Those historical buildings? They've been gutted and rebuilt from the inside out at least once during the past 50 years for the installation central air conditioning and elevators for the handicapped. And they're the exception to the rule. Few commercial buildings go more than 15 years without major renovation and few residential buildings make it more than 30.
Roads? Sure, US Route 1 does still travel approximately the same route but its repaved frequently, expanded and changed frequently, and its been supplanted in its original purpose as the major east-coast north-south route by Interstate 95. And even Route 1 has existed for less than a century. Before automobiles at the begining of the 20th century, there was no need for anything like it. Before automobiles, who could conceive of a multilane asphalt highway that needed to sustain speeds over 500 miles per day? How could yesteryear's engineers possibly plan for it?
The US constitution, the foundation of our law, has seen two major overhauls in the past two centuries: first due to the civil war and again because of the great depression. Even where parts of the text remain the same, their meanings have been drastically altered by the courts. Free speech has become freedom of expression. The right to bear arms somehow doesn't exist at all inside Washington DC except for police. The states have gone from being the primary seats of governance to being almost entirely subsidiary to the federal government. We're living under an almost totally different government than what saw the dawn of the 19th century.
Even the Catholic Church publishes a new catechism each year, a book which defines the religion. You'd think during two millennia they'd figure it out once and for all, yet it continues to evolve and change.
Few things last, either in their original purpose or their original design. They're continuously rebuilt, redesigned and reinvented... Even things like roads, buildings and governments for which our design experience goes back thousands of years.
Our software experience goes back 40 years, if you can call what we did 40 years ago software by any current definition. Why should we build it to last longer than than the roads and buildings, and indeed longer than software in any form has existed?
I'm sorry, but I'm not smart enough to successfully plan ahead two centuries and neither are you.
Methanol: A colorless, flammable liquid with an odor repulsive pungent. Shipped and stored in dissolved acetone. Can decompose spontaneously if pressure exceeds 15 PSIG.
Hazards: A toxic substance. Irriatates eyes and causes dizziness, nausea and is a possible carcinogen.
Yeah, I'm going to carry a bottle of that onto a post-9/11 jetliner.
This is a FAQ. Its the very first thing covered in every single RAID FAQ you find in Google. Read the FAQ.
And if you're losing that many drives, you should probably read the FAQs about overheating too. I've been responsible for hundreds of drives in the past decade and I've lost only two. Sounds like you have a problem.
This is a dumb idea. You have to pay the company extra to be protected from the defects in the company's product? That's like selling a car but if you want all five lugs for the tire its extra. Oh yeah, and if you don't buy the option, its recommended that you drive slowly on only smooth roads.
If I were a trial lawyer I'd be rubbing my hands with glee.
Many of the AP's you can buy run off a 12-volt power adapter. So, hook it up to a typical deep-cycle lead acid battery (e.g. marine or golf cart) and it can run all day. Since its an outdoor setting, you won't even need the more expensive gel cells that UPSes use.
Even quiet generators make some noise. Batteries make none.
The simples answer is: don't engineer it as a Big Brother device.
What you describe is a big brother device. It automatically detects all passing hikers so that when the damn fools get themselves lost they can be found again.
So build it a different way. The same technoogy you described could be put together like this:
You install "checkpoints" along the trail. Hikers optionally rent an RFID wriststrap for a buck or so. The checkpoint is also a map station, etc. When they hit the checkpoint, they swipe their wriststrap in front of the checkpoint and it emits a beep to let them know it recorded their passage. At the end of the day, your system sends an email to the hikers to give them a record of when they reached each checkpoint. He/she can race against himself in order to best his previous time. And as a happenstance side-benefit, if the damn fools get themselves lost, you know which checkpoint they reached last.;)
Some folks won't want a record of their passage and won't rent a wrist strap. If they get lost, you'll have more trouble finding them and they may suffer avoidable injury or even death. But you know what? That's OK too.
being familar with mainstreem sci-fi I find it more common then not to see scenes of Vancover or Torronto.
Yes, that's one of life's little ironies. A huge number of movie scenes are filmed in Canada, but the characters in the movie generally identify their location as somewhere in the US.
