The fundamental problem is that to defend your rights, you need money. It doesn't matter what the law is.
I was recently in a situation where I was slapped with a cease and desist order for something which was perfectly within my legal rights. I could cite extensive case law demonstrating that I was within my rights, and that I was not infringing on anyone else's rights.
But in the end, it came down to the fact that I was being slapped by a company with money, and I can't afford the lawyers. There's not money in it for the lawyers, so they won't do it on a contingent basis. It's much, much too small a case for an organization like the EFF.
So I end up being screwed. The simple fact is that law is irrelevant if you can't afford the lawyers to enforce it.
Try having the underwire in your bra trip the metal detector
That's nothing compared to undergoing a full-body / cavity search because you have the bad luck of encountering a Security Officer who happens to be your partner's very bitter ex.
My girlfriend is a voiceover artist, and tells me stories about what certain voices really look like. You'd be amazed at how many little boys are actually women in their 50s. (in fact, it's almost the exact reverse of chatroom personas, where most young women are old men! Hm. Wonder what that's all about.)
Of course, if you want a more famous example, just listen to Bart Simpson. Nancy's only in her 40s, but it's the same idea...
The ability to timeshift is a great idea, but applying it to television is less inspirational. I want them to expand this technology!
I wanna be able to do post-facto timeshifting of stuff like sleeping. Who wouldn't like to timeshift sleeping hours into the time spent stuck on hold, in a waiting room, or being talked at by proselytizers?
I gave up buying a whole class of tech books for the most part a few years ago. These are the specific books like "Configure Sendmail" or "Perl Reference." I mean they're great books for the purposes, but Google and Google's interface on the Usenet archives have the most current information easily available. I still buy books like Stevens' "Unix Network Programming" because they're more big picture explanations than function references.
Usually, when I have a tech problem, I can either figure it out on my own, or I have to research it. When it comes to obscure error messages, books are usually not very helpful. Usenet archives, however, are usually great. Type the text of the message into Google Groups, and at least 30% of the time, you'll get a direct hit on something that answers your question. And 70% of the time, you'll get a hint that steers you in the right direction, or helps you figure out what you *should* be searching for.
So yesterday, the network connection at our facility was down for four hours. I didn't have a single command reference available. I found myself sitting around twiddling my thumbs. I actually did things like organize old email, and clean up old cruft from my hard drive. It was painful.
Now I think I may want to at least keep reference caches on my local machine...
I want to see a virus that can withstand the temperature of falling through the atmosphere!
No, maybe I'd better rephrase that. Damn, I'd *hate* to see a virus that could withstand the temperature of falling through the atmosphere. Man, that'd be a *vicious* one!
I don't know what rights AT&T owned vs. the rights that Stroustrup personally owns (if any -- he is an employee of AT&T Labs, among other affiliations).
Just because Stowell's saying he doesn't know whether other compilers like gcc contain the IP doesn't mean he's not claiming rights (or wouldn't, if he thought he could get money out of it).
"C++ is one of the properties that SCO owns today and we frequently are approached by customers who wish to license C++ from us and we do charge for that." March 4 2003
I'll see your anecdotal evidence, and I'll raise you three cases of C++ disasters, ten C buffer overruns, and fifty million lines of legacy Jovial code that no-one can read.
OK, I'll get this off my chest first: C is the only Truly Great Language... well, other than assembler. But Real Programs are written in C.
Still, I have to say that I strongly disagree with you. For certain tasks, Java's a great language. I wouldn't use it for GUI code, and I wouldn't use it for sysadmin scripts, but for servers, multithreaded network applications, and similar tasks, it's a good language.
Sure, it's got some annoying aspects. It's overly "academic" in some of its approaches.
Java doesn't suck (and C and C++ really aren't the standard anymore).
Then, the EvilAgentsOfTheCompetition merely need to steal you keyfob.
"Ah," you say! "But the biometric passphrase will protect me!"
Yeah, until they "borrow" your finger.
(Long pointless tangential ramble: When I worked in a facility with a palm scanner, we always wanted to have it be our left hand. We figured the Russians might want to borrow our hand if they really wanted to get in to the place. Then there was the retina scanner. It's very difficult borrow someone's eye without causing enough damage to make it no longer match... but, if they're good, they just take the rest of the head with it. And even if they're not good, and cause enough damage to prevent access, well, crap, they still have your head.)
There really is no protection if your Network Admin starts leaking things (that's the only person who could do it in this case)
Yeah, well, your network admin and/or the sk1pt k!dd13 who just r00ted the box where your admin keeps the global passphrase in a plaintext reminder file.
