Probably. But lawyers have the term "irrevocable" to make that clear.
I'm not sure about this but if Y! licensed a sub-licensable patent to party A, and A licensed it to B - how can Y! revoke B's license? There have been no contracts between Y! and B. So, even if we assume that the license is revokable, Y! can only revoke A's license; and only A can revoke B's license. If Y! does revoke A's license, A can re-license it from any of the other B parties that previously had sub-licensed from anyone other than Yahoo.
Really the safest thing to do would be for Yahoo! to officially dedicate the patent to the public domain through the USPTO.
Dedicating the patents would be ideal from an outsider's point of view; but who knows what's going on with executives and lawyers? Fiduciary responsibility, investor lawsuits - IANAL to know all the factors.
The point that worries me is that Yahoo still retain the right to alter this agreement at any time and (heaven forbid) change it to force licence payments.
The license states that it is "sub-licensable":
1.1. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, DomainKeys Developer hereby grants You, a royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable, non-exclusive license under its rights to the Yahoo! Patent Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, and/or import Implementations.
IANAL, but to me it means that once I obtain this license, I can sub-license it to someone else without Yahoo! being involved in the contract. So, even though there is nothing preventing Yahoo! from charging for the license in the future, the licensors that would have already executed the license agreement would be under no obligation to do so. Those licensors would be able to sub-license the patents to new licensees under the original terms. So, there's no real problem there.
This, of course, is in sharp contrast to Microsoft's SenderID patent licensing scheme when the license granted by MS was "personal" and not sub-licensable. So, in effect, Microsoft would maintain control over any new licensee agreement. The Yahoo! agreement doesn't seem to suffer from the same impediment.
Following your links, pulmonary actinomycosis may be more appropriate. In the writing, he mentions bad dental hygiene and an electric toothbrush that may have caused or contributed to the infection. The symptoms described seem similar too. He should definitely see the specialist in these types of diseases (ID?) ASAP; he should be able to get an appointment later in the day or next morning at the latest - many doctors do understand the urgent need and will accommodate them. This is important since complications of pulmonary actinomycosis sound pretty bad and you don't want to get to those. As I understand from reading the full story, he has not been proactive about treating the illness for several years, but what can you do looking back? Better take care of it ASAP.
I AM NOT A DOCTOR. THIS IS NOT A MEDICAL ADVICE. CONSULT YOUR PHYSICIAN FOR MEDICAL HELP.
Are you kidding? I want homeland security on the case ASAP. I also want BSA to send threatening letters to all Microsoft departments and offices and force them to audit their licensed software and code copyrights - or else they'll break down the doors with the assistance of Secret Service and seize all their assets! You know, irresponsible IP thieves and pirates like these are the criminals that are forcing software industry to lose $50.7 trillion (or whatever number it is) per year.
He says if consumers wanted more features, they'd tell Microsoft, using the example of tabbed browsing. I would argue that if consumers knew what features they wanted, that would be true...
I don't think that's true for most people. When they want new features that are available in another product they just switch to that product; why would they bother reporting their grievances to the other company, and wait for them to respond unless they have other vested interests or costs of switching were high? In fact, this kind of response from a company representative means that the company (i.e. MS) is not being proactive in the market - which is relatively easy for a monopoly. However, when they lose sizeable chunk of the market share, they'll wake up and change the tune.
Look at this too:
"If there are features in our products that are subpar or need to be added, then I have great confidence that we are an organization that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that."
Well, I'd hate to shatter your confidence in your company, Mr. Vamos, but your customers have been asking you to implement full PNG transparency (a more or less trivial matter) in IE - what have you done to respond to that? You know he is full of it when you read this too:
"I don't believe it is a true statement that IE doesn't have the features that our customers want," he said. "We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback, then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team."
How about lack of "features" that nobody except worms and trojans use? Is lack of those "features" a feature? I could go on, but I'll stop at that.
When you purchase a product at retail containing a patent which is patented by the manufacturer - like, for example, dryer fabric softener sheets - they are giving you an implied license by selling it to you....
If you purchased a mass-market product that infringes on a third-party's patents (like Kodak's instant camera a few years ago), the manufacturere that made the device (Kodak) is liable for infringement to the owner of the patent or patents (Polaroid) and technically so are you.
So, it would then be possible to argue in court that even though you are violating a Polaroid patent, you were fraudulently led to believe by Kodak you had their implicit license for those patents. After all, it would be impossible for a consumer to go through a legality check of every household item they buy - would you request copies of all private patent agreements between Polaroid and Kodak before buying a camera off the shelf? Would anyone pay attention to you at all if you did? Is there any law that requires companies to disclose their private patent agreements to public? If not, then the consumer technically should not be held responsible.
