You have to give your private info to these companies, but you want to control how they use it. Does anyone else find this familiar? Isn't it just what software licenses and EULAs do? Why not take a page from their book and license your private information.
When you place an order, specify that you are providing this information in accordance with your Information License (provide a URL) and accepting your offer constitutes acceptance of the license. Then you control what the policy is. If they have a problem accepting it, they can email you and talk it over or whatever. It might be worth trying.
I know that licenses like this may not stand up in court, but that doesn't stop software companies from using them or people from honoring them. If anything, a customer's license is likely to have more standing, because the customer's hands are more tied. It's probably worth trying.
Anyone want to help this project out? Help work out a standard license to use for this? Drop me a line, this could be cool.
Wish I'd thought of this earlier, but maybe folks will pick up on it...
Does anyone else see a similarity here? You want to give these companies access to your private information to do what they have to do, but you want to exercise some control over it. So you want to give something away and still keep it. Sound like something other people do to you all the time? Like, say, a software license? Why not do just that? License your private information to the companies, spelling out what they can or cannot do. Note in the "comments" field a lot of online stores have that you are giving them your private information under the terms of your license (provide URL) and that doing business with you (fulfilling the order) constitutes acceptance of the terms. If they have a problem, they can email you and talk it over.
Then, suddenly, they're not the only ones with a policy. And if they capriciously change theirs, that does not free them from the license they agreed to. It seems as good as any silly agreement they make you sign on to. Probably worth a try. Will they just refuse to fulfil the order? Maybe. It's something to try.
I'll try to remember this next time a similar story comes out, so I can post it when it's more likely to be read. Meanwhile, if you think this is a good idea, send me some mail and maybe we can make a standard license for people to use. This might be interesting.
Yes, because DC has explicitly said that you are bound to use that free gift ONLY in approved manners.
The implication is that if you don't, you have to return it or pay them $20 for a personal developer's
license. You got it in the mail as a free gift. Postal laws say that you canNOT be bound in this manner. It's
all about freedom. How would you like it if Microsoft could send you a "Free Windows-ME CD" and
bind you to either having to install it, return it or pay for it? Oh, gee, all of a sudden it becomes different,
eh?
Yes, that's exactly the point; I'm a little annoyed the web page didn't make this clearer. It's not a problem that they sent these things out. Sure, let companies send me all the free hardware they want! The law doesn't say it's illegal to send stuff out like that, and free stuff is usually good. But, now DC is saying (in their new EULA) that they still own the toys and are only licensing them to you. That's what the problem is. They are claiming that they still own what the law says is yours (not mine; I got mine at Radio Shack). Make sure you note that that is what you're complaining about on the USPS form, if you fill it out.
Don't complain about people sending you toys for free; that should be encouraged. But they mustn't then say "...and that's still mine."
If there is no demand for a piece of information, it will be removed from Freenet.
I worry about this in Freenet too, from the other direction. It would be pretty easy to do horrible things to the performance of the network by inserting terabytes of spam (which is easily generated: you don't even have to store it all on your disk while you're doing it).
This is one of the things that troubles me about the DMCA. Well, that and everything else about it. By saying that it's illegal to try to crack encryption--even lousy encryption--they basically make everything potentially encryption. Microsoft gets annoyed at StarOffice being compatible, and tired of changing its format each release? No problem. The Microsoft Word document format is access-control, and anyone caught trying to read it is in violation of the DMCA. Neener neener.
The real Seqram has Slashdot ID... Oh, who cares, who'd want to impersonate me anyway?
Boy, was that article an exercise in finger-pointing! TrustE says, "Harumph! That is completely contrary to what we do here, and we're going to get the Bad Guys! It's all our web-traffic company's fault!" And that company of course says, "Harumph! That is completely contrary to what we do here, and we're going to get the Bad Guys! It's all thecounter.com's fault!" I guess when they find the two guys who run thecounter.com they'll say "Harumph! No, not us! We hired this high-school kid to do some coding for us for just one afternoon and he did all this..." Way to go on taking responsibility, guys.
