I have some carbonated water in a plastic 2-liter bottle that's been sitting for a couple years, still solid. I don't buy the "permeable to CO2" argument. Carbonation goes flat in 2-liter bottles because you keep letting the pressure go when you serve it! If you re-compress the bottle (with CO2, NOT with air like those "saver" pumps do), then the soda won't go flat.
They were, at one time, less than $0.10 each. If they're more expensive now, it is because there is no longer much competition for them. The only people who use diskettes now are people who really need them, so I guess the price can go up and people have to put up with it.
When diskettes ("floppies" are 5.25" or 8", with a few minor other formats; diskettes are the ones with the hard plastic cases, no longer "floppy") first came on the market, it was about $50 for a pack of 10. Eventually you could buy a box of 100 for about $5. Now they're back up to $10 for a box of 10? That's amazing.
You say "embedded controller", the documentation calls it "System-on-a-chip". So what? You think Intel wouldn't like to provide the processors for all those iPods? Combine that with increasing Mac sales, Apple should get some decent discounts.
Mind you, I'm no apologist for switching to Intel. I think Intel is just as capable as IBM of wandering off their roadmap or running out of gas halfway there (see: Itanium), and I find it ironic that Apple switches to x86 just as all the consoles seem to be switching to PPC. It will be very interesting to see how IBM chips compare to Intel chips over the next 5 years (in performance, power consumption and cost). I wouldn't put it past Apple to use both architectures for several more years, and even switch back solely to PPC if IBM comes through (or Intel doesn't), but I wouldn't bet on it.
I'm most concerned about Apple taking a step backwards from 64-bit, and moving to a clunky architecture, but that's because I'm interested in some things that benefit greatly from 64-bit processing and some machine-code generation. I regret the apparent shift away from Open Firmware, and a real shift backwards to the hoary old DOS partition format, but I'm truly thankful that they didn't switch to Itanium.
I thought Apple was around the 6th largest computer manufacturer - are you saying only the top 5 get "preferred vendor pricing"? You're also forgetting all those iPods, or did you forget that those have computers in them as well?
You have got to be kidding. First off, Microsoft didn't change the command line to do that, either. In the DOS command line, you still have to type an executable file (with or without the extension), then arguments. They allowed a double-click in a GUI environment, just like the Mac already did. That they based the action on the name of the file (specifically, the extension) is less innovative than the way the Mac already did it. The file-type and creator attributes always exist, they can't be deleted, only changed. This is no different than changing the extension of the file to get a different result, except that with the Mac file system, you have two indicators (type and creator) to determine what to do, not just one, and it isn't changed just because the user changes the name and doesn't make sure the extension stays the same. It isn't at all the same as #! in a Unix file, as that has to specify the exact path to the program, NOT a file type which is mapped to an executable.
In a command-line environment, you can specify exactly what you want to happen - it is much less convenient to do so in a GUI environment. It isn't that no one thought of it in a command-line environment as it wasn't necessary (the PATH environment variable is on a par with the convenience level).
As I said, other environments had already invented the "run a processor program" idea, anyway. On PLATO, you typed in a file name and specified whether you wanted to "run" or "edit" by the key you pressed. What program you actually executed in response depended on both the file type (out of a fixed set of types) and on settings you could make on that specific file (depending on which key you pressed to edit or run). File access at the system level also depended to an extent on the "processor" settings, giving the processor program extra privileges (such as allowing access to a file based on the user running the program - not normally allowed, as all access is normally based ONLY by what program is running, not what user is running).
The professional programmer working on a project on the side "for free" is still a professional programmer, not an amateur. That said, there is nothing wrong with "amateur". There's also nothing about Open Source that says it should, or is likely to be, primarily produced by unpaid volunteers. It can be a purely self-interested economic decision by a company to use and produce Open Source software.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Why wouldn't a company start off a project intending it to be Open Source? It actually makes more sense that most projects will be done by companies (who have the resources) than by a small group of people developing it on their own. This image of Open Source being driven by "hobbyists" (and what's wrong with them?) is a myth. It certainly allows for that kind of project, but it isn't predicated on it.
