This looks to me like they were in on the whole pump-and-dump scheme. See who's left holding the bag after these guys unload their stock -- that's the sucker.
I'm sure that is what the Enron people thought. We may yet see who is left holding the bag, or involved in a "pump" scheme in prison.
Well, when my girlfriend has her hand in my pocket.. one could argue that she is indeed getting something out of it. But really, I'm the one getting fondled.
Or getting your balls squeezed.
Something similar could be what is going on between the DMA and the judge. Thus, DMA has their hand in the judge's pocket.
Considering that Shakespeare stole heavily from older works I think he best keep his mouth shut.
Your post accurately points out a perfect example of how our modern, enlightened Intellectual Property system prevents thieves, such as Shakespere, from infringing the IP of others' hard work.
And forever afterward Eolas will be know as "those assholes" who made the whole mess happen. Way to go guys. I'm sure your PR flacks are happy as clams.
If not Eolas, then it would be someone else. And the someone else might not be as anti-Microsoft as Eolas appears to be.
Hey, I'd be happy if I had just won a half billion dollar penalty for past infringement. (Not counting future infringement, and future licenses.)
Eolas could license open source browsers at a different rate than closed source ones. Or simply choose not to pursue open source browsers.
Nonetheless, getting back to your post, it is not Eolas who is the asshole. They are merely working within the system. It is that system that is all around us, even here in this room as we speak. It is the big corporations, broken PTO, and congresscritters who are truly to blame, not Eolas.
Maybe the big corporations who are at fault will learn a lesson. If you keep a big fierce dog around, one of these days it is going to bite YOU. (But only in soviet russia.)
My guess it's a propaganda techinique. MS know they'll win on appeal, but for now, pro-software-patent forces in Europe can point to Eolas and say "look, patents DO help the little guy", despite the fact (as shown in economic analyses) that for every little guy they help, they allow big guys with lots of patents to crush thousands of little guys.
Who says MS will win on appeal?
One other thing that software patents do is allow IBM to crush SCO. IBM picked four patents because these four are infringed by every single SCO product. Look at it this way. Suppose SCO prevails over IBM, what happens? IBM pays $3 Billion -- which is the entire damages that SCO has suffered (no going after Linux users). IBM still gets to get damages against SCO for 20 years of patent violations. (Darl McBigMouth said in public that "we've been violating these patents for over 20 years".... ooops, I meant... "We've had some of these programs for over 20 years and this is the first we've heard about patent infringement.".) IBM still can prevent SCO from shipping any of their products unless they can negotiate a patent license from IBM. In short, patents are nuclear weapons. Whether they are good or bad depends on who holds them and how they are (mis)used.
Well, maybe Chinese/Palestinian/North Korean coders will give us free choice back by developping a similar browser that would laugh in the face of US patents.
Maybe they will. But if they did, then YOU are guilty of patent infringement if you download it and run it. That's the beauty / danger of how patents work.
Probably because they didn't want people writing crappy drivers willy nilly.
Just like a monopoly. They want to maintain exclusive control over who can write crappy drivers.
Crappy drivers used to be a huge cause of blue screens in windows.
Used to be? Should I infer that something else is now the major cause of the blue screens? For instance, could it be that it is now easier for an application to bring down the entire OS? (I don't think so.)
RTFA Read The Fucking Article. MS never said anything about it being "unfair". Good troll, though.
Who is the troll?
I did Read The FriendlyArticle. There is no need to use any fucking profanity in an attempt to be unfair to slashdot.
Let's see the title of the article is...
Microsoft: Asia
not playing fair over OS
And...
A plan by Japan, China and South Korea to develop an operating system alternative to Microsoft's Windows software could raise
concerns over fair competition, Microsoft said Friday.
Re:Patent protection?
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 1
once you break one law (listening in), would you care if you infringe on someones patent? I doubt it.
You are not evaluating the possible differences in penalties.
Listening in is a crime in most states with some suitable punishment that was probably codified into law decades ago.
Violating a patent is likely to get you the death penalty.
Nah, they'll just leave the server down for the weekend. It's cheaper than paying overtime for a tech.
They will leave the server down for the weekend not due to cost issues, but due to PR issues. They want as much PR as they can get.
Tuesday, September 2, 2003.
