The problem here is that this woman is a petty, vile, remorseless cunt (an applicable use of that word in this case which nobody can deny) that did a despicable thing that absolutely contributed significantly to the death of a child. Because the case was so mishandled (there are already laws which should have allowed certain prosecution without the ridiculous liberty-curtailing precedents involved here), the only way to make sure she gets what she deserves is to put the civil liberties of every person in the country in peril.
No, it doesn't. She should have been charged with a crime specific for what she did. There apparently was no crime they could charge her for, so they used something ridiculous and hoped it would stick.
I find both despicable. I find people like you even more despicable. The ends DO NOT justify the means.
If you call yourself Christian I quote Romans 12:19 "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord". If you're not, I say we are a nation of laws not men.
Now, after this comment is moderated down and I get really depressed at the loss of karma and jump off a bridge, do the moderators share any blame?
Well, me for one. I don't need anything Microsoft has to sell. I can be fairly sure Richard Stallman hasn't ever purchased a Microsoft product either. Millions of software pirates in the US and Asia would be others.
Whatever the word, it needs to convey the abandonment of fair play principles of competition and the selfish and callous disregard for others in the damage they cause.
"Destructive competition" is a term coined on the wikipedia page on the word "competition" but I don't think it does well to put those two words together as, to me at least, the word competition implies honor and fair play.
There is a well accepted and well known shorter word for "destructive competition". That word is "war".
That is pure BS, Barry Soetoro. Little company attempts partnership with big company, demos software. Big company ends up saying "no". Little company sues that big company stole their ideas.
Only Microsoft has a reputation and a court record of doing that.
Little guy to Microsoft - "Hey you know we descibed how to store format for an XML based document way back in the '90's You can't do this with your current version of Office." "Shut up" says MS. "Lots of people would find it really hard to keep getting richer off your idea if we had to stop selling Word or change the file format to a non infringing method right now. US courts! Make them stop bugging us." "OK, just let me roll over" Says Uncle Sam.
Or am I missing something here?
If you're missing something so am I. That's how I read this situation. You missed the part though that they attempted a partnership with Microsoft long before Microsoft used that technology in Microsoft Word.
When I have to setup one of their machines, the first thing I always do is reformat and build a new image anyway without all of the extra crap that shouldn't be there.
Another ringing endorsement for Microsoft Windows preinstalls. W00t!
I barely remember as a kid, folks used to make fun of Japanese made stuff.
Yeah, and after mastering the art of kaizen (and retooling after the war), nobody was laughing at "Made in Japan" any more.
India has refused to cripple themselves with c(r)ap and trade.
I know of at least two folks I mentored at work in the mid 1980s who are now university professors. I'm following my job to India, and I'll take up the role I've always taken up and be tutoring as many people as I can. I already have a "conspiracy" set up with a (very) bright programmer in Bangalore to tutor as many coworkers as we can.
India will not always be considered backwards and disrespected. I think that's a good thing. Competition Is Good.
It's fucking Word, its not like it is tied to the OS or anything.
This is hilarious.
Supposing that MS Windows exposed a full featured command line shell, it could very logically be tied to the OS in exactly the same sense that bash is tied to readline and zsh is tied to ZLE in being a DLL required by the standard CLI.
What's funnier is that that scenario makes a hell of a lot more sense than saying that Internet Explorer is an integral part of the OS.
for once the Slashdot groupthink is on the side of Microsoft.
/. groupthink has been on the side of Microsoft for a long time now.
In this case, it's not a case of a patent troll, it's a company that worked with Microsoft on some sort of partnership agreement and after showing what they had, Microsoft broke off talks and used the IP anyway.
I suppose it's ironic that in one of the unique cases where patent law is on the side of the little inventor against the "big bad corporation", that/. favors the "big bad corporation".
Besides isn't Ballmer an Co sitting on a big old pile o' cash ATM?
That "pile o' cash" got a whole lot smaller in the stock market crash. "Cash" on a balance sheet represents to a small extent an actual account balance in a bank (most of which are bankrupt and received bailouts) and a balance between short and long term investments. If Microsoft's corporate investment assets are anywhere near a derivatives market and/or real estate, watch out.
That being said, I'm not sure why they pursued the course they did. It seems fairly clear from the sequence of events that I've read, that Microsoft had been working with these guys on some sort of partnership, broke off talks at some point, and went ahead and used the IP anyway. Maybe they thought they could get away with it?