Another misused word being tossed around is "amateur". The word simply means that it isn't your profession. Anyone who is paid to be a programmer, who works on a project on the side, is by definition not an "amateur". In addition, the word has an undeserved negative connotation these days. At one point, it was a point of pride to be an amateur. A "professional" was someone who was in it only for the money, the real talent and innovation was in the amateurs. Look at amateur radio and astronomy today, and look at all the amateurs who were major contributors to science in the past.
As opposed to MacOS which was fully 32-bit in 1988 (and was mostly 32-bit, other than some silliness with using the upper 8 bits in some pointers for flags, making it more 24-bit in terms of maximum amount of memory that could be accessed) from the start. Wintel, in the meantime, was stuck with small/near/far/gigantic/huge pointers variable types and a horrible memory-paging scheme (actually, 2 of them!) and a limited fragmented memory model (TSR, anyone?).
Now, Lisa was innovative. A lot of it came from Xerox, true, but there was a lot of new stuff as well. If Apple could have been a little bit less innovative in price, it could have really taken off, and perhaps kept the horror that is x86 a distant memory.
I don't understand what you mean by "having any file be an executable command", by which you apparently mean that double-clicking it does something. You seem to think that most files on a Mac were untyped unowned files that you had to open by first going into a program. Virtually ALL files on a Mac are owned by some application, and will launch that application when you double-click it.
The idea of "processor programs" had been around well before that point. On PLATO, for example, you could specify two different programs that would process a file, one for "executing" and one for "editing". You could specify that the processor program had special privileges with respect to that file, as well, preventing other programs from being able to touch it (and letting the processor program be able to do user access checking in as flexible a manner as it liked).
Assuming the donwloaded video is a real depiction, there is certainly nudity. Starts off with nude woman giving a blowjob (we don't see any of his naughty bits). He grabs her head and starts pushing on it, then she gets up and wipes her mouth.
Then there's a scene with them having sex - apparently, you control the rhythm with the up/down controls, and can change between 3 different positions. Again, the woman is nude, the man is fully clothed. There's an "excitement" meter, which when it peaks out results in the woman crying out and "expressing her enthusiasm", with some hokey feedback saying "That's the spot! Remember, nice guys finish last. You the man, oh yeah, you the man"
The problem with "X" is that it wasn't trademarked, hence there was no control of its use. "X-rated" really means "unrated". There are some things you can't put in even an NC-17 rated movie.
You don't do decompiling and tracing like that to decompile an entire product. You do it so you can either figure out how it does something unusual, or how it does license management (so you can bypass it), or how a particular format or interface works (including encryption), or how it controls a proprietary device, or how it does something you want to change the behavior of so you can devise a patch.
Example: figure out how a DVD player determines that an inserted disk is a firmware upgrade, and figure out what format it needs to be in; then figure out where the menu functions are and add in a function to change the region and/or disable Macrovision. You don't need to trace the whole program, you're going to allow most of it to run as usual.
Why should businesses be allowed to "better control their marketing districts"? This seems very anti-competitive and non-free-market, why should we pass laws to encourage it? After all, if companies are free to outsource to places where prices are cheap, thus lowering wages here, why shouldn't consumers be allowed to do the same thing by buying items someplace where they have to price it cheaply? Why should they be able to have their cake and eat it too?
In many (most?) places, the apples hanging in your yard are yours, regardless of who owns the tree. If a tree hangs over a public right-of-way, the public can harvest it.
Well, if you don't like Adobe's program, use a free alternative. The format is well documented and there are other readers available. I've had to live in a world where everyone tries to send me.doc files, so a PDF world is VASTLY superior. I agree that for many purposes, HTML (or a similar markup scheme) is better (although not HTML as the world has seen fit to use it in most web pages, that's just perverted).
