Anyone remember the X-Files episode where you had the person who managed to upload his consciousness into a computer or something (I think it might have been a woman who uploaded to be with her already-uploaded boyfriend..) And the last scene where they show this "data-box" (quite like what's described here) being dropped off and hooked up to a fiber line, and a camera on the outside scanning around of it's own accord..
Headline in New York Times 2010:
"Experts Warn: Google Has Gone Sentient" "Humanity is Doomed, some say"... (to be continued..)
First there's the article about how Adobe is afraid to put automatic whitebalance compensation for Nikon RAW format into Photoshop because *they* are afraid of the DMCA.. Now the US/AU governments are afraid of using OSS because of the possibility of patent lawsuits because of laws *they* enacted (in theory anyway.. in reality, the USPTO and whatever AU equivalent kind of have minds of their own.. Not to mentio how the WTO figures into all this..)
"Caught in their own web" is how I'd put it.. Hilarious, isn't it?
What, oh what will future historians say about the 1990's to ??'s with regard to IP patents?
You don't happen to know any good OSS advocates/lawyers, do you? If so, get in touch with me. This (and abandonware in general) has been a long-standing issue of mine..
Another great little gem that Apple just forgot about was QuickDraw3D. Of course, now it's LGPL'd as Quesa. But there were all sorts of neat suff planned for QD3D 2.0.
And, it would be nice if Quesa could get a signed statement from Apple giving them permission to include the Apple QD3D samples with the official Quesa distribution..
Not GPL. Paul would *never* go for GPL. But another license, compatible with his KRL (Kallisys Reflexive License - see http://www.kallisys.org/reflexive/compatibilite/ for an incomplete list of compatible/incompatible licenses)
What I'd like to see more is that the *headers* were released. Not the code - just the headers. The code is in C++ after all (we know that because we have the debugger symbol file) And the other *6* driver development kits that were produced - those two would go a long way to making it easier to make things like new recognizers (TRecognizer class - both for charcters and guestures), screen drivers (TScreenDriver), tablet drivers (TTabletDriver), and plenty of other stuff..
If we had some of the non-sensitive code for things for the NOS or non-Apple products (display devices and such), it would go a long way to understanding how the QuickDraw model works - there is a mutexing used, since QD isn't reentrant, but I'm not sure it's used totally consistently. NewtQD also assumes that only the NS task will be using it, which is a problem if you want to use it from other tasks - the mutexing can't solve that apparently..
There are also alpha things that never got out.. Like things other than NS.. The infamous Dragon seech recognizer demo.. the list goes on..
As for what the commenter said about sensitive material - it isn't just Apple's stuff in there - Rosetta (the printed recognizer) is certianly valuable, but there's also the cursive recognizer from Paragraph, libraries and such from ARM Ltd., and perhaps other stuff as well.
I have a long argument to this effect (that I can't find at the moment) about why releasing the headers and *some* other code would be useful, and garner Apple a HUGE amount of goodwill in the OSS community. I sent it to Lawrence Lessig, but got back almost nothing.. Anybody know any really good OSS advocates/lawyers? Other than Stallman - see mention above about Paul and the GPL). If anyone would like to see it, or contact me on this, my email is:
Jim Witte
my website (which someday will look like something useful) is
From the article:
"...MPEG 2 MPEG 4 WMV9 DiVX decoding and encoding, scaling, frame rate conversion, and anything else you'd like it to do for you..."
Umm, I'm looking at the thomson-micro2002 pdf right now, and I can't find 'MPEG' anywhere in it? What page was this on? I just emailed the first author asking about exactly this..
br
Jim
I would expect that a large amount of internal
documentation exists on the history of this project
(including at least one presentation to an Open
Source conference).
Would the author of this post please get in touch with me to discuss how to proceed with this information (though the Austraian courts if not US - is Australia in the WTO. See my other comment in this thread here
What about legal action? There are at least a few lawyers out there that would sympathize with this madness (Lawrence Lessig comes to mind immediately, but he has other things on his plate).
Perhaps the most obvious person to initiate, organize, or fund a class-action suit would be the W3C itself. After all, what Amazon has done here is to basically patent what was an open-standard. One Click could be argued to be more like a trademark on the name. But this is potentially SO much broader, and seems to encompass much if not all of the cookie open-standard. (I haven't read the patent, and am not a lawyer and so couldn't see the most probably interpretations anyway)
If I were a person at the top of the W3C, I'd be hopping mad. What if someone tried to patent the "creation of multi-column" data presentation using tables in a markup language" Yes, this has reams of prior art, but so does this Amazon patent it seems.. Given this patent, perhaps the USPTO would grant such a patent...
