It's not a hole in his defence because we haven't heard his defense, because he hasn't gone to trial yet. It's something that the defense will have to explain to the jury's satisfaction or he will likely be found guilty. So it's a hole that they will need to fill. Besides, Reiser and his lawyer are proclaiming his innocence and discussing the case - they're defending him already, trial or not.
You're trying to decide whether he's innocent or guilty solely based on the information the prosecution has given you, before the judge imposed a gag order and told them to knock it off. I'm not judging his innocence or guilt at all - I don't have anywhere near enough info about the case to do that. But a lot of people here seem to believe that he's innocent, presumably because of the open source connection. Look at the number of posts that have suggested that Nina is still alive and offered no more justification for that belief than "I've heard it's happened like that in other cases". And many of those posts have been moderated up. I'm just trying to offer some perspective: the article wasn't particularly flattering to any of the people involved, and it's not at all clear that Hans is innocent, much as I hope that is the case.
For an article which is supposed to show the more "personal" side of things, the main thing I'm taking away from this is that the author is seriously fucked up. It's like the worst tabloid journalism combined with a Dvorak column. It certainly didn't do much to help Hans... And where did it say that it would or should show the more personal side of things, or help Hans? It said that Hans' lawyer wanted it to, but the journalist was under no obligation to do what the lawyer wanted.
I think a lot of Slashdot readers hope that Reiser is innocent and were looking for the article to cast more doubt on possible guilt than it did. The article showed all the people involved in a less than flattering light. Nina's alleged drug use, infidelity, and fraud/theft/embezzlement and Sturgeon's claims to have murdered eight people hardly help the prosecution. Personally I thought it was a pretty well balanced look at the case and did not pronounce judgment on either side. The fact is that the evidence doesn't look good for Reiser so far. As the article says, the missing front seat is a big whole in the defense's argument. To have come out with a story professing Hans' innocence a this point would not have sat well with a lot of people.
It's not Blue Origin. They're known to be using hydrogen peroxide as the fuel for their 'mystery project', which isn't going to get anyone to the moon, considering rockets based on H2O2 are barely enough to get you into a suborbital flight. You do know that the lunar lander challenge has nothing to do with going to the moon, right?
I'll bet it's Burt Rattan and Scaled Composites, but this time instead of being backed by Paul Allen, they'll be backed by Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic outfit. I can't see what Scaled Composites have to gain from it. The challenge is to lift off, move horizontally some distance and then land on a small concrete pad. Then repeat within a certain time limit. Scaled Composites have been focusing on a complete different approach - plane based launch systems. And of course they are now concentrating on getting a commercial operation up and running. Why would they distract themselves from that to spend time and effort on a challenge worth a couple of hundred grand using technology that won't be useful to their commercial operation?
I'm pretty sure that I was taught in college that 2 people can hold the patents to 2 very similar products so long as both came up with their respective products independent of each other. There is no allowance for independent creation. First person to invent and file wins. Infact, if someone has invented something and does not patent it but does publish the invention, someone else cannot patent the same invention unless they can prove they were first. This is because patents should only be granted on inventions that are novel (i.e. no prior art exists) and non-obvious.
With such a simple idea as "Buy it now", wouldn't a rational judge throw such a case out? It does seem to stretch the bounds of "non-obvious". However this case does not appear to be about evaluating the patent's validity, but rather whether or not eBay are infringing on the patent (valid or not).
Basically the API's he's using to release his plugin are covered under the express license I would assume. In other words the license (you know those things we use like GPL and LGPL) which covers the API's expressly forbids using those API's to integrate with Express. Provided he hasn't used any code from the Express product, I don't see how they can be. Licenses like the GPL are based on copyright. Unless he's distributing either code or executables copyrighted by Microsoft he doesn't need a license, in that same way that you don't need a license from Microsoft to develop or distribute an executable that uses the standard Windows APIs.