I don't know whether to be amused by this subtle "annexation" of Canada, or offended that a hundred million US movie-goers apparantly can't tell the difference.
1) The installer will include a "non-free" drivers disk. This will confuse folks new to debian dissuading them from using it, but existing debian users will find it just fine.
2) A variety of packages will split into free and non-free parts.
3) All but the 100 core zealots will run the non-free packages as a matter of course.
4) When one of the 100 core zealots complains about the lack of functionality in the non-free packages, they'll be invited to submit patches.
In other words, the practical result is the failure of the debian social contract. Oh well.
There has never been a case where a company failed to protect its trademark and lost.
The most commonly cited example would Sterling Drug Inc, which in 1921 lost the trademark on "Aspirin" when the name was ruled generic.
Kleenex still holds its trademark.
Kleenex and Xerox are typically cited as companies which -almost- lost their trademarks the same way Aspirin was lost and likely would have without a costly late-game defense.
This has nothing to do with trademarks.
According to the cease and desist letter, it has to do with trademarks and nothing else. The complaint was about the use of trademarks, not about copyrights.
Its also worth noting that parody is only specifically addressed in US -copyright- law. There is no similarly explicit exemption in trademark law.
As a US resident, I'll be charging from a 120 volt source. I'll skip the AC to DC intricacies and for the sake of simplicity I'll also assume a 1:1 charging efficiency (i.e. no energy lost to heat).
Any one else notice that 8 of the top 10 are from the East Coast, 4 of those are from the mid-atlantic (DC, Maryland and Virginia) and the absolutely none are from California or anywhere near silicon valley?
I've always had my doubts about intelligence behind some of the things I hear from California.;)
Isn't this what a subscription to the MAPS RBL via multihop BGP used to do back in '98? I used to use it before they started charging an arm and a leg, and it worked well. Protected the whole organization too, not just the mail servers configured for it.
Is it that hard for GPL fanatics to understand that some people don't WANT protection against people using their code in proprierty projects?
Not at all. You are free to use whatever license you want for your code, or even release it in to the public domain. I do.
The problem comes when you want to use somebody else's code, and that other programmer DID want protection against people using their code in proprierty projects.
Including, unfortunately, letting everyone use if for free for the first 15 years, then charging once it becomes a ubiquitous standard, such as happened with GIFs. [...] You can "undo" it for future releases, but whatever you already GPL'd stays that way forever.
Licensing is a form of contract. It works the same way for patents as for copyrights. If you explicitly allow a patent to be used for free under certain conditions, you can no more undo that than you can undo specifically allowing a copyright to be used for free.
The compression algorithm for GIFs never was offered for free in the first place. It just took the owner a long time to complain about its use.
Most C programs use dynamic libraries (.so or.dll depending on your OS preference). On major programs, many of these libraries were supplied by third parties but installed transparently by the new program. These shared libraries (and the ones already on the OS) are, in effect, that program's run time environment.
Java programs need a bigger run time environment than C programs, because as you mentioned they're not in the native processor and OS's instruction set. But other than size its really no different.
There is no technical reason a major Java app couldn't bundle JREs for the major OS's on its install CD and include stub installers for the major OS's as well so that one simple click installs the program just like any other. The sole reason that they don't and can't is that Sun requires the JRE to be installed with Sun's installer.
They should. They should charge a per-machine license on the order of $50 in a shareware (but not crippleware) style setup. If they did, I might consider buying Sun stock. I've read the jobs boards where half the jobs want someone with J2EE experience.
Right now, Sun is stuck in the worst of both worlds. They don't make any money on Java because they give it away for free and they don't get and productivity boost from outside programmers because they keep the project closed-source.
Java's major consumer right now is large-scale contractors. Particularly government contractors. You know, the folks who care about CMM3 and similar such stuff. Those folks couldn't care less about open source or closed source. The only thing that worries them about Java is sun's stock price -- an indicator that Sun may not be around much longer.
If Sun is missing the boat with those consumers, they're doing so in their failure to charge enough money for Java's use. These organizations have big budgets and could afford to pay Sun for Java if Sun could figure out how to ask.