Amazon is one suit-target. Another (I don't know if this is possible under US law) is the USPTO itself. Both of these would take truly stupendous amounts of money.
Another idea is to see if the EU or WTO could do something (or at least apply pressure). Remember, Amazon is a global company (at least of global reach), and while their US patent may not affect things in Germany (I don't know how international patent law works - but between the US and EU there may be broad-reaching patent treaties). And it could be a menace for the future if the WTO manages to standardize IP rules.
Doing anything serious at the international level would taken even *more* stupendous amounts of money (and given the exchange rate of the dollar - couldn't resist.). But perhaps a targeted dead-tree/fax/email flood to various foreign patent office people/sympathic foreign patent lawyers/WTO officials could at least try to raise the issue with people who (supposedly) would care.
Another idea would be to write not only to Congress on the issue, but push them to open a GAO or other congressional investigation into the issue. Also, write to people *in the PTO* itself.
I think a lot of what's going on here is that the PTO simply doesn't understand the new technology. People can whine about how we need new people, how we need to pay them more, but that doesn't change the (probably) reality that they just don't understand it. I am not sure they completely understand the fact that what Amazon applied to patent was already present as an open-standard by the W3C, and was not in effect a "novel" way of *using* the standard, but basically *the* standard itself.
Storing data according to a standard is not a "novel" use of the technology. It's like saying, "Writing an outline (as opposed to a letter) on a piece of paper" is a "novel" use of the technology of paper. It's absurd. If the "paper example" came before the PTO, it would be thrown out as absurd (I'd hope). But I think that's because paper and ink has been a technology that's been around for around for centuries. Web technology has not. That's the difference between the two.
And this is *not* restricted to just E-technology issues. It's also an issue in bio-tech: patenting not only of genes and naturally-occurring proteins (which is controversial), but patenting *biological pathways* themselves (and claiming partial ownership of any drug that makes use of any part of that pathway), and patenting *biological processes* that nature already do, and other researchers may already have done/found, such as stem-cell creation (bone marrow does it all the time)
It seems to me that what is needed is some way to challenge a patent short of going to court - a way to basically say to the PTO, "look, when you granted this patent, we weren't watching and so didn't look for prior art then. But we have prior art now, and proof that they are in fact prior to the granting. Reconsider the granting." No courts invo
I'm serious.. When I first read the beginning of the story, I thought that the *reason* he did this was to bring light to the absurdity of the patent system. Apparently not - he's just going to be more of the reason there are lawyer jokes..
Seriously, Lawrence Lessig *should* have done this: he should have taken out a patent on something so patently obvious (pun fully intended) that it's absurd to anyone with half a brain cell. This is something that concerned law professors should do.
I remember seeing a story a couple of years ago here about 'anti-patents'. I didn't read it, but it sounds like what this could have been. Sadly, he's just trying to make a buck after all. Maybe I'll email Lessig and suggest this course of action..
Point made. The 3g Ipods seem to run the build according to the dev list comments, at least with some modification - there's some question as to whether the FW controller is the same for one. But I keep wondering if Apple tweaks something on each build to (sort of) keep the Linux people out.
I just played my first DVD on the iBook (2001 or 2002 800Mhz combo drive dual USB) the other day (yeah, I'm behind the curve I know), and I'm now wondering if there's a region-locking hack for the firmware - of course it would void the drive warrenty..
"Image problem"? "Seen as hard"? Wait - for must people, they aren't even supposed to have to *think* about the BIOS (or OF, or ACPI, or EFI, or whatever they come up with next)
It seems to me (of course, I use a Mac, and don't hack with the firmware), that if you have a computer that just works, or where you don't have to worry about DLL Hell, where you don't have to worry about a driver installing into the wrong IRQ , the typical (non-Slashdot-reading) end-user shouldn't care (or even know) about what's used to bootstrap the machine.
I'm sorry, but seeing "genuine, agonizing" labor or someone slop around with their "presmably realistic" grey matter is just a tad bit disgusting for my tastes, and apparaently 60% of America's tastes as well..