A lesson to be learned: gpg --list-packets is Your Friend. Get friendly with the packet format. And now that I know what that one "unsupported subpacket" type, "reserved for future expansion" is (it was unsupported in the old version of the OpenPGP standard I read) I can upgrade my PGPacket script, which analyzes PGP packets much as gpg does, only in Perl and in different amounts of detail. Hey, there was no GPG when I wrote it, give me a break.
This is where the rampant corporatism is taking us: serfdom. What is expected from an applicant is
unquestioning, unconditional and undying loyality to the corporation and its cause. In order to get a job,
you have to sell your body, soul and time to the corporate demon.
I will not dispute the scariness of the way things seem to be pointed; I'm just noting a little irony here... On the one hand, you have worries like this, about the future; on the other hand, look at the past! Not too long ago, the concept of having changed jobs was something like having a criminal in the family. Of course you sold your soul to your company! After all, you were obviously going to work for the same company throughout your professional life, and in all likelihood so would your children. It's recent times that have changed all that, and a lot of it is the tech industry. Is the industry really swinging back to the old company-town, like a pendulum? Or is this paranoia on our (the workforce's) parts? Or a new kind of "serfdom," different from a few decades ago? It's something to ponder.
Nobody seems to be saying anything about the fact that Napster and its ilk, while certainly making all this stuff easier, did not make file-trading possible: that was done long ago. Peer to peer sharing something new and innovative? Bah. Ever hear of something called ftp? http? If the RIAA could wave its magic wand and infect every copy of Napster and Gnutella and Freenet and so on with rampant segfaults, they wouldn't be able to stop people trading MP3s. OK, maybe it would be harder, and a bit less anonymous, but so long as I can cheaply buy a website and a mess of space to put MP3s up for download, and as long as Google will find them for interested folks, I can share my files with my peers. The WWW is entirely made of file-sharing! To make that impossible would require them to dismantle the whole web, which would probably be even worse for business.
I suppose the only thing really stopping sharing MP3s by websites is AUPs from the ISPs (owwww, too many TLAs!) If I put up my Copyrighted Songs Collection on my webpage at GeoCities, they can probably quote me some passage in their AUP that I'm violating and pull the plug on the pages. That seems to work okay; I bet kiddieporn pages don't stay on the net very long for that reason. But considering the fact that the web is peer-to-peer file sharing, any legislation curtailing that kind of sharing software had better be worded very carefully, or it could affect the web as a whole. After all, http can be used for copyright infringement, even as Napster can be used legitimately.
I registered online, near the end of the registration period, but I'm still waiting for the package they said they're sending me by snail-mail. Will I get it in time to cast my vote??
Try www.name-space.com, an alternate registry with some 500-odd gTLDs already set up. All you have to do is point to their machines as your resolver and you can access the.bicycle,.sex,.shareware, etc. gTLDs. (so if you have that done, they're also www.name.space). Whether that's a good idea or not is something else: they'll let anyone register any gTLD. They're hoping to get enough popular support (people giving out their "new improved" names) that NSI will have to honor their gTLDs; I tend to think that won't happen. But FYI.
Yes, it sounds silly to keep the ads, but I completely agree that it's a great idea. I have some videotapes of movies I taped off TV five or six years ago, and while it's fun watching the movie and all, seeing all those old ads is really interesting. Ads are an ephemeral form of the filmmaker's art, and don't often get preserved, except for really good ones or in special museums. So yeah, save the ads!
What we need now, I guess, is for some enlightened slashdotter to patent QuickSort or do something equally demented, and then announce that they will licence anyone to use their original and patented work free of charge, but the program has to include a disclaimer reading "The US Patent Office is really dumb."