Big difference between copyright and patent - copyright gives you the right to do certain things (the ones you listed) - patent gives you no right to do anything - all it gives you is the right to prevent others from selling, using, etc.
IANAL, but I don't know about that - copyright is an exclusive right too. i.e., it doesn't give you any additional rights you don't already have, it's good for excluding others from having those rights.
My guess is that they'll inject adverts in to your e-mail when you download it using pop.
And how would that be different from spam? If it's a free e-mail company tagline at the end of the message it may be understandable, but if they start injecting full-fledged ads like
Hey Joe,
Good seeing you the other day. We're gonna catch the game next weekend, interested?
Sponsored Google Ad -------------------- FiNd YOUR ClAsSmAtEs NOW! http://www.spammersheaven.com/?trackinglink= fjdqpo adkjfjopwpfjkdowl -------------------- SPORTS betting, largest offshore CASINO! FREE $20 mAtChInG bEt!!! You WIN!!! http://www.spammersheavencasino.com/?track inglink= asfaskdjfowjfksadljdsofj --------------------
Let me know.
Bob
Not only may it be illegal in some states, people will not use the service. People already get extremely annoyed by bloated Hotmail taglines as it is; this type of thing would be a complete disaster.
None of them really make sense. There should be a separate menu entry for "settings" as in Konqueror and many KDE apps. Tools should be for things like Javascript console, DOM inspector, translate page, validate page, and other tools.
If you don't go to school, you don't need a scollarship.
Unless you can't go to college because you cannot afford it, or you were forced to drop out for financial reasons - then scholarship would be a lot of help.
I've stated this several times before, but WTH, I'll do it again. The problem with the MPAA is the same problem with the RIAA - they are both cartels: they are not competing for a consumer dollar amongst each other, they are enforcing illegal trade restrictions, bribing congress for ridiculous laws that don't make sense, and seek more control of the market and revenues by any means to avoid business risks associated with free market and competition. Once you are down that path, there is no turning back unless something drastic happens in the industry.
So, no, their strategy is definitely not making the downloading difficult - they are just ending up suing their best customers.
Imagine now, what would make "piracy" really difficult is if there was any competition in the entertainment industry and consumers were getting what they really want. No, not the service that works on Windows media player only and you pay and download a "movie" that you can watch for the next 24 hours only on your computer. This is useless. What consumers want is a service that allows them to download a movie (in MPEG-4/XVid/DivX/Theora/whatever) for, say $5, burn it to any DVD easily and watch it on any DVD player of their choice. Imagine now if all this can be done many ways - using your computer, networked DVD players, DVRs, etc., etc. On top of that, how about making the deals with broadband providers to mirror the content for faster downloads? How about helping them deploy fiber optic cables for better and faster market acceptance and saturation?
If not this way, find another way to deliver content and meet the existing and future demands of potential consumers. Let the market and the competition decide what method will win and what your consumers really want.
Instead, the way the cartel is taking the industry and the "market" is paying legislators to try to pass mandated DRM schemes, CDBPTA (or whatever), INDUCE Act, broadcast flag, guaranteed tax revenues (while they are not paying their share of taxes), restricting fair trades, and best of all - suing their own customers.
Will people ever say enough is enough and make their governments disband the illegal cartels?
No, you have to consider that Thunderbird is at version 0.9. When Firefox was at 0.9, it was not being compiled with optimizations. Unless you compile your own version of Thunderbird with optimizations enabled it's likely that they are disabled by default. I noticed a significant performance increase with Firefox from 0.9 to 1.0PR, for example.
I'm thinking you should read the federalist papers. The very very basic and oversimplified idea is that the federal government's job is to govern the states and provide for defense, not to wipe your mouth when you dribble and give you a job when you don't have one.
Well, then tell that to the government, because the way it is now it's increasingly governing its people and not just states and foreign matters. Other posters have pointed out many federal programs like social security, medicare, welfare, etc., etc., etc. So, as a matter of practicality, the federal government wants to directly govern the people but is not fairly represented by it.
No, because you cannot have a demographic and geographic tyranny of the majority. You must normalize the results based at least on geography due to differing interests, economies, social conditions, etc. Just about EVERY state has wildly different economic and social interests from NY and CA, but those interests would be totally squelched in your scenario.