On the other hand, ESR is right too. Windows is an aberration in the history of computing in the sense that just about nothing else has ever become and stayed ubiquitous when the company that started it held the reins too tightly. Even Windows didn't hold the reins tightly on its rise to ubiquity -- DOS was widely pirated by computer vendors without retribution and Windows leveraged that existing monopoly on its rise.
Sun has a choice to make with Java: They can keep 99% of a small market or they can keep 20%-30% of a market that's 10 times larger or more. They seem to have chosen the former, and their stock price reflects this.
I have to disagree with ESR on one point, though: The key problem with Java is not that it isn't open source. They key problem is that the presence of the runtime environment is not transparent to the user.
If you're using a C program or a visual basic program or a fortran program or a just about any other kind of program, you don't know it and don't care. The program installed itself when you clicked on the install file or when you told the package manager to go get it. End of story.
If you're running a Java program, you know it. You know it, because you had to go through Sun's specific Java installer, and read and agree to a massive click-through license. You had to do that even if the Java program came with a JRE.
If Sun wants Java to become ubiquitous, they will have to give up the click-through license on the JRE and also give up control of the installer for the JRE. No other language's runtime libraries require such a ridiculous thing, and none should.
Cross out the sentences you don't like. Add a couple in the margin if you think its appropriate. Then, show the person hiring what you did. Tell them, "Hey, I crossed out a couple of things to prevent some conflicts. Would you point them out to the boss in case any of them need further correction?"
Nine times out of ten, the person handling your paperwork will glance at it and file it away. That'll be the end of it. For the tenth time, just maintain a positive attitude: "Yeah, hey, I had a couple issues with that. I'm really eager to get started here. Lets schedule a appointment with the lawyer and get it taken care of."
Can't do it for a government job, but almost anywhere else...
If you're talking about a large number of customers making VOIP calls, then you probably need a balance-forward billing system rather than a classic double-entry system. For those not in the know, a balance-forward system is like your credit card bill where charges and payments do not necessarily match.
Has anybody spotted a *working* general purpose balance-forward billing system composed of FOSS software?
The point is to stay in business when the majority of our competitors have gone bankrupt. It is true that once in a while you get a customer who costs you more than he pays and its just better for him to go away. The rest of the time a company that wants to stay in business actually has to provide a little thing called Customer Service -- that means pleasantly working with all the fools who get hacked or get viruses, not just locking them out of the system.
Yeah, that's nice in theory but the thing is I'm not serving $30/mo cable modem customers, I'm serving business customers whose payments start around $200/mo. Business customers expect business grade service which includes the ability to run their own servers.
As a sysadmin at an ISP, this is good news for me. Getting customers to close their open relays has always been a hassle. "We really need you to take care of this; its against our terms of service" is often followed by "Well, maybe we'll just find another ISP."
"We expect you to take care of this; you're operating in violation of Federal Trade Commission policy" has a much nicer ring to it. One less likely to generate argument.
Booble is well protected as a parody under the copyright laws. Indeed, parody is one of only two "fair uses" explicitly coded into US law. The other (if you're interested) allows lending libraries to make copies.
Although its probably possible to prove that Booble really isn't a parody, Google faces an uphill battle to do so.
The trademark laws are another matter entirely. If Google can prove that Booble mimics their trademarks in a manner which dilutes Google's value (for example, by failing to make it clear that Booble is not run by Google) then Google can stomp all over them for the trademark violation.
Remember, if I put up a red sign on my restauraunt with yellow lettering which reads "MacDonalds" I am very much in violation of McDonald's trademark. and they can nail me to the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
Many things in society are long-term
Not really true.
Those historical buildings? They've been gutted and rebuilt from the inside out at least once during the past 50 years for the installation central air conditioning and elevators for the handicapped. And they're the exception to the rule. Few commercial buildings go more than 15 years without major renovation and few residential buildings make it more than 30.
Roads? Sure, US Route 1 does still travel approximately the same route but its repaved frequently, expanded and changed frequently, and its been supplanted in its original purpose as the major east-coast north-south route by Interstate 95. And even Route 1 has existed for less than a century. Before automobiles at the begining of the 20th century, there was no need for anything like it. Before automobiles, who could conceive of a multilane asphalt highway that needed to sustain speeds over 500 miles per day? How could yesteryear's engineers possibly plan for it?