OK, maybe I'm more politically naïve than other/.ers out there, but I don't see the problem. There isn't any NDA or something strange like that going on; the license just says you can't use the code without releasing it. It's information, and comprises a source of research. As the court recently said, code is how we geeks tell each other about things. I'm not sure the GPL can apply to the idea, only the code. Hell, in class in college, I was told (and told my students when I was a teacher) that it's okay to talk to each other and get ideas, but you had to write your code yourself. That's all that's happening here.
I suppose there could be some interesting questions, if there's truly a new algorithm in use, something that could be patented (I mean, even if the patent office made sense), maybe in that sense you're "stealing" the innovation, but I just have trouble with the concept of not being allowed to learn from something. How much is okay to learn? What if I suddenly understand how to do QuickSort when reading a GPL'd program? Does that make QuickSort forbidden to me without GPLing my code? Or a nifty commenting style, that anyone else could use because they saw it somewhere else, but I happened to learn it from a GPL program? An NDA, which is the closest thing I can think of to forbidding learning, only says you can't reveal the secret. Nobody can stop you from carrying your experiences and expertise with you, not even the GPL.
Haven't you ever wished you could respond to a Cease and Desist order by saying, "All right, I'll cease, but I flatly refuse to desist. I will fight that to the end!" (or possibly vice-versa)?
I hate to be defending the bad guys here, but I think eBay may have a leg to stand on regarding changing the negative feedback to neutral. I believe that feedback that actually counts toward your total can only be left by the seller or winning bidder in an auction. Check here for starters. It's not as specific as I thought it was, but it does point out that only the winning bidder can leave feedback... presumably feedback that counts. So the people leaving negative feedback against MS weren't directly involved (as buyer or seller) in an auction with them, hence their feedback could only be entered as neutral.
It's a good thing for Microsoft, too. Ac cording to eBay, when your rating goes below -4, you can get your account pulled. Ah well.
I'm all in favor of fighting this, and I'm pleased with what the lawyers are saying, and I hope they kick MS's butt from here to andromeda and back and all, but some of these questions leave me a little puzzled. I mean, if I were Microsoft, or a putative judge reading this exchange, I would think "why on earth should MS have to answer these questions?" This isn't a trial, Microsoft isn't on the stand here trying to defend itself. It's the plaintiff here, the accuser, and it probably expects/. to quit changing the subject and defend itself instead of attacking. Many of the questions seem pretty easy to answer:
1. How can Microsoft claim proprietary protections for enhancement to an open standard protocol?
2. How can Microsoft use the Kerberos name, which signifies an open standard protocol, in connection with a proprietary protocol?
MS responds: These questions do not bear on your violation of our copyright. The fact is we have made enhancements to the protocol, and they are proprietary, and we claim copyright to them. We do not have to defend our copyright to you; if you dispute it take us to court. In the meantime, though, you stand in violation of the copyright and DMCA, and we demand you remove the posts.
3. How can Microsoft claim trade secrecy for a protocol that is distributed over the Internet?
4. What measures has Microsoft taken to protect the trade secrecy of its Kerberos specification beyond the use of a click-wrap license agreement?
5. What measures has Microsoft taken to ensure that its Kerberos specification is only distributed to persons who are capable of entering into a binding contract in jurisdictions where such an agreement would be enforceable?
These are the most cogent points in the letter. Microsoft clearly failed to defend its trade secrets and yet claims they're still secrets. In fact, it should be pointed out that unzipping a self-extracting archive is common and well-known (doesn't MS itself mention it in one of their manuals?) and even without/. posters mentioning it Microsoft can't possibly be said to be safeguarding their secrets with such a laughable wrapper. They released their secrets with no meaningful safeguards, they abandoned them, they are no longer secrets. That's the tough question for them to answer.
6. How could posting of the Microsoft Kerberos specification on Slashdot have any detrimental impact on the market for authorized distribution of Microsoft's version of Kerberos?