In particular, the contract states that you cannot circumvent the limitations they've put on the low-end product. One of the limitations is no plugins. That's explained elsewhere, but here in the letter from the lawyers we at least see now that they have a clause prohibiting end-runs around the crippled features of the low-end product.
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Elsewhere, in another letter, they explain that they have the legal prohibition in the contract to cover cases exactly like this -- cases where they tried to block it technically, but someone found a loophole. So they use the contract as a way to say, "even if we screw up and left a way to do it technically, you still can't do it contractually."
Ok, but doesn't that merely prevent someone from using Express to develop such a plugin or using a plugin with Express? I don't see how that clause prevents someone distributing such a plugin. In this case I believe the author admitted to using Express to develop the plugin - that would mean he violated the license, but even so can Microsoft prevent him from distributing the plugin? That's what they are trying to do with the lawsuit. And if he claims that the latest version was developed exclusively with a purchased version of VS?
CVS and Subversion are open source projects, Linus should fix them. He did fix them: he wrote GIT. He's no really whinging, he's saying "I wrote this tool because the other options are crap".
I am going to assume that it means "in the late 1910s, which is much earlier than the 2007 date for the world at large". What a difference a comma would have made:
In the US, the tipping point from a majority rural to a majority urban population came early, in the late 1910s." Punctuation: it's not just for making faces.
Sounds like NS neglected to debunk the biggest myth of them all, namely that global warming means a uniform increase in temperature everywhere on the planet. They repeatedly pointed that out over and over again in the list. It's just that some people here didn't read the article. Imagine that.
I've got some more issues with the article. They didn't test filesystem compression. This would have been interesting to me because often the choice I make is not between different archivers, but between using an archiver or just compressing the directory with NTFS' native compression.
They also focused on compression rate when I believe they should have focused on decompression rate. I'll probably only archive something once, but I may read from the archive dozens of times. What matters to me is the trade-off between space saved and extra time taken to read the data, not the one-off cost of compressing it.
The customer is at fault. He is doing business with a dishonest party. He is also too lazy to seek a remedy FROM the dishonest party (all the retailer did was offer the crap product for sale; you're the one who bought it--it can't be the retailer's fault any more than it is your own). No. There are only two parties to the transaction: the customer and the retailer. The manufacturer is not involved in the sale at all. The retailer sold a product that does not work as it should. The retailer is ethically, morally, and in most countries legally required to correct the situation by either replacing the deficient product or refunding the purchase. The retailer may then seek redress from the manufacturer. It is certainly not the customer's responsibility to track down the manufacturer and ask them to correct the problem, and in fact often the manufacturer will refuse to deal with the customer and instead refer them back to the retailer.
You're the one that chose to buy the defective product The retailer chose to sell the product and misrepresented what they were selling. It is the retailer's responsibility to ensure that the products they sell match the descriptions they provide.
You are no less to blame than the retailer, and your actions result in harm only to the retailer, and do not translate into forcing the "bad guy" (Sony) to correct its actions. Where are you getting this stuff? The customer is completely blameless. They were told they were buying a DVD, with the clear implication that it would play in a DVD player. It does not. The retailer sold it to the customer. The retailer must correct their contract breach with the customer and then seek redress from their supplier. This is how it works in the real world.
I think you have it reversed. There are a few people out there who buy movies and watch them dozens of times, but the majority of people rent movies and watch them once or twice. Even when people DO purchase movies, they watch them maybe 3 or 4 times over the course of a couple years. According to the MPAA (http://www.mpaa.org/USEntertainmentIndustryMarket Stats.pdf), 1.14B DVDs were sold in the US in 2006 (that's sold to retailers - they don't state how many of those were unsold, but let's assume that stock levels are fairly constant year to year). DVDs sold for rental purposes totaled 185M. Obviously rentals will watched many times, but the DVD sales market is huge. This is a reversal of the situation with videos, where the rental market dominated and sales were a very small proportion. As you point out the DVD sales increase has not come at the expense of rentals, at least not totally. My opinion is that the increase has come at the expense of music sales, at least partially.
