I'm interested in a side-by-side comparison at three points:
Best against best. How do the current top-of-the-line CPUs from each company compare.
Similar price points. If I'm willing to spend $X on a CPU, which company gives me the most performance for my money?
Similar clock speeds. This is more a techie thing, gives me an idea of which company's wringing the most from each clock cycle in their chips. With current tech it's not a really reliable guide to which CPU to buy, but it gives me an idea of how their tech stacks up.
Re:MS SLES Coupons
on
GPLv3 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
Not quite a free pass. Notice that the grandfather clause only includes the bit about distributing GPLv3'd software while a party to such an agreement. It doesn't extend to failing to pass along any patent license (which includes things like covenants not to sue) or rights to pass along such a patent license in turn. So Novell can distribute GPLv3'd software because of the grandfather clause, but they can't distribute any of it subject to the agreement with MS without violating either the agreement or the software's license (license requires that they pass that coverage to all indirect recipients, agreement prohibits doing so).
"Getting in is easy. Getting out, that really isn't hard either. Getting out alive, that's the tricky part."
No. The bill doesn't outlaw CID spoofing, it outlaws sending misleading or inaccurate CID data. As long as the sent CID information accurately identifies the caller and doesn't mislead the recipient about who the caller is, you should be OK.
Because Novell, at the time it entered into the deal, had no knowledge of the then-nonexistent new language in the GPL. Linspire and Xandros, at the time they entered into their deals, knew about the language and knew it was going to be part of the license.
I think it's more an acknowledgment that the courts tend to take a dim view of trying to bind anyone to terms they couldn't have known about beforehand. So the grandfather clause says that deals entered into before the relevant changes to GPLv3 were penned aren't, merely by existing, a violation of the license. But notice that the language of GPLv3 applies that grandfather clause only to the existence of the agreement. Distribution of GPLv3'd software under such an agreement is not grandfathered, and is still subject to all the GPLv3's requirements including the requirement that any protections given to direct recipients must be able to be passed along to indirect recipients too. Which means Novell is still on the hook if they ever try to include GPLv3'd software in their distribution. But that will happen after GPLv3 is finalized, so Novell will know before distributing that they'll be subject to those terms and the courts have no problem whatsoever with that.
Look at it from a business standpoint. If I add a feature I need to a BSD-licensed project, for example, and contribute the code back so someone else can maintain and extend it and keep it integrated with new versions (so I don't have to keep updating and applying my own patches as new versions get released). Now a competitor can come along, extend my feature a bit, use that in their own product and never let me have access to their extension. But if I did the same with a GPL-licensed project, then although my competitor can still extend my feature they can't distribute it as part of their product without giving me access to their extension as well. That competitor can get a leg up on me by using my work as the basis for theirs, but only by giving me a leg up as well. It also means that competitor can't pull an MS-Kerberos stunt and make something based on my work that's subtly incompatible with my stuff in a way that gives that competitor an advantage. Or at least they can't without showing me exactly how they did it so I can respond.
All the GPLv3 language does is make merely having entered into the deal not per se a violation of the license. It does not exempt the company from any of the other terms of the license, including the requirement that all recipients receive not merely the protections resulting from any agreement but the right to pass along those protections in turn. So Novell is still on the hook there: as soon as they're faced with GPLv3'd software in their distribution they'll have to decide whether or not they can extend the agreement with Microsoft to cover all Linux users, not just those who got their software directly from Novell. If they can't, then distribution subject to the agreement would still be a violation of the GPLv3 even with the grandfather clause in there.