What I don't understand is your railing against "book format". Perhaps you just have a lousy monitor, operating system and PDF reader, and have only looked at PDFs produced by morons. Almost all the time I haven't been able to cut&paste is because it is a scanned image, not text. I already agreed that having the capability to inhibit printing or cut&paste is obnoxious - with Preview, if I can print the PDF, I can print it to another PDF which doesn't have a cut&paste restriction.
There's only one instance of Safari, Terminal, Mail, Appleworks, TextEdit, Preview, no matter how many windows I have open in each. To an extent, I agree that "one window = one instance of a program running" has an elegance, but in practice I find I really prefer to be able to switch to Safari, then press Cmnd-N to open a new window, than to have to go find the icon on the desktop or in a start menu or in the applications folder in order to create a "new instance". If I'm in Terminal, there's no "main window". I hit Cmnd-N to open a new terminal window, and it doesn't matter if I already have one open or not (if Terminal is running). In fact, I can think of very few applications with a "main window" - Mail is close, but even there I can open up a SECOND instance of the "main window".
Seems to me that if he is renting them out, they are almost by definition "not famous". If no one can associate the trademark with a particular company or product, the scope of the trademark should be very strictly limited to how it was registered and how it is being used. If it isn't even being used for an actual product or service, then he should lose it entirely.
He can still only claim protection for the use of the word in those fields for which he is using the mark. He also has to actually be USING it, not just sitting on it. He doesn't get general protection unless his mark is so widely used that it would likely be confused even if it is in a field that they aren't currently using the mark in.
There ought to be a law (maybe there is) that says this kind of abuse of trademark is illegal - the penalty should be that he loses all rights to the trademark in all fields. People shouldn't have to give in to this kind of "legal extortion" just because it is cheaper to pay him off and stop using it than to fight it when they are in the right.
One way might be to require going through a "trademark dispute arbitration" which can give a preliminary ruling that, e.g. "stealthisemail.com" is not infringing on "Stealth tennis shoes" (or whatever) - if he wants to continue and take it to court, he risks losing the trademark entirely. The process should cost the losing party $500, and no additional damages could be claimed if it is found infringing and they agree to stop using it immediately. That limits the damage to $500, which I think plenty of people would be willing to risk to challenge something like this, and also costs the abuser $500 every time he gets denied.
With a PDF that isn't simply a screen image (as these are) you can cut & paste the text, the images, etc. (unless the person who created it set the bits telling it not to - which is plain obnoxious and stupid, I grant you). I don't know why downloading a 250K file would take 5 minutes when a 70K file takes a few seconds.
The Mac has "the dock" to show active applications (the dock can also have closed applications and documents and folders as you wish, but open applications are always on it). There's a little arrow next to active ones, and I can right-click on the icon to bring up a menu (including Quit and a list of windows). Remember, a Mac program has the menu bar at the top, not in each window, so I can switch to an open program without any windows and still do something. It doesn't make sense in the Windows context.
Pressing Command-TAB brings up a list of active applications. It's sort of the same as the Windows Alt-TAB, except it only shows one entry per application, not per window. So, I can have 25 windows open in Safari, each with 20 tabs, and only have one entry show up in Command-TAB. I can, however, bring individual windows in an application forward without bringing all of them (unlike in previous versions of Mac OS). This makes much more sense to me than to remember to minimize a window when I'm done with it rather than close it because it is the last open window (and now I have a window with stale content in it - I could, on the other hand, force myself to remember to open a new blank window, minimize that, then close the old window - but that is an awful lot of work just to keep the damned application from closing).
Mac programs just don't have a "master window", for the most part. While it wouldn't be a real problem to have Safari close when I close the last window (it takes less than a second for Safari to start up), it would be annoying to have to always go click the icon in the dock to re-open it whenever I want to close the current window and open a fresh one and it happens to be the last open window. It would also be annoying that I have to have an open window just to be able to access the menu bar.
You close a Mac application explicitly. It doesn't just "go away" when you close the last window, as Windows applications almost always do. This means I can access menu items for that application without having to keep a window hanging around. A few applications where multiple windows wouldn't make sense close automatically when you close the (only) window, such as System Preferences. What this all means is that I can leave Acrobat Reader running (but idle) and not have to deal with slow startup.