At SCO headquarters this morning, SCO's CEO Darl McBride was quoted as saying: "Those evil hackers are still attacking SCO's superior Unix servers!". He then added "...and it's all IBM's fault!" "We know that IBM is behind this whole affair, including our poor security. We have evidence that proves it -- but we can't show it to anyone."
"If we were to prove that IBM were behind the attacks on SCO, then the attacks would stop."
This spurred the industry to create their own new standard, the VESA bus,
The new standard bus was EISA, not VESA. (See a sibling post for links.) I remember these events well.
IBM wanted to charge a rather high fee for anyone to license the new bus, both to clone manufacturers and to card manufacturers.
IBM was disapointed that all the clones had come along and undercut them on price and established a thriving industry, while they were busy pushing mainframes and thinking that the PC was a toy.
There was no way they could turn the clock back and seize control of the now common PC architecture made from standard off the shelf parts.
So they decided to introduce a new architecture, with some benefits, so that everyone would be compelled to follow IBM's lead, and pay IBM huge royalties.
The rest of the industry did thing that everyone was being encouraged to do at the time. "Just say NO." They went off and developed the EISA bus.
IBM was left with the non-standard architecture, the PS/2. Eventually IBM abandoned this and re-joined the rest of the industry making IBM PC's that were industry standard.
When lives are at stake, there has to be some failure analysis before-hand. You can't just write some software and, after it kills 10 people, say "oops, must be a bug."
I resent that.
This is not how professional software developers behave.
What a real professional would say is one of....
Can you demonstrate that bug for me in a live situation? (the one that kills people)
It works on my machine
It's not a bug, it's a feature
We'll fix it in one of the upcomming service packs
To me, there's one basic valid purpose of government, and that's to defend the individual rights of its citizens. In the U.S., this is the principle upon which the Constitution and Bill of Rights is based, and the primary ligitimate activities of government, the police, courts, and defense, are inferrable from that.
In the early days of NASA, what they did was a legitimate function of government.
There were an enormous number of spinoff technology advances.
Nobody would invest commercial dollars into space. There was no clear benefit.
But perhaps most importantly, some of the technology had very important military applications during the cold war.
Now, the military applications are not enough to justify government spending. We are not in a cold war. We have plenty of military technology, including putting things into space, and presumably even destroying things in space.
At the same time, the rewards of spending commercial dollars on space are very clear.
So while I agree that the government no longer belongs in the space business, I also believe that when it first got into the space business, it had legitimate business there for several reasons.
Let's suppose as you suggest that there are fewer than 100,000 possible variations of a WAV file that results from ripping a particular CD track.
The mp3 encoding process is exact, so there are a fixed small (< 100,000) number of possible mp3 files for the same song.
Well, everyone who has an mp3, even legitimately, will have one of these MD5 sums of their mp3 of that track. So the MD5 is now meaningless. Jane Doe's MD5 hash would then proove nothing. She could, indeed have ripped and encoded it herself, even though it matches the MD5 hash of other people's mp3 file. That doesn't mean she downloaded it.
Of course, the larger the number of possible MD5 hashes of a given track, the harder this argument is to make.
Since for any given WAV file, there are numerous ways to encode it to mp3, and numerous encoders (some floating point, some integer, differing implementation details that might have different 1-bit roundoff conditions, etc.) there are likely a larger number of possible MD5 hashes of an mp3 file.
Why have Java or SVG when Flash could have done the same thing, for instance.
Because SVG is open. Java is psuedo-open. Open source implementations are being developed. Java exists on all platforms, and is accessible to any browser that wants it. Flash is not. That is why.
What I am advocating is that we should try to promote open standards
Right, but I figured, maybe the bit differences might disappear in the encoding, some wacky things you can only determine empirically
I wouldn't expect two different WAV's that sound exactly the same to give the same mp3. But I wouldn't have bothered to test it either.
As I think about it, your theory is interesting. Since mp3 compression is based on the perception of audio, or getting rid of everything that you don't perceive, then there is some argument that two very similar WAV bit patterns that sound identical might actually be closer after encoding to mp3 than you might think. Of course an MD5 hash of the two mp3's is not a good indicator of this, as one single bit difference in two files radically alters the MD5 hash.
Slashdot Mirror
This looks to me like they were in on the whole pump-and-dump scheme. See who's left holding the bag after these guys unload their stock -- that's the sucker.
I'm sure that is what the Enron people thought. We may yet see who is left holding the bag, or involved in a "pump" scheme in prison.
