses to there.
Well, the person who browses there should be able to see at least all that the robot can see...so that's a limitation, of sorts. Robots.txt is purely intended to restrict how robot web searches act.
If you meant that the end-user should be able to see at least as much as the web spider, then I misunderstand you. That's just occured to me as a potential meaning of what you wrote.
Yeah, they want it all. Of course. Who doesn't. What's wrong is that they feel entitled to have what they want even if it hurts others.
I think you don't understand the topic.
Robots.txt already allows sites to tell search engines what to index, and what not to.
Setting up a competing ISP with lines, etc. isn't cheap, it takes megabucks. AND political handles on people.
If you just want to set up an ISP, and use someone else's lines, then it's relatively cheap and easy. You just can't make any money at it. Access fees will see to that.
In *your* opinion variable width fonts don't have that problem. In my opinion it's just that because their spaces are arbitrarily narrow, multi-spacing doesn't do any good. There *should* be extra spaces at the ends of sentences, but not after abbreviations. The only way to handle this is with significant multiple spaces. ... Either that or having a context checker that can detect whether a period represents a decimal point, the end of a sentence, or an abbreviation (or some combination of the preceeding). The context checker is a heavy and error prone solution. Multiple spaces at the ends of sentences are lightweight and adaptable to the desire of the author. Unfortunately, they are sensitive to the choice of font...and fonts with zero width (or very narrow) spaces defeat this option. (Not all variable width fonts decided to use extremely small spaces...and some use normal width only for the non-breaking spaces, which makes for interesting compositional problems.)
let's face it: the vast majority of traffic there is generated by people downloading movies, music and warez
This may well be true, and I've often heard it asserted. But I don't *know* that an even significant amount of transmission is for such purposes. What I've heard people who work for ISPs complain about is spam. I've got no personal evidence that it's *ever* used to download illegal media. I take it on faith that it happens, accept that it happens frequently. But I find "...the vast majority of traffic..." difficult to believe. I suspect that it's convenient FUD that's just quite difficult to refute.
I mentioned that trademarks weren't a serious threat. I didn't claim that the GPL addressed this.
It's true that you can't be certain that any piece of code is patent free, but that isn't quite what I said. What I said was that if a piece of code was released public domain that any patents on it held by the releaser might well be deemed licensed for use AS LONG AS YOU DON'T MODIFY THE CODE.
I tried to hedge around this a lot, because I am not a lawyer.
Public domain code isn't licensed to "do whatever you want with this". I isn't licensed at all. The GPL licenses explicitly say that you can modify and distribute modifications, so even if patents weren't mentioned this would probably be counted as a license to use the patent (from the chain of distributors) to (all subsequent distributors).
As such, in the current legal context, this is an example of "What can't you do with public domain code?", which was the question I was answering.
I'll admit that a direct answer wouldn't have mentioned the GPL, but this is meant as an example of contrast. Any license the provided the explicit right to further modification and distribution would have served as well, and the GPL is well known.
And unfortunately I can count on both of my senators to support them in whatever scheme they come up with.
Yes, and I consider it a pity that they lost the case. If they had been hard-cases at the beginning they would have won...think what that says about the behaviour our legal system encourages.
Even that overstates the case. The GPL only comes into effect when you distribute executables (or source code, but that's trivial). You can custome modify GPL software all you want without sharing it back...but you can't distribute it outside of your organization, be that organization a person or a corporation. If you do, then the distribution must be in compliance with the GPL.
OTOH, yes, you can be sued if you violate the license...for copyright infringement. If you don't adhere to the terms of the GPL, then you don't have the rights granted you by the GPL. And in that case, if you distribute it you are infringing copyright law. The FSF generally prefers to negotiate a settlement that avoids a lawsuit, but there's no legal requirement that it do so, and the policies of the non-FSF developers are up to the authors (well, copyright holders).
So if you just want to grab code and turn it proprietary, your best choices are public domain or BSD. There's a fair amount of code licensed BSD, but for some reason GPL is more popular with developers (in general, not necessarily you in particular).
Alternatively, you could buy non-GPL licenses from the authors or copyright holders. Most of them would be quite willing to deal for a reasonable price. Many would even contribute under a BSD license for free if it were for a project that they respected. You just wouldn't get an exclusive license.
Those whom none of the above satisfy, then I consider freeloaders. I don't see any reason to alter my behaviors to satisfy *them*. Let them steal from MS if they can; it's no less moral.
Public domain code (i.e., a copyright freedom) doesn't say anything about whether the code contains patents. I'll grant that if the person who released it tried to assert patent restrictions, they woud probably fall afoul of the doctrine of latches, this doesn't imply that the same is true for modifications that you make to the code.
It also doesn't say anything about trademarks, but since those need to be actively defended you would probably hear rather quickly if that was being used for a stealth attack. Patents are different. This is why most people intending stealth attacks prefer patents. Even then there are limits, but you don't want the expense of being on the wrong end of a patent suit, no matter how frivolous.