However, considering the timing, I'll bet bald, sweaty Steve is throwing chairs at his own shadow in not following through on the Yahoo! purchase last year *before* the crash. That excess "cash" on the balance sheet is probably worth *a lot* less now than what he could have gotten from Yahoo!.
It basically boils down to Google does things people like, Microsoft does things people don't like.... Also explains why Apple is liked so much more than Microsoft.
Let's see. Last night Mrs. Baur was telling me about an American who was killed in Cebu recently. I tried to find the article on the Philippine Inquirer website - no joy. In despair, I tried googling it and found the story and one of the links pointed back to the Inquirer.
I love my Macbook Pro. The user interface feels good. It's a logical evolution of the NeXTStep interface I learned to love with Windowmaker over a decade ago. I can have X11 apps running on the same screen as native Mac apps, all my remote work apps Just Work. I can play World of Warcraft. The dashboard is very cool and it does virtual desktops. Oh and/bin/zsh is installed by default. The only annoyance is that sometimes the bluetooth mouse goes a little crazy, but it's not enough to spoil the "experience".
Most of my Microsoft Windows experience was with XP a couple of years ago. A single desktop Just Plain Sucks. Not being able to fix the Big Key to the left of the A key to work as Control as God intended it to be, Just Plain Sucks. Not having access to a Unix Shell Just Plain Sucks.[1] Having it crash all the time (at least once a week) Just Plain Sucks. Oh and let's not get into the involuntary ALT-TAB of death in the middle of battles in WoW.
So let's see, I have a choice between things I enjoy using and get value out of, or I can use something that makes me want to drive a screwdriver through my forehead.
[1] I know there's Cygwin around somewhere, but this is the same sort of argument Microsofties use against Linux, so it's fair that I use it too.
we aren't always at the same place at the same time.
Yeah.
I know from experience that the vast majority of open source developers are not in the same time zone. We're spread out and diverse. That is an issue that many people do not seem to deal with well. Especially employers...
Actually I found it rather cool that even a relatively small project like XEmacs had developers in just about every time zone in the world.
Sadly, I suspect *you* haven't got it -- HE doesn't want anything from you, right? YOU want publicity from him. At least, that's the way its supposed to work if you want to create high-volume software.
Um, you're the one who doesn't get it. Linus' "world domination" quotes aside, most, if not all of us are not doing open source software with the goal of creating "high-volume software".
We all have our own reasons. Mine is that I want a system in source code, so I can fix things when bugs are found and that can NEVER be taken away from me.
(I'm surprised a member of the press misspelled "it's")
As a member of the press, I certainly can't make you, an open source developer, "drop everything now and focus on me." It will never surprise me in the slightest if you choose to ignore me completely -- a lot of big companies do that, too.
Hmmm. A tech writer with a 4k/. id... That's a huge amount of street cred. Do you use it? Now, I'm totally confused...
I've certainly been willing to respond to the media, though most of the time, the silence is deafening[1]. Then again, if you're talking about a 3 hour deadline and if you've never heard of my project before, I'm not sure what good it will do getting mentioned in an article like that.
[1] On the one occasion where I desperately needed mention of the company I worked for, they used the material I emailed them, but omitted the name of the company.
Most of the time, I truly do not need to know your project in depth to understand what is important about it. But I rely on you to know -- and to express -- its importance.
Hmm, a tech writer with a 5 digit id lower than mine. See a message earlier in this thread that lays out my thinking.
If you wrote about any of those examples, why weren't you asking me questions? I most certainly would have taken the time and answered them.
Actually, a 16k/. id is going to open a lot of doors for you. I hope you get paid well.
No, it's not an emergency... but I just got this assignment five minutes ago and I have to have it done in three hours because my boss said to have it done in three hours so he can put in on the web in three hours and 15 minutes and because he's planning to drop something else on my desk in three hours and five minutes. Man, I don't have an option here. Can you help me, please?
(Writing as someone who has run an Open Source project before)
If said reporter had never heard of my project before, I cannot think of any use case where I would want to be mentioned under those circumstances. As a comparison, when my work or my group's work has been covered on TV for the evening news (KSBY-6 and NHK-1 respectively) we were given more lead time than that to get ready for the cameras.
Now, if you were looking for my reaction to the latest diarrhea of the mouth from Richard Stallman, I'm not likely to have something written up in advance. I tried to ignore him as best as I could. I'd certainly spend some time and answer questions. I'm not sure what intelligent questions one could ask if the reporter had never heard of XEmacs before getting the article assignment as he wouldn't know why he should be talking to someone like me for balance.