Even if I were to agree to this logic, then there would have to be an agreeable way to fairly review and adjust electoral vote numbers per state every 4 years before presidential elections as the circumstances change. You would have to justify adjustments with the new state economies, political and social circumstances, prevailing interests, etc. For example, there were no auto and software industries 100 years ago, and therefore, you'd have to take into consideration those types of developing interests. Quite frankly, I don't think there would be a fair way to do this. And the absent such a system for electoral vote review, it is also unfair to cling to those numbers from long ago, when most of today's interests have since significantly changed.
How do the battleground states drown out the more populous ones?
That's to say - more populous states that lean significantly one way or towards one candidate. One way smaller battleground states have more influence on the election is that handful of them may practically decide who wins the election possibly discounting the will of a larger part of population. Or, at the very least they'll have a larger impact on the electoral vote numbers.
For example, in California 4,403,495 voters voted for Bush, but since Bush lost, all California electoral votes (55) went to Kerry. In Illinois, only 2,826,757 voters voted for Kerry, but all of Illinois' electoral votes (21) went to Kerry anyway. So, in effect, just under 3 million voters in Illinois have had more influence over the election than ~4.4 million voters in California, whose votes literally didn't count in the electoral vote tally.
If you look at the 2000 presidential election, the numbers will be more telling since the president-elect didn't actually win the popular vote.
Another way is that much of the discussion of "issues" that presidential candidates engage in and the "platforms" they run on, is tailored to the situation of those battleground states, putting most of the discussions that are affecting much larger numbers of people untouched.
The federal governments primary purpose as laid out in the constitution is to regulate trade between states and provide for the common security of the nation. That's it, no well-fare, not medicare, no federal highways, no federal funding of schools, no federally funded research (except maybe military). Nothing but trade and defense and foreign policy.
All this other crap that people seem to think is the job of the federal government was really just added by FDR and later on in the post-WWII era.
I agree with you more than I disagree. But given the reality as it is, the federal government is actually now "governing" people directly, and not only through foreign affairs and limited interstate matters. So, given this new reality as you correctly point out, the government should then be representative of its people (not the states) without discriminating against some citizens living in particular areas.
I am guessing you would agree, except that you would take the position that the federal government should be much smaller and limited than what it is now, and the presidential elections should stay as they are. That would be even better, but what are the chances of that happening? I can hear Ashcroft saying: "ta-aists this... ta-aists that" in the press conferences and I don't think they are too great. Plus, you know how presidents run their elections on "platforms" like education, social security, etc. No state is going to vote for a president that will propose the federal government should abandon spending on education.
As far as citizens' votes are concerned, there is no such thing as a "federal election". We are a country of united separate states (hence the United States)....
Concerning the election, it is not 280+ million Americans voting in a federal election, it is 50 states casting their weighted vote as a part of the Union. The difference is subtle, but very large.
I agree with you, but that's good for theory. The times when federal government was only involved with states, foreign affairs and very limited interstate matters is long gone. As a matter of reality, the federal government is directly involved in every citizen's life nowadays - have you paid federal taxes, medicare, social security, etc? There are countless laws, regulations, federal government agencies, federal financing plans that are affecting everyone's lives on everyday basis. You can argue how big, overpowered, and overstretched the federal government is, but the reality as it is, it needs to represent *people*, not the states, or through the states legislatures.
You make a good case and a reasonable argument; but at the same time the same logic would lead you to have to adjust the electoral votes given to each state by depending on their economy, political state, and other factors. For example, there was no Silicon Valley 200 years ago, nor were there automobile and airline industries. Does this mean Michigan should get even more electoral votes so that their interests are not trumped by Floridians and Texans? This is just an example, maybe not a good one, but the issue is who can decide what these electoral votes should be, and what should be the deciding factors now that cotton-picking is not on any state's primary economic and political development front.
People seem to be forgetting that this is the United _States_, not The Republic of America. The Federal Government should serve the States, and each State should get a voice in how the Federal side is run.
Just funny how sometimes it's United _States_, sometimes it's a Republic (like in a reply above yours), sometimes it's a Democratic Republic or a Representative Republic, and other times it's just Democracy.
It doesn't matter what label you use if you choose to ignore the reality. The federal government is directly involved in every citizen's life, not just the states (or their governments) of the union. Federal taxes, laws, regulations, everything that's bundled under interstate commerce that you don't have to leave your state to do. This is part of the reason why public presidential election is necessary, and presidents should not simply be picked by the state governments without public involvement (unless, of course, you want to argue that there should be no public presidential election at all since it's just the _States_).
