First: Metro AG has the Metro trademark registered also for computers. Second: Metro AG is one of the biggest retailers for Microsoft products, mainly via their Saturn and MediaMarkt chains of computer stores. So yes, there will be a violation of trademarks, if Metro AG sells Metro UI based tablets.
It's more complicated - Metro AG is the biggest retailer in Germany, and they also operate two chains of computer stores (Saturn and MediaMarkt). So there will be confusion, if Metro AG sells Metro UI based tablets.
So you are o.k. with an employer whose HR policy involves routinely breaking contracts? So how about your employment contract then? If they singlehandedly break that contract too?
No, the theory is that it is OK, as long as there are people not in anyway connected or related to the author being able to continue the maintenance of the article. The problem with personal knowledge is that it gets lost as soon as the person loses interest in wikipedia or is run over by a bus (which in turn also causes a sudden loss of interest in maintaining wikipedia articles). That's the same reason original research is frowned upon - there should always be at least a second person being able to continue where the original author as left. And it helps if you can make yourself knowledgeable about the subject without being referred to Wikipedia articles, if you want to edit Wikipedia articles.
And well FOSS is all copies of commercial applications, so they're out too.
I wonder what commercial application was the original for NCSA httpd (whose latest reincarnation is Apache, which started out as a series of patches to NCSA httpd). Or the original for sendmail. Or for BIND. Or for the BSD filesystem. I wonder why commercial UNICes included the BSD toolchain anyway, if there were commercial applications BSD copied from.
It is legal now to break contracts? And I thought, pacta sunt servanda.
If you sign up with Facebook (or any other site), you are contractually bound by the Terms of Services. Facebook's ToS explicitely state that you are not allowed to give your credentials to anyone else. If your future employer asks you to break contracts, you are fine with that?
No, this doesn't work. At least in Germany, the lawyer's fees are determined by the valuation of the case. There is a table which lists for each case value how much the lawyers will earn at maximum, and the plaintiff is the one putting a value on his suit. So you can always block the attempts of the defendant to shock you with high costs because you are the one determining how much the case will cost you.
It is not that easy. It's not "loser pays" in civil cases in Germany, because there you don't have losers. It's more like this, that the plaintiff in his suit defines the "Streitwert" (lawsuit value), which determines for instance the salaries for the lawyers and thus also the costs of the whole case. When in the judgement the damages get awarded, they are compared with the initial Streitwert, and you have more or less to pay the difference between the damages you get awarded and the initial valuation of the case. Lets say you sue for € 1 mio, and in the end you get awarded € 100,000, you have to pay 90% of the cost incurred by the defendent, which in turn has to pay 10% of your costs.
This is not exactly how it works, but it gives a general idea how the payments are determined. And it makes it dangerous to sue for astronomically high sums of money, because it could bankrupt you if you lose. The court even might require you to post a bail to make sure you can pay for your suit.
This is a nice legal theory, but this is not true for instance in the E.U. There the Court of the European Union ruled, that if you purchase a copy of a software, either via physical medium or via download, you actually own that copy. This means that you are free to use it as you see fit, and that you are for instance allowed to sell it to whoever you want. You only have to make all your other copies unusuable after the sale, and you are not allowed to split up volume licenses into several smaller portions.
Because the standards didn't came out of nothing. Why do you thing, most internet standards are called RFC? Request For Comments? Because there were people out there often on government contracts tinkering along with their equipment, building new equipment, inventing new uses for the equipment and while putting them to work found equipment missing which would make it easier to get the things done they had in mind. And because they saw that other people had similar things in mind, and they wanted their stuff to work with the stuff other people were doing, they wanted to have a discussion how to do it. So they send out a Request For Discussion (RFD). They provided prototypes and examples. And when the prototypes were working as intendend, when the discussion got to a point most people agreed that this was the solution they were looking for, they stopped the actual discussion of the new rules and protocols and just wanted comments how to built on top of the protocol just defined. So the final document which came as a result out of the Request For Discussion was sent out to everybody to comment: An RFC. The standard was not set out a priori, it was the result of a long series of experiments and discussions and finalized what was done, and for an RFD to evolve into an RFC, a reference implementation was required. So the standard came last, a posteriori, when the actual work was done, and the reference implementation up and running. Yes. Government funded research had something up and running before even finalizing the standard.