If you don't know about the Great Digital Divide in the open source world with Richard Stallman's name written all over it, you shouldn't be in the business. He most certainly is NOT a universal spokesman.
Now, to warp things around a bit, assume that the Oracle takeover of Sun had taken place in my watch. We have plenty of documentation on our website that details our relationship with Sun and thus why someone should be talking to me. If the reporter had never heard of XEmacs before, I'm don't think I'd want to be in said article. Anything I might have to say is going to get lost in confusion.
What I'm mainly getting out of this is that you seem to not only want to use our code for free, you are expecting us to write your "news" articles for you too and slap your byline on our writing.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Under the scenario you have described, I don't want to be mentioned in the article if you haven't done enough research to know why you should be talking to me. But if you had, I'd certainly be willing to give you a quote or two.
There's a big difference between auto-executing something from a pressed CD that you've bought and auto-executing something from an untrusted source on the Internet.
Nope. How many times has malware been distributed accidentally on such media as you describe? More than once and (at least) once from Microsoft.
Autoexecute anything was discredited long before Microsoft Windows 95. At least to anyone with at least half a brain and any knowledge of history. Apparently those resources were not available to Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happened to the notion that others' feelings ought to matter to us as much as our own?
That's about politeness and respect. The lack of which is regrettable, but not a criminal act.
The problem here is that this woman is a petty, vile, remorseless cunt (an applicable use of that word in this case which nobody can deny) that did a despicable thing that absolutely contributed significantly to the death of a child. Because the case was so mishandled (there are already laws which should have allowed certain prosecution without the ridiculous liberty-curtailing precedents involved here), the only way to make sure she gets what she deserves is to put the civil liberties of every person in the country in peril.
No, it doesn't. She should have been charged with a crime specific for what she did. There apparently was no crime they could charge her for, so they used something ridiculous and hoped it would stick.
I find both despicable. I find people like you even more despicable. The ends DO NOT justify the means.
If you call yourself Christian I quote Romans 12:19 "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord". If you're not, I say we are a nation of laws not men.
Now, after this comment is moderated down and I get really depressed at the loss of karma and jump off a bridge, do the moderators share any blame?
In a just universe, Lori Drew would be stoned to death by angry townspeople using the sharpest rocks possible. (Obsidian sounds about right.)
Like women should be stoned for adultery under Sharia law?
Just asking ...
Who doesn't buy from Microsoft?
Well, me for one. I don't need anything Microsoft has to sell. I can be fairly sure Richard Stallman hasn't ever purchased a Microsoft product either. Millions of software pirates in the US and Asia would be others.
Keep your Stockholm Syndrome to yourself.
microsoft not only has dominance on the desktop & laptops, they also have damn near 100% market share in the EVIL department too.
Big tobacco
Ah, but I enjoy smoking Marlboros a hell of a lot more than I ever "enjoyed" Microsoft Windows.
Whatever the word, it needs to convey the abandonment of fair play principles of competition and the selfish and callous disregard for others in the damage they cause.
That word is "war".
"Destructive competition" is a term coined on the wikipedia page on the word "competition" but I don't think it does well to put those two words together as, to me at least, the word competition implies honor and fair play.
There is a well accepted and well known shorter word for "destructive competition". That word is "war".
Competition is something a bit different.
i thought nerds would be and could be more creative. why do you all just recirculate stupid memes?
You must be new here.
And they do provide a way to nuke all anonymous cowards from orbit.
This could be any software manufacturer.
That is pure BS, Barry Soetoro. Little company attempts partnership with big company, demos software. Big company ends up saying "no". Little company sues that big company stole their ideas.
Only Microsoft has a reputation and a court record of doing that.
Little guy to Microsoft - "Hey you know we descibed how to store format for an XML based document way back in the '90's You can't do this with your current version of Office."
"Shut up" says MS. "Lots of people would find it really hard to keep getting richer off your idea if we had to stop selling Word or change the file format to a non infringing method right now. US courts! Make them stop bugging us."
"OK, just let me roll over" Says Uncle Sam.
Or am I missing something here?
If you're missing something so am I. That's how I read this situation. You missed the part though that they attempted a partnership with Microsoft long before Microsoft used that technology in Microsoft Word.
I think even "free trials" of MS Office is unheard of.