Now, when making public elections, it more than makes sense to follow the "all men created equal" principle and give each citizen the same vote, and not discriminate with regard to their geographic location and living preferences.
Oh, that's right, the popular vote guarantees that. Like the popular votes that made gay marriage illegal in nearly a dozen states yesterday.
Isn't that the principle and the purpose of voting - to determine what's more popular and what most people agree with and vote for? How else do you propose people participate in these matters, if not by voting?
Please. Popular vote + Strong Federal Government = Tyranny of the Majority
That's not necessarily the case. First of all, popular vote = one citizen, one vote, and is fair for all citizens, no matter where they choose to live. Second, I don't see what you mean by a "Strong" federal government. If you mean "strong" in a sense that it's unfairly discriminating against minorities, then how do you elect your state governments? Do you divide up states by counties, assign each county an arbitrary number of electoral votes, and count each county by an all-or-nothing number? What about your local county government - do you divide the county by cities and towns in a similar manner and assign arbitrary number of electoral votes for each? What about city governments - divide by neighborhoods? Would you be OK with giving real minorities (by skin color, age, etc.) more voting powers? Where does it stop? i.e., when do you come to a conclusion that popular vote = who people want to elect? And to another conclusion that these arbitrary numbers may be discriminating against some citizens that should have equal rights to participate in the elections?
And you propose to disregard a minority in favor of a majority.
No. The minority should have its fair share in the decision making, but there should not be some people (a.k.a. "minority") with more voting power than others.
It's called the Federal government for a reason, you know, not a *central* government.
It doesn't matter what label you give it - you can sit there and argue federal vs. central, democracy vs. republic vs. democratic republic, etc., etc.. I don't really care how it's named. The reality is it's *your* government and the issue is how your vote is counted, not what labels you choose to give it in the process.
If you don't like it, campaign to have the rules changed. See how many agree. Until then, shut up.
Why shut up? Because expressing opinions that differ from those of others (or of the most) is wrong? That put your "minority" argument right into the dumpster.
There was a _reason_ the electoral college came into being: so that populous states would not "drown" out the less populous ones.
This reasoning fails to make sense since right now less populous battleground states are "drowning out" the bigger ones that lean one way or the other in a way that they are deciding who is elected. In other words, a more committed majority state can be disregarded for the benefit of winning the minority battleground states.
Moreover, the federal elections should not be about states, but about all citizens in the country. You cannot make a compelling case to anyone that if you live in one state your vote = 1 vote towards presidential election, but in another state your vote = 1.2 votes towards the same election. And besides that, your vote will not count at all towards electoral vote because most of your *state* leans the other way.
It should always be that 1 citizen = 1 vote towards the federal election, not a state all-or-nothing tally; no matter where you live. Sure, people living in more populated areas will have more effect on less populated states or counties. The principle here is majority rule, minority rights. The electoral college doesn't guarantee that.
There is no reason why software, business model, design, etc. patents cannot be granted for a shorter period of time than other patents that may take longer time to turn into a product. How the funding is found or what profit is made does not depend only on the length of the patent period; it also depends on the quality of an invention, its industry, state of the economy, management, market demand, the intent of the patent holder, etc, etc, etc. So, you cannot take some average mean for patenting and producing a spacecraft engine and apply that period of time to a patent storing ID cookies on a client for "one-click" shopping.
On an unrelated note, if a patent applicant does not intend to invest their time and/or money, or seek investors to create and sell or otherwise benefit from the invention, then their patent should be revoked within a reasonable time (maybe 6 months to 1 year for software, longer for some other industries). It doesn't make sense to have purely law firms sitting on 15-19 year old half-vague patents without any intent to accomplish anything, and at the end of the patent period start suing legitimate businesses that actually create products and drive the economy forward.
IMO, these types of changes are needed for the patent system to "promote science and useful arts(?)" and not just act as a market competition and innovation deterrent, a effective cartel-type defensive mechanism, and a convenient revenue source for "IP" lawyers.
I have used SUSE since 6.x versions and I have 0 icons on my desktop. In fact, I disabled the "icons on desktop" feature altogether. I arranged most used application buttons (including the K menu) on the bottom panel (with transparency), and I have an auto-hiding panel at the top with the pager, taskbar, system tray and a clock. I think it's pretty clean and I personally don't like it set up any other way.
What I didn't understand was:
SUSE users... are far less concerned about where things are kept in the filesystem than they ought to be.
