Why would he deserve punishment? He didn't decide to beat the other guy, he was attacked and the natural consequences happened.
That he wasn't in any danger ignores 1) that he might have been (eggshell skull) and 2) that he didn't know this and shouldn't be expected to - he too was 13.
It should be handled like the bully grabbing an electric fence - not in itself a reason to punish anyone, it delivered its own consequences. What should be punished is the bullying that made the victim feel attacked at what might otherwise have been mere teenage play.
It's a mistake to label something natural, as if that means anything, and he's not acting but describing his view, but otherwise did you mean that you disagree with him that it's beneficial for the victim if they get to beat their tormentor or otherwise force it to stop.
I fingerpainted the full kernel for Windows 7 when I was a kid. Microsoft owes me money!
Oh yeah, that's exactly what I meant.
Do you realize how many purely conclusory words you used in your post? "*no* expectation", "clearly the system is a liability", "clearly viewed", etc. They're not fooling anyone.
Wrong. Patents clearly are viewed as a minefield - or do you need a cite? Yes, it's subjective, but it's a view held by many in R&D that good or bad they can blow up all too easily. They're too afraid to properly use the patent system in a useful manner because it so unreasonably rewards trolls instead of creators.
That's only true if you're not very good at patent law
And what's the first thing people scream in these threads? "If you're not a patent attorney, you know nothing." Of course I'm not very good at it.
or you have a terrible patent attorney giving you poor advice.
Yes, or very often no attorney. And patents are a minefield...
Trust me - large companies perform due diligence and freedom to operate searches every day.
Their lawyers do, to refine their own patent applications usually. Their engineers certainly do not just browse patents unsupervised.
If the system had value for R&D it'd be the first place engineers turned, like Perl programmers to CPAN.
Congress amended the law when they realized that was an issue. That they amended it to fix that kinda shows their intent.
They fixed that one exploit when issues like RAMBUS misleading standards bodies came to light. They left the basic nature of patents alone though.
Anything that doesn't recognize that while the patent was filed first the second person's ideas aren't necessarily derivative is broken.
Why? We're talking about the exact idea, [...] where I come up with A+B+C+D, and you "independently" come up with A+B+C+D several years later and then try to claim you were first... even though you never published, never applied for a patent, etc.
Not trying to claim I'm first.
[and are saying that] [they] owe [you] money!
No. Merely that I don't owe them any either.
You cannot freely invent your own solution, ever. It's owned in part by others
Yeah, it's amazing how not a single patent has been issued after the first one. To think 220 years later, and we're still on patent #1
For someone so concerned about how my overly conclusive language might be fooling people you're curiously willing to make crap up and try to imply I said it.
"Cannot freely invent"
You know the baggage I'm saying is attached. Yeah. The more patents we have to avoid, the less free.
No, you can freely invent your own solution. Do you instantly get rights to anything and everything you used? No.
To everything I made up myself, yes I should. Nothing less is reasonable.
For anything I copied, then yeah, we can talk.
You get the rights to your invention. So if you patent a stool, and I add a back to it and invent a chair, I can freely get a patent on a chair. I have to pay you a reasonable license fee for use of the stool portion until your patent expires, but that's only fair - I took your stool and added a back to it. Why shouldn't I pay you for your labor?
Did you take my stool design and add a back? If so I might agree. As long as I had done something that wasn't obvious to every other furniture craftsman.
But if you independently invented it or if I didn't help because it's just that trivial then why on earth would I have a cut of that? That'd be stupid.
Pay a kernel developer to do their work for your company. You should then have standing to sue when the next generation of t1vos/etc adopt a kernel containing your software. It probably wouldn't be hard to find someone willing.
There's a lot of legal nonsense around it though. In photography (in the USA) registering a copyright (which should be unnecessary) is essential to being able to really pursue a claim and receive damage.
The GPLv3 doesn't require that all parts of a project be GPLed, merely that none of the other parts prevent the obligations under the GPL being met.
If you don't disable a device when booting an unsigned firmware you don't have to release the firmware signing code. If you don't require bit-for-bit identical binaries you aren't responsible for helping users generate them as part of the build environment.
the original company still ends up getting the blame when user modifications break the product. I got really, really sick of dealing with those support issues over time.
