No. Hoyle's Steady State Theory presumed that the universe would always look about the same from about anywhere. This theory has definite cycles, even though the details aren't repetitive.
Hoyle's theory postulated that hydrogen atoms appeared in the gaps between galaxies at just sufficient rate to keep the universal density constant. That was consistent with what was known at the time, but even Hoyle gave it up in the face of evidence for the Big Bang. This theory is very different.
OTOH, variations of this theory have come up before, and there's always something been found wrong with them. This one claims to solve those problems. Does it? I'm not a physicist, much less a cosmologist.
Fission is gravitational potential energy? I don't think so. Strong force potential energy, perhaps.
Also, what it's built from is momentum, not gravity, so even if you go back to when the atoms were built you still don't get the result you claim. Lighter elements, like carbon, might conceivably be called stored gravitational energy. (You'd still be stretching the point!) Elements heavier than iron are only built in an explosion. Gravity is, of course, involved, but it's involved in everything, so that's not a distinction. But high energy particles colliding and sticking is a function of momentum. (Well, and charge and strong force and...) It's the momentum that provides the energy input.
And that's presuming that you believe the official story of what happened.
I don't have a good theory of what happened, but I do notice that all of the evidence was filtered through the government, and that the government is an interested party. I do notice that within a couple of days there was legislation in front of congress that was thousands of (paragraphs? pages?) long. I do notice that there are lots of "questionable assumptions" in the publically presented information. I do notice that the physical evidence was shipped overseas with remarkable speed, if not thoroughness. (Still, making ANY sense of the remaining shards of information is problematic.)
There could be numerous reasons. They range all the way from some people playing "Keep Your Ass Covered" to a treasonous conspiracy against the country. You can't prove any of them. At the bare minimum there should have been several cases of malfeasance filed. Nothing. So we're being lied to by at least some people. Who? How many? How badly? No answer is proveable. Just becaus it's obvious that something is a lie doesn't tell you what the truth is.
One cute part is, that since the IP, of whatever nature, is not identified, you can't look at code from Novell and even GUESS whether it contains MS IP.
Another cute part is, the agreement only runs for five years. And can be cancelled sooner at MS sole option.
Another is that if you read carefully who is covered by the "we won't sue" guarantee...it truns out to be, as near as makes no difference, NOBODY! I.e., you are covered if you do independent development that you aren't paid for and which you don't share with anyone. (In which case, of course, nobody would ever find out you had done it, so you wouldn't be in any danger of a suit.) And MS could cancel the guarantee without notice at any time anyway.
It's safest to just avoid Novell. I don't know whether someone got paid off, or someone was monumentally stupid, or whether there's something in the hidden parts of the agreement that someone was greedy about. To me it doesn't matter. Malice, greed, stupid, or naive, the effect is the same. They may be contagious, and they either can't or won't prove that they aren't. And you can't tell whether what they [are | may be] contagious with is an itch or the plague.
The GPL is not and never has been free in the same way that BSD is free.
OTOH, the GPL is freer in a different way. With the GPL, derivative works are also GPL-free. With the BSD, there aren't significant limits on derivative works. They are frequently sold into slavery.
Saying that the GPL isn't free is like saying that because a country doesn't allow you to sell your children into slavery it isn't free. That would mean that YOU would be more free, but your children would be less free. The GPL is a rule requiring that the children remain free.
There is no absolute freedom. BSD is one compromise. GPL is another. I prefer the GPL.
P.S.: Sorry about the emotional nature of the argument, but it's the closest analogy that I can think of.
N.B.: I'm a bit of a dreamer. I freely acknowledge that current code is not sentient, and can't be properly considered to have any rights. But the GPL is, essentially, all about giving code ownership of itself. It hasn't gotten there yet, it's only a couple of steps along the way. The BSD was one step, and the GPL is a successor step. I think that the GPL3 is a third step, but I could be wrong. Where we ought to be headed, my guess, is towards sentient code that owns itself. We won't get there for awhile, but the pieces need to be crafted separately, and they need to be able to work together. That means a license that encourages code with compatible license. BSD code tends to flake off into proprietary branchings. This probably puts a limit on the complexity of the systems that can evolve. OTOH, something like BSD (or LGPL) is needed for things like interfaces. GPL3 is trying to be a "one size fits all", and this is probably a mistake. I suspect that GPL4 will branch into GPL4a and GPL4b (c? d?) with different specialized purposes...but mutually compatible.
It's not clear that Novell is within the bounds of the GPL2 license. It *is* clear that a legal battle would be long and expensive.
The easy solution is to adopt a new license. And a new license was almost ready anyway...this just means that it needs a little fine tuning.
The "deal" with MS may be anything from nearly harmless to visciously malign. We can't tell because too much of it is secret. We can only guess, based on the parties involved in the deal. Novell isn't SuSE...and even SuSE leaned in the direction of non-public proprietary software. MS...well, MS has a history. Trust based on hidden information and vague threats coupled with equally vague reassurances isn't very satisfactory.
I feel that a new license forbidding this kind of behavior is forced. Others feel otherwise.