That doesn't make any sense to me. I know where most things are in the filesystem. In fact when SUSE (then SuSE) pledged LSB compatibility about 5 years ago, it (version 7.0 I believe) was instantly the most compliant distro, even outdoing Debian which was second according to the LSB-FHS (filesystem hierarchy standard) tests then. I don't know that Open Group does these comparison tests now and publishes the results, but recent SUSE versions are also all LSB 1.3 certified.
... the consideration from the copyright holder would be permission to copy the game from the disk to the hard-drive.
What are you paying for at the store then? To hang the box on the wall and use the CD as a coaster? Of course you are buying software to install it, run it and use it in the manner that it was designed, and that consideration is given at the time of purchase. I don't see anything additional that is provided by most EULAs.
Unfortunately, your 'anology' isn't even entirely accurate. The box of every piece of software I have has, in nice legable black print text telling you that you have to accept a license agreement before you use the product:
For example:
"You must accept the enclosed License Agreement before you can use this product. If you do not accept thte terms of the License Agreement, you should promptly return the product for a refund."
Which means nothing in terms of the sales transaction. There is no contract executed during the purchase of a product at a store. Any further contract (besides sale of a product) between parties must include consideration; there is no additional consideration provided to a consumer after the software has been purchased. No consideration - no contract.
True - the judge in the bnetd case ruled that when purchasing software consumers are just buying a shiny box and a coaster, but that doesn't make any sense whatsoever - they are clearly buying the software for the purpose of using it. Hopefully, the ruling is cleared up on the appeal and the record set clear.
in the event that some company comes around and claims that they themselves wrote firefox and decides to sue every user, i guess we'll be protected.
IANAL, but I don't know what you think your company will be protected from. AFAIK, neither copyright violations nor patent violations are subject to "good faith" knowledge or depend on how much you paid for the products. This is especially true for patents; unless, of course, your company has a separate agreement with the vendor where in case of lawsuit the vendor will pay litigation costs. Then they surely must have a similar agreement for the proprietary software as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure about this but if Y! licensed a sub-licensable patent to party A, and A licensed it to B - how can Y! revoke B's license? There have been no contracts between Y! and B. So, even if we assume that the license is revokable, Y! can only revoke A's license; and only A can revoke B's license. If Y! does revoke A's license, A can re-license it from any of the other B parties that previously had sub-licensed from anyone other than Yahoo.
Dedicating the patents would be ideal from an outsider's point of view; but who knows what's going on with executives and lawyers? Fiduciary responsibility, investor lawsuits - IANAL to know all the factors.
The license states that it is "sub-licensable":
1.1. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, DomainKeys Developer hereby grants You, a royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable, non-exclusive license under its rights to the Yahoo! Patent Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, and/or import Implementations.
IANAL, but to me it means that once I obtain this license, I can sub-license it to someone else without Yahoo! being involved in the contract. So, even though there is nothing preventing Yahoo! from charging for the license in the future, the licensors that would have already executed the license agreement would be under no obligation to do so. Those licensors would be able to sub-license the patents to new licensees under the original terms. So, there's no real problem there.
This, of course, is in sharp contrast to Microsoft's SenderID patent licensing scheme when the license granted by MS was "personal" and not sub-licensable. So, in effect, Microsoft would maintain control over any new licensee agreement. The Yahoo! agreement doesn't seem to suffer from the same impediment.
Following your links, pulmonary actinomycosis may be more appropriate. In the writing, he mentions bad dental hygiene and an electric toothbrush that may have caused or contributed to the infection. The symptoms described seem similar too. He should definitely see the specialist in these types of diseases (ID?) ASAP; he should be able to get an appointment later in the day or next morning at the latest - many doctors do understand the urgent need and will accommodate them. This is important since complications of pulmonary actinomycosis sound pretty bad and you don't want to get to those. As I understand from reading the full story, he has not been proactive about treating the illness for several years, but what can you do looking back? Better take care of it ASAP.
I AM NOT A DOCTOR. THIS IS NOT A MEDICAL ADVICE. CONSULT YOUR PHYSICIAN FOR MEDICAL HELP.
Are you kidding? I want homeland security on the case ASAP. I also want BSA to send threatening letters to all Microsoft departments and offices and force them to audit their licensed software and code copyrights - or else they'll break down the doors with the assistance of Secret Service and seize all their assets! You know, irresponsible IP thieves and pirates like these are the criminals that are forcing software industry to lose $50.7 trillion (or whatever number it is) per year.
I don't think that's true for most people. When they want new features that are available in another product they just switch to that product; why would they bother reporting their grievances to the other company, and wait for them to respond unless they have other vested interests or costs of switching were high? In fact, this kind of response from a company representative means that the company (i.e. MS) is not being proactive in the market - which is relatively easy for a monopoly. However, when they lose sizeable chunk of the market share, they'll wake up and change the tune.