7. Why wouldn't prospective purchasers of Windows 2000 need to know the contents of Microsoft's Kerberos specification in order to make informed judgments regarding interoperability in connection with their purchasing decisions?
8. Why shouldn't Slashdot users and the general public be able to view this protocol for purposes of commentary and criticism in light of its apparent relevance to issues in the government's antitrust litigation?
MS Responds: Thank you very much for your advice on our corporate policy. However, we feel for our own reasons that these posts are harmful to us. We don't have to explain those reasons to you; we claim copyright to this information and it is we that get to decide where they can and cannot be published, for reasons of our own. You remain in violation of our copyright. If you don't like our copyright, let a court or arbitrator decide. We don't have to defend it to the likes of you.
So, near as I can tell, only three of these questions are really all that meaningful; a MS lawyer or judge would probably see the others as just posturing. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, posturing has its good points too. But an MS lawyer wouldn't fear this letter, except for those points. Still, I'd like to see them try to answer those!
P.S. in case it wasn't obvious, the "MS Responds" stuff above was all me playing Devil's Advocate. I don't speak for Microsoft (thank heavens for that. MS would hate it too, since I'd say very bad things about them), and I don't even like MS. I'm just trying to see it as their lawyers might.
Er, it's petaQ, with an e, not a u. The capital Q is not just a "k" sound, more like a k followed by a "kh" (as in German "ach")... that's not really it, but it's a lot closer. And the apostrophe is a letter, don't forget to pronounce it. Clip the sound off at the end of Qapla' abruptly (glottal stop).
Sorry, I'm a Grammarian on the Klingon Language mailing list; I watch these things.
It isn't passive voice; it sounds that way in English because of the word-order. Some languages just order things differently. Many languages like putting things in subject-object-verb order, and quite a lot prefer verb-subject-object. That doesn't make them less or more active or passive. Klingon 'avwI' HoH HoD means "The captain kills the guard", simple as that, even though the word-order is literally "guard kill captain". To say "the guards were killed by the captain"... I probably wouldn't and just stick with the active phrase, but if you pressed me I could do HoDmo' 'avwI' HoHlu', literally "because-of-captain guards (something)killed"; the "something" indicates an impersonal voice, the closest Klingon has to passive.
People generally say that Klingon is actually a more action-centered language, because it has more emphasis on verbs than nouns. That may be arguable and may be just an impression, but it holds fairly true.
Don't impose English's word-order conventions on Klingon!
I think you haven't read up on the language closely enough. The letters used are a transliteration into the English alphabet, so of course they're going to look English! That's like saying Vietnamese is English because it uses the Latin alphabet, or Finnish or transliterated Hebrew for that matter. The sounds are another matter.
The sounds of Klingon are rather un-English. Of the 26 phonemes (admittedly English-ish in that it's the same number as letters in the English alphabet), 7 (D, gh, H, q, Q, S, tlh) don't occur in English at all, one (') is in English but not as a phoneme, and one (ng) occurs in English, but only at the ends of syllables (and not at the beginnings like it can in Klingon). Sure, we write them with English letters because it's easier to email and all, but that doesn't make the language based on English. Listen to them at http://www.kli.org/tlh/sounds.html
Moreover, even if the sounds were all common in English, that wouldn't make the language necessarily like English. Most of the sounds in Japanese occur in English (with some differences, admittedly), but that doesn't mean Japanese is English. You can even write Japanese in romaji (English letters); it doesn't change Japanese's Japaneseness. What makes a language unique to itself is mostly its grammar and partly its lexicon.
Klingon's grammar is somewhat unusual as languages go; quite unlike English, and although strange is really pretty simple compared to most languages (this is not necessarily a good thing if you're really a stickler for verisimilitude: it definitely feels like a constructed language). The word-order, yes; the way verbs conjugate for both subject and object (not unique to Klingon, certainly, but not common either); the handling of subordinate clauses, etc etc. Hey, it's fun.
