The analogies are all pretty lousy, as they fail to adequately consider the relationship between SCO and IBM (a stranger? I think not), and because the person benefitting is not the same as the person who did the stealing (presumably).
A better analogy is this: Iman and Simon are partners in a small business that they bought from Naomi. The business is a franchise store of a chain owned by Linus. Among other things, they sell bags marked $5 for the contents of the bag. You can look inside if you want, but few people do.
One day, Iman starts stealing money from the Simon's wallet and putting it in random bags. Simon finds out about this after he has sold a few hundred bags. He then considers suing the chain (owned by Linus) for taking their bags and distributing them to other stores.
This parallels the actual case quite well, but using a physical model instead of IP. What would happen in this case? Because the money was stolen property, the courts would likely order everyone who bought the bags to return the money.
Now let's say that Simon continues to sell the bags for another two weeks until he has time to prepare a clean batch of bags. What happens then?
Well, the courts would rule that the bags sold prior to the discovery would have to be returned, since the money was stolen property and the sale was illegal, just as before. However, any bags sold after the discovery would be considered to have been sold with Simon's knowledge, and Simon explicitly would have waived any legal right to demand the return of that money.
The only subtle problem he is that there are a dozen other partners whose money was not stolen. These people also sold bags. Are they liable for selling the bag? Probably not, since they had no reason to suspect that anyone other than their partners put things in the bag, and they had no reason not to trust their partners. However, the people who bought the bags from them still have to return the money. Of course, bags that they sold after Simon's discovery may or may not have to be returned, probably depending in large part on whether Simon informed them about the problem, and if he didd not, on whether Simon had a mechanism to do so.
Similarly, if there really is infringing code, it must be "returned" to SCO. However, any copies that they sold after that date contain copies of the IP that are then in-the-clear, as they were sold with their prior knowledge. (This excludes sales that were required by prior contract, since for some reason it isn't practical to rip the money out of the bag prior to the sale, and since the contract was made prior to the discovery.)
The fuzzy issues:
1. Are copies sold by others post-discovery considered in-the-clear?
2. Do IP laws allow the GPL to apply to the in-the-clear copies if thye are?
If SCO gave the information out to the community at this time, there would be millions of people digging out the origins of the code, proving that it was almost certainly from a publicly-available BSD source tree, and thus, showing that their case is without merit.
Now, if SCO's lawyers instead give the information to only a few people under an NDA and to the IBM lawyers under a similar NDA, the burden of proving innocence falls on a few people, and they have to try to hunt down the origin of the code quickly, and will have a hard time, and may not be able to prove that none of it infringes.
I smell a class-action retaliatory strike. Anybody?
It's easy. You start by not using TCP. Use UDP a la tftp, then at the end of the transfer, send a request for any missing packets. Once you have all the packets, reassemble it, and verify the checksum. You'll save a -lot- of overhead by doing it this way.
TCP was designed to give basic delivery guarantees at the protocol level, which is important for a robust, general solution. However, it is never the most efficient way to guarantee delivery. Maximizing efficiency requires application-specific knowledge.
All you have to do is argue that granting the right to post to an individual mailbox is not substantively different than granting the right to post to a mailing list in any way other than in scale. If you can convince a judge of that, you're home free, as mailing list servers were doing this for an entire year prior to when that patent was initially filed.
From info.bsdi.users newsgroup:
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 1996 20:48:32 -0600 From: Brent Chapman <Brent@GreatCircle.COM> Subject: Re: Denial of service... Netcom listservers (Markowitz, RISKS-18.38)
I don't know anything about this incident or about Netcom's installation of Majordomo (the mailing list management software in question), but speaking as the original author of the software, let me quote the original design paper ("Majordomo: How I Manage 17 Mailing Lists Without Answering '-request' Mail", USENIX LISA 6 conference, 1992):
... the goal is not absolute security, but to avoid people making a nuisance of themselves by abusing the Majordomo server.
By today's standards, Majordomo's "security" measures are incredibly weak; they weren't particularly strong even 5 years ago, when the software was written. Most lists are configured so that users can subscribe or unsubscribe themselves, which is determined simply by checking that the "From:" line in the header matches the address they're trying to subscribe/unsubscribe, and thus trivially subject to forgery. Furthermore, those operations that are "protected" are accessed through reusable passwords sent in clear-text through e-mail, and thus trivially subject to interception and reuse.