The US constitution, the foundation of our law, has seen two major overhauls in the past two centuries: first due to the civil war and again because of the great depression. Even where parts of the text remain the same, their meanings have been drastically altered by the courts. Free speech has become freedom of expression. The right to bear arms somehow doesn't exist at all inside Washington DC except for police. The states have gone from being the primary seats of governance to being almost entirely subsidiary to the federal government. We're living under an almost totally different government than what saw the dawn of the 19th century.
Even the Catholic Church publishes a new catechism each year, a book which defines the religion. You'd think during two millennia they'd figure it out once and for all, yet it continues to evolve and change.
Few things last, either in their original purpose or their original design. They're continuously rebuilt, redesigned and reinvented... Even things like roads, buildings and governments for which our design experience goes back thousands of years.
Our software experience goes back 40 years, if you can call what we did 40 years ago software by any current definition. Why should we build it to last longer than than the roads and buildings, and indeed longer than software in any form has existed?
I'm sorry, but I'm not smart enough to successfully plan ahead two centuries and neither are you.
From: http://www.c-f-c.com/gaslink/pure/methanol.htm
Methanol: A colorless, flammable liquid with an odor repulsive pungent. Shipped and stored in dissolved acetone. Can decompose spontaneously if pressure exceeds 15 PSIG.
Hazards: A toxic substance. Irriatates eyes and causes dizziness, nausea and is a possible carcinogen.
Yeah, I'm going to carry a bottle of that onto a post-9/11 jetliner.
This is a FAQ. Its the very first thing covered in every single RAID FAQ you find in Google. Read the FAQ.
And if you're losing that many drives, you should probably read the FAQs about overheating too. I've been responsible for hundreds of drives in the past decade and I've lost only two. Sounds like you have a problem.
This is a dumb idea. You have to pay the company extra to be protected from the defects in the company's product? That's like selling a car but if you want all five lugs for the tire its extra. Oh yeah, and if you don't buy the option, its recommended that you drive slowly on only smooth roads.
If I were a trial lawyer I'd be rubbing my hands with glee.
Many of the AP's you can buy run off a 12-volt power adapter. So, hook it up to a typical deep-cycle lead acid battery (e.g. marine or golf cart) and it can run all day. Since its an outdoor setting, you won't even need the more expensive gel cells that UPSes use.
Even quiet generators make some noise. Batteries make none.
And here I thought google was an alteration of gaggle which, which it is at least as similar a word as googol, and has similar implications.
The simples answer is: don't engineer it as a Big Brother device.
;)
What you describe is a big brother device. It automatically detects all passing hikers so that when the damn fools get themselves lost they can be found again.
So build it a different way. The same technoogy you described could be put together like this:
You install "checkpoints" along the trail.
Hikers optionally rent an RFID wriststrap for a buck or so.
The checkpoint is also a map station, etc.
When they hit the checkpoint, they swipe their wriststrap in front of the checkpoint and it emits a beep to let them know it recorded their passage.
At the end of the day, your system sends an email to the hikers to give them a record of when they reached each checkpoint. He/she can race against himself in order to best his previous time.
And as a happenstance side-benefit, if the damn fools get themselves lost, you know which checkpoint they reached last.
Some folks won't want a record of their passage and won't rent a wrist strap. If they get lost, you'll have more trouble finding them and they may suffer avoidable injury or even death. But you know what? That's OK too.
being familar with mainstreem sci-fi I find it more common then not to see scenes of Vancover or Torronto.
Yes, that's one of life's little ironies. A huge number of movie scenes are filmed in Canada, but the characters in the movie generally identify their location as somewhere in the US.
I don't know whether to be amused by this subtle "annexation" of Canada, or offended that a hundred million US movie-goers apparantly can't tell the difference.
The practical result of this are:
1) The installer will include a "non-free" drivers disk. This will confuse folks new to debian dissuading them from using it, but existing debian users will find it just fine.
2) A variety of packages will split into free and non-free parts.