Actually, IIRC the legal-tender laws had a very good purpose. When they were enacted, banks issued their own bank notes. All a bank note (which is what currency is) is is a paper issued by a bank promising to redeem it for a certain amount of "real" money on demand. With every bank issuing it's own, there's a problem. When I walk into a business and try to pay with bank notes issued by a bank several states away, how's the business to know that bank's still in business? How do they know it ever existed in the first place? Nobody would trust bank notes issued by banks that weren't local and known to them, and that's a big problem in interstate commerce. So the Federal government intervened by chartering a handful of banks and backing their notes with it's own guarantee that the government would redeem the notes if the banks couldn't or wouldn't. Now you didn't have to know or trust the issuing bank, as long as you trusted the government to keep it's promise (whether you do or not's another matter). To give this teeth, and make sure people weren't stuck with debts they couldn't pay because the creditor wouldn't accept any of the notes the debtor had, they added laws that said that offering to pay with government-guaranteed notes constituted, by law, a lawful tender of payment. A creditor was free to refuse to accept it, but as long as your offer was open they couldn't claim you hadn't paid. This covered the other half, making it so that people could use those government-guaranteed notes without having to worry about being stuck with a debt and the creditor wouldn't accept their form of payment.
Those chartered banks eventually merged and morphed into the Federal Reserve Bank we know today. But when it started, legal-tender laws had a perfectly good reason for being.
Remember that Goodmail isn't charging senders to get their mail delivered. The charge is to bypass the normal processing that the receiving ISP does to all e-mail and deliver directly into the recipient's inbox. If you don't pay Goodmail to get your mail certified then it still gets delivered, it just gets handled as normal everyday mail. Now if the receiving ISP starts dumping everything not flagged by Goodmail into the spam folder automatically that'll be another matter, but my problem there would be with the ISP and not Goodmail (unless Goodmail was telling the ISP to do this, but they aren't). That problem is one I'd have to take up with the recipient, though, since I'm not a customer of their ISP. But as long as it's the receiving ISP's choice how to handle Goodmail-marked mail, Goodmail and senders can do whatever they please as far as I'm concerned.
For myself, I'm a firm supporter of the ISP's right to filter incoming e-mail however they want. I like the fact that my ISP applies some pretty effective spam filters. I also like the fact that they're unlikely to bypass that filtering just because of a Goodmail signature on messages. The only thing I demand from an ISP is that they make it clear to customers what sort of filtering they do, so customers can decide whether they agree with it or not.
He can build his software on top of a free-software infrastructure quite well. What he can't do is include free software within his product itself, redistributing other people's code within his product instead of merely alongside it, without complying with their licenses. Of course he's got that issue with proprietary infrastructure too: you can't build MS Visual C++ products and distribute the neccesary VC++ runtime files along with it without complying with the VC++ redistributeables license.
No. Not without probably having to put your code under either the LGPL or the GPL depending on the exact mix of libraries.
Yes.
No. The worst you could be forced to do is not distribute it, if you ignore the answer to #2 or something. The demand a copyright holder can make if you're distributing their code is that you either comply with the their license or cease distribution, but which option you choose is your choice.
Probably not. You'll need not a BSD kernel but BSD-licensed libraries to avoid #2. All the others are already avoided.
This whole flap isn't about Microsoft merely including products in Vista. It's about them including their products in Vista and also locking Vista down to use only Microsoft's products for certain purposes even when Microsoft themselves provide and use an API specifically designed to allow for seamless substitution of service providers. It's as if Microsoft let you install any word processing software you wanted but no matter what settings you changed or what you told the system, double-clicking on a document would only open the document in Microsoft Word.
Internally, the search engine used by Vista's search boxes is a component with a defined API. The search engine registers as an implementation of that API, Vista itself uses that API to be a client of the search engine. And there's a well-defined way in the COM/DCOM system for a component to register as an implementation of an API and for the default or preferred implementation to be selected by the user (this is the same system the Set Program Access and Defaults controls use). But if I as a user install Google Desktop Search and tell the system I want to use it as the search engine, Vista will override my order and continue to use the Microsoft search engine instead. There's no technical reason to do this, in fact there's every technical reason not to, and the complaint is that Microsoft is artifically restricting it's competitors' non-OS products and favoring it's own in ways it can only do because it controls the OS those products depend on.
Bear in mind that, contractually, SOE had no say whatsoever in any of the things you complain about. In fact, SOE vehemently objected to every single one of them. But LucasArts, and George Lucas personally, have the final, absolute say over all game mechanics, rules, customer-service policies and such in SWG. SOE are essentially contractors doing the server administration, providing CS bodies and providing some coders working to specs provided by Lucas. The general opinion about SWG I've heard from the SOE people here in San Diego, from the front-line CS up to the execs, is "Never again.". And frankly I'm not suprised Lucas screwed up SWG with NGE, look what he did to his own movies with episodes 1-3.