As editor of the Klingon Hamlet, I can tell you that there are places where the Klingon text really sparkles... it's just too bad so few people can appreciate it. Ah well.
The 2000-word lexicon is not as big a deal as you might think--though yes, I do sometimes find myself wishing for a word I don't have. But that figure doesn't include the formations possible with Klingon's very productive suffixes, and also compounds. We translated Hamlet without inventing any new words; what we had sufficed for that. And I've been able to write and chat about all kinds of subjects in Klingon. You'd be surprised what you can do with a small vocabulary and productive ways of increasing it.
Anyway, looking like English isn't a bad thing in itself anyway, but either way, that's one thing Klingon isn't guilty of.
Yes, I'm the Assistant Director of the Klingon Language Institute.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to give your private info to these companies, but you want to control how they use it. Does anyone else find this familiar? Isn't it just what software licenses and EULAs do? Why not take a page from their book and license your private information.
When you place an order, specify that you are providing this information in accordance with your Information License (provide a URL) and accepting your offer constitutes acceptance of the license. Then you control what the policy is. If they have a problem accepting it, they can email you and talk it over or whatever. It might be worth trying.
I know that licenses like this may not stand up in court, but that doesn't stop software companies from using them or people from honoring them. If anything, a customer's license is likely to have more standing, because the customer's hands are more tied. It's probably worth trying.
Anyone want to help this project out? Help work out a standard license to use for this? Drop me a line, this could be cool.
Wish I'd thought of this earlier, but maybe folks will pick up on it...
Does anyone else see a similarity here? You want to give these companies access to your private information to do what they have to do, but you want to exercise some control over it. So you want to give something away and still keep it. Sound like something other people do to you all the time? Like, say, a software license? Why not do just that? License your private information to the companies, spelling out what they can or cannot do. Note in the "comments" field a lot of online stores have that you are giving them your private information under the terms of your license (provide URL) and that doing business with you (fulfilling the order) constitutes acceptance of the terms. If they have a problem, they can email you and talk it over.
Then, suddenly, they're not the only ones with a policy. And if they capriciously change theirs, that does not free them from the license they agreed to. It seems as good as any silly agreement they make you sign on to. Probably worth a try. Will they just refuse to fulfil the order? Maybe. It's something to try.
I'll try to remember this next time a similar story comes out, so I can post it when it's more likely to be read. Meanwhile, if you think this is a good idea, send me some mail and maybe we can make a standard license for people to use. This might be interesting.
Yes, that's exactly the point; I'm a little annoyed the web page didn't make this clearer. It's not a problem that they sent these things out. Sure, let companies send me all the free hardware they want! The law doesn't say it's illegal to send stuff out like that, and free stuff is usually good. But, now DC is saying (in their new EULA) that they still own the toys and are only licensing them to you. That's what the problem is. They are claiming that they still own what the law says is yours (not mine; I got mine at Radio Shack). Make sure you note that that is what you're complaining about on the USPS form, if you fill it out.
Don't complain about people sending you toys for free; that should be encouraged. But they mustn't then say "...and that's still mine."
If there is no demand for a piece of information, it will be removed from Freenet.
I worry about this in Freenet too, from the other direction. It would be pretty easy to do horrible things to the performance of the network by inserting terabytes of spam (which is easily generated: you don't even have to store it all on your disk while you're doing it).
I didn't install their software; I didn't even open the CD envelope. Does that mean I can post the software safely?
This is one of the things that troubles me about the DMCA. Well, that and everything else about it. By saying that it's illegal to try to crack encryption--even lousy encryption--they basically make everything potentially encryption. Microsoft gets annoyed at StarOffice being compatible, and tired of changing its format each release? No problem. The Microsoft Word document format is access-control, and anyone caught trying to read it is in violation of the DMCA. Neener neener.
The real Seqram has Slashdot ID... Oh, who cares, who'd want to impersonate me anyway?