How is spelling America with a 'K' insightful?
Yeah. It offends the Gnome people who live in AmeriGa.
Well, when my girlfriend has her hand in my pocket.. one could argue that she is indeed getting something out of it. But really, I'm the one getting fondled.
Or getting your balls squeezed.
Something similar could be what is going on between the DMA and the judge. Thus, DMA has their hand in the judge's pocket.
Considering that Shakespeare stole heavily from older works I think he best keep his mouth shut.
:-)
Your post accurately points out a perfect example of how our modern, enlightened Intellectual Property system prevents thieves, such as Shakespere, from infringing the IP of others' hard work.
I have believed for some time now that the crossover applications are the real danger, while MS is focusing on Linux.
Surely hybrid vehicles are not so bad that they would leave you trying to hitch a ride?
And forever afterward Eolas will be know as "those assholes" who made the whole mess happen. Way to go guys. I'm sure your PR flacks are happy as clams.
If not Eolas, then it would be someone else. And the someone else might not be as anti-Microsoft as Eolas appears to be.
Hey, I'd be happy if I had just won a half billion dollar penalty for past infringement. (Not counting future infringement, and future licenses.)
Eolas could license open source browsers at a different rate than closed source ones. Or simply choose not to pursue open source browsers.
Nonetheless, getting back to your post, it is not Eolas who is the asshole. They are merely working within the system. It is that system that is all around us, even here in this room as we speak. It is the big corporations, broken PTO, and congresscritters who are truly to blame, not Eolas.
Maybe the big corporations who are at fault will learn a lesson. If you keep a big fierce dog around, one of these days it is going to bite YOU. (But only in soviet russia.)
My guess it's a propaganda techinique. MS know they'll win on appeal, but for now, pro-software-patent forces in Europe can point to Eolas and say "look, patents DO help the little guy", despite the fact (as shown in economic analyses) that for every little guy they help, they allow big guys with lots of patents to crush thousands of little guys.
Who says MS will win on appeal?
One other thing that software patents do is allow IBM to crush SCO. IBM picked four patents because these four are infringed by every single SCO product. Look at it this way. Suppose SCO prevails over IBM, what happens? IBM pays $3 Billion -- which is the entire damages that SCO has suffered (no going after Linux users). IBM still gets to get damages against SCO for 20 years of patent violations. (Darl McBigMouth said in public that "we've been violating these patents for over 20 years".... ooops, I meant... "We've had some of these programs for over 20 years and this is the first we've heard about patent infringement.".) IBM still can prevent SCO from shipping any of their products unless they can negotiate a patent license from IBM. In short, patents are nuclear weapons. Whether they are good or bad depends on who holds them and how they are (mis)used.
Well, maybe Chinese/Palestinian/North Korean coders will give us free choice back by developping a similar browser that would laugh in the face of US patents.
Maybe they will. But if they did, then YOU are guilty of patent infringement if you download it and run it. That's the beauty / danger of how patents work.
Probably because they didn't want people writing crappy drivers willy nilly.
Just like a monopoly. They want to maintain exclusive control over who can write crappy drivers.
Crappy drivers used to be a huge cause of blue screens in windows.
Used to be? Should I infer that something else is now the major cause of the blue screens? For instance, could it be that it is now easier for an application to bring down the entire OS? (I don't think so.)
Privacy is not a basic human right.
Please reply with all of your information please. We want to know, and you do not have any right to stop us from knowing.
....deserve neither liberty nor safety."
....deserve and will have niether liberty nor safety."
What about...
Who is the troll?
I did Read The Friendly Article. There is no need to use any fucking profanity in an attempt to be unfair to slashdot.
Let's see the title of the article is... And...
once you break one law (listening in), would you care if you infringe on someones patent? I doubt it.
You are not evaluating the possible differences in penalties.
Listening in is a crime in most states with some suitable punishment that was probably codified into law decades ago.
Violating a patent is likely to get you the death penalty.
Nah, they'll just leave the server down for the weekend. It's cheaper than paying overtime for a tech.
They will leave the server down for the weekend not due to cost issues, but due to PR issues. They want as much PR as they can get.
Tuesday, September 2, 2003.
At SCO headquarters this morning, SCO's CEO Darl McBride was quoted as saying: "Those evil hackers are still attacking SCO's superior Unix servers!". He then added "...and it's all IBM's fault!" "We know that IBM is behind this whole affair, including our poor security. We have evidence that proves it -- but we can't show it to anyone."