The next release of Majordomo (which will be version 1.94) will include a simple challenge/response "confirm" mode for lists, where a supposed subscriber will be sent pseudo-random confirmation string that they must turn around and send back to the server before their subscription is finalized. This should significantly cut down on the spam subscriptions. Version 1.94 is in alpha test now, and due for release sometime in the next few months; send e-mail to majordomo-announce-request@greatcircle.com if you'd like to be added to the list for notification when it's released, or to majordomo-workers-request@greatcircle.com if you're interested in helping with the development and alpha/beta test)
Clearly, I should have worked harder to keep folks from making a nuisance of themselves with the original version of Majordomo. Some days, I think that releasing the damn thing was the biggest mistake I ever made...:-) And I now have a _lot_ of sympathy for folks like Eric Allman (author of Sendmail), whose creations have taken on a life of their own on the net...
Brent Chapman | Great Circle Associates | 1057 West Dana Street Brent@GreatCircle.COM | http://www.greatcircle.com | Mountain View, CA 94041
Feel free to verify this in google's newsgroup search.
WRT the Massachusetts/New Hampshire issue, some other states (Tennessee, for example) are in pretty serious trouble because of the same issue. Since Tennessee is long and narrow, most of the population is within about a 20-minute drive of another state. Since they have no income tax, their government keeps shutting down. It is truly an embarrassment.
The biggest problem with sales tax, however, is that sales tax is the most heavily disproportionate tax possible when it comes to the local population. People living at or below the poverty line spend most (if not all) of their income on goods and services, and thus are paying 8% or more of their income. People making a million dollars a year spend maybe 10% of their income on goods and services, and thus pay less than 1% tax.
There are taxes that target tourists. Hotel taxes are a prime example. Sales tax, however, impacts locals and tourists equally, and in a way that is particularly hostile to the lower and middle classes. This gives me an idea. There ought to be some way to file some sort of discrimination suit or something to get sales tax abolished.... Just a thought.
IIRC, GPS was only added to the U.S. cruise missiles after they decided that visual tracking wasn't accurate enough. You really don't need a radio source to figure out where you are most of the time. It's just that last 20% or so.:-p
Of course, with enough warning, the military could block out the sun. (Simpsons did it! Simpsons did it!)
With a little bit of effort, assuming the engine can be started and stopped at will and has reasonably accurate guidance, this could be used for other things... like replacing traffic helicopters over urban areas with relatively safe rocket-powered cameras that fly around over the city until they're low on fuel, then fly to an appropriate location and land for refueling.
Before you say that this is nuts, think about this: helicopters are far more dangerous than any airplane. There have been a total of 21 deaths to date in U.S. commercial airplanes this year according to the NTSB. That's based on up to 150,000 flights per day.
So far, the U.S. Military, has already seen 29 helicopter deaths (and 8 additional British casualties in one of those crashes), and at least one other minor crash with no fatalities, and this is not including any that resulted from being under fire. That's based on a few hundred flights per day in Iraq, so I'm guessing a few thousand worldwide. Oh, and that's total flights, not helicopter flights. I doubt the percentage of helicopter flights is particularly high... maybe a couple of hundred helicopter flights per day as a high estimate.
That would make helicopters about 1,000 times as dangerous as airplanes. Lest you think this is a fluke of the way the military uses aircraft, the statistics on the crash rate of helicopters in Alaska should tell you otherwise. The only problem is that airplanes fly too fast for people to get a good view of what's going on in terms of ground traffic.
Enter the cruise missile. Fly ten of them around, snapping pictures and shooting video clips and periodically dumping the footage back via 802.11b networks on the ground. Near-instant gratification, and without putting your staff at risk.
Not to mention that if a blimp is cool, a missile must be... well, really cool.:-)
Nope. There are two ways, IBM could simply pull out a stack of patents and says, "Oh, by the way, you're in violation of them." At that point, SCO either shuts up or IBM's lawyers just bury them like a full latrine.
