The law is not nearly as simplistic as you make it sound. Some laws require mens rea. Some laws are strict liability. Some laws require specific intent. I can't say I'm knowledgeable of the situation with the laws that Google violated, but they may be guilty of anything depending of how the law is actually written.
I'd suggest that you search for some of the terms above and read up.
Yeah detractors totally wouldn't find something else to whine about if everyone used stock UIs. *rolls eyes*
The whole point of Android being open is so people can build on top of it. If you don't want vendor modified UIs and OS builds, go get an iPhone or root your phone. If people are so short sighted as to not realize that the "fragmentation" is a strength not a weakness of Android that's their own problem.
I don't really see what's wrong with Sense. I've got it on my EVO. It's fine. The screenshots are there to be shots for the bookmark applet. If you don't want them made you can just delete the folder they're being put in and created a text file with the same name on your sd card. Should HTC have made this feature more clear and given a way to disable it, yes. But it's not the bloody end of the world and there's nothing wrong with Sense. Maybe you don't like it but I do and oddly it seems quite a lot of other people do.
For that matter, nobody is forcing anyone to buy a phone with Sense on it. There are phones with stock UIs on them.
You're reading way too much into those articles. Nobody said they were upset that google didn't bother to call them.
Simon just said it isn't open source due to the field of use restriction in the patent grant and that it hasn't been submitted to the OSI. And ASKED google to submit it.
And Michael's article only briefly touches on the situation with the VP8 licenses and all he does is ask questions.
You're reading emotion into these posts where there is none.
I've read the thread when it showed up in my email. I didn't see any sign that OSI was upset. Someone brought up the fact that google was using a different license. There was a discussion about the license they used. OSI doesn't evaluate licenses unless the authors of the license ask them for their opinion of the license. Someone suggested they prod Google. Google responded and said they weren't ready to submit it and were still working out compatibility issues. They also said they wanted to discourage reuse of this license and asked for procedural changes to deal with that. They also asked for more openness from OSI on the discussions surrounding the license and for clarification of a corporate governance issue.
Nobody seemed upset. Rather someone just tried to turn a non-issue into news.
Actually you can change the system font size on OS X, it's just not exposed by the Apple provided configuration tools. Probably because it's not terribly useful for most of their users because most of their users are using machines with built in displays. If you really want to adjust the font size use TinkerTool: http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
First of all I think you need a timeline to help you understand how this vulnerability was handled:
Feb 1st, 2010: VulnDisco is updated with a zero day exploit for Firefox 3.6. No details on how the exploit works are provided. The exploit is only available in binary form when you buy a copy of VulnDisco. Some people buy VulnDisco and have difficulty in making the exploit work. https://forum.immunityinc.com/board/thread/1161/vulndisco-9-0/
Assuming that they got the details on the 16th and actually came up with the fix the same day (which is probable), that's a 2 week turnaround. Given that there have been no further nightlies posted for 3.6.2 since the March 16th it seems pretty clear they're in the release stages of getting 3.6.2 out of the door.
I'm not really sure how you expect them to get it out sooner. The largest delay here is them getting the information they needed to fix it. Which accounted for a month and a half worth of time.
Should they work at reducing the lag between having the fix done and putting out releases. Yes and based on my interview there serveral years ago they were committed to doing just that. But there's still an awful lot of work that has to go into actually doing those releases. They don't just magically appear.
I interviewed with Mozilla a few years back when they were looking for a Release Engineer. I think you underestimate the amount of work that goes into producing a release. Firefox is released in 70+ languages for 3 platforms. On top of this they release upgrade versions and not just full binaries, which of course is different for each platform. So you're looking at around 420+ different versions. There are also branded versions as well, which adds even more versions.
This was a few years ago and they were looking to bring in another Release Engineer, do more automation with the goal of reducing their release turn around time. So I don't think it's as easy as "Why don't they just do more releases."