By the way, DVD sales numbers are a lot higher than music sales. According to Neilsen (http://www.linuxelectrons.com/news/general/9945/m usic-market-data-2006) total US album sales in all forms totalled about 630M units. If you throw in singles it still only comes to 1.2B (but obviously singles don't generate the same revenue). So I think I'm justified in saying that if even 10% of DVD sales are at the expense of music then it more than accounts for the downturn the music industry is seeing.
If what you said were the case, then there would be music rental places, and movie purchasing places. But we all know that the primary source for aquiring movies is through a rental house, to be watched once. Where-as music (on physically the same kind of media) is always purchased and owned. The medium has expectations of how many times the audience will need to, and want to view the work in order to get the full experience. Generally, an album will be listened to a good magnitude more times than a movie will be watched. I never said people don't listen to purchased music multiple times. I said that they are choosing to buy movies instead of music. It doesn't matter how many times people watch a movie they've bought or listen to music they've bought. It only matters what their perception is when they are buying it. And the sales numbers say that movie sales are up and music sales are down.
In either case, I don't care of the film cost $1MM, $10MM, or $100MM to make. Nor do I care if the CD cost $100, $1K, $10K or $100K or $1MM to produce. It's my enjoyment of the product that determines whether it's of value to me.
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Odds are that they go through the rest of the life like most people do -- if they want something and they think it's a good value, they'll buy it, without making some sort of moral judgement of the ratio of the cost of production to the retail price. I wasn't intending the cost thing to be the main point, I was just trying to use it as an example of the apparent value that DVDs and CDs can have. It's clearly not a good indication of the worth of particular CDs and DVDs to individual consumers. The point is simply that a lot of people would rather spend their money on DVDs rather than CDs because they value the DVDs more. Not everyone, but a significant proportion. Even in your case you're spending money on DVDs via Netflix that you could instead spend on music.
"The RIAA has conviently ignored the impact of DVDs." Not sure that I follow. The music industry is fighting for its very life against the impact of other sources of entertainment. What I was really meaning here is that the RIAA is ignoring the impact of DVDs in their media material. I'm sure they know that DVDs etc are eating into their sales but I don't see them acknowledging that fact or doing much to counteract it. Instead they are spending a lot of effort blaming piracy and trying to counteract it. There are probably a number of reasons for that, e.g. the piracy issue is easier to be seen to be doing something about, and no doubt some of their people truly believe that piracy is sole or at least major cause. But I'm sure that at least some of their people realise that even the elimination of piracy would not return the industry to the booming state it enjoyed in the 80's and 90's.
What IS sad, however, is that people don't consider $15 a good deal for an hours worth of music. I think a big part of the reason for this is that it doesn't compare well to DVDs. Should I consider $15 dollars a good deal for an hour of music that cost $1M to produce when I can spend $20 for 2 hours of movie that cost $200M to produce? (Not that cost is any indication of quality.)
The RIAA has conviently ignored the impact of DVDs. People spend a lot of money on DVDs, money that in many cases would have been spent on music if DVDs didn't exist. I suspect this is the most significant factor in the music industries declining fortunes, not piracy. People have X dollars to spend on entertainment and that money is being spent on different things than it was 10 years ago. DVDs and games are up, music is down.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of quotation involved here. There is indeed a lot of quotation going on.
I think a lot of Slashdot readers hope that Reiser is innocent and were looking for the article to cast more doubt on possible guilt than it did. The article showed all the people involved in a less than flattering light. Nina's alleged drug use, infidelity, and fraud/theft/embezzlement and Sturgeon's claims to have murdered eight people hardly help the prosecution. Personally I thought it was a pretty well balanced look at the case and did not pronounce judgment on either side. The fact is that the evidence doesn't look good for Reiser so far. As the article says, the missing front seat is a big whole in the defense's argument. To have come out with a story professing Hans' innocence a this point would not have sat well with a lot of people.
Google shows 11 million hits for "folksonomy". That makes it more than three times as common as "shenanigans" in Google's index.