Don't know about theirs, but I have a similar device from another company that I bought from the Apple company store. The only problem is that here in the silicon valley, KQED is at 88.5, and another station is at 88.1. That blows out 88.5 and 88.1, but the problem is that KQED leaks so badly onto adjacent channels that at least in most of Cupertino, it's basically useless, and it's barely acceptable in Sunnyvale. It only becomes usable around Los Gatos and is fine on 88.7 from there South as far as Santa Cruz except in a few spots around Scott's Valley (for some unknown reason).
Your mileage may vary, depending on your location. As for me, I'm currently debating whether to take it back (and maybe get the Belkin) or to hack an external antenna into it... or maybe a 5 Watt linear.:-)
To go after SBC? You bet your ass we will. I think that probably the vast majority of Slashdotters who have ever had to deal with SBC have probably been screwed by them at least once, and thus would gladly put money into a legal fund to sue them into oblivion.
Unfortunately, submarine patents are perfectly legal. What's illegal about this is that the patent blatantly doesn't cover what they claim it covers.
To everyone on Slashdot, remember: you have a choice in cellular providers, long distance services, and ISPs. You may not have a choice in land-line phones, but you can make them beg for every penny they get from you. Do not use SBC long distance. Do not use SBC DSL. Do not use CellularOne in areas where it is run in conjunction with SBC. Do not use Cingular Wireless.
SBC is truly an evil company, far more so than even Microsoft. They're a baby bell who longs for the days when they had a complete monopoly over telephone services across the country, and as a result, they have repeatedly abused their limited monopoly power over the citizens of California (and probably other states) and repeatedly tried to gain even more power through legislation that would keep them from having to lease shared access to their lines to other companies (for DSL service, etc.). Now in yet another act of petulance, SBC is suing companies for using web standards rather than suing the bodies that made those standards and the companies that implement them.
Worse yet, their patent is at best loosely tied to the concept of frames, and any reasonable person would laugh at them for this. However, because many of these companies are smaller companies that can't afford to defend themselves, SBC is able to use these fraudulent legal strongarm tactics to extort money from them.
My friends and colleagues, it's time to draw a line in the sand, to say we will go this far and no further. Everyone who is being sued MUST fight this. It is your civic duty; your national honor is at stake. You must organize and work together to form a united front in the legal defense of every case, and make certain every case goes to trial or is dropped outright. Do not settle. Do not pay one penny in patent royalties.
While you fight---and win---the cases against SBC, you should also file individual countersuits for harassment against them in your LOCAL court system to force them to send their lawyers to YOU. Your goal should be to literally drag SBC into legal fee Hell.
The only way to deal with a company that attempts to make fraudulent use of patents is to make them pay for their abuse of our legal system, and if necessary to end their attempts at extortion, to literally sue them into oblivion. And yes, I will contribute to a legal defense fund if you set one up, so long as it is with the clear intent to counter sue the living crap out of SBC.
The usual IANAL caveats apply, as though it were not obvious.
Actually, poor quality speakers can make a codec seem worse than it really is.
Take MP3 artifacting for example. Most of the more noticeable artifacts are "swirling" in the high frequency data and some low-frequency distortion, I think, as well. A cheap pair of speakers with poor bass-to-midrange response will dramatically increase how obnoxious this distortion sounds.
I'm pretty sure the FCC allows them for emergency use in the U.S., too. One of my pilot friends once told me that a lot of pilots of smaller aircraft keep a cell phone to contact the tower in case of radio failure.
If you empty a magazine of 9MM into the skin of an aircraft at 35,000 feet the cabin outflow valve would sense that it needs to be less open and would simply close a little more.
The effect on the passengers would be... exactly nothing.
Umm... yeah, but if one of those happens to blow out a window, you'll be lucky if a large chunk of the side of the plane doesn't shear during the explosive decompression. There's a reason that normal bullets should -never- be allowed in an aircraft.
Maintaining the contents of DRAM sucks a lot of power. I'm not sure that increasing the RAM to make the HD spin less would be an advantage.
Not sure about the reported skip protection difference. If I were guessing, though, i'd guess it was a change in the size of software or the scratchpad utilization needed by the software, rather than a decrease in the amount of RAM on board. Remember, RAM generally comes in powers of two. If the OS took 2 megs, then 25 minutes of skip protection would be 27 megs of RAM, which just doesn't make much sense. (16+8+2+1?)