I have trouble enough with the apparent absolute *obsession* that both shows like Alias AND the "news" broadcasters have with showing needles stuch in people's arms (or other parts, in the case of Alias), and the amount of explicit "hard" torture (I mean by hard torture meaning depection of sever pain) shown on the last season of 24. Of course, that was Fox for you, and maybe I'm just a softie..
The Cockroach ad was probably viewed as either offensive to Buddists (and Hindus too probably), or just stupid (after the first viewing). And for people whose empathy-genrating centers in the brain are set a bit too high for our current culture of sarcasm (and which do not easily turn off when the conscious mind knows something is not real, see above note about tortune scenes), it might also be a bit hard to watch (although probably not as hard as above-mentioned ads)
And, oh, by the way, why is it a WOMAN who is reincarnated as a cockroach - just a tad bit mysogynistic here (and isn't it a jackal that's used as a reincarnation target to keep women "in their place"?)
SONY is doing this? They run a film division. One that's (suppposedly) concerned about piracy (and price protection via regions) Gawd! Can anyone say, "left not does not know what right hand is doing?"
Please do check. I for one would like to know. I would have sent an email asking this question, but Slashdot doesn't have any private email function (why the %#%$ not? It would encourage people to get together to work on issues? Isn't that supposed to be one of the goals of/.? See my website [soon] for rants of this nature)
I reviewed the rest of the court summary, and in the interest of completeness, have to say I was wrong about the conclusion of a basis for an "emotional distress" ruling in the US Federal Code. The judgement of "emotional distress" in the case described was made in a previous court ruling under Iowa law. The decision of this particular case was whether the debt was "nondischargable" under Federal law. This involved the principle of collateral effect (of the previous State judgement) and the doctrine of "collateral estoppel" which bars re-liitigation of factual elements of a previous court proceeding.
There were several references made to the applicability of the terms "willful" and "malice" with respect to the infliction of the emotional distress in the case (I think), which do appaear to refer to Federal caselaw (see page 5 of the PDF). However it is not clear to me whether these cases simply help define the terms, or whether they could provide a basis for ascertaining the infliction of emotional distress under Federal law.
That being said, it is my general impression that, even if a legal definition of emotional distress does not exist in the Federal code, it does exist in the codes of a number of different states. I would assume that any case brought against ESA would be brought in a court local to its place of residence (California, I assume, but am not sure). However, since a class-action suit would neccesarily involve many parties in many different jurisdictions, I am not sure that they could all be litigated under the code of ESA's home jurisdiction. The case would also cross state lines, possibly invoking the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution (though I am not sure whether that clause could be stretched quite that far..)
In this case, the Plantiff (Peggy Tucker) had brought a small claims action against two Defendants because of an allegation made that she has fraudulently rented videotapes using one Defendant's name. The Plantiff was interrogated by police and later cleared of the allegations of fraud. However, she alleged that the allegations constituted intertional influction of emotional distress under Iowa law (paragraph 7).
In the judgement, the court found that:
9. The court found the report made to the police was made with reckless disregard for the probability that the aftermath of making the report would cause emotional distress.
10. The court found the emotional distress sustained by the Plaintiff appeared to have been a "desired by-product" of Defendant George Bauswell's conduct.
11. The court awarded the Plaintiff $177.00 for
uninsured medical expenses incurred as a result of the Defendant's conduct. The court also assessed $500.00 in exemplary damages against Mr. Bauswell [one of the Defendants] for subjecting his exspouse to a criminal investigation "knowing that there [was] no basis in fact for such action."
Note: Added Bold emphasis mine.
As I am neither a lawyer nor a law student, I don't have the energy to wade through the rest of the court summary. But at the end, it does state that the judgement in favor of the Plaintiff was made persuant to 11 U.S.C. section 523(a)6. This indicates that the judgement was made not under Iowa law, but under U.S. Federal law. As such, perhaps a similar argument could be made against ESA, although the Federal definition of "emtional distress" may be different from those of Iowa.
As a larger comment on the Slashdot community as a whole: as I said, I am not a law student (actually a computer science student), but I took about 2 minutes of my time to look up a piece of relavent caselaw, and then another 20 minutes of my time to wade through it (this is why I'm not a law student..) I did not simply type some one-off, unfounded comment which, while intended in humor, is an indication a type of general apathy apparently seemingly prevalent among a portion of the Slashdot readership (or commentator-ship, at least).