Note that I'm not opening the PDF in a web browser page, I'm opening it in another application. The.5 seconds I was talking about was startup time for Apple's Preview viewer program (displays image files, postscript files and PDFs). While I'm downloading it (in the web browser, not in Acrobat - even with a plug-in, Acrobat isn't the thing doing the downloading), I'm not hung up at all. Perhaps you should get a better web browser or operating system!
As for these particular PDF files, I'm not sure what you're complaining about. They ARE images of pieces of paper, and they AREN'T all that big. The sizes are 146K, 175K, 267K and 312K. Compare that to around 100K for the front page of Slashdot.
If I take a small (20 bytes) text file and print it to a PDF, I get about a 5K file. However, almost all of that is header and font information. If I add 10 characters, the file size of the PDF grows by 10 characters. It grows by a bit more for a new paragraph or page. I agree with you that a raw text file is much better than a PDF if all you want is the text. However, if I've laid out a newsletter with flowed columns, images, different fonts and sizes and headlines and such, and I want to send it to you, what would you suggest? In a PDF, you can search the text, the layout is preserved, and the paging is preserved. There ARE uses for that sort of thing, there's a reason books aren't presented to you as long scrolls that you roll down continuously. A good layout makes things easier to read.
Actually, I thought it was striking that nowhere in their documents did they claim he accessed their network after his purported resignation. All the access was in the 3 weeks BEFORE he sent the letter. The "big deal" appears to be that he was using his personal laptop to access CVS, both at work and at home, and that he accessed source code for projects that he "wasn't authorized to work on", plus the utter stupidity of the insinuation that downloading more files than you upload is evidence of misappropriation (in fact, that he uploaded changed files AT ALL is indication that he was working).
Hopefully, the response to all of this will be that a) his legal bills get paid by donations; b) his case gets thrown out; c) they get fined for filing false reports; d) he successfully sues these bastards for defamation; and e) they get hit with a bunch of lawsuits for computer trespass and have everything in their offices and the homes of their officers seized.
Working for a company that is doing illegal things is not illegal if you're not participating in those acts. Otherwise, everyone at Enron would be in jail now. Writing code that is used by someone else to do something illegal is also not illegal. Refusing to do something illegal is good evidence that anything that happened earlier was not with your knowledge.
Calling it illegal is necessary if you're going to refuse to participate. Firing him for refusing to do something illegal is going to get them in trouble. Firing him for refusing to do something he "thought might not be very nice to do" wouldn't.
What, you'd rather have a bunch of GIFs packed up in a tar file or something? A PDF is a perfectly reasonable way of distributing pictures of pieces of paper, which is what these are. When I click on a PDF link, Safari downloads it and opens it in Preview, which takes about.5 seconds. The only time I have any problems is when people scan in documents in Adobe's version 6 or later format. In that case, I have to manually open it in Acrobat Reader 6 (Reader 6 and 7 are horribly bloated, and take several seconds to start up - fortunately, being a Mac, it doesn't close the application when I close the last window).
As a virtual printer format, it is not that inefficient. HTML generators are often much more inefficient (and aren't intended for the same type of thing - an invariant format, with invariant fonts, so we can all talk about "the 3rd line of the 5th page" - for simply distributing content, HTML makes more sense, except everyone tries to make HTML be invariant).
If you want to rail against a format, rail against idiots who put up.doc files (especially when the content is plain text), or use HTML in their e-mail!
Regardless of whether you or the uploading site "made the copy", it is probably still illegal for you to play (or otherwise view) the file. Copyright law allows you to make transient copies that are necessary for accessing the content, BUT that only applies to "authorized copies" of the work. Since, regardless of who violated copyright, it is NOT an authorized copy, that provision doesn't apply.