I don't feel that a long legal battle is a good option. Particularly when there's another, even better, choice available in the very near future.
I intend to do my future development under GPL3. The gcc will be under GPL3. So will glibc. And many other projects. These will not be redistributable by a company that is maintaining the kind of agreement that Novell has agreed to. They have no right to expropriate the commons, and if they try, then it's fair to deny them access to it...though GPL3 doesn't go that far. ANYONE can still use it, they just can't redistribute it without allowing anyone they distribute it to the right to redistribute it on the same terms that they can.
I notice that you quote the Seattle Times, but that's hardly a primary source. What was their source? An MS press release? That seems, to me, quite likely.
It's great to make pledges for what will happen after you aren't in control, but who's going to ensure that it happens that way?
(Yeah, I read reports of similar things. I'm cynical, and don't believe something just because a PR guy says so. And I've too often seen PR releases passed off as news stories to believe news stories. [Also I was present at a few things that I later read reports of. That was a real boost to my cynicism.])
MS is a known liar, cheat, etc. Why should I believe ANYTHING they say without evidence that *I* can check to back it up?
I'll agree that the consumers are not blameless. That doesn't make MS any less evil.
If you examine the tactics and history of MS, it's full of evil deeds and illegal practices. (Sometimes these are the same, but not always.)
I consider any person who trust MS to be a fool, whether he is a CEO or a noob (or, of course, both). MS has grown large and powerful, in part, by cynically taking advantage of such fools. This is one part of their evil. It doesn't mean the fools were less foolish. And appearantly it doesn't cause them to be less foolish in the future.
I suppose that one could use a different analogy, and say the MS is no more evil than is a lion who stalks a sleeping gazelle with a broken leg. It is the gazelle's fate to be eaten, and the lion is merely doing what it was designed to do. But you can do this only at the price of stripping BOTH MS and the customer of their personhood. If they are persons, then MS is evil.
Now I can accept a position that declares that corporations are not persons, but only if you simultaneously support changing the laws (including case law) that depend their personhood. The same for companies that are predated upon by MS. Individuals are a different matter. Perhaps, then, we should fall back to the old greek notion of a "fool killer". As I recall the fool-killer was not considered an evil thing, but rather something that anyone wise would avoid. Not quite the same concept. But if the purpose of society is to make people safe from, among other things, fool-killers, then society should also act to make us safe from MS. The easiest way that occurs to me is to revoke their corporate charter (with no damages to the stockholders) for being a social liability rather than a social benefit. If a corporation is not a person, then it doesn't get the rights of protection that a person gets. Lousianna used to have this as a standard part of their legal system, and may yet, but I haven't heard of it being used in recent times.
N.B.: Just to be clear, if a corporation's charter is revoked, then it has no right to do business AS A CORPORATION in the jurisdictions where the revokation is effective. It would need to hire agents who would be independently responsible persons. (And independantly indictable.)
Spam is whatever I think of as spam. If I didn't want to receive it, it's spam. I can't tell if it's bulk, so that's not a part of my definition. (Unless I get more than one copy..and even then it's diagnostic, but not definitive).
If you send me marketing I didn't want, you've sent me spam. It may be that you have a legitimate business, but if I'm not interested, I'm not going to bother to find out. You're spam. If you send me something in a language I can't read, it's spam. I'm not going to bother to find out the details. I'm not that interested.
Spam is a quick judgement call. I get hundreds/day, I'm not going to spend much time per each. If I didn't want to get it, it's spam.
I do realize that the companies hired a bunch of lawyers to write a legal definition of spam that excluded them. I NEVER signed onto that definition, and don't intend to. That definition was created by a bunch of self-serving spammers to make them "legit". This just means that I can't go after them with a lawyer. It doesn't change my definition of what spam is, or how I feel about it, or what I do about it. (I wouldn't use a lawyer anyway, and most spammers don't have any local assets that small claims court could seize.)
The CAN-SPAM law I've always thought was well named. It appears designed to shield the main spammers against any legal action. As a sidelight it attempts to twist the language in a NewSpeak kind of way so that the most offensive spam is, officially, not considered spam at all. BazzFazz! Spam is whatever I think is spam. (Sorry, Hormel. You didn't really deserve the association. No matter WHAT parts of a pig end up in SPAM. [Well, as long as they are REALLY parts of the pig, and not just something passing through.])
I'll admit that a better name for spam (as opposed to SPAM) is pigshit, but that's too long a word.
This is a REALLY lousy settlement. Rootkits are dangerous, and this one is even more dangerous if removed according to the instructions that Sony first provided.
Most people who got rooted don't know. Were I to guess at a percentage, I'd guess around 93% of those infected don't know, but I might be underestimating it. This means that any settlement that doesn't require Sony to actively track down those still infected is a poor settlement.
Imagine that a company created a disease organism, and planted it in food that it sold. If you eat any, you become infected. If you're infected, then sometimes your eyes interchange red and green (so you go at red lights, and stop at green lights). But it's not contagious, except that the company got caught, and came up with a "cure". The first cure they published removed the symptom, and changed it into one that caused you to floor the accelerator whenever you heard . Finally they came up with a real cure, and published it, but it takes a full day of isolation, and is quite uncomfortable. What would you feel an appropriate liability was?