Badly run companies run into this. I've worked at ISPs that have been Microsoft's unofficial support desk because they couldn't tell the customer that there's a signal at their cable, the rest is between them and their OS vendor.
Other companies in almost exactly the same demographics have happy users, without supporting their OS or playing weird games, simply by being upfront with the users about where problems lie.
The two situations are you describe are completely differnt ends of the process....
Different ends yes, of the same process though. Let me rework this a bit:
[upstream developer exerting control over] end user [distribution of] software and upstream developer exerting control over a downstream product.
You want control over those below you, but freedom from those above you.
Sure, the GPL has a cost, but then so do commercial libraries ($$$) - why do people present strange what-ifs where the GPL conflicts with some closed-source process as an excuse for non-compliance with the GPL? It'd be like writing two checks for the same money and blaming the first person to cash it for preventing the second person from getting paid.
It's not meant to be free. If you're really, really sick of dealing with it, maybe you simply didn't understand the cost, like many people didn't understand the implications of their variable-rate mortgages.
What submarine patents? Since 2000, all patent applications have been published within 18 months of filing.
I'm using it to show the intent of the law. There's *no* expectation that others can benefit from patents, and that's why the law is flawed.
This specific exploit is fixed but the whole system remains one where you hope you don't end up using someone else's ideas as compared to one where you eagerly seek out patents for their wisdom. Clearly the system is a liability.
No, they're decided by the BPAI, which is a pseudo-court.
No, what I mean is that you presented "nobody will believe you invented this independently" as if it were a real problem - it is not, real courts deal with this issue all the time in many fields.
Nonetheless, to return to the original point, interferences come up when inventor A and inventor B independently invent something and independently apply for patents. They don't come up when inventor A gets a patent and "inventor" B suddenly claims that he came up with the idea 20 years ago.
Anything that doesn't recognize that while the patent was filed first the second person's ideas aren't necessarily derivative is broken. Patents are clearly viewed like a minefield, where the patent adds nothing of value to the state of the art because everyone is afraid to go looking, or even be told of its existence.
Perhaps the answer is to stop copying code from your competitors and actually invent your own solutions.
Aside from the potential copyright issue I hadn't heard about before, I think this statement is a terrible misstatement of the situation.
You cannot freely invent your own solution, ever. It's owned in part by others - not those who've seriously advanced science like Newton, but patent trolls who camp on using XOR to draw to the screen, lasers to tease cats, or the number of confirmation steps in an order.
Facts are facts, the security problem is up to you.
No one at Google has probably ever ACTUALLY read a single email of yours. There is though a mindless computer crunching through all the words in your email forming associations.
Um yeah, thanks. Got that... Had you thought that I thought they used pigeons? Or gnomes under NDAs? Sentient computers?
I just don't really care if some mindless robot sniffs me talking to my girlfriend about where to eat this weekend, or if a program gets wind of my uber-secret nefarious lol-cat trading ring.
Didn't ask, thanks. Don't need to be told that you have nothing to hide.
LET'S HAVE A WAR OF THE ANECDOTES! Har har har har!
Your mental instability is showing.
But none of that has anything to do with my original statement, as I wasn't talking about the stability of the system
You must have mistaken my post for one where I said something about stability.
I simply thought it was funny because the same (type of) UI issues make me feel like Windows requires telepathy.
And last time I used Linux it wouldn't freakin' send jack to the projector at all without a reboot. And if you put the laptop to sleep, it'd crash when it tried to wake up.
Oh cute, you decided to have your little war.
Sure, OS X and Windows have assloads of config files [...] a GUI to edit them (unless you're doing something really, really obscure)[...] All the config files are the same format: XML
The registry didn't seem plaintext last I checked (Win XP). Nor does Regedit really count as a GUI more than Firfox's about:config does.
I was talking about how you need to know about 26 completely different formats of config file to make your goddamned Linux server do what you want in the first place.
Yeah, I get it.
I was talking about how this particular UI element was not like the others, requiring me to know the specific bugs/features of all the software inside out to do something. If I hit 'apply' like in other dialogs, nothing would happen.
Most of which had either no documentation. And the ones that had documentation, didn't have examples of how to use the most common features, rendering them mostly useless.