But then, maybe the network admin actually is competent, in which case you are correct.
What makes you think that I think that the defeat of this one patent suit will result in software patents going away?
If you read the line you quoted, I said that I hoped that *this* patent suit would be defeated. The rest of my posting was stating my objections to software patents.
I'll not deny having stupid ideas, but I resent having my commentary called stupid when it wasn't making the stupid assertion in the first place.
While I have no love for Microsoft, this will be a good thing if it results in the defeat of this patent suit.
Software patents have the potential for destroying the software industry.
In 1972, the Supreme Court of the US ruled that you couldn't patent an Algorithm, it had to be a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter." But then in 1981, they sort of reversed themselves to allow patent protection for algorithms that were part of a patented process.
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
Software patents could push the price of everyday software, even Open Source software, to astronomical levels. You think the SCO situation is bad? Imagine if all those ancient IBM, Burroughs, DEC, Sperry, NTT, AT&T, etc, patents got dug up and enforced. Try writing software without using some of the algorithms that were developed from the 1930s and on. But, on the other hand, imagine if those companies (or the companies who now own the rights to their work) were to use all that prior art to clobber companies like SCO or Eolas who want to scorch, burn, and pillage.
StdDisclaimer: I am not a patent attorney, lawyer, or legal professional. These are opinions and facts as I understand them.
Three out of five motorcycle-driving acquaintances have been hit by cars or light trucks who "just didn't see them." For each accident, there have been dozens of near misses, avoided only by the skill of the motorcycle driver.
Unfortunately, in a big city it's just an odds game.
The same is true in automobiles and light trucks, it's just that the odds are better, and the odds of avoiding serious injury or death are better in an enclosing vehicle. I personally have been hit on both a bicycle and a gasoline-powered scooter, and consider myself lucky to be alive.
I've been reading a lot of great old (and not-so-old) Classics on my Kyocera 6035 smart phone (basically a Palm device). You can download a lot of stuff for free from http://www.memoware.com. There are also free document reader applications that handle a lot of different formats: PalmReader, TomeRaider, QED; you can find 'em all at http://palmgear.com.
Reading on the little 160 pixel-square screen takes a little getting used to, but it's very convenient, having the text with you whenever you have your phone (which is to say, always).
Emma Goldman suggested that it was a wise idea to always carry a good book "because you never know when you're going to be arrested."
I agree, especially if you use a more liberal definition of "arrested" -- i.e., delayed, stuck waiting for something/someone, etc. I've read e-texts at diners, when stuck in serious traffic, on airplanes, in the john, in my office, in bed, on a park bench, waiting in a courthouse, while on hold, etc. I'll admit not having read in the bathtub, but that's risky with a paper book as well.
Recently read works include: The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, The Call of Cthulhu by Lovecraft, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Perils of Pauline by Charles Goddard, and the Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I currently have in my phone Desert Gold by Zane Grey, a translation of the Gnostic Codices from Nag Hammadi, The Story of O, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, and Three Eyewitness Accounts of the Battles at Lexington and Concord.
Eaxctly. And what about the energy required to provide the sugars?
Say you run these things on corn syrup or the like. How many calories go into growing and processing the corn versus how many calories the bac-to-battery generates?
Slashdot Mirror
Untrue.
At least in the United States, car companies are required to support their vehicles for 7 years after the sale.
Sure, the law would get bent if a huge corporation went down in a flaming ball of litigation... But it is a law, anyway.
The fundamental problem is that to defend your rights, you need money. It doesn't matter what the law is.
I was recently in a situation where I was slapped with a cease and desist order for something which was perfectly within my legal rights. I could cite extensive case law demonstrating that I was within my rights, and that I was not infringing on anyone else's rights.
But in the end, it came down to the fact that I was being slapped by a company with money, and I can't afford the lawyers. There's not money in it for the lawyers, so they won't do it on a contingent basis. It's much, much too small a case for an organization like the EFF.
So I end up being screwed. The simple fact is that law is irrelevant if you can't afford the lawyers to enforce it.
That's nothing compared to undergoing a full-body / cavity search because you have the bad luck of encountering a Security Officer who happens to be your partner's very bitter ex.
The Dutch Advantage: bad weather in their homeland.
... nevermind. I either need to up the dosage or quit already.)
If you get more clouds, you have to learn to be more efficient.
The Aussies had the disadvantage that they've got 358 sunny days each year, so they didn't bother with efficiency.