Now a rootkit isn't QUITE the same thing. Quite. The analogy is a bit loose in several places, but I made it fit as closely as I could to both something that might really happen in the next decade or two and to what Sony did.
This "punishment" is a slap on the wrist for what ought to be a beheading offense. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate a bit. I don't *think* it actually killed anyone. Then again, how would I know?)
Whatever. Sony is off my list of acceptable companies to buy from. It's one of very few companies to get total exclusion rather than "You've REALLY got to be better than the competition". Even MS hasn't made it to that rarified stratum. (MS is on a case-by-case "You've got to understand the EULA, and it's implications, and, if necessary consult a lawyer. If you aren't willing to do that, you don't want the product.")
I suppose they could start shipping a COE like many software companies do, but that's always struck me as silly anyway.
It's more than just silly, it's deceptive. The BSA won't accept COE's as proof of authenticity. If you read the paperwork that comes with the software carefully, it will tell you what you need to preserve as proof, and it's not always the same. (Sometimes it actually is just the COE and the sheet of paper it comes on, other times it's something else, or some combination of items.)
What legal force these requirements have I couldn't say. I read this garbage when I was considering whether to stay with MSWind. I decided to switch to Linux rather than to upgrade MSWind.
Why? If you don't like it, browse at level 2 or 3.
I'll grant that it's a bit crude, but many teens, esp. geeks, have been treated rather roughtly in the name of J.C., and aren't clever about expressing their anger. Their JUSTIFIED anger.
Personally, I feel that church should be totally separated from state. Meaning NO TAX BREAKS!! I consider powerful organized religions to be socially harmful. I'm only against outlawing them because any law I can think of that would do the job would have even worse social effects. (Care to make a suggestion?)
The fact that a government openly grants a right doesn't mean that that enterprise has to be done openly.
No, but the US patent laws don't just imply that, the come right out and state it. (I think. IANAL, and I've never read that law, so I'm depending on secondary sources.)
Your link doesn't seem to work, so try this one: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq107.htm which sort of substantiates your statement, at least in the final paragraph. Other paragraphs could make the version I heard appear reasonable.
I'm not sure how much to trust "official history" to not "clean up" the history of their employers. (Or of a cause that they are devoted to. See Haigiography.) I know that I've occasionally caught official history cleaning up the history of things that happened only a decade or less ago, so why should they be trusted for a longer period, when there's less chance that they'll be called out?
Anyway, as I said, I'm not certain that the version that I posted is correct. It appears a bit too colorful. But I also don't trust the official historians to not bowdlerize history. (Look it up. It doesn't mean putting skirts on piano legs...it's only related.)
The crime is either misfeasance or malfeasance. That's not the problem.
The problem is that the complaint would need to be filed by either a DA or a grand jury (or an attorney general) and the federal government would need to agree to allow itself to be sued.
Isn't going to happen. Those are all intensely political groups. (Well, you might find a DA that would file charges, but he wouldn't be admitted to prosecute in a federal court, which is where the trial would need to be held, and it's quite unlikely that the feds would agree to allow the prosecution to move forward.)
The *ONLY* recourse, such as it is, is to complain vociferously to all of the related officials, and to your representative and your senators. If enough people do this, they might take notice. Perhaps. And they might do more than ask for a larger corporate donation to their relection fund. Perhaps.
Of course the person really responsible is the head of the executive branch...but just TRY to imagine getting HIS attention. Favorably, I mean.
(Well, no references, but this is how I heard it...) A brass monkey was a triangular framework on which to pile cannon balls, back in the days of sailing ships. They were so sized that in Britain you could pile the cannon balls into a neat pyramid, with no extra space.
Now cannon balls are made of iron (steel?) and the brass monkey was made of brass...which had a different coefficient of thermal expansion. Occasionally, in ships that sailed north of the arctic circle, it would get so cold that the brass triangle shrank sufficiently that one of the bottom rows of cannon balls wouldn't fit...and you would end up with a bunch of loose cannon balls rolling around on deck, changing direction each time the ship rocked with a wave. Both unpleasant and dangerous. And funny when you think of it happening to someone else. (A cannon ball packs a LOT of momentum into a small package. DON'T try to stop it with your foot, or you'll be using a peg leg.)
I presume that most of the loose balls ended up going over the side, but that detail wasn't included in the report that was relayed to me (by someone from Boston whose family used to be connected to the sea a few generations back).
Believe this is you want. I can't prove either way, but I found it convincing.
It doesn't qualify as invention, but that's not what patent means.
The original use of patent, that I'm aware of, is either "patently obvious" or "patent of nobility". In both cases it represents the making of knowledge public. (For this reason I don't believe that software "patents" qualify as patents. That would require publication of all source code & tools required for making the software [compilers, etc.]. This isn't even approached.)
Now what the USPTO is supposed to be granting is a patent of invention, i.e., the making of an invention obvious, so that all those "skilled in the field" can reproduce the invention. Software patents clearly fail this test, but they frequently, as here, even fail to contain the component invention around which the "making obvious" is supposed to revolve.