Look at this too:
"If there are features in our products that are subpar or need to be added, then I have great confidence that we are an organization that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that."
Well, I'd hate to shatter your confidence in your company, Mr. Vamos, but your customers have been asking you to implement full PNG transparency (a more or less trivial matter) in IE - what have you done to respond to that? You know he is full of it when you read this too:
"I don't believe it is a true statement that IE doesn't have the features that our customers want," he said. "We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback, then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team."
How about lack of "features" that nobody except worms and trojans use? Is lack of those "features" a feature? I could go on, but I'll stop at that.
So, it would then be possible to argue in court that even though you are violating a Polaroid patent, you were fraudulently led to believe by Kodak you had their implicit license for those patents. After all, it would be impossible for a consumer to go through a legality check of every household item they buy - would you request copies of all private patent agreements between Polaroid and Kodak before buying a camera off the shelf? Would anyone pay attention to you at all if you did? Is there any law that requires companies to disclose their private patent agreements to public? If not, then the consumer technically should not be held responsible.
IANAL, but I don't know about that - copyright is an exclusive right too. i.e., it doesn't give you any additional rights you don't already have, it's good for excluding others from having those rights.
And how would that be different from spam? If it's a free e-mail company tagline at the end of the message it may be understandable, but if they start injecting full-fledged ads like
Hey Joe,
Good seeing you the other day. We're gonna catch the game next weekend, interested?
Sponsored Google Ad
--------------------
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http://www.spammersheaven.com/?trackinglink
--------------------
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Let me know.
Bob
Not only may it be illegal in some states, people will not use the service. People already get extremely annoyed by bloated Hotmail taglines as it is; this type of thing would be a complete disaster.
None of them really make sense. There should be a separate menu entry for "settings" as in Konqueror and many KDE apps. Tools should be for things like Javascript console, DOM inspector, translate page, validate page, and other tools.
Unless you can't go to college because you cannot afford it, or you were forced to drop out for financial reasons - then scholarship would be a lot of help.
I've stated this several times before, but WTH, I'll do it again. The problem with the MPAA is the same problem with the RIAA - they are both cartels: they are not competing for a consumer dollar amongst each other, they are enforcing illegal trade restrictions, bribing congress for ridiculous laws that don't make sense, and seek more control of the market and revenues by any means to avoid business risks associated with free market and competition. Once you are down that path, there is no turning back unless something drastic happens in the industry.
So, no, their strategy is definitely not making the downloading difficult - they are just ending up suing their best customers.
Imagine now, what would make "piracy" really difficult is if there was any competition in the entertainment industry and consumers were getting what they really want. No, not the service that works on Windows media player only and you pay and download a "movie" that you can watch for the next 24 hours only on your computer. This is useless. What consumers want is a service that allows them to download a movie (in MPEG-4/XVid/DivX/Theora/whatever) for, say $5, burn it to any DVD easily and watch it on any DVD player of their choice. Imagine now if all this can be done many ways - using your computer, networked DVD players, DVRs, etc., etc. On top of that, how about making the deals with broadband providers to mirror the content for faster downloads? How about helping them deploy fiber optic cables for better and faster market acceptance and saturation?
If not this way, find another way to deliver content and meet the existing and future demands of potential consumers. Let the market and the competition decide what method will win and what your consumers really want.
Instead, the way the cartel is taking the industry and the "market" is paying legislators to try to pass mandated DRM schemes, CDBPTA (or whatever), INDUCE Act, broadcast flag, guaranteed tax revenues (while they are not paying their share of taxes), restricting fair trades, and best of all - suing their own customers.
Will people ever say enough is enough and make their governments disband the illegal cartels?
No, you have to consider that Thunderbird is at version 0.9. When Firefox was at 0.9, it was not being compiled with optimizations. Unless you compile your own version of Thunderbird with optimizations enabled it's likely that they are disabled by default. I noticed a significant performance increase with Firefox from 0.9 to 1.0PR, for example.
Well, then tell that to the government, because the way it is now it's increasingly governing its people and not just states and foreign matters. Other posters have pointed out many federal programs like social security, medicare, welfare, etc., etc., etc. So, as a matter of practicality, the federal government wants to directly govern the people but is not fairly represented by it.