There are still quite a few warts on git's user interface. Want to wipe out local changes to a single file you use checkout. Want to wipe out a whole trees worth of changes you use reset. Don't get me wrong I think git has come a long way, but git was just built as they went. There was very little in the way of well thought out user interface design and it shows.
That's not always the case. Some states (not sure if it's the majority) allow this type of thing to be expunged. It typically takes a civil action to request the removal but I'd think in a situation like this where you were found not guilty of something that has such a social stigma that you'd bother to go through the process.
the 1994 World Series was canceled when it looked like a foreign team was going to win for the third time in a row and the US teams refused to play unless the rules were changed in their favour.
You imply only the World Series was canceled in 1994. Rather the strike began before the normal season was even finished. There was no guarantee the Expos would be in the world series at that point.
You imply that the strike was to change rules favorable to foreign teams. Rather the strike was to maintain the status quo. Thus the Canadian wins in 1992 and 1993 and potential win in 1994 were under the existing rules.
You state that the US teams refused to play. Rather it was the players not the teams that refused to do anything.
As I said before the strike was about salary caps. You can say that the salary caps would have been beneficial to the Canadian teams. However, this is a far cry from saying that the US teams refused to play because the Expos might have won the 1994 World Series. Even if the players had not fought this rule change it would not have taken effect until after the 1994 World Series had been played.
About half your comment is correct and then you wander off into basically a conspiracy theory about US players striking to prevent the Expos from winning.
I think a far simpler explanation for the strike exists. Greed.
Nice revisionist history. The players went on strike because the owners wanted a salary cap. It had nothing to do with the Montreal Expos. Though it is true that the strike pretty much destroyed the Expos.
You have a point. My analogy was only to point out the flaw in referring to this as some sort of flaw in design. It's not so much a flaw in design as it is external forces making something obsolete. Obviously, software is much simpler and cheaper to fix than hardware (automobiles). No analogy is perfect and almost every analogy is designed to demonstrate a point and falls down outside those constraints.
I don't deny that Microsoft has ulterior motives for withholding the fix to the public.
Nope, more like the US decided to switch to metric and people complaining that Ford won't replace their English unit speedometer with one that has more prominent markings for metric. In both cases, the product still works but external factors make it less convenient. With Ford you have to look at the smaller metric markings. With Microsoft, you have to manually update the clock for daylight savings time twice a year. Neither case is a malfunction.
Read your links again. Neither of them say serving temperature should be 190 degrees. The second link you give is about brewing temperature not serving temperature. It's also useful to point out that for every degree increase in temperature skin burns twice as fast. Given that McDonalds sells its coffee to customers who are often consuming it in a car or at least carrying it in one, is not selling gourmet coffee that needs to be super hot to experience the flavor.... I have to think that 190 degrees (5 degrees over the highest of the range on the bunnomatic site you gave) is a bit ridiculous. Especially when you figure that means it'll burn you 10 times as fast as 185 degree coffee.
Ultimately, what you're forgetting is that the womans mistake was a small one time incidental accident. McDonalds knew about the risks yet continued to serve their coffee at that temperature. I don't think any reasonable person would expect coffee to be served so hot as to achieve 3rd degree burns in 2-7 seconds. So while the woman does share some of the blame I don't think she shoulders all of it and the court verdict represented that (holding the woman 20% responsible for the accident).
Here's an example. A man sits in the middle of the road. Another individual comes along in his car and runs over the man sitting in the road, seriously injuring but not killing the man sitting in the middle of the road. Both of those individuals actions and choices lead to the injury. Would it surprise you to learn that the man driving the car would be held responsible for his actions, despite the man sitting in the middle of the road doing something completely stupid?
I don't disagree that their is a lack of personal responsiblity in American society, but I don't feel the McDonalds case is a poster perfect example of that. Which is why almost all of the facts of the case are left out and it's reduced down to woman spills coffee on her self and sues McDonalds. Which of course sounds outrageous.