3) All but the 100 core zealots will run the non-free packages as a matter of course.
4) When one of the 100 core zealots complains about the lack of functionality in the non-free packages, they'll be invited to submit patches.
In other words, the practical result is the failure of the debian social contract. Oh well.
There has never been a case where a company failed to protect its trademark and lost.
The most commonly cited example would Sterling Drug Inc, which in 1921 lost the trademark on "Aspirin" when the name was ruled generic.
Kleenex still holds its trademark.
Kleenex and Xerox are typically cited as companies which -almost- lost their trademarks the same way Aspirin was lost and likely would have without a costly late-game defense.
This has nothing to do with trademarks.
According to the cease and desist letter, it has to do with trademarks and nothing else. The complaint was about the use of trademarks, not about copyrights.
Its also worth noting that parody is only specifically addressed in US -copyright- law. There is no similarly explicit exemption in trademark law.
30 seconds eh? My laptop battery (HP Pavilion Notebook) delivers 11.1 volts and holds a charge of 3.8 amp-hours. Lets do a little math.
3.6 amp-hours * 3600 seconds/hour = 12960 amp-seconds
12960 amp-seconds * 11.1 volts = 143856 watt-seconds
As a US resident, I'll be charging from a 120 volt source. I'll skip the AC to DC intricacies and for the sake of simplicity I'll also assume a 1:1 charging efficiency (i.e. no energy lost to heat).
143856 watt-seconds / 30 seconds ~= 4800 watts
4800 watts / 120 volts = 40 amps
Now, your typical household circuit is 15 amps. Try to charge that laptop battery in 30 seconds and you're going to throw the breaker.
Any one else notice that 8 of the top 10 are from the East Coast, 4 of those are from the mid-atlantic (DC, Maryland and Virginia) and the absolutely none are from California or anywhere near silicon valley?
;)
I've always had my doubts about intelligence behind some of the things I hear from California.
Uh...
Isn't this what a subscription to the MAPS RBL via multihop BGP used to do back in '98? I used to use it before they started charging an arm and a leg, and it worked well. Protected the whole organization too, not just the mail servers configured for it.
Is the gpl a text that says "if you change a word of this text you shall be excommunciated from the religion of Free Software, Stallman prophet ?"
Actually, yes. The GPL attempts to assert copyright on itself and refuses permission to make derivative works.
Is it that hard for GPL fanatics to understand that some people don't WANT protection against people using their code in proprierty projects?
Not at all. You are free to use whatever license you want for your code, or even release it in to the public domain. I do.
The problem comes when you want to use somebody else's code, and that other programmer DID want protection against people using their code in proprierty projects.
Including, unfortunately, letting everyone use if for free for the first 15 years, then charging once it becomes a ubiquitous standard, such as happened with GIFs. [...] You can "undo" it for future releases, but whatever you already GPL'd stays that way forever.
Licensing is a form of contract. It works the same way for patents as for copyrights. If you explicitly allow a patent to be used for free under certain conditions, you can no more undo that than you can undo specifically allowing a copyright to be used for free.
The compression algorithm for GIFs never was offered for free in the first place. It just took the owner a long time to complain about its use.
Most C programs use dynamic libraries (.so or .dll depending on your OS preference). On major programs, many of these libraries were supplied by third parties but installed transparently by the new program. These shared libraries (and the ones already on the OS) are, in effect, that program's run time environment.
Java programs need a bigger run time environment than C programs, because as you mentioned they're not in the native processor and OS's instruction set. But other than size its really no different.
There is no technical reason a major Java app couldn't bundle JREs for the major OS's on its install CD and include stub installers for the major OS's as well so that one simple click installs the program just like any other. The sole reason that they don't and can't is that Sun requires the JRE to be installed with Sun's installer.
They don't make any money from Java directly.
They should. They should charge a per-machine license on the order of $50 in a shareware (but not crippleware) style setup. If they did, I might consider buying Sun stock. I've read the jobs boards where half the jobs want someone with J2EE experience.
Right now, Sun is stuck in the worst of both worlds. They don't make any money on Java because they give it away for free and they don't get and productivity boost from outside programmers because they keep the project closed-source.