In an earlier post in this "discussion" (although it isn't really a discussion, because it does nothing to encourage the persuasion of personal opinions or the formation of plans of action), "Rifter" states that "Since the Attorneys General [..] refuse to prosecute any of these entities for their numerous perjories [..] [the entities] see no need for due diligence [..] [resulting] in scenarios like this"
This comment was rated a 5, but since "Rifter" does not show his email publicly, there is no way that like-minds can talk to him about what he said. Given his comment (which is true), an obvious course of action is for each of the apparently hundreds of people who have taken the time to comment on this article (including myself) to organize and write letters - even form letters - to various Attorneys General urging them to vigourously investigate and prosecute allegations of purjury in cases such as this. Yet I saw no suggestions of such nature made (perhaps I missed it though..)
I find it very hard to believe that this C&D letter is an isolated incident - after all, who would particularly have an axe to grind with Gentoo? Furthermore, there have bee
Open source software lives by the certainty of the licensing it uses. If we can't trust the interpretation of the licenses, then we can't feel confident in working with this code. The FSF is risking a serious blow to the open source community.
So why not just draft your own license that's basically the LGPL, except that it is built specifically so that it will work as most people expect it to with Java libraries (and maybe other languages, like Objective-C libraries)?
Make sure that the license is compatible (as much as possible without destroying the intended modification for Java code) with the FSF's LGPL, GPL, etc licensees. Then find some way (I have no idea how to do this) to get people to know about this. Maybe bribe on of the Slashdot webmasters to put it on..
I found it interesting that the article mentioned that Hatch, as a music composer, earned $18,000 in royalties last year. Aha! But don't song-writers generally get a better deal out of the current system than the poor blokes who actually sing? That's why everyone wants to write their own music these days, and why noone is interested in singing the old stuff (which is generally better IMO) I wonder, does Hatch know this?
Why the heck doesn't the FSF have this on the FRONT PAGE!! After all, Linux is GPL, and isn't the copyright of all GPL software supposed to be transferred (maybe not exclusively, I'm not sure) to the FSF expressedly for legal protection reasons?
Oh, Why doesn't Apple just BUY SCO out in a hostile (or maybe not..) takeover and be done with it! Here's the scenario:
Apple buys out out SCO (they only have a market cap of about 75 million (surely less by later today;-)
then they donate or otherwise nullifies ALL their patents (anti-patents as discussed several years ago here?) to the FSF, or BSD group, or whatever.
Or perhaps Apple could somehow buy out SCO as a wholly owned subsidiary so that SCO retains it's own liabilies (I don't know exactly how this happens, but I know that DOW Chemical did it when they bough Union Carbide. [See Bhopal.org for the other side of the hideous tragedy]) Then Apple could still sue the pants off SCO (if SCO had any value left, that is)
Then Apple goes on the rampage, and sues the USPTO over frivolous patents. They might have to take care here not to tread on some of their own patents. I don't have time to look them up, but I'm sure they have some *worthy* ones on the books relating to the Rosetta/InkWell/Newton (but not, specifically, one I was told about by L.Y. regarding the integration of character and word recognition information - which was a counter-patent against a stupid patent by another company on the integration of stoke and character information.)
Ah, well, I know no-one will probably read this.. But I can dream..
While their communicators could relay position, I'm not so sure that they are responsible for vital stats.
I remember the episode. I'd say the computer just uses some kind of long-range RF energy to read it off from a distance.. after all, the medical tricorders read off all *sorts* of stuff without ever touching the patient, so it has to use some kind of RF/subspace signals to do it.
If you accept this kind of reading vitals at a distance, the only problem is the range. Tricorders seem to work at a range of less than about 2 meters, except where they were scanning for large energy sources (at a range of several 10s of meters, something I figure we could do today - well, except for subspace radiation;-) The specifically-designated "medical tricorders" have that little thingee that the doctor waves around the patient's body at a range of about 10 cm. So the range of the scan in "Remember Me" seems definately a plot hole. (Not the first, and not the last, as I read once, "Voyager had plot holes so big you could drive the ship though them!")
More to the point of the tracking thins, anybody remember the season 7 episode "Attached"? Where Picard and Beverly were telepathically linked together - in a way that also meant they couldn't get outside of about 2 meters distance without getting sick..