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I have some carbonated water in a plastic 2-liter bottle that's been sitting for a couple years, still solid. I don't buy the "permeable to CO2" argument. Carbonation goes flat in 2-liter bottles because you keep letting the pressure go when you serve it! If you re-compress the bottle (with CO2, NOT with air like those "saver" pumps do), then the soda won't go flat.
They were, at one time, less than $0.10 each. If they're more expensive now, it is because there is no longer much competition for them. The only people who use diskettes now are people who really need them, so I guess the price can go up and people have to put up with it.
When diskettes ("floppies" are 5.25" or 8", with a few minor other formats; diskettes are the ones with the hard plastic cases, no longer "floppy") first came on the market, it was about $50 for a pack of 10. Eventually you could buy a box of 100 for about $5. Now they're back up to $10 for a box of 10? That's amazing.
You're seriously cracked if you don't think that the Intel deal with Apple included agreements involving the chips to be used in iPods.
And I suppose you can run Linux on a mouse?
You say "embedded controller", the documentation calls it "System-on-a-chip". So what? You think Intel wouldn't like to provide the processors for all those iPods? Combine that with increasing Mac sales, Apple should get some decent discounts.
Mind you, I'm no apologist for switching to Intel. I think Intel is just as capable as IBM of wandering off their roadmap or running out of gas halfway there (see: Itanium), and I find it ironic that Apple switches to x86 just as all the consoles seem to be switching to PPC. It will be very interesting to see how IBM chips compare to Intel chips over the next 5 years (in performance, power consumption and cost). I wouldn't put it past Apple to use both architectures for several more years, and even switch back solely to PPC if IBM comes through (or Intel doesn't), but I wouldn't bet on it.
I'm most concerned about Apple taking a step backwards from 64-bit, and moving to a clunky architecture, but that's because I'm interested in some things that benefit greatly from 64-bit processing and some machine-code generation. I regret the apparent shift away from Open Firmware, and a real shift backwards to the hoary old DOS partition format, but I'm truly thankful that they didn't switch to Itanium.
I thought Apple was around the 6th largest computer manufacturer - are you saying only the top 5 get "preferred vendor pricing"? You're also forgetting all those iPods, or did you forget that those have computers in them as well?
You have got to be kidding. First off, Microsoft didn't change the command line to do that, either. In the DOS command line, you still have to type an executable file (with or without the extension), then arguments. They allowed a double-click in a GUI environment, just like the Mac already did. That they based the action on the name of the file (specifically, the extension) is less innovative than the way the Mac already did it. The file-type and creator attributes always exist, they can't be deleted, only changed. This is no different than changing the extension of the file to get a different result, except that with the Mac file system, you have two indicators (type and creator) to determine what to do, not just one, and it isn't changed just because the user changes the name and doesn't make sure the extension stays the same. It isn't at all the same as #! in a Unix file, as that has to specify the exact path to the program, NOT a file type which is mapped to an executable.
In a command-line environment, you can specify exactly what you want to happen - it is much less convenient to do so in a GUI environment. It isn't that no one thought of it in a command-line environment as it wasn't necessary (the PATH environment variable is on a par with the convenience level).
As I said, other environments had already invented the "run a processor program" idea, anyway. On PLATO, you typed in a file name and specified whether you wanted to "run" or "edit" by the key you pressed. What program you actually executed in response depended on both the file type (out of a fixed set of types) and on settings you could make on that specific file (depending on which key you pressed to edit or run). File access at the system level also depended to an extent on the "processor" settings, giving the processor program extra privileges (such as allowing access to a file based on the user running the program - not normally allowed, as all access is normally based ONLY by what program is running, not what user is running).
The professional programmer working on a project on the side "for free" is still a professional programmer, not an amateur. That said, there is nothing wrong with "amateur". There's also nothing about Open Source that says it should, or is likely to be, primarily produced by unpaid volunteers. It can be a purely self-interested economic decision by a company to use and produce Open Source software.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Why wouldn't a company start off a project intending it to be Open Source? It actually makes more sense that most projects will be done by companies (who have the resources) than by a small group of people developing it on their own. This image of Open Source being driven by "hobbyists" (and what's wrong with them?) is a myth. It certainly allows for that kind of project, but it isn't predicated on it.