Back when BillG made that comment, the primary threat to a company was another company who made things. In that environment a patent war chest is a defense: since that other company makes things, if they sue you you can search your war chest for patents they might infringe upon in return. Today, though, the primary threat is from IP holding companies. Against them, the size of your patent war chest doesn't matter. They don't make anything, they don't do anything, therefore there's nothing you can go after no matter how many patents you hold (unless you happen to be the lucky soul holding the patent on sueing people for patent infringement). I think even Microsoft is slowly coming to the realization that patents pose a greater threat to them than their value as a weapon.
I think you miss one thing in your blog post: GPLv3 won't affect business users at all. What it will affect is one particular class of commercial software developers: those who want to use GPL'd code as the basis for their product. That group of developers needs to be able to release the results under proprietary licenses that forbid their customers from redistributing those products. The GPL prohibits that, and GPLv3 closes several loopholes that could allow working around the GPL'd conditions. That's obviously bad for those developers, but not unnecessarily bad for the original authors of the code.
Now, one thing I'm also missing is where those commercial developers are customers of the code's original authors. Those developers aren't paying the original authors anything for the use of the code, and usually a customer is paying something in some form for the product they're getting. If you don't want to pay anything, why should I consider you my customer? The GPL requests payment in kind (code), and those developers you speak of don't want to pay back with their code. They don't want to pay in money, else the whole question would be moot as they'd go to the original authors and negotiate a non-GPL license for the code in return for royalty payments or sometime and wouldn't have to worry about the GPL anymore. They sound more like freeloaders than customers, actually.
I'm sure certain companies would like GPLv3 to be alienating open-source developers, but frankly I don't see that happening too much. The only people it's alienating are people who would never use the GPL anyway. I've heard this tune sung before, when GPLv2 was being introduced: all those unrealistic, idealistic, totally unneccesary changes RMS was introducing would completely destroy the license and developers would abandon the GPL as unworkable. We can see how accurate that prediction was.
I use an even simpler solution to the problem than any Mr. Hasselton suggests. Each site I sign up with where I care about this gets a unique e-mail address dedicated to them, one that isn't my regular e-mail address. I don't bother telling anyone else what these site-specific addresses are because nobody but that site should be sending mail to them anyway. Anyone checking my regular e-mail addresses would get back "not a member", since that address isn't a member. They can try and guess what different address I used, but that's only likely to work for sites like eBay where having an account isn't particularly embarrassing. For someplace like Match.com I'd be using something plausible but arbitrary like "tk487c5", and that's going to be all but impossible to guess if you don't know what it is already.
Re:What will change and what is the fix for TiVo?
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 1
I think the legal arguments are two-fold:
It involves making a copy into the device's memory, which you don't have a license to do.
It requires circumventing a protection mechanism, which you aren't legally allowed to do.
Now, USC Title 17 117(a)(1) shoots down part 1 of that by explicitly saying that copies which are an essential part of the utilization of a program in conjunction with a machine are not infringements of copyright. Part 2, of course, is shot down by GPLv3 saying that Tivo cannot invoke that bit and still be in compliance with the license that lets them distribute the GPL'd code they base their product on.
Re:What will change and what is the fix for TiVo?
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
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· Score: 2, Informative
There isn't. That's intentional. The spirit of the GPL says "When you base your stuff on GPL'd code, the people you give the results to are free to do the same things you did.". Tivo wants to be able to modify and redistribute someone else's code, but not allow anyone to modify and redistribute their code. Trying to finesse the point by saying "Well, you can modify the code and redistribute it, but the people you give it to can't use it in any meaningful way..." isn't going to fly.
One problem is that often the ISP is a content provider. Take Time-Warner Cable, for example. Notice the name. Now, do you think thier ISP division is not connected to their cable-television, movie production, music distribution and other divisions? If it isn't, those other divisions probably want it to be. They want to make sure that, while their content is available to their Internet users (under suitable controls, naturally), everybody else's content is throttled and generally horrible.