No, it is not only the profit. I might have become a carpenter, able to built my own windows (there is a carpenter in the backyard of my house, and another down the road), but I chosed not to. I might have become a mason, building my own houses. I even had courses doing exactly that during my school time, even though only four hours every two weeks. I chosed not to. I know a little knitting and tailoring, because the nursery teacher had us children craft something for Christmas each year, but I chosed not to become a fashion designer. There is a rule of thumb that to master a subject, you have to do it for about 10,000 hrs. In a normal working year, there are about 2080 hrs without holidays or vacation (52x40). So you have to work five years to master something. Five years of farming, five years of carpentry, five years of masonry, five years of tailoring, five years of cooking, five years of forging, five years of mining, five years of plumbing, five years of each profession necessary to provide for today's needs. My life is too short for that. Literally too short. I expect to live about 75 years, this means that I at a maximum can become proficient at 15 different trades. And then I die.
Also three pane windows are mainly filled with argon today. The low heat conductivity, even lower than nitrogenium or normal air, has its advantages. Also argon filled double pane windows are lighter, cheaper and provide about the same thermal isolation than three pane air filled windows.
Everything mechanical is prone to break prematurely. That's why I never went for a clamshell phone like the StarTAC or a Nokia Commander, and that's why I don't want a slide-out keyboard.
No, because the stock and the scion are the same species. If you don't cut them down, wherever they spring up, the original stock will grow its own branches and maybe even choke the scion.
Yes, and additionally, plants grow new arms all the time, so if you cut a branch from a plant, it will replace it with another branch. So you can cut many scions from a single plant and graft them on several stocks.
Grafting does not influence the genome or the genome settings. You could even argue, that the grafted plant is not a single individuum, but in fact two plants, or even more, if you graft more than one scion on the same stock. My parents once had a pear tree with at least five different scions. So grafting would be akin to have two (or more) copies of the same program with individual settings coupled together. I even have a setup like that running at a customer site, where a minimal Lotus Domino installation at one server works as connector between a non-IBM-software on the same computer and the real Domino server. The minimal Domino is grafted onto the original Domino installation.
Selective breeding = tinkering with parameters and settings. GM = changing part of the program binary.
Actually, it's quite fascinating, how flexible the genetic code is, because all dogs for instance share the same genetic code, the chihuahua has the same genes as the pitbull or the the scottish border collie. The only difference are the allels, the actual settings on the individual genes.
No. Only because there are no other protection mechanisms in fashion, brand names mean everything. Other industries with nearly no other protection mechanisms are similar, like the food industry. Also here, the trademark is everything, because about everyone is able to make a sweet, coffeinated and caramel colored soda or put grilled minced meat in a bun.
"[...] and given that Microsoft have had desktop applications with built-in grammar check since around 1997 - how come Google don't?"
My answer would be: I don't get anything useful from Microsoft's grammar check. If it actually suggests something, it is contrary to what I meant, it makes the sentence unnecessarily complicated or it is outright wrong. So Google might not include a grammar check because grammar checks don't add anything useful?
No, the oldest one ever released was Windows 1.01, released somewhen end of 1985. Windows 2.0 came end of 1987, and was replaced soon by Windows 2.1 (and its siblings Windows/286 and Windows/386) in 1988. Support for Windows 2.x endet in 2001(!).
This is not true for instance in Germany and many other european countries. There marriage is a legal procedure, performed by a municipal clerk. You can only go to your church, synagoge, mosque or whatever the sacred place is called in your religion to celebrate your marriage if you can show the official document sealing your marriage. Also the legal implications coming with marriage require the official procedure and the accompagnying paperwork.
Slashdot Mirror
First: Metro AG has the Metro trademark registered also for computers.
Second: Metro AG is one of the biggest retailers for Microsoft products, mainly via their Saturn and MediaMarkt chains of computer stores.