Another misused word being tossed around is "amateur". The word simply means that it isn't your profession. Anyone who is paid to be a programmer, who works on a project on the side, is by definition not an "amateur". In addition, the word has an undeserved negative connotation these days. At one point, it was a point of pride to be an amateur. A "professional" was someone who was in it only for the money, the real talent and innovation was in the amateurs. Look at amateur radio and astronomy today, and look at all the amateurs who were major contributors to science in the past.
As opposed to MacOS which was fully 32-bit in 1988 (and was mostly 32-bit, other than some silliness with using the upper 8 bits in some pointers for flags, making it more 24-bit in terms of maximum amount of memory that could be accessed) from the start. Wintel, in the meantime, was stuck with small/near/far/gigantic/huge pointers variable types and a horrible memory-paging scheme (actually, 2 of them!) and a limited fragmented memory model (TSR, anyone?).
Now, Lisa was innovative. A lot of it came from Xerox, true, but there was a lot of new stuff as well. If Apple could have been a little bit less innovative in price, it could have really taken off, and perhaps kept the horror that is x86 a distant memory.
I don't understand what you mean by "having any file be an executable command", by which you apparently mean that double-clicking it does something. You seem to think that most files on a Mac were untyped unowned files that you had to open by first going into a program. Virtually ALL files on a Mac are owned by some application, and will launch that application when you double-click it.
The idea of "processor programs" had been around well before that point. On PLATO, for example, you could specify two different programs that would process a file, one for "executing" and one for "editing". You could specify that the processor program had special privileges with respect to that file, as well, preventing other programs from being able to touch it (and letting the processor program be able to do user access checking in as flexible a manner as it liked).
Assuming the donwloaded video is a real depiction, there is certainly nudity. Starts off with nude woman giving a blowjob (we don't see any of his naughty bits). He grabs her head and starts pushing on it, then she gets up and wipes her mouth.
Then there's a scene with them having sex - apparently, you control the rhythm with the up/down controls, and can change between 3 different positions. Again, the woman is nude, the man is fully clothed. There's an "excitement" meter, which when it peaks out results in the woman crying out and "expressing her enthusiasm", with some hokey feedback saying "That's the spot! Remember, nice guys finish last. You the man, oh yeah, you the man"
You think that would make it AO?
The problem with "X" is that it wasn't trademarked, hence there was no control of its use. "X-rated" really means "unrated". There are some things you can't put in even an NC-17 rated movie.
You don't do decompiling and tracing like that to decompile an entire product. You do it so you can either figure out how it does something unusual, or how it does license management (so you can bypass it), or how a particular format or interface works (including encryption), or how it controls a proprietary device, or how it does something you want to change the behavior of so you can devise a patch.
Example: figure out how a DVD player determines that an inserted disk is a firmware upgrade, and figure out what format it needs to be in; then figure out where the menu functions are and add in a function to change the region and/or disable Macrovision. You don't need to trace the whole program, you're going to allow most of it to run as usual.
Why should businesses be allowed to "better control their marketing districts"? This seems very anti-competitive and non-free-market, why should we pass laws to encourage it? After all, if companies are free to outsource to places where prices are cheap, thus lowering wages here, why shouldn't consumers be allowed to do the same thing by buying items someplace where they have to price it cheaply? Why should they be able to have their cake and eat it too?
In many (most?) places, the apples hanging in your yard are yours, regardless of who owns the tree. If a tree hangs over a public right-of-way, the public can harvest it.
Well, if you don't like Adobe's program, use a free alternative. The format is well documented and there are other readers available. I've had to live in a world where everyone tries to send me .doc files, so a PDF world is VASTLY superior. I agree that for many purposes, HTML (or a similar markup scheme) is better (although not HTML as the world has seen fit to use it in most web pages, that's just perverted).