Of course corporations in this country want tort reform and the McDonalds case is a very easy one t point to in order to stir up public outrage over current tort law. Like I said above it's very easy to make it sound outrageous and to diminish the publics confidence in our justice system and juries.
Too bad you're completely misrepresenting the McDonalds case. Let's review a few facts.
First of all the coffee was being served at 180-190 degrees (as per corporate policy) and was unfit for human consumption. McDonalds admitted this at the trial. She received third degree burns on her thighs and genitals, there's absolutely no way you can expect someone to consume coffee so hot as to give you third degree burns.
Second McDonalds had received numerous complaints about the temperture of their coffee, including many other people who had received severe burns. All of this over a 10 year period and yet they did nothing about it. They didn't turn down the temperature of their coffee or warn their customers about this issue. At trial they admitted that they didn't even have any plans to consider turning down the temperature of their coffee.
Finally, they tried to settle for just the cost of her medical bils but McDonalds refused. The final judgement against McDonalds was reduced by 20% to cover the womans neglegence in handling of the coffee.
This often cited case is often cited without any of the facts that explain just exactly what happened. The case would never have happened had McDonalds done the responsible thing in the first place and turned the temperature of their coffee down to a safe level. Fact is McDonalds turned their coffee temperature down as a result of this case. I'd say the law worked for the people. It forced a corporation to fix the problem or face more law suits with large verdicts against them. McDonalds coffee is now served at 150 degrees.
Actually Subversion trunk can already build against APR 1.0.0. We had a lengthy discussion about this a while back. I'm not sure we ever really resolved it. But the general consensus seemed to be that enforcing majors of our dependency to always be the same wasn't something we were enforcing binary compatability for.
I.E. Subversion's compatability guarantees are only good to the degree that you don't go changing major versions of the libraries.
You are correct that Apache 2.0.x will continue using APR 0.9.x, but Apache 2.2.x (currently called 2.1.x) will use APR 1.0.0. If we enforce the major of APR we can only function with Apache 2.0.x, which is not a requirement we really want to limit ourselves to.
Now that I've read their ruling that someone else posted, it's clear that their rationale was simply to reaffirm the above linked rulings. They also went so far as to say explicitly that Wi-Fi use qualifies under the fixed wireless portion of the Over-The-Air Reception Devices rulings:
We also affirm that the rights that consumers have under our rules to install and operate customer antennas one meter or less in size apply to the operation of unlicensed equipment, such as Wi-Fi access points - just as they do to the use of equipment in connection with fixed wireless services licensed by the FCC.
and also that landlords can't stop you even via your lease:
The rules prohibit homeowner associations, landlords, state and local governments, or any other third parties from placing restrictions that impair a customer antenna user's ability to install, maintain, or use such customer antennas transmitting and/or receiving commercial nonbroadcast communications signals when the antenna is located on property within the exclusive use or control of the user where the user has a direct or indirect ownership or leasehold interest in the property, except under certain exceptions for safety and historic preservation.
Actually that's usually not the way it works. Federal law trumps any contract, local or state laws. Consider what happened with cable TV. Apartment complexes tried to say that you couldn't get satellite TV and had to use their cable provider. In the end the FCC ended up ruling that they can't restrict you from installing an antenna.
There are very few exceptions to this rule. Legitimate safey regulations (which is very narrowly defined), regulations related to the preservation of properties listed on the National Register of Historic places, you can't damage someone elses property with your antenna (drilling holes in a railing or roof you don't own), reasonable size restrictions, and finally it has to be in your own private space, not a common area.
If you take a look at a lot of apartment complexes these days you'll notice a lot of satellite antennas mounted to buckets sitting on decks. This ruling is why. The apartment complexes hate it, they think they're ugly, but there is nothing they can do about it.
Incidentally this same ruling was ammended to apply to fixed wireless, and yes they do mention Internet access. I don't think it's too difficult to say that this existing ruling already preempts any potential contract clause that you're worried about. At a minimum I think it shows how the FCC would end up ruling on the issue.