I've never seen anything except APIs be well documented, anywhere. Extensively documented as if they were paid by the word, but never well.
However, the syntax of config files is usually pretty simple. A very small percentage of X config problems are because of a malformed file.
The difficulty comes in knowing what to put in the file, or which options to select, and it's the same across UIs.
I can't keep that kind of shit in my head. More power to you if you can.
That might be your problem, trying. I don't remember the format of a cron file, I look at the comment at the top of the file.
However, I had to simply remember that this particular wonky UI element worked that way. That's what I see as requiring the telepathy. (Well, prescience I guess, but...)
Companies will not invest that money unless they a reasonable expectation that they are the only ones who will benefit from the investment.
Bullshit. Yes, that's the scare story, but it's ridiculous.
This is like saying companies won't open a store that sold products their competitors sell. Smart companies do aim for the fringes to have less competition, but what you're saying is that with any competition at all, business is impossible.
It's obviously false in 99.3% of cases and like the god-of-the-cracks phenomenon, patent supports point at the leftover areas as where they're absolutely required, like how religious supporters point to our lack of total understand of the big bang as proof for their specific religion.
Without that guarantee of return, these companies would have never bothered to invent VHS, CD, MPEG in the first place.
Why do people buy this shit? You recite corporate psalms well, but have you ever given it any thought?
Why are you(/those like you) always so quick to grant monopoly rights to things I might like to do?
Why not just create one big company, give them monopoly rights to everything, and tax everyone 100% and give it to them? By patent standard the guaranteed profits alone, let alone lack of competition, should make it the most innovating and profitable thing possible. In only a few years science will be complete and the world, a worker's paradise.
Patents are the ones we hate because they are so ridiculously broad (covering concepts and ideas).
Mainly, I think, because they don't allow for independent discovery. There's something so monumentally unfair about creating some hard but obvious like b-frames and then being told someone else owns the idea - such that you can't even write FOSS with it.
Personally, I think the answer is just to ignore the law. Use whichever codec, even some explicitly patented one, and just develop outside their jurisdiction. See if the USA would ban Firefox/etc over it, and if it wouldn't just drive the popularity through the roof anyways. Currently it's an tangible organization but development could be decentralized at any time.
For instance, the piracy craze could switch to a patented format - ideally one infringing on so many competitors patents you could never actually implement it legally. Soon after, all patent-compliant applications (IE, Safari, Chrome) would become irrelevant, as would devices locked around them.
I really dislike how someone starts an ostensibly free service and then funds it with guilt, making their business choices your problem.
I don't know Google's thoughts but I doubt they're losing anything - just not making as much from this guy. I'd imagine simply keeping you from using an MS or Apple product has value, as does increasing their brand by more people using their domain for email. And then there's the advertising factor - if you did have to buy a pay service after ten years, who're you going to do it with, the people who've never nagged you or some random company you heard about via spam?
Considering that you drawing Mo isn't blasphemous, you realize the answer is that they'd riot if they got attention, regardless of the excuse.
The rule, such as it is, is for believers only and is roughly akin to the "no idols" rules of xtianity. That even historical pictures would be bad seems to be a recent invention, somewhat like the ~6000 year age of the Earth some xians believe came from the bible but was instead invented years later by a "scholar".
This is what you get though when you pander to religious people and act like any of their crazy fantasies are true - they then force you to continue the charade. Like a billion loony-bin Napoleons all demanding to be the emperor.
Thanks to the roll-your-own mentality and the prevalence of people who build custom kernels it's not half as risky as it seems. If you were going through making your own edits on production servers, that's risky, if you just use make menuconfig to turn off stuff you won't use it's as close to risk-free as you can get.
Besides, everything needs testing, even the vanilla distro. Most people talking about how trusting custom kernels is crazy probably don't fully test their apps before deployment on a stock kernel.
As an example of a non-kernel way to screw things up... I was wrapping up a contract and one of the last-minute questions was how to keep a cron job from hurting the realtime performance. I said "nice it" and was out the door. Three months later I was back, diagnosing random hard lockups. Bet you can guess where this was going... Instead of nicing the cron job up they niced all of their software down, a lot. Even the non-essentials.
The thing with Linux servers, is if you learn to do things the way they work, you're fine-- you need "telepathy" with whoever wrote the software, because it's nothing but dozens of undocumented assumptions.