I run everything inbound through a spam filter first. Anything flagged as spam gets ignored until the end of the day, then I make a quick pass through to see if anything jumps out at me as valid and delete everything else. The stuff that makes it into my inbox I ask three questions about:
Do I need to remember this for the future?
Do I need to respond to this?
Do I need to respond to this now?
If the answer to #3 is yes, I respond and file the message. If the answer to #2 is yes, I flag it for follow-up. At the end of the day I recheck all the flagged messages and if I still need to respond I do. If the answer to #1 is yes, I file the message in the appropriate folder and flag it based on how long I figure I need to remember it. If the answer to all three is no, I delete the message. Once a month I make a pass through my folders and delete messages I don't need or want to keep any longer.
80% or more of my mail gets deleted within 48 hours of arriving (or, at work, filed in the "preserve the evidence for the upcoming court-martial" folder).
Hmm. Lompoc introduces a municipal wireless network. Just as the city starts, the local DSL and cable providers suddenly do massive upgrades to their systems. Upgrades that the city has been asking for for years, and that the DSL and cable providers have found it infeasible to do. One wonders whether this sudden change of heart on the part of the private providers might have something to do with the failure of the wireless network, and whether those providers would have had that change of heart if it weren't for the threat of a competitor they couldn't exclude hanging over their heads.
Well, cable quality matters and it doesn't. The "doesn't" part comes from the fact that it's a digital signal. Either it gets to the other end sufficiently intact to be decipherable or it doesn't. If it does, you get a 100% accurate reproduction of the input signal. As long as the signal is above that threshold, it doesn't matter how far above it it is.
The "does" part comes from the corollary: if the signal isn't decipherable, you get nothing. Analog signals degrade gracefully: as signal quality goes down you get more and more snow and other artifacts, but it's a smooth loss. Digital like HDMI is binary, all or nothing. You go from getting a perfect picture to getting a black screen. The higher the quality of cable, the fewer problems you have that drag the signal down below the threshold for readability. That's especially important on long cable runs where simple distance is already pulling the signal down close to the threshold. When you're close to the maximum distance, a high-quality cable can mean the difference between getting a signal and not.
Actually it's "knew or should reasonably have known". That second part is the kicker. When applying for a patent an applicant's required by law to do certain due-diligence research (including the prior-art search) first and include the results in the application. If a reasonable person doing the research required by law would've discovered the prior art, then whether Netflix actually knew about it doesn't matter.
Or that's the theory, anyway. In practice you get into extended argument about what's reasonable, and things go downhill from there.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm interested in a side-by-side comparison at three points:
Not quite a free pass. Notice that the grandfather clause only includes the bit about distributing GPLv3'd software while a party to such an agreement. It doesn't extend to failing to pass along any patent license (which includes things like covenants not to sue) or rights to pass along such a patent license in turn. So Novell can distribute GPLv3'd software because of the grandfather clause, but they can't distribute any of it subject to the agreement with MS without violating either the agreement or the software's license (license requires that they pass that coverage to all indirect recipients, agreement prohibits doing so).
"Getting in is easy. Getting out, that really isn't hard either. Getting out alive, that's the tricky part."
No. The bill doesn't outlaw CID spoofing, it outlaws sending misleading or inaccurate CID data. As long as the sent CID information accurately identifies the caller and doesn't mislead the recipient about who the caller is, you should be OK.
Because Novell, at the time it entered into the deal, had no knowledge of the then-nonexistent new language in the GPL. Linspire and Xandros, at the time they entered into their deals, knew about the language and knew it was going to be part of the license.
I think it's more an acknowledgment that the courts tend to take a dim view of trying to bind anyone to terms they couldn't have known about beforehand. So the grandfather clause says that deals entered into before the relevant changes to GPLv3 were penned aren't, merely by existing, a violation of the license. But notice that the language of GPLv3 applies that grandfather clause only to the existence of the agreement. Distribution of GPLv3'd software under such an agreement is not grandfathered, and is still subject to all the GPLv3's requirements including the requirement that any protections given to direct recipients must be able to be passed along to indirect recipients too. Which means Novell is still on the hook if they ever try to include GPLv3'd software in their distribution. But that will happen after GPLv3 is finalized, so Novell will know before distributing that they'll be subject to those terms and the courts have no problem whatsoever with that.