I can't seem to find this new ruling online yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if it also already dealt with this issue. I would imagine that the airlines lease included some sort of clause like this.
Slashdot Mirror
The law is not nearly as simplistic as you make it sound. Some laws require mens rea. Some laws are strict liability. Some laws require specific intent. I can't say I'm knowledgeable of the situation with the laws that Google violated, but they may be guilty of anything depending of how the law is actually written.
I'd suggest that you search for some of the terms above and read up.
Yeah detractors totally wouldn't find something else to whine about if everyone used stock UIs. *rolls eyes*
The whole point of Android being open is so people can build on top of it. If you don't want vendor modified UIs and OS builds, go get an iPhone or root your phone. If people are so short sighted as to not realize that the "fragmentation" is a strength not a weakness of Android that's their own problem.
I don't really see what's wrong with Sense. I've got it on my EVO. It's fine. The screenshots are there to be shots for the bookmark applet. If you don't want them made you can just delete the folder they're being put in and created a text file with the same name on your sd card. Should HTC have made this feature more clear and given a way to disable it, yes. But it's not the bloody end of the world and there's nothing wrong with Sense. Maybe you don't like it but I do and oddly it seems quite a lot of other people do.
For that matter, nobody is forcing anyone to buy a phone with Sense on it. There are phones with stock UIs on them.
You're reading way too much into those articles. Nobody said they were upset that google didn't bother to call them.
Simon just said it isn't open source due to the field of use restriction in the patent grant and that it hasn't been submitted to the OSI. And ASKED google to submit it.
And Michael's article only briefly touches on the situation with the VP8 licenses and all he does is ask questions.
You're reading emotion into these posts where there is none.
I've read the thread when it showed up in my email. I didn't see any sign that OSI was upset. Someone brought up the fact that google was using a different license. There was a discussion about the license they used. OSI doesn't evaluate licenses unless the authors of the license ask them for their opinion of the license. Someone suggested they prod Google. Google responded and said they weren't ready to submit it and were still working out compatibility issues. They also said they wanted to discourage reuse of this license and asked for procedural changes to deal with that. They also asked for more openness from OSI on the discussions surrounding the license and for clarification of a corporate governance issue.
Nobody seemed upset. Rather someone just tried to turn a non-issue into news.
Actually you can change the system font size on OS X, it's just not exposed by the Apple provided configuration tools. Probably because it's not terribly useful for most of their users because most of their users are using machines with built in displays. If you really want to adjust the font size use TinkerTool:
http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
First of all I think you need a timeline to help you understand how this vulnerability was handled:
Feb 1st, 2010: VulnDisco is updated with a zero day exploit for Firefox 3.6. No details on how the exploit works are provided. The exploit is only available in binary form when you buy a copy of VulnDisco. Some people buy VulnDisco and have difficulty in making the exploit work. https://forum.immunityinc.com/board/thread/1161/vulndisco-9-0/
March 16th, 2010: First 3.6.2 nightly builds that contain a fix are made available: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.6.2-candidates/build3/
March 18th, 2010: Mozilla announces that the original discoverer of the problem provided them sufficient details to find and fix the vulnerability. They also link to the nightlies linked to above on the March 16th entry. http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2010/03/18/update-on-secunia-advisory-sa38608/
March 30th, 2010: Scheduled release date.
Assuming that they got the details on the 16th and actually came up with the fix the same day (which is probable), that's a 2 week turnaround. Given that there have been no further nightlies posted for 3.6.2 since the March 16th it seems pretty clear they're in the release stages of getting 3.6.2 out of the door.
I'm not really sure how you expect them to get it out sooner. The largest delay here is them getting the information they needed to fix it. Which accounted for a month and a half worth of time.
Should they work at reducing the lag between having the fix done and putting out releases. Yes and based on my interview there serveral years ago they were committed to doing just that. But there's still an awful lot of work that has to go into actually doing those releases. They don't just magically appear.