For evolutionary progress, there must be oppositional conditions. It's just another example of the theory of Darwin.
(Disclaimer: satire. Get it? Darwin? Y'know? Ah
Well, even here, most voices are done by adults.
My girlfriend is a voiceover artist, and tells me stories about what certain voices really look like. You'd be amazed at how many little boys are actually women in their 50s. (in fact, it's almost the exact reverse of chatroom personas, where most young women are old men! Hm. Wonder what that's all about.)
Of course, if you want a more famous example, just listen to Bart Simpson. Nancy's only in her 40s, but it's the same idea...
Linkin Park?
Why, that's practically the best song Phil Ochs ever recorder.
'though he did spell it a bit different-like.
That, or you don't watch TV.
The ability to timeshift is a great idea, but applying it to television is less inspirational. I want them to expand this technology!
I wanna be able to do post-facto timeshifting of stuff like sleeping. Who wouldn't like to timeshift sleeping hours into the time spent stuck on hold, in a waiting room, or being talked at by proselytizers?
Actually, you should just urinate on his desk.
Not that that will help you graduate, or anything, but it will get a point across.
I gave up buying a whole class of tech books for the most part a few years ago. These are the specific books like "Configure Sendmail" or "Perl Reference." I mean they're great books for the purposes, but Google and Google's interface on the Usenet archives have the most current information easily available. I still buy books like Stevens' "Unix Network Programming" because they're more big picture explanations than function references.
Usually, when I have a tech problem, I can either figure it out on my own, or I have to research it. When it comes to obscure error messages, books are usually not very helpful. Usenet archives, however, are usually great. Type the text of the message into Google Groups, and at least 30% of the time, you'll get a direct hit on something that answers your question. And 70% of the time, you'll get a hint that steers you in the right direction, or helps you figure out what you *should* be searching for.
So yesterday, the network connection at our facility was down for four hours. I didn't have a single command reference available. I found myself sitting around twiddling my thumbs. I actually did things like organize old email, and clean up old cruft from my hard drive. It was painful.
Now I think I may want to at least keep reference caches on my local machine...
I want to see a virus that can withstand the temperature of falling through the atmosphere!
No, maybe I'd better rephrase that. Damn, I'd *hate* to see a virus that could withstand the temperature of falling through the atmosphere. Man, that'd be a *vicious* one!
He's claiming rights to the compiler in general.
I don't know what rights AT&T owned vs. the rights that Stroustrup personally owns (if any -- he is an employee of AT&T Labs, among other affiliations).
Just because Stowell's saying he doesn't know whether other compilers like gcc contain the IP doesn't mean he's not claiming rights (or wouldn't, if he thought he could get money out of it).
Keep in mind that this is the same guy who said:
"C++ is one of the properties that SCO owns today and we frequently are approached by customers who wish to license C++ from us and we do charge for that." March 4 2003
No point in trying to argue with delusionals.
But.. you can!
l
o ft.htm
Check out:
Ira Klang's TRS-80 Central:
http://www.trs-80.com/
TRS-80 Emulators:
http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/trs80.htm
http://discover-net.net/~dmkeil/
TRS-80 Software:
http://home.planet.nl/~srahman/trs80_s
(I was a TRS-80 user from way back as well... published games under the Pacific Software name back in the early 80s.)
Oh. I didn't realize we were comparing to x86.
Well...
My AMD Thunderbird gets ducted out to the back yard, where it powers the kilns for a small community of potters and their porcelain works.
My P4 1.6 is currently supporting a team up at Lawrence Berkeley Labs who are doing research into high temperature plasma.
OK. While I'm a big Apple advocate and an Apple owner, I must take exception to the statement that Apple has always been "cool."
My G4 is not cool. It heats up the flippin' room. My cat curls up behind the fan vent like there was a crackling fire behind the grille.
Before that, my 604e/180 dualie cranked out more heat than your average BLU-118/B thermobaric-tipped ordinance.
Great machines, yes. Cool, no.
I'll see your anecdotal evidence, and I'll raise you three cases of C++ disasters, ten C buffer overruns, and fifty million lines of legacy Jovial code that no-one can read.
... well, other than assembler. But Real Programs are written in C.
OK, I'll get this off my chest first: C is the only Truly Great Language
Still, I have to say that I strongly disagree with you. For certain tasks, Java's a great language. I wouldn't use it for GUI code, and I wouldn't use it for sysadmin scripts, but for servers, multithreaded network applications, and similar tasks, it's a good language.