So yes, there will be a violation of trademarks, if Metro AG sells Metro UI based tablets.
It's more complicated - Metro AG is the biggest retailer in Germany, and they also operate two chains of computer stores (Saturn and MediaMarkt). So there will be confusion, if Metro AG sells Metro UI based tablets.
Actually, it's a shortening of the original name of the Paris underground trains: Compagnie du Métropolitain de Paris.
So you are o.k. with an employer whose HR policy involves routinely breaking contracts? So how about your employment contract then? If they singlehandedly break that contract too?
No, the theory is that it is OK, as long as there are people not in anyway connected or related to the author being able to continue the maintenance of the article. The problem with personal knowledge is that it gets lost as soon as the person loses interest in wikipedia or is run over by a bus (which in turn also causes a sudden loss of interest in maintaining wikipedia articles). That's the same reason original research is frowned upon - there should always be at least a second person being able to continue where the original author as left. And it helps if you can make yourself knowledgeable about the subject without being referred to Wikipedia articles, if you want to edit Wikipedia articles.
And well FOSS is all copies of commercial applications, so they're out too.
I wonder what commercial application was the original for NCSA httpd (whose latest reincarnation is Apache, which started out as a series of patches to NCSA httpd). Or the original for sendmail. Or for BIND. Or for the BSD filesystem. I wonder why commercial UNICes included the BSD toolchain anyway, if there were commercial applications BSD copied from.
It is legal now to break contracts? And I thought, pacta sunt servanda.
If you sign up with Facebook (or any other site), you are contractually bound by the Terms of Services. Facebook's ToS explicitely state that you are not allowed to give your credentials to anyone else. If your future employer asks you to break contracts, you are fine with that?
No, this doesn't work. At least in Germany, the lawyer's fees are determined by the valuation of the case. There is a table which lists for each case value how much the lawyers will earn at maximum, and the plaintiff is the one putting a value on his suit. So you can always block the attempts of the defendant to shock you with high costs because you are the one determining how much the case will cost you.
It is not that easy. It's not "loser pays" in civil cases in Germany, because there you don't have losers. It's more like this, that the plaintiff in his suit defines the "Streitwert" (lawsuit value), which determines for instance the salaries for the lawyers and thus also the costs of the whole case. When in the judgement the damages get awarded, they are compared with the initial Streitwert, and you have more or less to pay the difference between the damages you get awarded and the initial valuation of the case. Lets say you sue for € 1 mio, and in the end you get awarded € 100,000, you have to pay 90% of the cost incurred by the defendent, which in turn has to pay 10% of your costs.
This is not exactly how it works, but it gives a general idea how the payments are determined. And it makes it dangerous to sue for astronomically high sums of money, because it could bankrupt you if you lose. The court even might require you to post a bail to make sure you can pay for your suit.
This is a nice legal theory, but this is not true for instance in the E.U. There the Court of the European Union ruled, that if you purchase a copy of a software, either via physical medium or via download, you actually own that copy. This means that you are free to use it as you see fit, and that you are for instance allowed to sell it to whoever you want. You only have to make all your other copies unusuable after the sale, and you are not allowed to split up volume licenses into several smaller portions.
Because the standards didn't came out of nothing. Why do you thing, most internet standards are called RFC? Request For Comments? Because there were people out there often on government contracts tinkering along with their equipment, building new equipment, inventing new uses for the equipment and while putting them to work found equipment missing which would make it easier to get the things done they had in mind. And because they saw that other people had similar things in mind, and they wanted their stuff to work with the stuff other people were doing, they wanted to have a discussion how to do it. So they send out a Request For Discussion (RFD). They provided prototypes and examples. And when the prototypes were working as intendend, when the discussion got to a point most people agreed that this was the solution they were looking for, they stopped the actual discussion of the new rules and protocols and just wanted comments how to built on top of the protocol just defined. So the final document which came as a result out of the Request For Discussion was sent out to everybody to comment: An RFC.
The standard was not set out a priori, it was the result of a long series of experiments and discussions and finalized what was done, and for an RFD to evolve into an RFC, a reference implementation was required. So the standard came last, a posteriori, when the actual work was done, and the reference implementation up and running. Yes. Government funded research had something up and running before even finalizing the standard.