Boy, was that article an exercise in finger-pointing! TrustE says, "Harumph! That is completely contrary to what we do here, and we're going to get the Bad Guys! It's all our web-traffic company's fault!" And that company of course says, "Harumph! That is completely contrary to what we do here, and we're going to get the Bad Guys! It's all thecounter.com's fault!" I guess when they find the two guys who run thecounter.com they'll say "Harumph! No, not us! We hired this high-school kid to do some coding for us for just one afternoon and he did all this..." Way to go on taking responsibility, guys.
Honestly, how could this have gone unnoticed??
A lesson to be learned: gpg --list-packets is Your Friend. Get friendly with the packet format. And now that I know what that one "unsupported subpacket" type, "reserved for future expansion" is (it was unsupported in the old version of the OpenPGP standard I read) I can upgrade my PGPacket script, which analyzes PGP packets much as gpg does, only in Perl and in different amounts of detail. Hey, there was no GPG when I wrote it, give me a break.
Quoth the poster:
I will not dispute the scariness of the way things seem to be pointed; I'm just noting a little irony here... On the one hand, you have worries like this, about the future; on the other hand, look at the past! Not too long ago, the concept of having changed jobs was something like having a criminal in the family. Of course you sold your soul to your company! After all, you were obviously going to work for the same company throughout your professional life, and in all likelihood so would your children. It's recent times that have changed all that, and a lot of it is the tech industry. Is the industry really swinging back to the old company-town, like a pendulum? Or is this paranoia on our (the workforce's) parts? Or a new kind of "serfdom," different from a few decades ago? It's something to ponder.
Nobody seems to be saying anything about the fact that Napster and its ilk, while certainly making all this stuff easier, did not make file-trading possible: that was done long ago. Peer to peer sharing something new and innovative? Bah. Ever hear of something called ftp? http? If the RIAA could wave its magic wand and infect every copy of Napster and Gnutella and Freenet and so on with rampant segfaults, they wouldn't be able to stop people trading MP3s. OK, maybe it would be harder, and a bit less anonymous, but so long as I can cheaply buy a website and a mess of space to put MP3s up for download, and as long as Google will find them for interested folks, I can share my files with my peers. The WWW is entirely made of file-sharing! To make that impossible would require them to dismantle the whole web, which would probably be even worse for business.
I suppose the only thing really stopping sharing MP3s by websites is AUPs from the ISPs (owwww, too many TLAs!) If I put up my Copyrighted Songs Collection on my webpage at GeoCities, they can probably quote me some passage in their AUP that I'm violating and pull the plug on the pages. That seems to work okay; I bet kiddieporn pages don't stay on the net very long for that reason. But considering the fact that the web is peer-to-peer file sharing, any legislation curtailing that kind of sharing software had better be worded very carefully, or it could affect the web as a whole. After all, http can be used for copyright infringement, even as Napster can be used legitimately.
I registered online, near the end of the registration period, but I'm still waiting for the package they said they're sending me by snail-mail. Will I get it in time to cast my vote??
Is it just me, or does everyone wind up in an endless loop of redirects/refreshes when you try to access the link?
Try www.name-space.com, an alternate registry with some 500-odd gTLDs already set up. All you have to do is point to their machines as your resolver and you can access the .bicycle, .sex, .shareware, etc. gTLDs. (so if you have that done, they're also www.name.space). Whether that's a good idea or not is something else: they'll let anyone register any gTLD. They're hoping to get enough popular support (people giving out their "new improved" names) that NSI will have to honor their gTLDs; I tend to think that won't happen. But FYI.
Yes, it sounds silly to keep the ads, but I completely agree that it's a great idea. I have some videotapes of movies I taped off TV five or six years ago, and while it's fun watching the movie and all, seeing all those old ads is really interesting. Ads are an ephemeral form of the filmmaker's art, and don't often get preserved, except for really good ones or in special museums. So yeah, save the ads!
Woops, doesn't this run afoul of Amazon's completely original "One-click technology"?