Sure, it's got some annoying aspects. It's overly "academic" in some of its approaches.
Java doesn't suck (and C and C++ really aren't the standard anymore).
Then, the EvilAgentsOfTheCompetition merely need to steal you keyfob.
... but, if they're good, they just take the rest of the head with it. And even if they're not good, and cause enough damage to prevent access, well, crap, they still have your head.)
"Ah," you say! "But the biometric passphrase will protect me!"
Yeah, until they "borrow" your finger.
(Long pointless tangential ramble: When I worked in a facility with a palm scanner, we always wanted to have it be our left hand. We figured the Russians might want to borrow our hand if they really wanted to get in to the place. Then there was the retina scanner. It's very difficult borrow someone's eye without causing enough damage to make it no longer match
Yeah, well, your network admin and/or the sk1pt k!dd13 who just r00ted the box where your admin keeps the global passphrase in a plaintext reminder file.
But then, maybe the network admin actually is competent, in which case you are correct.
A little hostile are we?
What makes you think that I think that the defeat of this one patent suit will result in software patents going away?
If you read the line you quoted, I said that I hoped that *this* patent suit would be defeated. The rest of my posting was stating my objections to software patents.
I'll not deny having stupid ideas, but I resent having my commentary called stupid when it wasn't making the stupid assertion in the first place.
While I have no love for Microsoft, this will be a good thing if it results in the defeat of this patent suit.
Software patents have the potential for destroying the software industry.
In 1972, the Supreme Court of the US ruled that you couldn't patent an Algorithm, it had to be a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter." But then in 1981, they sort of reversed themselves to allow patent protection for algorithms that were part of a patented process.
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
Software patents could push the price of everyday software, even Open Source software, to astronomical levels. You think the SCO situation is bad? Imagine if all those ancient IBM, Burroughs, DEC, Sperry, NTT, AT&T, etc, patents got dug up and enforced. Try writing software without using some of the algorithms that were developed from the 1930s and on. But, on the other hand, imagine if those companies (or the companies who now own the rights to their work) were to use all that prior art to clobber companies like SCO or Eolas who want to scorch, burn, and pillage.
StdDisclaimer: I am not a patent attorney, lawyer, or legal professional. These are opinions and facts as I understand them.
Except in the city.
Three out of five motorcycle-driving acquaintances have been hit by cars or light trucks who "just didn't see them." For each accident, there have been dozens of near misses, avoided only by the skill of the motorcycle driver.
Unfortunately, in a big city it's just an odds game.
The same is true in automobiles and light trucks, it's just that the odds are better, and the odds of avoiding serious injury or death are better in an enclosing vehicle. I personally have been hit on both a bicycle and a gasoline-powered scooter, and consider myself lucky to be alive.
Um, you'll have trouble discussing protocols with Jon unless you've got the services of a good Medium (hey, and maybe a good protocol!)
Jon passed away in 1998.
I've been reading a lot of great old (and not-so-old) Classics on my Kyocera 6035 smart phone (basically a Palm device). You can download a lot of stuff for free from http://www.memoware.com. There are also free document reader applications that handle a lot of different formats: PalmReader, TomeRaider, QED; you can find 'em all at http://palmgear.com.
Reading on the little 160 pixel-square screen takes a little getting used to, but it's very convenient, having the text with you whenever you have your phone (which is to say, always).
Emma Goldman suggested that it was a wise idea to always carry a good book "because you never know when you're going to be arrested."
I agree, especially if you use a more liberal definition of "arrested" -- i.e., delayed, stuck waiting for something/someone, etc. I've read e-texts at diners, when stuck in serious traffic, on airplanes, in the john, in my office, in bed, on a park bench, waiting in a courthouse, while on hold, etc. I'll admit not having read in the bathtub, but that's risky with a paper book as well.
Recently read works include: The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, The Call of Cthulhu by Lovecraft, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Perils of Pauline by Charles Goddard, and the Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I currently have in my phone Desert Gold by Zane Grey, a translation of the Gnostic Codices from Nag Hammadi, The Story of O, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, and Three Eyewitness Accounts of the Battles at Lexington and Concord.
Eaxctly. And what about the energy required to provide the sugars?
Say you run these things on corn syrup or the like. How many calories go into growing and processing the corn versus how many calories the bac-to-battery generates?
Yeah, and they're flippin' great in places where there's a lot of seismic activity.
(Yeah, yeah, I know. Steel reinforced blah blah...)