Look at it from a business standpoint. If I add a feature I need to a BSD-licensed project, for example, and contribute the code back so someone else can maintain and extend it and keep it integrated with new versions (so I don't have to keep updating and applying my own patches as new versions get released). Now a competitor can come along, extend my feature a bit, use that in their own product and never let me have access to their extension. But if I did the same with a GPL-licensed project, then although my competitor can still extend my feature they can't distribute it as part of their product without giving me access to their extension as well. That competitor can get a leg up on me by using my work as the basis for theirs, but only by giving me a leg up as well. It also means that competitor can't pull an MS-Kerberos stunt and make something based on my work that's subtly incompatible with my stuff in a way that gives that competitor an advantage. Or at least they can't without showing me exactly how they did it so I can respond.
All the GPLv3 language does is make merely having entered into the deal not per se a violation of the license. It does not exempt the company from any of the other terms of the license, including the requirement that all recipients receive not merely the protections resulting from any agreement but the right to pass along those protections in turn. So Novell is still on the hook there: as soon as they're faced with GPLv3'd software in their distribution they'll have to decide whether or not they can extend the agreement with Microsoft to cover all Linux users, not just those who got their software directly from Novell. If they can't, then distribution subject to the agreement would still be a violation of the GPLv3 even with the grandfather clause in there.
Actually, IIRC the legal-tender laws had a very good purpose. When they were enacted, banks issued their own bank notes. All a bank note (which is what currency is) is is a paper issued by a bank promising to redeem it for a certain amount of "real" money on demand. With every bank issuing it's own, there's a problem. When I walk into a business and try to pay with bank notes issued by a bank several states away, how's the business to know that bank's still in business? How do they know it ever existed in the first place? Nobody would trust bank notes issued by banks that weren't local and known to them, and that's a big problem in interstate commerce. So the Federal government intervened by chartering a handful of banks and backing their notes with it's own guarantee that the government would redeem the notes if the banks couldn't or wouldn't. Now you didn't have to know or trust the issuing bank, as long as you trusted the government to keep it's promise (whether you do or not's another matter). To give this teeth, and make sure people weren't stuck with debts they couldn't pay because the creditor wouldn't accept any of the notes the debtor had, they added laws that said that offering to pay with government-guaranteed notes constituted, by law, a lawful tender of payment. A creditor was free to refuse to accept it, but as long as your offer was open they couldn't claim you hadn't paid. This covered the other half, making it so that people could use those government-guaranteed notes without having to worry about being stuck with a debt and the creditor wouldn't accept their form of payment.
Those chartered banks eventually merged and morphed into the Federal Reserve Bank we know today. But when it started, legal-tender laws had a perfectly good reason for being.
Remember that Goodmail isn't charging senders to get their mail delivered. The charge is to bypass the normal processing that the receiving ISP does to all e-mail and deliver directly into the recipient's inbox. If you don't pay Goodmail to get your mail certified then it still gets delivered, it just gets handled as normal everyday mail. Now if the receiving ISP starts dumping everything not flagged by Goodmail into the spam folder automatically that'll be another matter, but my problem there would be with the ISP and not Goodmail (unless Goodmail was telling the ISP to do this, but they aren't). That problem is one I'd have to take up with the recipient, though, since I'm not a customer of their ISP. But as long as it's the receiving ISP's choice how to handle Goodmail-marked mail, Goodmail and senders can do whatever they please as far as I'm concerned.
For myself, I'm a firm supporter of the ISP's right to filter incoming e-mail however they want. I like the fact that my ISP applies some pretty effective spam filters. I also like the fact that they're unlikely to bypass that filtering just because of a Goodmail signature on messages. The only thing I demand from an ISP is that they make it clear to customers what sort of filtering they do, so customers can decide whether they agree with it or not.