There was a free trial of MS Office on my Macbook Pro (Mac OS X 10.4).
Remember kids, the first hit is free ...
When I have to setup one of their machines, the first thing I always do is reformat and build a new image anyway without all of the extra crap that shouldn't be there.
Another ringing endorsement for Microsoft Windows preinstalls. W00t!
I barely remember as a kid, folks used to make fun of Japanese made stuff.
Yeah, and after mastering the art of kaizen (and retooling after the war), nobody was laughing at "Made in Japan" any more.
India has refused to cripple themselves with c(r)ap and trade.
I know of at least two folks I mentored at work in the mid 1980s who are now university professors. I'm following my job to India, and I'll take up the role I've always taken up and be tutoring as many people as I can. I already have a "conspiracy" set up with a (very) bright programmer in Bangalore to tutor as many coworkers as we can.
India will not always be considered backwards and disrespected. I think that's a good thing. Competition Is Good.
It just means that I have plans friday night while my geek friends sit at home grinding on World of Warcraft.
My plans for next Friday are to run heroics with my wife to help get her new level 80 geared up. Best of both worlds, I suppose.
It's fucking Word, its not like it is tied to the OS or anything.
This is hilarious.
Supposing that MS Windows exposed a full featured command line shell, it could very logically be tied to the OS in exactly the same sense that bash is tied to readline and zsh is tied to ZLE in being a DLL required by the standard CLI.
What's funnier is that that scenario makes a hell of a lot more sense than saying that Internet Explorer is an integral part of the OS.
Muwahahahaha. This is hilarious.
for once the Slashdot groupthink is on the side of Microsoft.
/. groupthink has been on the side of Microsoft for a long time now.
In this case, it's not a case of a patent troll, it's a company that worked with Microsoft on some sort of partnership agreement and after showing what they had, Microsoft broke off talks and used the IP anyway.
I suppose it's ironic that in one of the unique cases where patent law is on the side of the little inventor against the "big bad corporation", that /. favors the "big bad corporation".
Besides isn't Ballmer an Co sitting on a big old pile o' cash ATM?
That "pile o' cash" got a whole lot smaller in the stock market crash. "Cash" on a balance sheet represents to a small extent an actual account balance in a bank (most of which are bankrupt and received bailouts) and a balance between short and long term investments. If Microsoft's corporate investment assets are anywhere near a derivatives market and/or real estate, watch out.
That being said, I'm not sure why they pursued the course they did. It seems fairly clear from the sequence of events that I've read, that Microsoft had been working with these guys on some sort of partnership, broke off talks at some point, and went ahead and used the IP anyway. Maybe they thought they could get away with it?
However, considering the timing, I'll bet bald, sweaty Steve is throwing chairs at his own shadow in not following through on the Yahoo! purchase last year *before* the crash. That excess "cash" on the balance sheet is probably worth *a lot* less now than what he could have gotten from Yahoo!.
It had never occurred to me that my ID had street cred. Would this give me anything valuable? Like, say, free dark chocolate? (I have my priorities.)
You must be new here. :-)
A low numbered /. id means you've been around for awhile - that you're not just some hack who is jumping on a tech band wagon.
Um, sorry, no dark chocolate from me, but if it's important to you, I'm sure other /.ers would bury you in it ...
(I've read some of your other articles now. You're a very good writer. I can see why I only have rejection slips ...)
It basically boils down to Google does things people like, Microsoft does things people don't like. ... Also explains why Apple is liked so much more than Microsoft.
Let's see. Last night Mrs. Baur was telling me about an American who was killed in Cebu recently. I tried to find the article on the Philippine Inquirer website - no joy. In despair, I tried googling it and found the story and one of the links pointed back to the Inquirer.
I love my Macbook Pro. The user interface feels good. It's a logical evolution of the NeXTStep interface I learned to love with Windowmaker over a decade ago. I can have X11 apps running on the same screen as native Mac apps, all my remote work apps Just Work. I can play World of Warcraft. The dashboard is very cool and it does virtual desktops. Oh and /bin/zsh is installed by default. The only annoyance is that sometimes the bluetooth mouse goes a little crazy, but it's not enough to spoil the "experience".
Most of my Microsoft Windows experience was with XP a couple of years ago. A single desktop Just Plain Sucks. Not being able to fix the Big Key to the left of the A key to work as Control as God intended it to be, Just Plain Sucks. Not having access to a Unix Shell Just Plain Sucks.[1] Having it crash all the time (at least once a week) Just Plain Sucks. Oh and let's not get into the involuntary ALT-TAB of death in the middle of battles in WoW.