Back to reality, I'm really surprised noone has raised the frightening possibilty of the INS using this to track foriegn students..
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone remember the X-Files episode where you had the person who managed to upload his consciousness into a computer or something (I think it might have been a woman who uploaded to be with her already-uploaded boyfriend..) And the last scene where they show this "data-box" (quite like what's described here) being dropped off and hooked up to a fiber line, and a camera on the outside scanning around of it's own accord..
... (to be continued..)
Headline in New York Times 2010:
"Experts Warn: Google Has Gone Sentient"
"Humanity is Doomed, some say"
First there's the article about how Adobe is afraid to put automatic whitebalance compensation for Nikon RAW format into Photoshop because *they* are afraid of the DMCA.. Now the US/AU governments are afraid of using OSS because of the possibility of patent lawsuits because of laws *they* enacted (in theory anyway.. in reality, the USPTO and whatever AU equivalent kind of have minds of their own.. Not to mentio how the WTO figures into all this..)
"Caught in their own web" is how I'd put it.. Hilarious, isn't it?
What, oh what will future historians say about the 1990's to ??'s with regard to IP patents?
You don't happen to know any good OSS advocates/lawyers, do you? If so, get in touch with me. This (and abandonware in general) has been a long-standing issue of mine..
Another great little gem that Apple just forgot about was QuickDraw3D. Of course, now it's LGPL'd as Quesa. But there were all sorts of neat suff planned for QD3D 2.0.
And, it would be nice if Quesa could get a signed statement from Apple giving them permission to include the Apple QD3D samples with the official Quesa distribution..
Jim Witte
jswitte@bloomington.in.us
Not GPL. Paul would *never* go for GPL. But another license, compatible with his KRL (Kallisys Reflexive License - see http://www.kallisys.org/reflexive/compatibilite/ for an incomplete list of compatible/incompatible licenses)
What I'd like to see more is that the *headers* were released. Not the code - just the headers. The code is in C++ after all (we know that because we have the debugger symbol file) And the other *6* driver development kits that were produced - those two would go a long way to making it easier to make things like new recognizers (TRecognizer class - both for charcters and guestures), screen drivers (TScreenDriver), tablet drivers (TTabletDriver), and plenty of other stuff..
If we had some of the non-sensitive code for things for the NOS or non-Apple products (display devices and such), it would go a long way to understanding how the QuickDraw model works - there is a mutexing used, since QD isn't reentrant, but I'm not sure it's used totally consistently. NewtQD also assumes that only the NS task will be using it, which is a problem if you want to use it from other tasks - the mutexing can't solve that apparently..
There are also alpha things that never got out.. Like things other than NS.. The infamous Dragon seech recognizer demo.. the list goes on..
As for what the commenter said about sensitive material - it isn't just Apple's stuff in there - Rosetta (the printed recognizer) is certianly valuable, but there's also the cursive recognizer from Paragraph, libraries and such from ARM Ltd., and perhaps other stuff as well.
I have a long argument to this effect (that I can't find at the moment) about why releasing the headers and *some* other code would be useful, and garner Apple a HUGE amount of goodwill in the OSS community. I sent it to Lawrence Lessig, but got back almost nothing.. Anybody know any really good OSS advocates/lawyers? Other than Stallman - see mention above about Paul and the GPL). If anyone would like to see it, or contact me on this, my email is:
Jim Witte
my website (which someday will look like something useful) is
http://www.bloomington.in.us/~jswitte/
Jim
From the article: "...MPEG 2 MPEG 4 WMV9 DiVX decoding and encoding, scaling, frame rate conversion, and anything else you'd like it to do for you..."
Umm, I'm looking at the thomson-micro2002 pdf right now, and I can't find 'MPEG' anywhere in it? What page was this on? I just emailed the first author asking about exactly this..
br Jim
could be difficult as most open source ideas are published as soon as they are thought of
Why? Is there some requirement that something that's published cannot be patented?
Jim
Read my comment here for some other ideas (after the first paragraph)..
I would expect that a large amount of internal documentation exists on the history of this project (including at least one presentation to an Open Source conference).
Would the author of this post please get in touch with me to discuss how to proceed with this information (though the Austraian courts if not US - is Australia in the WTO. See my other comment in this thread here
What about legal action? There are at least a few lawyers out there that would sympathize with this madness (Lawrence Lessig comes to mind immediately, but he has other things on his plate).