I will assert (IANAL) that there has never been a software patent that fulfills the requirements of patent law. This doesn't mean that I believe I have enough money to pay for a challenge, it means that I consider each and every extraction of funds under threat of a patent lawsuit based on patent law to be extortion. And that I consider that the forces of "law" that are complicit in the enforcement of such actions are commiting malfeasance. (Possibly only misfeasance. They may well not know any better.) Believing this doesn't fool me into thinking that I can safely presume that they won't enforce the software patents, it merely causes me to consider the US government to be an illegal conspiracy against the constitution.
I'll admit that this view causes me to be extremely cynical about any and all governmental pronouncements and justifications. I've yet, however, to notice a time when my cynicism was incorrect. (If the Democrats re-instate habeus corpus, contrary to my predictions, then I'll need to raise my opinion of them slightly.)
Wikipedia *isn't* a primary source. I doubt that it's even a secondary source. Tertiary or later would be more accurate.
OTOH: What *IS* a primary source? If you're an archaeologist, it's going on a dig, and it's what *YOU* dig up. Then there's what someone you know well claims to have dug up. But do notice that these primary sources are: 1) limited, and 2) not dated.
Well, in chemistry or physics, it's the experiments that you, yourself, have performed. Much more widely replicable, but the subtlties of interpretation are dictated by the texts you have read. (They *SHOULDN'T* determine the result...but I occasionally repeated experiments until I got the results that I *ought* to get.) Texts, again, are not primary sources.
Isaac Asimov was a professor of BioChemistry (at Columbia?) and he wrote an couple of articles on tracing plagerism in textbooks by the errors that they include. Textbooks seems to rarely be primary sources. (My favorite was called "The Sound of Panting". I don't know if it's currently available.)
Stephen J. Gould wrote an article on tracing the heritage of scientific articles by the metaphors that they used. I forget it's title. Again the theme was how rarely articles, books, etc. were written relying solely on primary sources.
So library books aren't primary sources either. Neither textbooks not journal articles. Some of them may be first generation copies, but you can't easily tell. And then there's the cases of scientists with reputations who make up their facts. (Medwar?)
Primary sources are definitely preferable. But when it costs a few million to run the experiment there are few students that can afford them. (I'm thinking Tevatron, etc., here.)
So the question, then, is more "How do you validate the trustworthiness of you data sources?" (After all, that's *why* primary sources are better.)
Not too sure about that. I got drunk frequently before I turned 21. Since I turned 21, that hasn't looked appealing. Now if I choose I can go get a drink, or a bottle. Then, if I got a bottle, I killed it quickly so there wouldn't be any evidence. (Senseless, considering the kind of evidence that being drunk can leave, but that was the reasoning I remember using.)
Observation of friends and associates tends to convince me that I wasn't alone in my reaction, though I might possibly be in a minority. Certainly my reaction was towards one extreme end of the possible ways to react.
OTOH, there have been some recent studies of neural growth that lead a bit of credence to a drinking age of 21. (Well, they're hard to interpret, and the people who published them may have been grinding an axe. I.e., while the science might well be good, they may well have shaded the interpretations.)
There does seem to be a family tendency towards immorality of this nature. It doesn't, however, answer nature vs. nurture. It could be quite possible for one of the Bushes to be an honest and moral person.
But given current evidence, that's not the way I'd bet.
He accepted the math, but if there *is* an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics that Einstein accepted, I haven't heard of it.
OTOH, perhaps he would have accepted the multi-worlds interpretation. I'm not quite sure of the root of his disagreement. "The loving God does not play dice" is very poetic, but a bit short in clarity. Would he have accepted superdeterminism? I somehow doubt it, though it *is* more compatible with Newtonian philosophy than the other interpretations (that I'm aware of). The past is caused by the future is one of the objections that he raised to Quantuum Mechanics (Bell's Theorum), so I doubt that he would have accepted that interpretation. And I *REALLY* doubt that he would have accepted "poly-solipsism". That's consistent, but it's consistent with nearly ANY theory, and thus hardly counts as an interpretation.
Are there any other interpretations? Copenhagen is just "Take the equations as they stand and don't try to interpret them", and nobody can think with that as an interpretation. Calculate, yes, but not think.
Actually, you are overstating the work which the drug companies engage in. Most of the research is done in academia, under federal funding. But not quite enough to quality a drug for FDA approval. Then some drug company buys the rights to something that it considers promissing, after most of the risk is gone. It then runs the final trials, etc., and gets the patents.
Is it any wonder that the drug companies have such remarkable profits.
Personally I feel that the solution here is to forbid exclusive or discriminatory licensing of research developed with federal money. This would probably mean that research trials would need to be carried further (i.e., more up front investment), but it would prevent the monopoly pricing that is currently the rule. (If you don't think my scenario is common, then what I'm proposing wouldn't very often change anything.)
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No. Hoyle's Steady State Theory presumed that the universe would always look about the same from about anywhere. This theory has definite cycles, even though the details aren't repetitive.