So let's see, I have a choice between things I enjoy using and get value out of, or I can use something that makes me want to drive a screwdriver through my forehead.
[1] I know there's Cygwin around somewhere, but this is the same sort of argument Microsofties use against Linux, so it's fair that I use it too.
we aren't always at the same place at the same time.
Yeah.
I know from experience that the vast majority of open source developers are not in the same time zone. We're spread out and diverse. That is an issue that many people do not seem to deal with well. Especially employers ...
Actually I found it rather cool that even a relatively small project like XEmacs had developers in just about every time zone in the world.
Sadly, I suspect *you* haven't got it -- HE doesn't want anything from you, right? YOU want publicity from him. At least, that's the way its supposed to work if you want to create high-volume software.
Um, you're the one who doesn't get it. Linus' "world domination" quotes aside, most, if not all of us are not doing open source software with the goal of creating "high-volume software".
We all have our own reasons. Mine is that I want a system in source code, so I can fix things when bugs are found and that can NEVER be taken away from me.
(I'm surprised a member of the press misspelled "it's")
As a member of the press, I certainly can't make you, an open source developer, "drop everything now and focus on me." It will never surprise me in the slightest if you choose to ignore me completely -- a lot of big companies do that, too.
Hmmm. A tech writer with a 4k /. id ... That's a huge amount of street cred. Do you use it? Now, I'm totally confused ...
I've certainly been willing to respond to the media, though most of the time, the silence is deafening[1]. Then again, if you're talking about a 3 hour deadline and if you've never heard of my project before, I'm not sure what good it will do getting mentioned in an article like that.
[1] On the one occasion where I desperately needed mention of the company I worked for, they used the material I emailed them, but omitted the name of the company.
Most of the time, I truly do not need to know your project in depth to understand what is important about it. But I rely on you to know -- and to express -- its importance.
Hmm, a tech writer with a 5 digit id lower than mine. See a message earlier in this thread that lays out my thinking.
If you wrote about any of those examples, why weren't you asking me questions? I most certainly would have taken the time and answered them.
Actually, a 16k /. id is going to open a lot of doors for you. I hope you get paid well.
No, it's not an emergency ... but I just got this assignment five minutes ago and I have to have it done in three hours because my boss said to have it done in three hours so he can put in on the web in three hours and 15 minutes and because he's planning to drop something else on my desk in three hours and five minutes. Man, I don't have an option here. Can you help me, please?
(Writing as someone who has run an Open Source project before)
If said reporter had never heard of my project before, I cannot think of any use case where I would want to be mentioned under those circumstances. As a comparison, when my work or my group's work has been covered on TV for the evening news (KSBY-6 and NHK-1 respectively) we were given more lead time than that to get ready for the cameras.
Now, if you were looking for my reaction to the latest diarrhea of the mouth from Richard Stallman, I'm not likely to have something written up in advance. I tried to ignore him as best as I could. I'd certainly spend some time and answer questions. I'm not sure what intelligent questions one could ask if the reporter had never heard of XEmacs before getting the article assignment as he wouldn't know why he should be talking to someone like me for balance.
If you don't know about the Great Digital Divide in the open source world with Richard Stallman's name written all over it, you shouldn't be in the business. He most certainly is NOT a universal spokesman.
Now, to warp things around a bit, assume that the Oracle takeover of Sun had taken place in my watch. We have plenty of documentation on our website that details our relationship with Sun and thus why someone should be talking to me. If the reporter had never heard of XEmacs before, I'm don't think I'd want to be in said article. Anything I might have to say is going to get lost in confusion.
What I'm mainly getting out of this is that you seem to not only want to use our code for free, you are expecting us to write your "news" articles for you too and slap your byline on our writing.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Under the scenario you have described, I don't want to be mentioned in the article if you haven't done enough research to know why you should be talking to me. But if you had, I'd certainly be willing to give you a quote or two.
There's a big difference between auto-executing something from a pressed CD that you've bought and auto-executing something from an untrusted source on the Internet.
Nope. How many times has malware been distributed accidentally on such media as you describe? More than once and (at least) once from Microsoft.
Autoexecute anything was discredited long before Microsoft Windows 95. At least to anyone with at least half a brain and any knowledge of history. Apparently those resources were not available to Microsoft.