It's funny, I'd have said with Linux you need persistence and with Windows you need telepathy.
I always had a terrible time configuring Windows (XP) to play video (as opposed to an empty magenta window) on my projector. It wasn't just a matter of changing the settings and exiting, you had to change them, go into the nvidia tab, make a change, cancel it, and then hit apply in the main settings window. (Or slightly different...) For some reason neither control panel fully worked alone, only this specific combo of the two.
The only clue was a slightly longer flicker when it really applied settings as compared to when it didn't. The specific incantation was discovered accidentally and took forever to reproduce the first few times.
With Linux you at least usually get an error message you can search for.
I guess I prefer a system that I know I can get working if I try to one that should work but is totally opaque when it does not.
Back in the 70s Iran had already started stockpiling mass, gigatonnes of it in finely-powdered high-density silica-composites. If they've continued to acquire mass (and we must assume they have) they could already have dangerous amounts. Leaked CIA documents allege they have access (via slant-drilling technology) to approximately 5.9 yottatonnes of high-grade mass. Enough, if extracted and compacted into a ball, to measure almost 13000km across!
Presumably, the terrorist nation would then attach powerful rockets to their illicit mass and accelerate it, producing powerful gravitational effects - identical (except in scale) to those you admit they already know how to turn into literally unstoppable weapons of mass destruction!
Clearly it's far more dangerous than anyone will admit.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would he deserve punishment? He didn't decide to beat the other guy, he was attacked and the natural consequences happened.
That he wasn't in any danger ignores 1) that he might have been (eggshell skull) and 2) that he didn't know this and shouldn't be expected to - he too was 13.
It should be handled like the bully grabbing an electric fence - not in itself a reason to punish anyone, it delivered its own consequences. What should be punished is the bullying that made the victim feel attacked at what might otherwise have been mere teenage play.
It's a mistake to label something natural, as if that means anything, and he's not acting but describing his view, but otherwise did you mean that you disagree with him that it's beneficial for the victim if they get to beat their tormentor or otherwise force it to stop.
Why?
I fingerpainted the full kernel for Windows 7 when I was a kid. Microsoft owes me money!
Oh yeah, that's exactly what I meant.
Do you realize how many purely conclusory words you used in your post? "*no* expectation", "clearly the system is a liability", "clearly viewed", etc. They're not fooling anyone.
Wrong. Patents clearly are viewed as a minefield - or do you need a cite? Yes, it's subjective, but it's a view held by many in R&D that good or bad they can blow up all too easily. They're too afraid to properly use the patent system in a useful manner because it so unreasonably rewards trolls instead of creators.
That's only true if you're not very good at patent law
And what's the first thing people scream in these threads? "If you're not a patent attorney, you know nothing." Of course I'm not very good at it.
or you have a terrible patent attorney giving you poor advice.
Yes, or very often no attorney. And patents are a minefield...
Trust me - large companies perform due diligence and freedom to operate searches every day.
Their lawyers do, to refine their own patent applications usually. Their engineers certainly do not just browse patents unsupervised.
If the system had value for R&D it'd be the first place engineers turned, like Perl programmers to CPAN.
Congress amended the law when they realized that was an issue. That they amended it to fix that kinda shows their intent.
They fixed that one exploit when issues like RAMBUS misleading standards bodies came to light. They left the basic nature of patents alone though.
Anything that doesn't recognize that while the patent was filed first the second person's ideas aren't necessarily derivative is broken.
Why? We're talking about the exact idea, [...] where I come up with A+B+C+D, and you "independently" come up with A+B+C+D several years later and then try to claim you were first... even though you never published, never applied for a patent, etc.
Not trying to claim I'm first.
[and are saying that] [they] owe [you] money!
No. Merely that I don't owe them any either.
You cannot freely invent your own solution, ever. It's owned in part by others
Yeah, it's amazing how not a single patent has been issued after the first one. To think 220 years later, and we're still on patent #1
For someone so concerned about how my overly conclusive language might be fooling people you're curiously willing to make crap up and try to imply I said it.
"Cannot freely invent"
You know the baggage I'm saying is attached. Yeah. The more patents we have to avoid, the less free.