What I don't understand is your railing against "book format". Perhaps you just have a lousy monitor, operating system and PDF reader, and have only looked at PDFs produced by morons. Almost all the time I haven't been able to cut&paste is because it is a scanned image, not text. I already agreed that having the capability to inhibit printing or cut&paste is obnoxious - with Preview, if I can print the PDF, I can print it to another PDF which doesn't have a cut&paste restriction.
There's only one instance of Safari, Terminal, Mail, Appleworks, TextEdit, Preview, no matter how many windows I have open in each. To an extent, I agree that "one window = one instance of a program running" has an elegance, but in practice I find I really prefer to be able to switch to Safari, then press Cmnd-N to open a new window, than to have to go find the icon on the desktop or in a start menu or in the applications folder in order to create a "new instance". If I'm in Terminal, there's no "main window". I hit Cmnd-N to open a new terminal window, and it doesn't matter if I already have one open or not (if Terminal is running). In fact, I can think of very few applications with a "main window" - Mail is close, but even there I can open up a SECOND instance of the "main window".
Seems to me that if he is renting them out, they are almost by definition "not famous". If no one can associate the trademark with a particular company or product, the scope of the trademark should be very strictly limited to how it was registered and how it is being used. If it isn't even being used for an actual product or service, then he should lose it entirely.
He can still only claim protection for the use of the word in those fields for which he is using the mark. He also has to actually be USING it, not just sitting on it. He doesn't get general protection unless his mark is so widely used that it would likely be confused even if it is in a field that they aren't currently using the mark in.
There ought to be a law (maybe there is) that says this kind of abuse of trademark is illegal - the penalty should be that he loses all rights to the trademark in all fields. People shouldn't have to give in to this kind of "legal extortion" just because it is cheaper to pay him off and stop using it than to fight it when they are in the right.
One way might be to require going through a "trademark dispute arbitration" which can give a preliminary ruling that, e.g. "stealthisemail.com" is not infringing on "Stealth tennis shoes" (or whatever) - if he wants to continue and take it to court, he risks losing the trademark entirely. The process should cost the losing party $500, and no additional damages could be claimed if it is found infringing and they agree to stop using it immediately. That limits the damage to $500, which I think plenty of people would be willing to risk to challenge something like this, and also costs the abuser $500 every time he gets denied.
With a PDF that isn't simply a screen image (as these are) you can cut & paste the text, the images, etc. (unless the person who created it set the bits telling it not to - which is plain obnoxious and stupid, I grant you). I don't know why downloading a 250K file would take 5 minutes when a 70K file takes a few seconds.
The Mac has "the dock" to show active applications (the dock can also have closed applications and documents and folders as you wish, but open applications are always on it). There's a little arrow next to active ones, and I can right-click on the icon to bring up a menu (including Quit and a list of windows). Remember, a Mac program has the menu bar at the top, not in each window, so I can switch to an open program without any windows and still do something. It doesn't make sense in the Windows context.
Pressing Command-TAB brings up a list of active applications. It's sort of the same as the Windows Alt-TAB, except it only shows one entry per application, not per window. So, I can have 25 windows open in Safari, each with 20 tabs, and only have one entry show up in Command-TAB. I can, however, bring individual windows in an application forward without bringing all of them (unlike in previous versions of Mac OS). This makes much more sense to me than to remember to minimize a window when I'm done with it rather than close it because it is the last open window (and now I have a window with stale content in it - I could, on the other hand, force myself to remember to open a new blank window, minimize that, then close the old window - but that is an awful lot of work just to keep the damned application from closing).
Mac programs just don't have a "master window", for the most part. While it wouldn't be a real problem to have Safari close when I close the last window (it takes less than a second for Safari to start up), it would be annoying to have to always go click the icon in the dock to re-open it whenever I want to close the current window and open a fresh one and it happens to be the last open window. It would also be annoying that I have to have an open window just to be able to access the menu bar.