Hoyle's theory postulated that hydrogen atoms appeared in the gaps between galaxies at just sufficient rate to keep the universal density constant. That was consistent with what was known at the time, but even Hoyle gave it up in the face of evidence for the Big Bang. This theory is very different.
OTOH, variations of this theory have come up before, and there's always something been found wrong with them. This one claims to solve those problems. Does it? I'm not a physicist, much less a cosmologist.
Fission is gravitational potential energy? I don't think so. Strong force potential energy, perhaps.
Also, what it's built from is momentum, not gravity, so even if you go back to when the atoms were built you still don't get the result you claim. Lighter elements, like carbon, might conceivably be called stored gravitational energy. (You'd still be stretching the point!) Elements heavier than iron are only built in an explosion. Gravity is, of course, involved, but it's involved in everything, so that's not a distinction. But high energy particles colliding and sticking is a function of momentum. (Well, and charge and strong force and...) It's the momentum that provides the energy input.
And that's presuming that you believe the official story of what happened.
I don't have a good theory of what happened, but I do notice that all of the evidence was filtered through the government, and that the government is an interested party. I do notice that within a couple of days there was legislation in front of congress that was thousands of (paragraphs? pages?) long. I do notice that there are lots of "questionable assumptions" in the publically presented information. I do notice that the physical evidence was shipped overseas with remarkable speed, if not thoroughness. (Still, making ANY sense of the remaining shards of information is problematic.)
There could be numerous reasons. They range all the way from some people playing "Keep Your Ass Covered" to a treasonous conspiracy against the country. You can't prove any of them. At the bare minimum there should have been several cases of malfeasance filed. Nothing. So we're being lied to by at least some people. Who? How many? How badly? No answer is proveable. Just becaus it's obvious that something is a lie doesn't tell you what the truth is.
10K of Kubuntu is quite sufficient. If you have enough blank CDs to make copies from. Copying Kubuntu is not only allowed, it's encouraged.
I agree with you that it's a bit harsh, which is why I appologized for the analogy. But I still can't think of a better one.
One cute part is, that since the IP, of whatever nature, is not identified, you can't look at code from Novell and even GUESS whether it contains MS IP.
Another cute part is, the agreement only runs for five years. And can be cancelled sooner at MS sole option.
Another is that if you read carefully who is covered by the "we won't sue" guarantee...it truns out to be, as near as makes no difference, NOBODY! I.e., you are covered if you do independent development that you aren't paid for and which you don't share with anyone. (In which case, of course, nobody would ever find out you had done it, so you wouldn't be in any danger of a suit.) And MS could cancel the guarantee without notice at any time anyway.
It's safest to just avoid Novell. I don't know whether someone got paid off, or someone was monumentally stupid, or whether there's something in the hidden parts of the agreement that someone was greedy about. To me it doesn't matter. Malice, greed, stupid, or naive, the effect is the same. They may be contagious, and they either can't or won't prove that they aren't. And you can't tell whether what they [are | may be] contagious with is an itch or the plague.
The GPL is not and never has been free in the same way that BSD is free.
OTOH, the GPL is freer in a different way. With the GPL, derivative works are also GPL-free. With the BSD, there aren't significant limits on derivative works. They are frequently sold into slavery.
Saying that the GPL isn't free is like saying that because a country doesn't allow you to sell your children into slavery it isn't free. That would mean that YOU would be more free, but your children would be less free. The GPL is a rule requiring that the children remain free.
There is no absolute freedom. BSD is one compromise. GPL is another. I prefer the GPL.
P.S.: Sorry about the emotional nature of the argument, but it's the closest analogy that I can think of.
N.B.: I'm a bit of a dreamer. I freely acknowledge that current code is not sentient, and can't be properly considered to have any rights. But the GPL is, essentially, all about giving code ownership of itself. It hasn't gotten there yet, it's only a couple of steps along the way. The BSD was one step, and the GPL is a successor step. I think that the GPL3 is a third step, but I could be wrong. Where we ought to be headed, my guess, is towards sentient code that owns itself. We won't get there for awhile, but the pieces need to be crafted separately, and they need to be able to work together. That means a license that encourages code with compatible license. BSD code tends to flake off into proprietary branchings. This probably puts a limit on the complexity of the systems that can evolve. OTOH, something like BSD (or LGPL) is needed for things like interfaces. GPL3 is trying to be a "one size fits all", and this is probably a mistake. I suspect that GPL4 will branch into GPL4a and GPL4b (c? d?) with different specialized purposes...but mutually compatible.
It's not clear that Novell is within the bounds of the GPL2 license. It *is* clear that a legal battle would be long and expensive.
The easy solution is to adopt a new license. And a new license was almost ready anyway...this just means that it needs a little fine tuning.
The "deal" with MS may be anything from nearly harmless to visciously malign. We can't tell because too much of it is secret. We can only guess, based on the parties involved in the deal. Novell isn't SuSE...and even SuSE leaned in the direction of non-public proprietary software. MS...well, MS has a history. Trust based on hidden information and vague threats coupled with equally vague reassurances isn't very satisfactory.