No, you can freely invent your own solution. Do you instantly get rights to anything and everything you used? No.
To everything I made up myself, yes I should. Nothing less is reasonable.
For anything I copied, then yeah, we can talk.
You get the rights to your invention. So if you patent a stool, and I add a back to it and invent a chair, I can freely get a patent on a chair. I have to pay you a reasonable license fee for use of the stool portion until your patent expires, but that's only fair - I took your stool and added a back to it. Why shouldn't I pay you for your labor?
Did you take my stool design and add a back? If so I might agree. As long as I had done something that wasn't obvious to every other furniture craftsman.
But if you independently invented it or if I didn't help because it's just that trivial then why on earth would I have a cut of that? That'd be stupid.
the cat-exercising patent is abandoned,
It was s
Pay a kernel developer to do their work for your company. You should then have standing to sue when the next generation of t1vos/etc adopt a kernel containing your software. It probably wouldn't be hard to find someone willing.
There's a lot of legal nonsense around it though. In photography (in the USA) registering a copyright (which should be unnecessary) is essential to being able to really pursue a claim and receive damage.
The GPLv3 doesn't require that all parts of a project be GPLed, merely that none of the other parts prevent the obligations under the GPL being met.
If you don't disable a device when booting an unsigned firmware you don't have to release the firmware signing code. If you don't require bit-for-bit identical binaries you aren't responsible for helping users generate them as part of the build environment.
the original company still ends up getting the blame when user modifications break the product. I got really, really sick of dealing with those support issues over time.
Badly run companies run into this. I've worked at ISPs that have been Microsoft's unofficial support desk because they couldn't tell the customer that there's a signal at their cable, the rest is between them and their OS vendor.
Other companies in almost exactly the same demographics have happy users, without supporting their OS or playing weird games, simply by being upfront with the users about where problems lie.
The two situations are you describe are completely differnt ends of the process....
Different ends yes, of the same process though. Let me rework this a bit:
[upstream developer exerting control over] end user [distribution of] software and upstream developer exerting control over a downstream product.
You want control over those below you, but freedom from those above you.
Sure, the GPL has a cost, but then so do commercial libraries ($$$) - why do people present strange what-ifs where the GPL conflicts with some closed-source process as an excuse for non-compliance with the GPL? It'd be like writing two checks for the same money and blaming the first person to cash it for preventing the second person from getting paid.
It's not meant to be free. If you're really, really sick of dealing with it, maybe you simply didn't understand the cost, like many people didn't understand the implications of their variable-rate mortgages.
What submarine patents? Since 2000, all patent applications have been published within 18 months of filing.
I'm using it to show the intent of the law. There's *no* expectation that others can benefit from patents, and that's why the law is flawed.
This specific exploit is fixed but the whole system remains one where you hope you don't end up using someone else's ideas as compared to one where you eagerly seek out patents for their wisdom. Clearly the system is a liability.
No, they're decided by the BPAI, which is a pseudo-court.
No, what I mean is that you presented "nobody will believe you invented this independently" as if it were a real problem - it is not, real courts deal with this issue all the time in many fields.
Nonetheless, to return to the original point, interferences come up when inventor A and inventor B independently invent something and independently apply for patents. They don't come up when inventor A gets a patent and "inventor" B suddenly claims that he came up with the idea 20 years ago.
Anything that doesn't recognize that while the patent was filed first the second person's ideas aren't necessarily derivative is broken. Patents are clearly viewed like a minefield, where the patent adds nothing of value to the state of the art because everyone is afraid to go looking, or even be told of its existence.
Perhaps the answer is to stop copying code from your competitors and actually invent your own solutions.
Aside from the potential copyright issue I hadn't heard about before, I think this statement is a terrible misstatement of the situation.
You cannot freely invent your own solution, ever. It's owned in part by others - not those who've seriously advanced science like Newton, but patent trolls who camp on using XOR to draw to the screen, lasers to tease cats, or the number of confirmation steps in an order.
In order to be a rational human being you must NOT believe in ANYTHING.
OK. I will take your advice. That means that I don't believe in that, either. Now what do I do?
Think, about it, before acting. Like with everything else.
Trying to argue the existence or non-existence of God via logic is pointless.