He can build his software on top of a free-software infrastructure quite well. What he can't do is include free software within his product itself, redistributing other people's code within his product instead of merely alongside it, without complying with their licenses. Of course he's got that issue with proprietary infrastructure too: you can't build MS Visual C++ products and distribute the neccesary VC++ runtime files along with it without complying with the VC++ redistributeables license.
I wish they would. Microsoft makes some very good hardware.
This whole flap isn't about Microsoft merely including products in Vista. It's about them including their products in Vista and also locking Vista down to use only Microsoft's products for certain purposes even when Microsoft themselves provide and use an API specifically designed to allow for seamless substitution of service providers. It's as if Microsoft let you install any word processing software you wanted but no matter what settings you changed or what you told the system, double-clicking on a document would only open the document in Microsoft Word.
Internally, the search engine used by Vista's search boxes is a component with a defined API. The search engine registers as an implementation of that API, Vista itself uses that API to be a client of the search engine. And there's a well-defined way in the COM/DCOM system for a component to register as an implementation of an API and for the default or preferred implementation to be selected by the user (this is the same system the Set Program Access and Defaults controls use). But if I as a user install Google Desktop Search and tell the system I want to use it as the search engine, Vista will override my order and continue to use the Microsoft search engine instead. There's no technical reason to do this, in fact there's every technical reason not to, and the complaint is that Microsoft is artifically restricting it's competitors' non-OS products and favoring it's own in ways it can only do because it controls the OS those products depend on.
Bear in mind that, contractually, SOE had no say whatsoever in any of the things you complain about. In fact, SOE vehemently objected to every single one of them. But LucasArts, and George Lucas personally, have the final, absolute say over all game mechanics, rules, customer-service policies and such in SWG. SOE are essentially contractors doing the server administration, providing CS bodies and providing some coders working to specs provided by Lucas. The general opinion about SWG I've heard from the SOE people here in San Diego, from the front-line CS up to the execs, is "Never again.". And frankly I'm not suprised Lucas screwed up SWG with NGE, look what he did to his own movies with episodes 1-3.
Back when BillG made that comment, the primary threat to a company was another company who made things. In that environment a patent war chest is a defense: since that other company makes things, if they sue you you can search your war chest for patents they might infringe upon in return. Today, though, the primary threat is from IP holding companies. Against them, the size of your patent war chest doesn't matter. They don't make anything, they don't do anything, therefore there's nothing you can go after no matter how many patents you hold (unless you happen to be the lucky soul holding the patent on sueing people for patent infringement). I think even Microsoft is slowly coming to the realization that patents pose a greater threat to them than their value as a weapon.
I think you miss one thing in your blog post: GPLv3 won't affect business users at all. What it will affect is one particular class of commercial software developers: those who want to use GPL'd code as the basis for their product. That group of developers needs to be able to release the results under proprietary licenses that forbid their customers from redistributing those products. The GPL prohibits that, and GPLv3 closes several loopholes that could allow working around the GPL'd conditions. That's obviously bad for those developers, but not unnecessarily bad for the original authors of the code.
Now, one thing I'm also missing is where those commercial developers are customers of the code's original authors. Those developers aren't paying the original authors anything for the use of the code, and usually a customer is paying something in some form for the product they're getting. If you don't want to pay anything, why should I consider you my customer? The GPL requests payment in kind (code), and those developers you speak of don't want to pay back with their code. They don't want to pay in money, else the whole question would be moot as they'd go to the original authors and negotiate a non-GPL license for the code in return for royalty payments or sometime and wouldn't have to worry about the GPL anymore. They sound more like freeloaders than customers, actually.
I'm sure certain companies would like GPLv3 to be alienating open-source developers, but frankly I don't see that happening too much. The only people it's alienating are people who would never use the GPL anyway. I've heard this tune sung before, when GPLv2 was being introduced: all those unrealistic, idealistic, totally unneccesary changes RMS was introducing would completely destroy the license and developers would abandon the GPL as unworkable. We can see how accurate that prediction was.