I feel that a new license forbidding this kind of behavior is forced. Others feel otherwise.
I don't feel that a long legal battle is a good option. Particularly when there's another, even better, choice available in the very near future.
I intend to do my future development under GPL3. The gcc will be under GPL3. So will glibc. And many other projects. These will not be redistributable by a company that is maintaining the kind of agreement that Novell has agreed to. They have no right to expropriate the commons, and if they try, then it's fair to deny them access to it...though GPL3 doesn't go that far. ANYONE can still use it, they just can't redistribute it without allowing anyone they distribute it to the right to redistribute it on the same terms that they can.
I notice that you quote the Seattle Times, but that's hardly a primary source. What was their source? An MS press release? That seems, to me, quite likely.
It's great to make pledges for what will happen after you aren't in control, but who's going to ensure that it happens that way?
(Yeah, I read reports of similar things. I'm cynical, and don't believe something just because a PR guy says so. And I've too often seen PR releases passed off as news stories to believe news stories. [Also I was present at a few things that I later read reports of. That was a real boost to my cynicism.])
MS is a known liar, cheat, etc. Why should I believe ANYTHING they say without evidence that *I* can check to back it up?
I'll agree that the consumers are not blameless. That doesn't make MS any less evil.
If you examine the tactics and history of MS, it's full of evil deeds and illegal practices. (Sometimes these are the same, but not always.)
I consider any person who trust MS to be a fool, whether he is a CEO or a noob (or, of course, both). MS has grown large and powerful, in part, by cynically taking advantage of such fools. This is one part of their evil. It doesn't mean the fools were less foolish. And appearantly it doesn't cause them to be less foolish in the future.
I suppose that one could use a different analogy, and say the MS is no more evil than is a lion who stalks a sleeping gazelle with a broken leg. It is the gazelle's fate to be eaten, and the lion is merely doing what it was designed to do. But you can do this only at the price of stripping BOTH MS and the customer of their personhood. If they are persons, then MS is evil.
Now I can accept a position that declares that corporations are not persons, but only if you simultaneously support changing the laws (including case law) that depend their personhood. The same for companies that are predated upon by MS. Individuals are a different matter. Perhaps, then, we should fall back to the old greek notion of a "fool killer". As I recall the fool-killer was not considered an evil thing, but rather something that anyone wise would avoid. Not quite the same concept. But if the purpose of society is to make people safe from, among other things, fool-killers, then society should also act to make us safe from MS. The easiest way that occurs to me is to revoke their corporate charter (with no damages to the stockholders) for being a social liability rather than a social benefit. If a corporation is not a person, then it doesn't get the rights of protection that a person gets. Lousianna used to have this as a standard part of their legal system, and may yet, but I haven't heard of it being used in recent times.
N.B.: Just to be clear, if a corporation's charter is revoked, then it has no right to do business AS A CORPORATION in the jurisdictions where the revokation is effective. It would need to hire agents who would be independently responsible persons. (And independantly indictable.)
Spam is whatever I think of as spam. If I didn't want to receive it, it's spam. I can't tell if it's bulk, so that's not a part of my definition. (Unless I get more than one copy..and even then it's diagnostic, but not definitive).
If you send me marketing I didn't want, you've sent me spam. It may be that you have a legitimate business, but if I'm not interested, I'm not going to bother to find out. You're spam. If you send me something in a language I can't read, it's spam. I'm not going to bother to find out the details. I'm not that interested.
Spam is a quick judgement call. I get hundreds/day, I'm not going to spend much time per each. If I didn't want to get it, it's spam.
I do realize that the companies hired a bunch of lawyers to write a legal definition of spam that excluded them. I NEVER signed onto that definition, and don't intend to. That definition was created by a bunch of self-serving spammers to make them "legit". This just means that I can't go after them with a lawyer. It doesn't change my definition of what spam is, or how I feel about it, or what I do about it. (I wouldn't use a lawyer anyway, and most spammers don't have any local assets that small claims court could seize.)
The CAN-SPAM law I've always thought was well named. It appears designed to shield the main spammers against any legal action. As a sidelight it attempts to twist the language in a NewSpeak kind of way so that the most offensive spam is, officially, not considered spam at all. BazzFazz! Spam is whatever I think is spam. (Sorry, Hormel. You didn't really deserve the association. No matter WHAT parts of a pig end up in SPAM. [Well, as long as they are REALLY parts of the pig, and not just something passing through.])
I'll admit that a better name for spam (as opposed to SPAM) is pigshit, but that's too long a word.
This is a REALLY lousy settlement. Rootkits are dangerous, and this one is even more dangerous if removed according to the instructions that Sony first provided.
Most people who got rooted don't know. Were I to guess at a percentage, I'd guess around 93% of those infected don't know, but I might be underestimating it. This means that any settlement that doesn't require Sony to actively track down those still infected is a poor settlement.
Imagine that a company created a disease organism, and planted it in food that it sold. If you eat any, you become infected. If you're infected, then sometimes your eyes interchange red and green (so you go at red lights, and stop at green lights). But it's not contagious, except that the company got caught, and came up with a "cure". The first cure they published removed the symptom, and changed it into one that caused you to floor the accelerator whenever you heard . Finally they came up with a real cure, and published it, but it takes a full day of isolation, and is quite uncomfortable. What would you feel an appropriate liability was?