Perhaps the most obvious person to initiate, organize, or fund a class-action suit would be the W3C itself. After all, what Amazon has done here is to basically patent what was an open-standard. One Click could be argued to be more like a trademark on the name. But this is potentially SO much broader, and seems to encompass much if not all of the cookie open-standard. (I haven't read the patent, and am not a lawyer and so couldn't see the most probably interpretations anyway)
If I were a person at the top of the W3C, I'd be hopping mad. What if someone tried to patent the "creation of multi-column" data presentation using tables in a markup language" Yes, this has reams of prior art, but so does this Amazon patent it seems.. Given this patent, perhaps the USPTO would grant such a patent...
Amazon is one suit-target. Another (I don't know if this is possible under US law) is the USPTO itself. Both of these would take truly stupendous amounts of money.
Another idea is to see if the EU or WTO could do something (or at least apply pressure). Remember, Amazon is a global company (at least of global reach), and while their US patent may not affect things in Germany (I don't know how international patent law works - but between the US and EU there may be broad-reaching patent treaties). And it could be a menace for the future if the WTO manages to standardize IP rules.
Doing anything serious at the international level would taken even *more* stupendous amounts of money (and given the exchange rate of the dollar - couldn't resist.). But perhaps a targeted dead-tree/fax/email flood to various foreign patent office people/sympathic foreign patent lawyers/WTO officials could at least try to raise the issue with people who (supposedly) would care.
Another idea would be to write not only to Congress on the issue, but push them to open a GAO or other congressional investigation into the issue. Also, write to people *in the PTO* itself.
I think a lot of what's going on here is that the PTO simply doesn't understand the new technology. People can whine about how we need new people, how we need to pay them more, but that doesn't change the (probably) reality that they just don't understand it. I am not sure they completely understand the fact that what Amazon applied to patent was already present as an open-standard by the W3C, and was not in effect a "novel" way of *using* the standard, but basically *the* standard itself.
Storing data according to a standard is not a "novel" use of the technology. It's like saying, "Writing an outline (as opposed to a letter) on a piece of paper" is a "novel" use of the technology of paper. It's absurd. If the "paper example" came before the PTO, it would be thrown out as absurd (I'd hope). But I think that's because paper and ink has been a technology that's been around for around for centuries. Web technology has not. That's the difference between the two.
And this is *not* restricted to just E-technology issues. It's also an issue in bio-tech: patenting not only of genes and naturally-occurring proteins (which is controversial), but patenting *biological pathways* themselves (and claiming partial ownership of any drug that makes use of any part of that pathway), and patenting *biological processes* that nature already do, and other researchers may already have done/found, such as stem-cell creation (bone marrow does it all the time)
It seems to me that what is needed is some way to challenge a patent short of going to court - a way to basically say to the PTO, "look, when you granted this patent, we weren't watching and so didn't look for prior art then. But we have prior art now, and proof that they are in fact prior to the granting. Reconsider the granting." No courts invo
I'm serious.. When I first read the beginning of the story, I thought that the *reason* he did this was to bring light to the absurdity of the patent system. Apparently not - he's just going to be more of the reason there are lawyer jokes..
Seriously, Lawrence Lessig *should* have done this: he should have taken out a patent on something so patently obvious (pun fully intended) that it's absurd to anyone with half a brain cell. This is something that concerned law professors should do.
I remember seeing a story a couple of years ago here about 'anti-patents'. I didn't read it, but it sounds like what this could have been. Sadly, he's just trying to make a buck after all. Maybe I'll email Lessig and suggest this course of action..
Point made. The 3g Ipods seem to run the build according to the dev list comments, at least with some modification - there's some question as to whether the FW controller is the same for one. But I keep wondering if Apple tweaks something on each build to (sort of) keep the Linux people out.
I just played my first DVD on the iBook (2001 or 2002 800Mhz combo drive dual USB) the other day (yeah, I'm behind the curve I know), and I'm now wondering if there's a region-locking hack for the firmware - of course it would void the drive warrenty..
"Image problem"? "Seen as hard"? Wait - for must people, they aren't even supposed to have to *think* about the BIOS (or OF, or ACPI, or EFI, or whatever they come up with next)
It seems to me (of course, I use a Mac, and don't hack with the firmware), that if you have a computer that just works, or where you don't have to worry about DLL Hell, where you don't have to worry about a driver installing into the wrong IRQ , the typical (non-Slashdot-reading) end-user shouldn't care (or even know) about what's used to bootstrap the machine.