It all comes down to pure profit.
No, it is not only the profit. I might have become a carpenter, able to built my own windows (there is a carpenter in the backyard of my house, and another down the road), but I chosed not to. I might have become a mason, building my own houses. I even had courses doing exactly that during my school time, even though only four hours every two weeks. I chosed not to. I know a little knitting and tailoring, because the nursery teacher had us children craft something for Christmas each year, but I chosed not to become a fashion designer.
There is a rule of thumb that to master a subject, you have to do it for about 10,000 hrs. In a normal working year, there are about 2080 hrs without holidays or vacation (52x40). So you have to work five years to master something. Five years of farming, five years of carpentry, five years of masonry, five years of tailoring, five years of cooking, five years of forging, five years of mining, five years of plumbing, five years of each profession necessary to provide for today's needs. My life is too short for that. Literally too short. I expect to live about 75 years, this means that I at a maximum can become proficient at 15 different trades. And then I die.
Also three pane windows are mainly filled with argon today. The low heat conductivity, even lower than nitrogenium or normal air, has its advantages. Also argon filled double pane windows are lighter, cheaper and provide about the same thermal isolation than three pane air filled windows.
Everything mechanical is prone to break prematurely. That's why I never went for a clamshell phone like the StarTAC or a Nokia Commander, and that's why I don't want a slide-out keyboard.
Both the Braeburn scion and the rootstock are individuals from the species Malus domestica.
No, because the stock and the scion are the same species. If you don't cut them down, wherever they spring up, the original stock will grow its own branches and maybe even choke the scion.
Yes, and additionally, plants grow new arms all the time, so if you cut a branch from a plant, it will replace it with another branch. So you can cut many scions from a single plant and graft them on several stocks.
Unless of course if the ToS contradict current laws, then the ToS are ToSsed out.
Grafting does not influence the genome or the genome settings. You could even argue, that the grafted plant is not a single individuum, but in fact two plants, or even more, if you graft more than one scion on the same stock. My parents once had a pear tree with at least five different scions. So grafting would be akin to have two (or more) copies of the same program with individual settings coupled together. I even have a setup like that running at a customer site, where a minimal Lotus Domino installation at one server works as connector between a non-IBM-software on the same computer and the real Domino server. The minimal Domino is grafted onto the original Domino installation.
The bin Ladin family does not operate gas stations, they operate a construction and holding conglomerate.
More complicated:
Selective breeding = tinkering with parameters and settings.
GM = changing part of the program binary.
Actually, it's quite fascinating, how flexible the genetic code is, because all dogs for instance share the same genetic code, the chihuahua has the same genes as the pitbull or the the scottish border collie. The only difference are the allels, the actual settings on the individual genes.
No. Only because there are no other protection mechanisms in fashion, brand names mean everything. Other industries with nearly no other protection mechanisms are similar, like the food industry. Also here, the trademark is everything, because about everyone is able to make a sweet, coffeinated and caramel colored soda or put grilled minced meat in a bun.
"[...] and given that Microsoft have had desktop applications with built-in grammar check since around 1997 - how come Google don't?"
My answer would be: I don't get anything useful from Microsoft's grammar check. If it actually suggests something, it is contrary to what I meant, it makes the sentence unnecessarily complicated or it is outright wrong. So Google might not include a grammar check because grammar checks don't add anything useful?
No, the oldest one ever released was Windows 1.01, released somewhen end of 1985. Windows 2.0 came end of 1987, and was replaced soon by Windows 2.1 (and its siblings Windows/286 and Windows/386) in 1988. Support for Windows 2.x endet in 2001(!).
Marriage is a religious rite [...]
This is not true for instance in Germany and many other european countries. There marriage is a legal procedure, performed by a municipal clerk. You can only go to your church, synagoge, mosque or whatever the sacred place is called in your religion to celebrate your marriage if you can show the official document sealing your marriage. Also the legal implications coming with marriage require the official procedure and the accompagnying paperwork.