Even if I were to agree to this logic, then there would have to be an agreeable way to fairly review and adjust electoral vote numbers per state every 4 years before presidential elections as the circumstances change. You would have to justify adjustments with the new state economies, political and social circumstances, prevailing interests, etc. For example, there were no auto and software industries 100 years ago, and therefore, you'd have to take into consideration those types of developing interests. Quite frankly, I don't think there would be a fair way to do this. And the absent such a system for electoral vote review, it is also unfair to cling to those numbers from long ago, when most of today's interests have since significantly changed.
That's to say - more populous states that lean significantly one way or towards one candidate. One way smaller battleground states have more influence on the election is that handful of them may practically decide who wins the election possibly discounting the will of a larger part of population. Or, at the very least they'll have a larger impact on the electoral vote numbers.
For example, in California 4,403,495 voters voted for Bush, but since Bush lost, all California electoral votes (55) went to Kerry. In Illinois, only 2,826,757 voters voted for Kerry, but all of Illinois' electoral votes (21) went to Kerry anyway. So, in effect, just under 3 million voters in Illinois have had more influence over the election than ~4.4 million voters in California, whose votes literally didn't count in the electoral vote tally.
If you look at the 2000 presidential election, the numbers will be more telling since the president-elect didn't actually win the popular vote.
Another way is that much of the discussion of "issues" that presidential candidates engage in and the "platforms" they run on, is tailored to the situation of those battleground states, putting most of the discussions that are affecting much larger numbers of people untouched.
I agree with you more than I disagree. But given the reality as it is, the federal government is actually now "governing" people directly, and not only through foreign affairs and limited interstate matters. So, given this new reality as you correctly point out, the government should then be representative of its people (not the states) without discriminating against some citizens living in particular areas.
I am guessing you would agree, except that you would take the position that the federal government should be much smaller and limited than what it is now, and the presidential elections should stay as they are. That would be even better, but what are the chances of that happening? I can hear Ashcroft saying: "ta-aists this... ta-aists that" in the press conferences and I don't think they are too great. Plus, you know how presidents run their elections on "platforms" like education, social security, etc. No state is going to vote for a president that will propose the federal government should abandon spending on education.
I agree with you, but that's good for theory. The times when federal government was only involved with states, foreign affairs and very limited interstate matters is long gone. As a matter of reality, the federal government is directly involved in every citizen's life nowadays - have you paid federal taxes, medicare, social security, etc? There are countless laws, regulations, federal government agencies, federal financing plans that are affecting everyone's lives on everyday basis. You can argue how big, overpowered, and overstretched the federal government is, but the reality as it is, it needs to represent *people*, not the states, or through the states legislatures.
You make a good case and a reasonable argument; but at the same time the same logic would lead you to have to adjust the electoral votes given to each state by depending on their economy, political state, and other factors. For example, there was no Silicon Valley 200 years ago, nor were there automobile and airline industries. Does this mean Michigan should get even more electoral votes so that their interests are not trumped by Floridians and Texans? This is just an example, maybe not a good one, but the issue is who can decide what these electoral votes should be, and what should be the deciding factors now that cotton-picking is not on any state's primary economic and political development front.
Just funny how sometimes it's United _States_, sometimes it's a Republic (like in a reply above yours), sometimes it's a Democratic Republic or a Representative Republic, and other times it's just Democracy.
It doesn't matter what label you use if you choose to ignore the reality. The federal government is directly involved in every citizen's life, not just the states (or their governments) of the union. Federal taxes, laws, regulations, everything that's bundled under interstate commerce that you don't have to leave your state to do. This is part of the reason why public presidential election is necessary, and presidents should not simply be picked by the state governments without public involvement (unless, of course, you want to argue that there should be no public presidential election at all since it's just the _States_).
Now, when making public elections, it more than makes sense to follow the "all men created equal" principle and give each citizen the same vote, and not discriminate with regard to their geographic location and living preferences.
Isn't that the principle and the purpose of voting - to determine what's more popular and what most people agree with and vote for? How else do you propose people participate in these matters, if not by voting?
That's not necessarily the case. First of all, popular vote = one citizen, one vote, and is fair for all citizens, no matter where they choose to live. Second, I don't see what you mean by a "Strong" federal government. If you mean "strong" in a sense that it's unfairly discriminating against minorities, then how do you elect your state governments? Do you divide up states by counties, assign each county an arbitrary number of electoral votes, and count each county by an all-or-nothing number? What about your local county government - do you divide the county by cities and towns in a similar manner and assign arbitrary number of electoral votes for each? What about city governments - divide by neighborhoods? Would you be OK with giving real minorities (by skin color, age, etc.) more voting powers? Where does it stop? i.e., when do you come to a conclusion that popular vote = who people want to elect? And to another conclusion that these arbitrary numbers may be discriminating against some citizens that should have equal rights to participate in the elections?
