In general, I don't mind patents for things that are truly innovative -- even for algorithms or for biological processes. But most high-tech patents should have a much shorter lifespan -- two or three years. The point of patents is to encourage invention and more importantly sharing of information. And it worked really well back when techology didn't change much in twenty years. Now, when the landscape changes radically in eighteen months, the laws need to reflect that.
Some younger kids may be able NQC, with some help -- it's not really that difficult.
MIT has a nice version of Logo that both has a GUI and is a complete, powerful programming language. I'm not sure if it runs on MS Windows, but definitely there's a Mac version. It's available to educators, but unfortunately not to anyone else.
For the curious, the original RoboTag (on which the chapter in the book is based) is at http://www.mattdm.org/mindstorms/. It's not quite as computer-science as Jonathan's version, but it works very well, and I like to think I've got a nice explanation of it all. Plus I've got cool movies.
I haven't updated the web page in quite a while (other projects; you know how it is....). But take a look if you're interested.
More importantly, will Konqueror strive to be 100% standards-compliant? I have no problem with multiple competing browsers, but if it's not going to be as good as Mozilla in this respect, why not just embed the Mozilla renderer?
The DNS namespace is not appropriate for trademark laws at all. It's amazing how many things are trademarked -- if we removed all of them from the allowed list of domains, only large corporations with armies of lawyers would be allowed to have anything but random sequences of alphanumerics.
Trademarks are designed to work within specific classes of goods and services. Purdue the school is certainly within Class 41, Education. Since the site in question isn't being used to sell (or "trade", as the case may be) anything, it doesn't really fall into any class. But even if it did, it probably would be a different one, and there would be no conflict.
Furthermore, trademarks DO NOT remove the usage of a word from the language. Just because someone has trademarked the letter Q (Paramount has, by the way) doesn't mean you can't use it. As I understand it, descriptive use of trademarks is okay. You are allowed to call the Boston Marathon "The Boston Marathon" without the permission of the trademark owners -- you don't have to call it "that big long famous race that's held in Boston. That might apply in this case as well.
I assume you haven't read Cryptonomicon. A lot of it features Enigma, Dr. Turing, Station X, and the world's first computing devices that aided codebreakers. Sound familiar?
I'm not so sure. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that appeals focus on findings of law, and that's very difficult to appeal a finding of fact.
This is irrelevant. The MS antitrust case specifically refers to the intel-compatible desktop PC operating system market. Servers (and even more so non-x86 servers) aren't at issue.
That's all well and good in an ideal world. But an almost magical faith in market forces seems naive. As huge corporations grow more and more powerful, they pose an ever-increasing threat to individual freedom. If we're not careful, we'll end up with a sort of feudalism with our lives ruled by supermultinationals. We don't live in an ideal world, so in order to make things work as well as possible, we have to have laws to protect people from abuses of power.
The Court defines the market as that of OSes for Intel-compatible desktop personal computers. It pretty convincingly argues that there are no other significant companies in that market -- Linux and BeOS notwithstanding. Hence, monopoly.
Note the context -- he is specifically talking about desktop PC operating systems. Linux is currently a strong server platform (although still certainly in the minority) but just beginning to make inroads in the desktop PC market. Hence, "fringe".
It's not very likely to be a problem with a userland program, but rather something with the kernel itself -- maybe a third-party kernel module, or something you're hacking.
I'm always amazed when people offer AOL's purchase of Netscape as a sign of Microsoft's weakness. I mean, once, Netscape was going to change the computing world. Now, they're just fodder for the Internet for Newbies company.
you can download the file "comps" from the "base" directory of the redhat distro, and look what packages are there. it'd be pretty easy to script something....
That's an interesting suggestion. It's too bad the domain name system wasn't designed sort of like the usenet hierarchy: apple.computer.com, apple.music.media.com, fiona-apple.music.arts.
In the "real world", there's the concept of "famous marks", which are generally considered (ok, remember here that I'm not a lawyer) to be identified unambiguously with a certain company. Kodak may qualify as one of these. Of course, EVERYONE likes to claim that their mark is a famous one, so that confuses the issue somewhat.
In any case, I feel a lot better about made-up words being trademarks -- people's names and common words/phrases shouldn't be removed from the language just to protect some corporate interests!
Ok, first of all: this is basically a good ruling.
But, it doesn't address the underlying problem -- trademarks and domain names don't mix. Paramount, for example, has a trademark on the letter Q. Don't use that in your domain name! In fact, basically every word you can think of is someone's trademark. If that means that they have the exclusive rights to any domains containing that word, the whole system is going to break.
I'm not sure what the fix is: trademarks are a pretty good basic idea. But they were meant to work within specific areas of commerce, and be limited geographically. It doesn't scale up to a national level, let alone a worldwide one -- and it gets even worse when companies of totally different types are in competition for the same ".com" domains.
(A side note -- I don't mean to be pedantic, but trademark is very different from copyright. The/. article above gets them mixed up. Everyone complains a lot when the general media can't understand the concept of hacker/cracker/script-kiddie -- it seems like we could get things like that right here!)
Technic Lego can connect in different ways -- you can make things that are far more sturdy than Construx. Construx is cool too, but it's not as versatile.
It's true that it's a pricey toy. But the quality is far higher than any of the competition.
I'd prefer they keep the prices as they are and maintain quality * rather than making simpler sets with fewer and more specialized pieces. Or (worse) making poor-quality bad-fitting pieces.
* or increase quality -- recent set design has really slipped in the past few years.
Slashdot Mirror
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MIT has a nice version of Logo that both has a GUI and is a complete, powerful programming language. I'm not sure if it runs on MS Windows, but definitely there's a Mac version. It's available to educators, but unfortunately not to anyone else.
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I haven't updated the web page in quite a while (other projects; you know how it is....). But take a look if you're interested.
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Trademarks are designed to work within specific classes of goods and services. Purdue the school is certainly within Class 41, Education. Since the site in question isn't being used to sell (or "trade", as the case may be) anything, it doesn't really fall into any class. But even if it did, it probably would be a different one, and there would be no conflict.
Furthermore, trademarks DO NOT remove the usage of a word from the language. Just because someone has trademarked the letter Q (Paramount has, by the way) doesn't mean you can't use it. As I understand it, descriptive use of trademarks is okay. You are allowed to call the Boston Marathon "The Boston Marathon" without the permission of the trademark owners -- you don't have to call it "that big long famous race that's held in Boston. That might apply in this case as well.
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http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
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Oh well, too late.
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In any case, I feel a lot better about made-up words being trademarks -- people's names and common words/phrases shouldn't be removed from the language just to protect some corporate interests!
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But, it doesn't address the underlying problem -- trademarks and domain names don't mix. Paramount, for example, has a trademark on the letter Q. Don't use that in your domain name! In fact, basically every word you can think of is someone's trademark. If that means that they have the exclusive rights to any domains containing that word, the whole system is going to break.
I'm not sure what the fix is: trademarks are a pretty good basic idea. But they were meant to work within specific areas of commerce, and be limited geographically. It doesn't scale up to a national level, let alone a worldwide one -- and it gets even worse when companies of totally different types are in competition for the same ".com" domains.
(A side note -- I don't mean to be pedantic, but trademark is very different from copyright. The
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I'd prefer they keep the prices as they are and maintain quality * rather than making simpler sets with fewer and more specialized pieces. Or (worse) making poor-quality bad-fitting pieces.
* or increase quality -- recent set design has really slipped in the past few years.
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