I said "seem to" because I haven't read the patent. But I'm sure it is not a patent on the concept of "buying something now", as you are assuming.
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Elsewhere, in another letter, they explain that they have the legal prohibition in the contract to cover cases exactly like this -- cases where they tried to block it technically, but someone found a loophole. So they use the contract as a way to say, "even if we screw up and left a way to do it technically, you still can't do it contractually."
Ok, but doesn't that merely prevent someone from using Express to develop such a plugin or using a plugin with Express? I don't see how that clause prevents someone distributing such a plugin. In this case I believe the author admitted to using Express to develop the plugin - that would mean he violated the license, but even so can Microsoft prevent him from distributing the plugin? That's what they are trying to do with the lawsuit. And if he claims that the latest version was developed exclusively with a purchased version of VS?Also wrong. Try this one.
Plus another 10,000 without the spaces (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=09F911029D74 E35BD84156C5635688C0)
1 is not a prime number.
They also focused on compression rate when I believe they should have focused on decompression rate. I'll probably only archive something once, but I may read from the archive dozens of times. What matters to me is the trade-off between space saved and extra time taken to read the data, not the one-off cost of compressing it.
There's only one way Jack could know that for sure. So either Jack's a fucking liar, or Jack personally used those games to train this guy up.
You are simply wrong about this. Do some research on consumer protection laws.
By the way, DVD sales numbers are a lot higher than music sales. According to Neilsen (http://www.linuxelectrons.com/news/general/9945/m usic-market-data-2006) total US album sales in all forms totalled about 630M units. If you throw in singles it still only comes to 1.2B (but obviously singles don't generate the same revenue). So I think I'm justified in saying that if even 10% of DVD sales are at the expense of music then it more than accounts for the downturn the music industry is seeing.
If what you said were the case, then there would be music rental places, and movie purchasing places. But we all know that the primary source for aquiring movies is through a rental house, to be watched once. Where-as music (on physically the same kind of media) is always purchased and owned. The medium has expectations of how many times the audience will need to, and want to view the work in order to get the full experience. Generally, an album will be listened to a good magnitude more times than a movie will be watched. I never said people don't listen to purchased music multiple times. I said that they are choosing to buy movies instead of music. It doesn't matter how many times people watch a movie they've bought or listen to music they've bought. It only matters what their perception is when they are buying it. And the sales numbers say that movie sales are up and music sales are down....
Odds are that they go through the rest of the life like most people do -- if they want something and they think it's a good value, they'll buy it, without making some sort of moral judgement of the ratio of the cost of production to the retail price. I wasn't intending the cost thing to be the main point, I was just trying to use it as an example of the apparent value that DVDs and CDs can have. It's clearly not a good indication of the worth of particular CDs and DVDs to individual consumers. The point is simply that a lot of people would rather spend their money on DVDs rather than CDs because they value the DVDs more. Not everyone, but a significant proportion. Even in your case you're spending money on DVDs via Netflix that you could instead spend on music. "The RIAA has conviently ignored the impact of DVDs." Not sure that I follow. The music industry is fighting for its very life against the impact of other sources of entertainment. What I was really meaning here is that the RIAA is ignoring the impact of DVDs in their media material. I'm sure they know that DVDs etc are eating into their sales but I don't see them acknowledging that fact or doing much to counteract it. Instead they are spending a lot of effort blaming piracy and trying to counteract it. There are probably a number of reasons for that, e.g. the piracy issue is easier to be seen to be doing something about, and no doubt some of their people truly believe that piracy is sole or at least major cause. But I'm sure that at least some of their people realise that even the elimination of piracy would not return the industry to the booming state it enjoyed in the 80's and 90's.
The RIAA has conviently ignored the impact of DVDs. People spend a lot of money on DVDs, money that in many cases would have been spent on music if DVDs didn't exist. I suspect this is the most significant factor in the music industries declining fortunes, not piracy. People have X dollars to spend on entertainment and that money is being spent on different things than it was 10 years ago. DVDs and games are up, music is down.