Depends on the algorithm. There are algorithms that offer little, if any cumulative degradation. Ogg/Vorbis is reportedly one of them. From what I can tell, DV video seems to be another (if the compression/decompression is done correctly). Not sure about AAC.
Slashdot Mirror
A better analogy is this: Iman and Simon are partners in a small business that they bought from Naomi. The business is a franchise store of a chain owned by Linus. Among other things, they sell bags marked $5 for the contents of the bag. You can look inside if you want, but few people do.
One day, Iman starts stealing money from the Simon's wallet and putting it in random bags. Simon finds out about this after he has sold a few hundred bags. He then considers suing the chain (owned by Linus) for taking their bags and distributing them to other stores.
This parallels the actual case quite well, but using a physical model instead of IP. What would happen in this case? Because the money was stolen property, the courts would likely order everyone who bought the bags to return the money.
Now let's say that Simon continues to sell the bags for another two weeks until he has time to prepare a clean batch of bags. What happens then?
Well, the courts would rule that the bags sold prior to the discovery would have to be returned, since the money was stolen property and the sale was illegal, just as before. However, any bags sold after the discovery would be considered to have been sold with Simon's knowledge, and Simon explicitly would have waived any legal right to demand the return of that money.
The only subtle problem he is that there are a dozen other partners whose money was not stolen. These people also sold bags. Are they liable for selling the bag? Probably not, since they had no reason to suspect that anyone other than their partners put things in the bag, and they had no reason not to trust their partners. However, the people who bought the bags from them still have to return the money. Of course, bags that they sold after Simon's discovery may or may not have to be returned, probably depending in large part on whether Simon informed them about the problem, and if he didd not, on whether Simon had a mechanism to do so.
Similarly, if there really is infringing code, it must be "returned" to SCO. However, any copies that they sold after that date contain copies of the IP that are then in-the-clear, as they were sold with their prior knowledge. (This excludes sales that were required by prior contract, since for some reason it isn't practical to rip the money out of the bag prior to the sale, and since the contract was made prior to the discovery.)
The fuzzy issues:
1. Are copies sold by others post-discovery considered in-the-clear?
2. Do IP laws allow the GPL to apply to the in-the-clear copies if thye are?
IANALBIPOOTV.
- Linux software that was improperly copied into SCO software.
Now, if SCO's lawyers instead give the information to only a few people under an NDA and to the IBM lawyers under a similar NDA, the burden of proving innocence falls on a few people, and they have to try to hunt down the origin of the code quickly, and will have a hard time, and may not be able to prove that none of it infringes.
I smell a class-action retaliatory strike. Anybody?
(If you don't understand this, you obviously don't know who I am.... Those who do will laugh. Those who don't will read my bio and then laugh. )
TCP was designed to give basic delivery guarantees at the protocol level, which is important for a robust, general solution. However, it is never the most efficient way to guarantee delivery. Maximizing efficiency requires application-specific knowledge.
From info.bsdi.users newsgroup:
Feel free to verify this in google's newsgroup search.
The biggest problem with sales tax, however, is that sales tax is the most heavily disproportionate tax possible when it comes to the local population. People living at or below the poverty line spend most (if not all) of their income on goods and services, and thus are paying 8% or more of their income. People making a million dollars a year spend maybe 10% of their income on goods and services, and thus pay less than 1% tax.
There are taxes that target tourists. Hotel taxes are a prime example. Sales tax, however, impacts locals and tourists equally, and in a way that is particularly hostile to the lower and middle classes. This gives me an idea. There ought to be some way to file some sort of discrimination suit or something to get sales tax abolished.... Just a thought.
No, Bluetooth is more like the Pinto of wireless networking. It's slow, blows up easily, and comes in your choice of puke green or silver.
Okay, maybe not the last one. :-)
Over upstate New York?
Of course, with enough warning, the military could block out the sun. (Simpsons did it! Simpsons did it!)
Before you say that this is nuts, think about this: helicopters are far more dangerous than any airplane. There have been a total of 21 deaths to date in U.S. commercial airplanes this year according to the NTSB. That's based on up to 150,000 flights per day.