I interviewed with Mozilla a few years back when they were looking for a Release Engineer. I think you underestimate the amount of work that goes into producing a release. Firefox is released in 70+ languages for 3 platforms. On top of this they release upgrade versions and not just full binaries, which of course is different for each platform. So you're looking at around 420+ different versions. There are also branded versions as well, which adds even more versions.
This was a few years ago and they were looking to bring in another Release Engineer, do more automation with the goal of reducing their release turn around time. So I don't think it's as easy as "Why don't they just do more releases."
There are still quite a few warts on git's user interface. Want to wipe out local changes to a single file you use checkout. Want to wipe out a whole trees worth of changes you use reset. Don't get me wrong I think git has come a long way, but git was just built as they went. There was very little in the way of well thought out user interface design and it shows.
That's not always the case. Some states (not sure if it's the majority) allow this type of thing to be expunged. It typically takes a civil action to request the removal but I'd think in a situation like this where you were found not guilty of something that has such a social stigma that you'd bother to go through the process.
Has nothing to do with the iPod. Here's the story:
http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/macbook/is_apples_mac_u_pic_worth_a_thousand_words.html
the 1994 World Series was canceled when it looked like a foreign team was going to win for the third time in a row and the US teams refused to play unless the rules were changed in their favour.
You imply only the World Series was canceled in 1994. Rather the strike began before the normal season was even finished. There was no guarantee the Expos would be in the world series at that point.
You imply that the strike was to change rules favorable to foreign teams. Rather the strike was to maintain the status quo. Thus the Canadian wins in 1992 and 1993 and potential win in 1994 were under the existing rules.
You state that the US teams refused to play. Rather it was the players not the teams that refused to do anything.
As I said before the strike was about salary caps. You can say that the salary caps would have been beneficial to the Canadian teams. However, this is a far cry from saying that the US teams refused to play because the Expos might have won the 1994 World Series. Even if the players had not fought this rule change it would not have taken effect until after the 1994 World Series had been played.
About half your comment is correct and then you wander off into basically a conspiracy theory about US players striking to prevent the Expos from winning.
I think a far simpler explanation for the strike exists. Greed.
Nice revisionist history. The players went on strike because the owners wanted a salary cap. It had nothing to do with the Montreal Expos. Though it is true that the strike pretty much destroyed the Expos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Major_League_Baseball_strike
Only if you're not smart enough to turn off the automatic feature. There is a checkbox to turn it off.
You have a point. My analogy was only to point out the flaw in referring to this as some sort of flaw in design. It's not so much a flaw in design as it is external forces making something obsolete. Obviously, software is much simpler and cheaper to fix than hardware (automobiles). No analogy is perfect and almost every analogy is designed to demonstrate a point and falls down outside those constraints.
I don't deny that Microsoft has ulterior motives for withholding the fix to the public.
And you're saying that in reply to an article about an unofficial fix for it?
Nope, more like the US decided to switch to metric and people complaining that Ford won't replace their English unit speedometer with one that has more prominent markings for metric. In both cases, the product still works but external factors make it less convenient. With Ford you have to look at the smaller metric markings. With Microsoft, you have to manually update the clock for daylight savings time twice a year. Neither case is a malfunction.
Read your links again. Neither of them say serving temperature should be 190 degrees. The second link you give is about brewing temperature not serving temperature. It's also useful to point out that for every degree increase in temperature skin burns twice as fast. Given that McDonalds sells its coffee to customers who are often consuming it in a car or at least carrying it in one, is not selling gourmet coffee that needs to be super hot to experience the flavor.... I have to think that 190 degrees (5 degrees over the highest of the range on the bunnomatic site you gave) is a bit ridiculous. Especially when you figure that means it'll burn you 10 times as fast as 185 degree coffee.
Ultimately, what you're forgetting is that the womans mistake was a small one time incidental accident. McDonalds knew about the risks yet continued to serve their coffee at that temperature. I don't think any reasonable person would expect coffee to be served so hot as to achieve 3rd degree burns in 2-7 seconds. So while the woman does share some of the blame I don't think she shoulders all of it and the court verdict represented that (holding the woman 20% responsible for the accident).