"If we were to prove that IBM were behind the attacks on SCO, then the attacks would stop."
This spurred the industry to create their own new standard, the VESA bus,
The new standard bus was EISA, not VESA. (See a sibling post for links.) I remember these events well.
IBM wanted to charge a rather high fee for anyone to license the new bus, both to clone manufacturers and to card manufacturers.
IBM was disapointed that all the clones had come along and undercut them on price and established a thriving industry, while they were busy pushing mainframes and thinking that the PC was a toy.
There was no way they could turn the clock back and seize control of the now common PC architecture made from standard off the shelf parts.
So they decided to introduce a new architecture, with some benefits, so that everyone would be compelled to follow IBM's lead, and pay IBM huge royalties.
The rest of the industry did thing that everyone was being encouraged to do at the time. "Just say NO." They went off and developed the EISA bus.
IBM was left with the non-standard architecture, the PS/2. Eventually IBM abandoned this and re-joined the rest of the industry making IBM PC's that were industry standard.
I resent that.
This is not how professional software developers behave.
What a real professional would say is one of....
To me, there's one basic valid purpose of government, and that's to defend the individual rights of its citizens. In the U.S., this is the principle upon which the Constitution and Bill of Rights is based, and the primary ligitimate activities of government, the police, courts, and defense, are inferrable from that.
In the early days of NASA, what they did was a legitimate function of government.
There were an enormous number of spinoff technology advances.
Nobody would invest commercial dollars into space. There was no clear benefit.
But perhaps most importantly, some of the technology had very important military applications during the cold war.
Now, the military applications are not enough to justify government spending. We are not in a cold war. We have plenty of military technology, including putting things into space, and presumably even destroying things in space.
At the same time, the rewards of spending commercial dollars on space are very clear.
So while I agree that the government no longer belongs in the space business, I also believe that when it first got into the space business, it had legitimate business there for several reasons.
Or perhaps, trash influencing media, and therefore public opinion?
Yeah, dude. He should be moderating instead of posting.
Let's suppose as you suggest that there are fewer than 100,000 possible variations of a WAV file that results from ripping a particular CD track.
The mp3 encoding process is exact, so there are a fixed small (< 100,000) number of possible mp3 files for the same song.
Well, everyone who has an mp3, even legitimately, will have one of these MD5 sums of their mp3 of that track. So the MD5 is now meaningless. Jane Doe's MD5 hash would then proove nothing. She could, indeed have ripped and encoded it herself, even though it matches the MD5 hash of other people's mp3 file. That doesn't mean she downloaded it.
Of course, the larger the number of possible MD5 hashes of a given track, the harder this argument is to make.
Since for any given WAV file, there are numerous ways to encode it to mp3, and numerous encoders (some floating point, some integer, differing implementation details that might have different 1-bit roundoff conditions, etc.) there are likely a larger number of possible MD5 hashes of an mp3 file.
Why have Java or SVG when Flash could have done the same thing, for instance.
Because SVG is open. Java is psuedo-open. Open source implementations are being developed. Java exists on all platforms, and is accessible to any browser that wants it. Flash is not. That is why.
What I am advocating is that we should try to promote open standards
Ah, but you are not.
This would screw up swarming downloads, though.
Not if the swarming block sizes were not arbitrary block sizes, but were blocks of even numbers of mp3 frames.
I read somewhere that an mp3 files is a bunch of 11 byte frames. Even including the header, ID3 tags. Everything.
If this is true, then swarming downloads of some block size which is a multiple of 11 bytes should still work.
But we're not looking for any two files with the same hash. We're looking for another file whose hash matches a specific value.
Let me say it differently....
We're not looking for two people who have the same birthday. We're looking for another person who has MY birthday.
Right, but I figured, maybe the bit differences might disappear in the encoding, some wacky things you can only determine empirically
I wouldn't expect two different WAV's that sound exactly the same to give the same mp3. But I wouldn't have bothered to test it either.
As I think about it, your theory is interesting. Since mp3 compression is based on the perception of audio, or getting rid of everything that you don't perceive, then there is some argument that two very similar WAV bit patterns that sound identical might actually be closer after encoding to mp3 than you might think. Of course an MD5 hash of the two mp3's is not a good indicator of this, as one single bit difference in two files radically alters the MD5 hash.