You close a Mac application explicitly. It doesn't just "go away" when you close the last window, as Windows applications almost always do. This means I can access menu items for that application without having to keep a window hanging around. A few applications where multiple windows wouldn't make sense close automatically when you close the (only) window, such as System Preferences. What this all means is that I can leave Acrobat Reader running (but idle) and not have to deal with slow startup.
Note that I'm not opening the PDF in a web browser page, I'm opening it in another application. The .5 seconds I was talking about was startup time for Apple's Preview viewer program (displays image files, postscript files and PDFs). While I'm downloading it (in the web browser, not in Acrobat - even with a plug-in, Acrobat isn't the thing doing the downloading), I'm not hung up at all. Perhaps you should get a better web browser or operating system!
As for these particular PDF files, I'm not sure what you're complaining about. They ARE images of pieces of paper, and they AREN'T all that big. The sizes are 146K, 175K, 267K and 312K. Compare that to around 100K for the front page of Slashdot.
If I take a small (20 bytes) text file and print it to a PDF, I get about a 5K file. However, almost all of that is header and font information. If I add 10 characters, the file size of the PDF grows by 10 characters. It grows by a bit more for a new paragraph or page. I agree with you that a raw text file is much better than a PDF if all you want is the text. However, if I've laid out a newsletter with flowed columns, images, different fonts and sizes and headlines and such, and I want to send it to you, what would you suggest? In a PDF, you can search the text, the layout is preserved, and the paging is preserved. There ARE uses for that sort of thing, there's a reason books aren't presented to you as long scrolls that you roll down continuously. A good layout makes things easier to read.
Actually, I thought it was striking that nowhere in their documents did they claim he accessed their network after his purported resignation. All the access was in the 3 weeks BEFORE he sent the letter. The "big deal" appears to be that he was using his personal laptop to access CVS, both at work and at home, and that he accessed source code for projects that he "wasn't authorized to work on", plus the utter stupidity of the insinuation that downloading more files than you upload is evidence of misappropriation (in fact, that he uploaded changed files AT ALL is indication that he was working).
Hopefully, the response to all of this will be that a) his legal bills get paid by donations; b) his case gets thrown out; c) they get fined for filing false reports; d) he successfully sues these bastards for defamation; and e) they get hit with a bunch of lawsuits for computer trespass and have everything in their offices and the homes of their officers seized.
Working for a company that is doing illegal things is not illegal if you're not participating in those acts. Otherwise, everyone at Enron would be in jail now. Writing code that is used by someone else to do something illegal is also not illegal. Refusing to do something illegal is good evidence that anything that happened earlier was not with your knowledge.
Calling it illegal is necessary if you're going to refuse to participate. Firing him for refusing to do something illegal is going to get them in trouble. Firing him for refusing to do something he "thought might not be very nice to do" wouldn't.
What, you'd rather have a bunch of GIFs packed up in a tar file or something? A PDF is a perfectly reasonable way of distributing pictures of pieces of paper, which is what these are. When I click on a PDF link, Safari downloads it and opens it in Preview, which takes about .5 seconds. The only time I have any problems is when people scan in documents in Adobe's version 6 or later format. In that case, I have to manually open it in Acrobat Reader 6 (Reader 6 and 7 are horribly bloated, and take several seconds to start up - fortunately, being a Mac, it doesn't close the application when I close the last window).
As a virtual printer format, it is not that inefficient. HTML generators are often much more inefficient (and aren't intended for the same type of thing - an invariant format, with invariant fonts, so we can all talk about "the 3rd line of the 5th page" - for simply distributing content, HTML makes more sense, except everyone tries to make HTML be invariant).
If you want to rail against a format, rail against idiots who put up .doc files (especially when the content is plain text), or use HTML in their e-mail!
Regardless of whether you or the uploading site "made the copy", it is probably still illegal for you to play (or otherwise view) the file. Copyright law allows you to make transient copies that are necessary for accessing the content, BUT that only applies to "authorized copies" of the work. Since, regardless of who violated copyright, it is NOT an authorized copy, that provision doesn't apply.