I'm sorry, but seeing "genuine, agonizing" labor or someone slop around with their "presmably realistic" grey matter is just a tad bit disgusting for my tastes, and apparaently 60% of America's tastes as well..
I have trouble enough with the apparent absolute *obsession* that both shows like Alias AND the "news" broadcasters have with showing needles stuch in people's arms (or other parts, in the case of Alias), and the amount of explicit "hard" torture (I mean by hard torture meaning depection of sever pain) shown on the last season of 24. Of course, that was Fox for you, and maybe I'm just a softie..
The Cockroach ad was probably viewed as either offensive to Buddists (and Hindus too probably), or just stupid (after the first viewing). And for people whose empathy-genrating centers in the brain are set a bit too high for our current culture of sarcasm (and which do not easily turn off when the conscious mind knows something is not real, see above note about tortune scenes), it might also be a bit hard to watch (although probably not as hard as above-mentioned ads)
And, oh, by the way, why is it a WOMAN who is reincarnated as a cockroach - just a tad bit mysogynistic here (and isn't it a jackal that's used as a reincarnation target to keep women "in their place"?)
Jim Witte
jswitte@bloomington.in.us
http://www.bloomington.in.us/~jswitte
SONY is doing this? They run a film division. One that's (suppposedly) concerned about piracy (and price protection via regions) Gawd! Can anyone say, "left not does not know what right hand is doing?"
Jim Witte
http://www.bloomington.in.us/~jswitte
"Spam! Bah - just get Jaguar!"
Uughh.. We can live without this..
I reviewed the rest of the court summary, and in the interest of completeness, have to say I was wrong about the conclusion of a basis for an "emotional distress" ruling in the US Federal Code. The judgement of "emotional distress" in the case described was made in a previous court ruling under Iowa law. The decision of this particular case was whether the debt was "nondischargable" under Federal law. This involved the principle of collateral effect (of the previous State judgement) and the doctrine of "collateral estoppel" which bars re-liitigation of factual elements of a previous court proceeding.
There were several references made to the applicability of the terms "willful" and "malice" with respect to the infliction of the emotional distress in the case (I think), which do appaear to refer to Federal caselaw (see page 5 of the PDF). However it is not clear to me whether these cases simply help define the terms, or whether they could provide a basis for ascertaining the infliction of emotional distress under Federal law.
That being said, it is my general impression that, even if a legal definition of emotional distress does not exist in the Federal code, it does exist in the codes of a number of different states. I would assume that any case brought against ESA would be brought in a court local to its place of residence (California, I assume, but am not sure). However, since a class-action suit would neccesarily involve many parties in many different jurisdictions, I am not sure that they could all be litigated under the code of ESA's home jurisdiction. The case would also cross state lines, possibly invoking the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution (though I am not sure whether that clause could be stretched quite that far..)
Again, this is why I'm not a law student..
Care to site some caselaw on this? I'm not a lawyer, but a came up with asummary of an PDF Iowa case filed in U.S. Bankrupct Court in the Southern District of Iowa.
In this case, the Plantiff (Peggy Tucker) had brought a small claims action against two Defendants because of an allegation made that she has fraudulently rented videotapes using one Defendant's name. The Plantiff was interrogated by police and later cleared of the allegations of fraud. However, she alleged that the allegations constituted intertional influction of emotional distress under Iowa law (paragraph 7).
In the judgement, the court found that:
As I am neither a lawyer nor a law student, I don't have the energy to wade through the rest of the court summary. But at the end, it does state that the judgement in favor of the Plaintiff was made persuant to 11 U.S.C. section 523(a)6. This indicates that the judgement was made not under Iowa law, but under U.S. Federal law. As such, perhaps a similar argument could be made against ESA, although the Federal definition of "emtional distress" may be different from those of Iowa.
As a larger comment on the Slashdot community as a whole: as I said, I am not a law student (actually a computer science student), but I took about 2 minutes of my time to look up a piece of relavent caselaw, and then another 20 minutes of my time to wade through it (this is why I'm not a law student..) I did not simply type some one-off, unfounded comment which, while intended in humor, is an indication a type of general apathy apparently seemingly prevalent among a portion of the Slashdot readership (or commentator-ship, at least).