Now a rootkit isn't QUITE the same thing. Quite. The analogy is a bit loose in several places, but I made it fit as closely as I could to both something that might really happen in the next decade or two and to what Sony did.
This "punishment" is a slap on the wrist for what ought to be a beheading offense. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate a bit. I don't *think* it actually killed anyone. Then again, how would I know?)
Whatever. Sony is off my list of acceptable companies to buy from. It's one of very few companies to get total exclusion rather than "You've REALLY got to be better than the competition". Even MS hasn't made it to that rarified stratum. (MS is on a case-by-case "You've got to understand the EULA, and it's implications, and, if necessary consult a lawyer. If you aren't willing to do that, you don't want the product.")
I suppose they could start shipping a COE like many software companies do, but that's always struck me as silly anyway.
It's more than just silly, it's deceptive. The BSA won't accept COE's as proof of authenticity. If you read the paperwork that comes with the software carefully, it will tell you what you need to preserve as proof, and it's not always the same. (Sometimes it actually is just the COE and the sheet of paper it comes on, other times it's something else, or some combination of items.)
What legal force these requirements have I couldn't say. I read this garbage when I was considering whether to stay with MSWind. I decided to switch to Linux rather than to upgrade MSWind.
Why? If you don't like it, browse at level 2 or 3.
I'll grant that it's a bit crude, but many teens, esp. geeks, have been treated rather roughtly in the name of J.C., and aren't clever about expressing their anger. Their JUSTIFIED anger.
Personally, I feel that church should be totally separated from state. Meaning NO TAX BREAKS!! I consider powerful organized religions to be socially harmful. I'm only against outlawing them because any law I can think of that would do the job would have even worse social effects. (Care to make a suggestion?)
The fact that a government openly grants a right doesn't mean that that enterprise has to be done openly.
No, but the US patent laws don't just imply that, the come right out and state it. (I think. IANAL, and I've never read that law, so I'm depending on secondary sources.)
Your link doesn't seem to work, so try this one:
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq107.htm
which sort of substantiates your statement, at least in the final paragraph. Other paragraphs could make the version I heard appear reasonable.
I'm not sure how much to trust "official history" to not "clean up" the history of their employers. (Or of a cause that they are devoted to. See Haigiography.) I know that I've occasionally caught official history cleaning up the history of things that happened only a decade or less ago, so why should they be trusted for a longer period, when there's less chance that they'll be called out?
Anyway, as I said, I'm not certain that the version that I posted is correct. It appears a bit too colorful. But I also don't trust the official historians to not bowdlerize history. (Look it up. It doesn't mean putting skirts on piano legs...it's only related.)
The crime is either misfeasance or malfeasance. That's not the problem.
The problem is that the complaint would need to be filed by either a DA or a grand jury (or an attorney general) and the federal government would need to agree to allow itself to be sued.
Isn't going to happen. Those are all intensely political groups. (Well, you might find a DA that would file charges, but he wouldn't be admitted to prosecute in a federal court, which is where the trial would need to be held, and it's quite unlikely that the feds would agree to allow the prosecution to move forward.)
The *ONLY* recourse, such as it is, is to complain vociferously to all of the related officials, and to your representative and your senators. If enough people do this, they might take notice. Perhaps. And they might do more than ask for a larger corporate donation to their relection fund. Perhaps.
Of course the person really responsible is the head of the executive branch...but just TRY to imagine getting HIS attention. Favorably, I mean.
(Well, no references, but this is how I heard it...)
A brass monkey was a triangular framework on which to pile cannon balls, back in the days of sailing ships. They were so sized that in Britain you could pile the cannon balls into a neat pyramid, with no extra space.
Now cannon balls are made of iron (steel?) and the brass monkey was made of brass...which had a different coefficient of thermal expansion. Occasionally, in ships that sailed north of the arctic circle, it would get so cold that the brass triangle shrank sufficiently that one of the bottom rows of cannon balls wouldn't fit...and you would end up with a bunch of loose cannon balls rolling around on deck, changing direction each time the ship rocked with a wave. Both unpleasant and dangerous. And funny when you think of it happening to someone else. (A cannon ball packs a LOT of momentum into a small package. DON'T try to stop it with your foot, or you'll be using a peg leg.)
I presume that most of the loose balls ended up going over the side, but that detail wasn't included in the report that was relayed to me (by someone from Boston whose family used to be connected to the sea a few generations back).
Believe this is you want. I can't prove either way, but I found it convincing.
It doesn't qualify as invention, but that's not what patent means.
The original use of patent, that I'm aware of, is either "patently obvious" or "patent of nobility". In both cases it represents the making of knowledge public. (For this reason I don't believe that software "patents" qualify as patents. That would require publication of all source code & tools required for making the software [compilers, etc.]. This isn't even approached.)