Phipps is right, but so is Raymond.
Java's major consumer right now is large-scale contractors. Particularly government contractors. You know, the folks who care about CMM3 and similar such stuff. Those folks couldn't care less about open source or closed source. The only thing that worries them about Java is sun's stock price -- an indicator that Sun may not be around much longer.
If Sun is missing the boat with those consumers, they're doing so in their failure to charge enough money for Java's use. These organizations have big budgets and could afford to pay Sun for Java if Sun could figure out how to ask.
On the other hand, ESR is right too. Windows is an aberration in the history of computing in the sense that just about nothing else has ever become and stayed ubiquitous when the company that started it held the reins too tightly. Even Windows didn't hold the reins tightly on its rise to ubiquity -- DOS was widely pirated by computer vendors without retribution and Windows leveraged that existing monopoly on its rise.
Sun has a choice to make with Java: They can keep 99% of a small market or they can keep 20%-30% of a market that's 10 times larger or more. They seem to have chosen the former, and their stock price reflects this.
I have to disagree with ESR on one point, though: The key problem with Java is not that it isn't open source. They key problem is that the presence of the runtime environment is not transparent to the user.
If you're using a C program or a visual basic program or a fortran program or a just about any other kind of program, you don't know it and don't care. The program installed itself when you clicked on the install file or when you told the package manager to go get it. End of story.
If you're running a Java program, you know it. You know it, because you had to go through Sun's specific Java installer, and read and agree to a massive click-through license. You had to do that even if the Java program came with a JRE.
If Sun wants Java to become ubiquitous, they will have to give up the click-through license on the JRE and also give up control of the installer for the JRE. No other language's runtime libraries require such a ridiculous thing, and none should.
As Nike says: just do it.
Cross out the sentences you don't like. Add a couple in the margin if you think its appropriate. Then, show the person hiring what you did. Tell them, "Hey, I crossed out a couple of things to prevent some conflicts. Would you point them out to the boss in case any of them need further correction?"
Nine times out of ten, the person handling your paperwork will glance at it and file it away. That'll be the end of it. For the tenth time, just maintain a positive attitude: "Yeah, hey, I had a couple issues with that. I'm really eager to get started here. Lets schedule a appointment with the lawyer and get it taken care of."
Can't do it for a government job, but almost anywhere else...
If you're talking about a large number of customers making VOIP calls, then you probably need a balance-forward billing system rather than a classic double-entry system. For those not in the know, a balance-forward system is like your credit card bill where charges and payments do not necessarily match.
Has anybody spotted a *working* general purpose balance-forward billing system composed of FOSS software?
What's the point?
The point is to stay in business when the majority of our competitors have gone bankrupt. It is true that once in a while you get a customer who costs you more than he pays and its just better for him to go away. The rest of the time a company that wants to stay in business actually has to provide a little thing called Customer Service -- that means pleasantly working with all the fools who get hacked or get viruses, not just locking them out of the system.
Every other ISP out there firewalls port 25
Yeah, that's nice in theory but the thing is I'm not serving $30/mo cable modem customers, I'm serving business customers whose payments start around $200/mo. Business customers expect business grade service which includes the ability to run their own servers.
As a sysadmin at an ISP, this is good news for me. Getting customers to close their open relays has always been a hassle. "We really need you to take care of this; its against our terms of service" is often followed by "Well, maybe we'll just find another ISP."
"We expect you to take care of this; you're operating in violation of Federal Trade Commission policy" has a much nicer ring to it. One less likely to generate argument.
Booble is well protected as a parody under the copyright laws. Indeed, parody is one of only two "fair uses" explicitly coded into US law. The other (if you're interested) allows lending libraries to make copies.
Although its probably possible to prove that Booble really isn't a parody, Google faces an uphill battle to do so.
The trademark laws are another matter entirely. If Google can prove that Booble mimics their trademarks in a manner which dilutes Google's value (for example, by failing to make it clear that Booble is not run by Google) then Google can stomp all over them for the trademark violation.
Remember, if I put up a red sign on my restauraunt with yellow lettering which reads "MacDonalds" I am very much in violation of McDonald's trademark. and they can nail me to the wall.