Beowulf slaying a Grendel cluster with these?
What we need now, I guess, is for some enlightened slashdotter to patent QuickSort or do something equally demented, and then announce that they will licence anyone to use their original and patented work free of charge, but the program has to include a disclaimer reading "The US Patent Office is really dumb."
OK, maybe I'm more politically naïve than other /.ers out there, but I don't see the problem. There isn't any NDA or something strange like that going on; the license just says you can't use the code without releasing it. It's information, and comprises a source of research. As the court recently said, code is how we geeks tell each other about things. I'm not sure the GPL can apply to the idea, only the code. Hell, in class in college, I was told (and told my students when I was a teacher) that it's okay to talk to each other and get ideas, but you had to write your code yourself. That's all that's happening here.
I suppose there could be some interesting questions, if there's truly a new algorithm in use, something that could be patented (I mean, even if the patent office made sense), maybe in that sense you're "stealing" the innovation, but I just have trouble with the concept of not being allowed to learn from something. How much is okay to learn? What if I suddenly understand how to do QuickSort when reading a GPL'd program? Does that make QuickSort forbidden to me without GPLing my code? Or a nifty commenting style, that anyone else could use because they saw it somewhere else, but I happened to learn it from a GPL program? An NDA, which is the closest thing I can think of to forbidding learning, only says you can't reveal the secret. Nobody can stop you from carrying your experiences and expertise with you, not even the GPL.
Haven't you ever wished you could respond to a Cease and Desist order by saying, "All right, I'll cease, but I flatly refuse to desist. I will fight that to the end!" (or possibly vice-versa)?
I hate to be defending the bad guys here, but I think eBay may have a leg to stand on regarding changing the negative feedback to neutral. I believe that feedback that actually counts toward your total can only be left by the seller or winning bidder in an auction. Check here for starters. It's not as specific as I thought it was, but it does point out that only the winning bidder can leave feedback... presumably feedback that counts. So the people leaving negative feedback against MS weren't directly involved (as buyer or seller) in an auction with them, hence their feedback could only be entered as neutral.
It's a good thing for Microsoft, too. Ac cording to eBay, when your rating goes below -4, you can get your account pulled. Ah well.
I'm all in favor of fighting this, and I'm pleased with what the lawyers are saying, and I hope they kick MS's butt from here to andromeda and back and all, but some of these questions leave me a little puzzled. I mean, if I were Microsoft, or a putative judge reading this exchange, I would think "why on earth should MS have to answer these questions?" This isn't a trial, Microsoft isn't on the stand here trying to defend itself. It's the plaintiff here, the accuser, and it probably expects /. to quit changing the subject and defend itself instead of attacking. Many of the questions seem pretty easy to answer:
MS responds: These questions do not bear on your violation of our copyright. The fact is we have made enhancements to the protocol, and they are proprietary, and we claim copyright to them. We do not have to defend our copyright to you; if you dispute it take us to court. In the meantime, though, you stand in violation of the copyright and DMCA, and we demand you remove the posts.
These are the most cogent points in the letter. Microsoft clearly failed to defend its trade secrets and yet claims they're still secrets. In fact, it should be pointed out that unzipping a self-extracting archive is common and well-known (doesn't MS itself mention it in one of their manuals?) and even without /. posters mentioning it Microsoft can't possibly be said to be safeguarding their secrets with such a laughable wrapper. They released their secrets with no meaningful safeguards, they abandoned them, they are no longer secrets. That's the tough question for them to answer.
MS Responds: Thank you very much for your advice on our corporate policy. However, we feel for our own reasons that these posts are harmful to us. We don't have to explain those reasons to you; we claim copyright to this information and it is we that get to decide where they can and cannot be published, for reasons of our own. You remain in violation of our copyright. If you don't like our copyright, let a court or arbitrator decide. We don't have to defend it to the likes of you.