No. The minority should have its fair share in the decision making, but there should not be some people (a.k.a. "minority") with more voting power than others.
It doesn't matter what label you give it - you can sit there and argue federal vs. central, democracy vs. republic vs. democratic republic, etc., etc.. I don't really care how it's named. The reality is it's *your* government and the issue is how your vote is counted, not what labels you choose to give it in the process.
Why shut up? Because expressing opinions that differ from those of others (or of the most) is wrong? That put your "minority" argument right into the dumpster.
This reasoning fails to make sense since right now less populous battleground states are "drowning out" the bigger ones that lean one way or the other in a way that they are deciding who is elected. In other words, a more committed majority state can be disregarded for the benefit of winning the minority battleground states.
Moreover, the federal elections should not be about states, but about all citizens in the country. You cannot make a compelling case to anyone that if you live in one state your vote = 1 vote towards presidential election, but in another state your vote = 1.2 votes towards the same election. And besides that, your vote will not count at all towards electoral vote because most of your *state* leans the other way.
It should always be that 1 citizen = 1 vote towards the federal election, not a state all-or-nothing tally; no matter where you live. Sure, people living in more populated areas will have more effect on less populated states or counties. The principle here is majority rule, minority rights. The electoral college doesn't guarantee that.
There is no reason why software, business model, design, etc. patents cannot be granted for a shorter period of time than other patents that may take longer time to turn into a product. How the funding is found or what profit is made does not depend only on the length of the patent period; it also depends on the quality of an invention, its industry, state of the economy, management, market demand, the intent of the patent holder, etc, etc, etc. So, you cannot take some average mean for patenting and producing a spacecraft engine and apply that period of time to a patent storing ID cookies on a client for "one-click" shopping.
On an unrelated note, if a patent applicant does not intend to invest their time and/or money, or seek investors to create and sell or otherwise benefit from the invention, then their patent should be revoked within a reasonable time (maybe 6 months to 1 year for software, longer for some other industries). It doesn't make sense to have purely law firms sitting on 15-19 year old half-vague patents without any intent to accomplish anything, and at the end of the patent period start suing legitimate businesses that actually create products and drive the economy forward.
IMO, these types of changes are needed for the patent system to "promote science and useful arts(?)" and not just act as a market competition and innovation deterrent, a effective cartel-type defensive mechanism, and a convenient revenue source for "IP" lawyers.
I have used SUSE since 6.x versions and I have 0 icons on my desktop. In fact, I disabled the "icons on desktop" feature altogether. I arranged most used application buttons (including the K menu) on the bottom panel (with transparency), and I have an auto-hiding panel at the top with the pager, taskbar, system tray and a clock. I think it's pretty clean and I personally don't like it set up any other way.
... are far less concerned about where things are kept in the filesystem than they ought to be.
What I didn't understand was:
SUSE users
That doesn't make any sense to me. I know where most things are in the filesystem. In fact when SUSE (then SuSE) pledged LSB compatibility about 5 years ago, it (version 7.0 I believe) was instantly the most compliant distro, even outdoing Debian which was second according to the LSB-FHS (filesystem hierarchy standard) tests then. I don't know that Open Group does these comparison tests now and publishes the results, but recent SUSE versions are also all LSB 1.3 certified.
What are you paying for at the store then? To hang the box on the wall and use the CD as a coaster? Of course you are buying software to install it, run it and use it in the manner that it was designed, and that consideration is given at the time of purchase. I don't see anything additional that is provided by most EULAs.
Which means nothing in terms of the sales transaction. There is no contract executed during the purchase of a product at a store. Any further contract (besides sale of a product) between parties must include consideration; there is no additional consideration provided to a consumer after the software has been purchased. No consideration - no contract.
True - the judge in the bnetd case ruled that when purchasing software consumers are just buying a shiny box and a coaster, but that doesn't make any sense whatsoever - they are clearly buying the software for the purpose of using it. Hopefully, the ruling is cleared up on the appeal and the record set clear.
Disclaimer - IANAL.
IANAL, but I don't know what you think your company will be protected from. AFAIK, neither copyright violations nor patent violations are subject to "good faith" knowledge or depend on how much you paid for the products. This is especially true for patents; unless, of course, your company has a separate agreement with the vendor where in case of lawsuit the vendor will pay litigation costs. Then they surely must have a similar agreement for the proprietary software as well.