I use an even simpler solution to the problem than any Mr. Hasselton suggests. Each site I sign up with where I care about this gets a unique e-mail address dedicated to them, one that isn't my regular e-mail address. I don't bother telling anyone else what these site-specific addresses are because nobody but that site should be sending mail to them anyway. Anyone checking my regular e-mail addresses would get back "not a member", since that address isn't a member. They can try and guess what different address I used, but that's only likely to work for sites like eBay where having an account isn't particularly embarrassing. For someplace like Match.com I'd be using something plausible but arbitrary like "tk487c5", and that's going to be all but impossible to guess if you don't know what it is already.
I think the legal arguments are two-fold:
- It involves making a copy into the device's memory, which you don't have a license to do.
- It requires circumventing a protection mechanism, which you aren't legally allowed to do.
Now, USC Title 17 117(a)(1) shoots down part 1 of that by explicitly saying that copies which are an essential part of the utilization of a program in conjunction with a machine are not infringements of copyright. Part 2, of course, is shot down by GPLv3 saying that Tivo cannot invoke that bit and still be in compliance with the license that lets them distribute the GPL'd code they base their product on.There isn't. That's intentional. The spirit of the GPL says "When you base your stuff on GPL'd code, the people you give the results to are free to do the same things you did.". Tivo wants to be able to modify and redistribute someone else's code, but not allow anyone to modify and redistribute their code. Trying to finesse the point by saying "Well, you can modify the code and redistribute it, but the people you give it to can't use it in any meaningful way..." isn't going to fly.
One problem is that often the ISP is a content provider. Take Time-Warner Cable, for example. Notice the name. Now, do you think thier ISP division is not connected to their cable-television, movie production, music distribution and other divisions? If it isn't, those other divisions probably want it to be. They want to make sure that, while their content is available to their Internet users (under suitable controls, naturally), everybody else's content is throttled and generally horrible.
I run everything inbound through a spam filter first. Anything flagged as spam gets ignored until the end of the day, then I make a quick pass through to see if anything jumps out at me as valid and delete everything else. The stuff that makes it into my inbox I ask three questions about:
- Do I need to remember this for the future?
- Do I need to respond to this?
- Do I need to respond to this now?
If the answer to #3 is yes, I respond and file the message. If the answer to #2 is yes, I flag it for follow-up. At the end of the day I recheck all the flagged messages and if I still need to respond I do. If the answer to #1 is yes, I file the message in the appropriate folder and flag it based on how long I figure I need to remember it. If the answer to all three is no, I delete the message. Once a month I make a pass through my folders and delete messages I don't need or want to keep any longer.80% or more of my mail gets deleted within 48 hours of arriving (or, at work, filed in the "preserve the evidence for the upcoming court-martial" folder).
Hmm. Lompoc introduces a municipal wireless network. Just as the city starts, the local DSL and cable providers suddenly do massive upgrades to their systems. Upgrades that the city has been asking for for years, and that the DSL and cable providers have found it infeasible to do. One wonders whether this sudden change of heart on the part of the private providers might have something to do with the failure of the wireless network, and whether those providers would have had that change of heart if it weren't for the threat of a competitor they couldn't exclude hanging over their heads.
Well, cable quality matters and it doesn't. The "doesn't" part comes from the fact that it's a digital signal. Either it gets to the other end sufficiently intact to be decipherable or it doesn't. If it does, you get a 100% accurate reproduction of the input signal. As long as the signal is above that threshold, it doesn't matter how far above it it is.
The "does" part comes from the corollary: if the signal isn't decipherable, you get nothing. Analog signals degrade gracefully: as signal quality goes down you get more and more snow and other artifacts, but it's a smooth loss. Digital like HDMI is binary, all or nothing. You go from getting a perfect picture to getting a black screen. The higher the quality of cable, the fewer problems you have that drag the signal down below the threshold for readability. That's especially important on long cable runs where simple distance is already pulling the signal down close to the threshold. When you're close to the maximum distance, a high-quality cable can mean the difference between getting a signal and not.
Actually it's "knew or should reasonably have known". That second part is the kicker. When applying for a patent an applicant's required by law to do certain due-diligence research (including the prior-art search) first and include the results in the application. If a reasonable person doing the research required by law would've discovered the prior art, then whether Netflix actually knew about it doesn't matter.
Or that's the theory, anyway. In practice you get into extended argument about what's reasonable, and things go downhill from there.