Here's an example. A man sits in the middle of the road. Another individual comes along in his car and runs over the man sitting in the road, seriously injuring but not killing the man sitting in the middle of the road. Both of those individuals actions and choices lead to the injury. Would it surprise you to learn that the man driving the car would be held responsible for his actions, despite the man sitting in the middle of the road doing something completely stupid?
I don't disagree that their is a lack of personal responsiblity in American society, but I don't feel the McDonalds case is a poster perfect example of that. Which is why almost all of the facts of the case are left out and it's reduced down to woman spills coffee on her self and sues McDonalds. Which of course sounds outrageous.
Of course corporations in this country want tort reform and the McDonalds case is a very easy one t point to in order to stir up public outrage over current tort law. Like I said above it's very easy to make it sound outrageous and to diminish the publics confidence in our justice system and juries.
Too bad you're completely misrepresenting the McDonalds case. Let's review a few facts.
First of all the coffee was being served at 180-190 degrees (as per corporate policy) and was unfit for human consumption. McDonalds admitted this at the trial. She received third degree burns on her thighs and genitals, there's absolutely no way you can expect someone to consume coffee so hot as to give you third degree burns.
Second McDonalds had received numerous complaints about the temperture of their coffee, including many other people who had received severe burns. All of this over a 10 year period and yet they did nothing about it. They didn't turn down the temperature of their coffee or warn their customers about this issue. At trial they admitted that they didn't even have any plans to consider turning down the temperature of their coffee.
Finally, they tried to settle for just the cost of her medical bils but McDonalds refused. The final judgement against McDonalds was reduced by 20% to cover the womans neglegence in handling of the coffee.
This often cited case is often cited without any of the facts that explain just exactly what happened. The case would never have happened had McDonalds done the responsible thing in the first place and turned the temperature of their coffee down to a safe level. Fact is McDonalds turned their coffee temperature down as a result of this case. I'd say the law worked for the people. It forced a corporation to fix the problem or face more law suits with large verdicts against them. McDonalds coffee is now served at 150 degrees.
Some places already do this.
Hell and Yahoo's maps are even harder to read, Ugh.
& country=us&trf=1
http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?csz=seattle,+WA
Least they could have done is copy it well...
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/
and you can even get it on mobile devices:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/products/
Actually Subversion trunk can already build against APR 1.0.0. We had a lengthy discussion about this a while back. I'm not sure we ever really resolved it. But the general consensus seemed to be that enforcing majors of our dependency to always be the same wasn't something we were enforcing binary compatability for.
I.E. Subversion's compatability guarantees are only good to the degree that you don't go changing major versions of the libraries.
You are correct that Apache 2.0.x will continue using APR 0.9.x, but Apache 2.2.x (currently called 2.1.x) will use APR 1.0.0. If we enforce the major of APR we can only function with Apache 2.0.x, which is not a requirement we really want to limit ourselves to.
There are very few exceptions to this rule. Legitimate safey regulations (which is very narrowly defined), regulations related to the preservation of properties listed on the National Register of Historic places, you can't damage someone elses property with your antenna (drilling holes in a railing or roof you don't own), reasonable size restrictions, and finally it has to be in your own private space, not a common area.
If you take a look at a lot of apartment complexes these days you'll notice a lot of satellite antennas mounted to buckets sitting on decks. This ruling is why. The apartment complexes hate it, they think they're ugly, but there is nothing they can do about it.
Incidentally this same ruling was ammended to apply to fixed wireless, and yes they do mention Internet access. I don't think it's too difficult to say that this existing ruling already preempts any potential contract clause that you're worried about. At a minimum I think it shows how the FCC would end up ruling on the issue.
I can't seem to find this new ruling online yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if it also already dealt with this issue. I would imagine that the airlines lease included some sort of clause like this.