So far, the U.S. Military, has already seen 29 helicopter deaths (and 8 additional British casualties in one of those crashes), and at least one other minor crash with no fatalities, and this is not including any that resulted from being under fire. That's based on a few hundred flights per day in Iraq, so I'm guessing a few thousand worldwide. Oh, and that's total flights, not helicopter flights. I doubt the percentage of helicopter flights is particularly high... maybe a couple of hundred helicopter flights per day as a high estimate.
That would make helicopters about 1,000 times as dangerous as airplanes. Lest you think this is a fluke of the way the military uses aircraft, the statistics on the crash rate of helicopters in Alaska should tell you otherwise. The only problem is that airplanes fly too fast for people to get a good view of what's going on in terms of ground traffic.
Enter the cruise missile. Fly ten of them around, snapping pictures and shooting video clips and periodically dumping the footage back via 802.11b networks on the ground. Near-instant gratification, and without putting your staff at risk.
Not to mention that if a blimp is cool, a missile must be... well, really cool. :-)
We agree to your price of 10 million Lira (about $584). Please send us your contact information so we can buy you out.
Sincerely,
Darl McBride
CEO, SCO Group
Your mileage may vary, depending on your location. As for me, I'm currently debating whether to take it back (and maybe get the Belkin) or to hack an external antenna into it... or maybe a 5 Watt linear. :-)
To everyone on Slashdot, remember: you have a choice in cellular providers, long distance services, and ISPs. You may not have a choice in land-line phones, but you can make them beg for every penny they get from you. Do not use SBC long distance. Do not use SBC DSL. Do not use CellularOne in areas where it is run in conjunction with SBC. Do not use Cingular Wireless.
SBC is truly an evil company, far more so than even Microsoft. They're a baby bell who longs for the days when they had a complete monopoly over telephone services across the country, and as a result, they have repeatedly abused their limited monopoly power over the citizens of California (and probably other states) and repeatedly tried to gain even more power through legislation that would keep them from having to lease shared access to their lines to other companies (for DSL service, etc.). Now in yet another act of petulance, SBC is suing companies for using web standards rather than suing the bodies that made those standards and the companies that implement them.
Worse yet, their patent is at best loosely tied to the concept of frames, and any reasonable person would laugh at them for this. However, because many of these companies are smaller companies that can't afford to defend themselves, SBC is able to use these fraudulent legal strongarm tactics to extort money from them.
My friends and colleagues, it's time to draw a line in the sand, to say we will go this far and no further. Everyone who is being sued MUST fight this. It is your civic duty; your national honor is at stake. You must organize and work together to form a united front in the legal defense of every case, and make certain every case goes to trial or is dropped outright. Do not settle. Do not pay one penny in patent royalties.
While you fight---and win---the cases against SBC, you should also file individual countersuits for harassment against them in your LOCAL court system to force them to send their lawyers to YOU. Your goal should be to literally drag SBC into legal fee Hell.
The only way to deal with a company that attempts to make fraudulent use of patents is to make them pay for their abuse of our legal system, and if necessary to end their attempts at extortion, to literally sue them into oblivion. And yes, I will contribute to a legal defense fund if you set one up, so long as it is with the clear intent to counter sue the living crap out of SBC.
The usual IANAL caveats apply, as though it were not obvious.
Take MP3 artifacting for example. Most of the more noticeable artifacts are "swirling" in the high frequency data and some low-frequency distortion, I think, as well. A cheap pair of speakers with poor bass-to-midrange response will dramatically increase how obnoxious this distortion sounds.
The effect on the passengers would be... exactly nothing.
Umm... yeah, but if one of those happens to blow out a window, you'll be lucky if a large chunk of the side of the plane doesn't shear during the explosive decompression. There's a reason that normal bullets should -never- be allowed in an aircraft.
Not sure about the reported skip protection difference. If I were guessing, though, i'd guess it was a change in the size of software or the scratchpad utilization needed by the software, rather than a decrease in the amount of RAM on board. Remember, RAM generally comes in powers of two. If the OS took 2 megs, then 25 minutes of skip protection would be 27 megs of RAM, which just doesn't make much sense. (16+8+2+1?)