So, near as I can tell, only three of these questions are really all that meaningful; a MS lawyer or judge would probably see the others as just posturing. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, posturing has its good points too. But an MS lawyer wouldn't fear this letter, except for those points. Still, I'd like to see them try to answer those!
P.S. in case it wasn't obvious, the "MS Responds" stuff above was all me playing Devil's Advocate. I don't speak for Microsoft (thank heavens for that. MS would hate it too, since I'd say very bad things about them), and I don't even like MS. I'm just trying to see it as their lawyers might.
Er, it's petaQ, with an e, not a u. The capital Q is not just a "k" sound, more like a k followed by a "kh" (as in German "ach")... that's not really it, but it's a lot closer. And the apostrophe is a letter, don't forget to pronounce it. Clip the sound off at the end of Qapla' abruptly (glottal stop).
Sorry, I'm a Grammarian on the Klingon Language mailing list; I watch these things.
It isn't passive voice; it sounds that way in English because of the word-order. Some languages just order things differently. Many languages like putting things in subject-object-verb order, and quite a lot prefer verb-subject-object. That doesn't make them less or more active or passive. Klingon 'avwI' HoH HoD means "The captain kills the guard", simple as that, even though the word-order is literally "guard kill captain". To say "the guards were killed by the captain"... I probably wouldn't and just stick with the active phrase, but if you pressed me I could do HoDmo' 'avwI' HoHlu', literally "because-of-captain guards (something)killed"; the "something" indicates an impersonal voice, the closest Klingon has to passive.
People generally say that Klingon is actually a more action-centered language, because it has more emphasis on verbs than nouns. That may be arguable and may be just an impression, but it holds fairly true.
Don't impose English's word-order conventions on Klingon!
I think you haven't read up on the language closely enough. The letters used are a transliteration into the English alphabet, so of course they're going to look English! That's like saying Vietnamese is English because it uses the Latin alphabet, or Finnish or transliterated Hebrew for that matter. The sounds are another matter.
The sounds of Klingon are rather un-English. Of the 26 phonemes (admittedly English-ish in that it's the same number as letters in the English alphabet), 7 (D, gh, H, q, Q, S, tlh) don't occur in English at all, one (') is in English but not as a phoneme, and one (ng) occurs in English, but only at the ends of syllables (and not at the beginnings like it can in Klingon). Sure, we write them with English letters because it's easier to email and all, but that doesn't make the language based on English. Listen to them at http://www.kli.org/tlh/sounds.html
Moreover, even if the sounds were all common in English, that wouldn't make the language necessarily like English. Most of the sounds in Japanese occur in English (with some differences, admittedly), but that doesn't mean Japanese is English. You can even write Japanese in romaji (English letters); it doesn't change Japanese's Japaneseness. What makes a language unique to itself is mostly its grammar and partly its lexicon.
Klingon's grammar is somewhat unusual as languages go; quite unlike English, and although strange is really pretty simple compared to most languages (this is not necessarily a good thing if you're really a stickler for verisimilitude: it definitely feels like a constructed language). The word-order, yes; the way verbs conjugate for both subject and object (not unique to Klingon, certainly, but not common either); the handling of subordinate clauses, etc etc. Hey, it's fun.
As editor of the Klingon Hamlet, I can tell you that there are places where the Klingon text really sparkles... it's just too bad so few people can appreciate it. Ah well.
The 2000-word lexicon is not as big a deal as you might think--though yes, I do sometimes find myself wishing for a word I don't have. But that figure doesn't include the formations possible with Klingon's very productive suffixes, and also compounds. We translated Hamlet without inventing any new words; what we had sufficed for that. And I've been able to write and chat about all kinds of subjects in Klingon. You'd be surprised what you can do with a small vocabulary and productive ways of increasing it.
Anyway, looking like English isn't a bad thing in itself anyway, but either way, that's one thing Klingon isn't guilty of.
Yes, I'm the Assistant Director of the Klingon Language Institute.