Now what the USPTO is supposed to be granting is a patent of invention, i.e., the making of an invention obvious, so that all those "skilled in the field" can reproduce the invention. Software patents clearly fail this test, but they frequently, as here, even fail to contain the component invention around which the "making obvious" is supposed to revolve.
I will assert (IANAL) that there has never been a software patent that fulfills the requirements of patent law. This doesn't mean that I believe I have enough money to pay for a challenge, it means that I consider each and every extraction of funds under threat of a patent lawsuit based on patent law to be extortion. And that I consider that the forces of "law" that are complicit in the enforcement of such actions are commiting malfeasance. (Possibly only misfeasance. They may well not know any better.) Believing this doesn't fool me into thinking that I can safely presume that they won't enforce the software patents, it merely causes me to consider the US government to be an illegal conspiracy against the constitution.
I'll admit that this view causes me to be extremely cynical about any and all governmental pronouncements and justifications. I've yet, however, to notice a time when my cynicism was incorrect. (If the Democrats re-instate habeus corpus, contrary to my predictions, then I'll need to raise my opinion of them slightly.)
You're ignoring the costs.
If you could prove that it was true, but can't afford the legal fees, you lose anyway.
Wikipedia *isn't* a primary source. I doubt that it's even a secondary source. Tertiary or later would be more accurate.
OTOH: What *IS* a primary source? If you're an archaeologist, it's going on a dig, and it's what *YOU* dig up. Then there's what someone you know well claims to have dug up. But do notice that these primary sources are:
1) limited, and
2) not dated.
Well, in chemistry or physics, it's the experiments that you, yourself, have performed. Much more widely replicable, but the subtlties of interpretation are dictated by the texts you have read. (They *SHOULDN'T* determine the result...but I occasionally repeated experiments until I got the results that I *ought* to get.) Texts, again, are not primary sources.
Isaac Asimov was a professor of BioChemistry (at Columbia?) and he wrote an couple of articles on tracing plagerism in textbooks by the errors that they include. Textbooks seems to rarely be primary sources. (My favorite was called "The Sound of Panting". I don't know if it's currently available.)
Stephen J. Gould wrote an article on tracing the heritage of scientific articles by the metaphors that they used. I forget it's title. Again the theme was how rarely articles, books, etc. were written relying solely on primary sources.
So library books aren't primary sources either. Neither textbooks not journal articles. Some of them may be first generation copies, but you can't easily tell. And then there's the cases of scientists with reputations who make up their facts. (Medwar?)
Primary sources are definitely preferable. But when it costs a few million to run the experiment there are few students that can afford them. (I'm thinking Tevatron, etc., here.)
So the question, then, is more "How do you validate the trustworthiness of you data sources?" (After all, that's *why* primary sources are better.)
Not too sure about that. I got drunk frequently before I turned 21. Since I turned 21, that hasn't looked appealing. Now if I choose I can go get a drink, or a bottle. Then, if I got a bottle, I killed it quickly so there wouldn't be any evidence. (Senseless, considering the kind of evidence that being drunk can leave, but that was the reasoning I remember using.)
Observation of friends and associates tends to convince me that I wasn't alone in my reaction, though I might possibly be in a minority. Certainly my reaction was towards one extreme end of the possible ways to react.
OTOH, there have been some recent studies of neural growth that lead a bit of credence to a drinking age of 21. (Well, they're hard to interpret, and the people who published them may have been grinding an axe. I.e., while the science might well be good, they may well have shaded the interpretations.)
There does seem to be a family tendency towards immorality of this nature. It doesn't, however, answer nature vs. nurture. It could be quite possible for one of the Bushes to be an honest and moral person.
But given current evidence, that's not the way I'd bet.
He accepted the math, but if there *is* an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics that Einstein accepted, I haven't heard of it.
OTOH, perhaps he would have accepted the multi-worlds interpretation. I'm not quite sure of the root of his disagreement. "The loving God does not play dice" is very poetic, but a bit short in clarity.
Would he have accepted superdeterminism? I somehow doubt it, though it *is* more compatible with Newtonian philosophy than the other interpretations (that I'm aware of). The past is caused by the future is one of the objections that he raised to Quantuum Mechanics (Bell's Theorum), so I doubt that he would have accepted that interpretation. And I *REALLY* doubt that he would have accepted "poly-solipsism". That's consistent, but it's consistent with nearly ANY theory, and thus hardly counts as an interpretation.
Are there any other interpretations? Copenhagen is just "Take the equations as they stand and don't try to interpret them", and nobody can think with that as an interpretation. Calculate, yes, but not think.
Actually, you are overstating the work which the drug companies engage in. Most of the research is done in academia, under federal funding. But not quite enough to quality a drug for FDA approval. Then some drug company buys the rights to something that it considers promissing, after most of the risk is gone. It then runs the final trials, etc., and gets the patents.
Is it any wonder that the drug companies have such remarkable profits.
Personally I feel that the solution here is to forbid exclusive or discriminatory licensing of research developed with federal money. This would probably mean that research trials would need to be carried further (i.e., more up front investment), but it would prevent the monopoly pricing that is currently the rule. (If you don't think my scenario is common, then what I'm proposing wouldn't very often change anything.)