In an earlier post in this "discussion" (although it isn't really a discussion, because it does nothing to encourage the persuasion of personal opinions or the formation of plans of action), "Rifter" states that "Since the Attorneys General [..] refuse to prosecute any of these entities for their numerous perjories [..] [the entities] see no need for due diligence [..] [resulting] in scenarios like this"
This comment was rated a 5, but since "Rifter" does not show his email publicly, there is no way that like-minds can talk to him about what he said. Given his comment (which is true), an obvious course of action is for each of the apparently hundreds of people who have taken the time to comment on this article (including myself) to organize and write letters - even form letters - to various Attorneys General urging them to vigourously investigate and prosecute allegations of purjury in cases such as this. Yet I saw no suggestions of such nature made (perhaps I missed it though..)
I find it very hard to believe that this C&D letter is an isolated incident - after all, who would particularly have an axe to grind with Gentoo? Furthermore, there have bee
Open source software lives by the certainty of the licensing it uses. If we can't trust the interpretation of the licenses, then we can't feel confident in working with this code. The FSF is risking a serious blow to the open source community.
So why not just draft your own license that's basically the LGPL, except that it is built specifically so that it will work as most people expect it to with Java libraries (and maybe other languages, like Objective-C libraries)?
Make sure that the license is compatible (as much as possible without destroying the intended modification for Java code) with the FSF's LGPL, GPL, etc licensees. Then find some way (I have no idea how to do this) to get people to know about this. Maybe bribe on of the Slashdot webmasters to put it on..
I found it interesting that the article mentioned that Hatch, as a music composer, earned $18,000 in royalties last year. Aha! But don't song-writers generally get a better deal out of the current system than the poor blokes who actually sing? That's why everyone wants to write their own music these days, and why noone is interested in singing the old stuff (which is generally better IMO) I wonder, does Hatch know this?
Why the heck doesn't the FSF have this on the FRONT PAGE!! After all, Linux is GPL, and isn't the copyright of all GPL software supposed to be transferred (maybe not exclusively, I'm not sure) to the FSF expressedly for legal protection reasons?
Anybody??
- Apple buys out out SCO (they only have a market cap of about 75 million (surely less by later today
;-) - then they donate or otherwise nullifies ALL their patents (anti-patents as discussed several years ago here?) to the FSF, or BSD group, or whatever.
Or perhaps Apple could somehow buy out SCO as a wholly owned subsidiary so that SCO retains it's own liabilies (I don't know exactly how this happens, but I know that DOW Chemical did it when they bough Union Carbide. [See Bhopal.org for the other side of the hideous tragedy]) Then Apple could still sue the pants off SCO (if SCO had any value left, that is)Then Apple goes on the rampage, and sues the USPTO over frivolous patents. They might have to take care here not to tread on some of their own patents. I don't have time to look them up, but I'm sure they have some *worthy* ones on the books relating to the Rosetta/InkWell/Newton (but not, specifically, one I was told about by L.Y. regarding the integration of character and word recognition information - which was a counter-patent against a stupid patent by another company on the integration of stoke and character information.)
Ah, well, I know no-one will probably read this.. But I can dream..
While their communicators could relay position, I'm not so sure that they are responsible for vital stats.
;-) The specifically-designated "medical tricorders" have that little thingee that the doctor waves around the patient's body at a range of about 10 cm. So the range of the scan in "Remember Me" seems definately a plot hole. (Not the first, and not the last, as I read once, "Voyager had plot holes so big you could drive the ship though them!")
I remember the episode. I'd say the computer just uses some kind of long-range RF energy to read it off from a distance.. after all, the medical tricorders read off all *sorts* of stuff without ever touching the patient, so it has to use some kind of RF/subspace signals to do it.
If you accept this kind of reading vitals at a distance, the only problem is the range. Tricorders seem to work at a range of less than about 2 meters, except where they were scanning for large energy sources (at a range of several 10s of meters, something I figure we could do today - well, except for subspace radiation
More to the point of the tracking thins, anybody remember the season 7 episode "Attached"? Where Picard and Beverly were telepathically linked together - in a way that also meant they couldn't get outside of about 2 meters distance without getting sick..
Back to reality, I'm really surprised noone has raised the frightening possibilty of the INS using this to track foriegn students..
Jim