Not to those who get it. To them it's the red-pill.
But how would you go about it?
That's because patents require public disclosure and publishing.
No, it works with submarine patents (unreleased) so it's not based on the possibility of copying the work.
People aren't going to believe that it was an independent act of creation, no matter how much you claim you've never heard of this Shakespeare guy.
That's what logs and receipts are for. Courts decide this sort of thing all the time.
Otherwise, there is no real security problem.
Facts are facts, the security problem is up to you.
No one at Google has probably ever ACTUALLY read a single email of yours. There is though a mindless computer crunching through all the words in your email forming associations.
Um yeah, thanks. Got that... Had you thought that I thought they used pigeons? Or gnomes under NDAs? Sentient computers?
I just don't really care if some mindless robot sniffs me talking to my girlfriend about where to eat this weekend, or if a program gets wind of my uber-secret nefarious lol-cat trading ring.
Didn't ask, thanks. Don't need to be told that you have nothing to hide.
LET'S HAVE A WAR OF THE ANECDOTES! Har har har har!
Your mental instability is showing.
But none of that has anything to do with my original statement, as I wasn't talking about the stability of the system
You must have mistaken my post for one where I said something about stability.
I simply thought it was funny because the same (type of) UI issues make me feel like Windows requires telepathy.
And last time I used Linux it wouldn't freakin' send jack to the projector at all without a reboot. And if you put the laptop to sleep, it'd crash when it tried to wake up.
Oh cute, you decided to have your little war.
Sure, OS X and Windows have assloads of config files [...] a GUI to edit them (unless you're doing something really, really obscure)[...] All the config files are the same format: XML
The registry didn't seem plaintext last I checked (Win XP). Nor does Regedit really count as a GUI more than Firfox's about:config does.
I was talking about how you need to know about 26 completely different formats of config file to make your goddamned Linux server do what you want in the first place.
Yeah, I get it.
I was talking about how this particular UI element was not like the others, requiring me to know the specific bugs/features of all the software inside out to do something. If I hit 'apply' like in other dialogs, nothing would happen.
Most of which had either no documentation. And the ones that had documentation, didn't have examples of how to use the most common features, rendering them mostly useless.
I've never seen anything except APIs be well documented, anywhere. Extensively documented as if they were paid by the word, but never well.
However, the syntax of config files is usually pretty simple. A very small percentage of X config problems are because of a malformed file.
The difficulty comes in knowing what to put in the file, or which options to select, and it's the same across UIs.
I can't keep that kind of shit in my head. More power to you if you can.
That might be your problem, trying. I don't remember the format of a cron file, I look at the comment at the top of the file.
However, I had to simply remember that this particular wonky UI element worked that way. That's what I see as requiring the telepathy. (Well, prescience I guess, but...)
Why do you think
Because he has a naive view of patents that's like copyrights where simply not using someone else's work means something.
By that (rational) standard, Theora is unencumbered, because it doesn't benefit from any software patents.
If the majority of people knew how patents worked there wouldn't be patents. They're such an obvious injustice.
Which wouldn't protect you anyways. Even if you independently invented everything they'd still shut you down for one overlap. That's what patents are.
No. It's should be the answer. Independent creation should be an absolute defense against patent infringement, but it is not.
Even if you know nothing of my patent and have totally reinvented the field yourself, you lose.
What copyright problems does VP8 have? Link?
Companies will not invest that money unless they a reasonable expectation that they are the only ones who will benefit from the investment.
Bullshit. Yes, that's the scare story, but it's ridiculous.
This is like saying companies won't open a store that sold products their competitors sell. Smart companies do aim for the fringes to have less competition, but what you're saying is that with any competition at all, business is impossible.
It's obviously false in 99.3% of cases and like the god-of-the-cracks phenomenon, patent supports point at the leftover areas as where they're absolutely required, like how religious supporters point to our lack of total understand of the big bang as proof for their specific religion.
Without that guarantee of return, these companies would have never bothered to invent VHS, CD, MPEG in the first place.
Why do people buy this shit? You recite corporate psalms well, but have you ever given it any thought?
Why are you(/those like you) always so quick to grant monopoly rights to things I might like to do?
Why not just create one big company, give them monopoly rights to everything, and tax everyone 100% and give it to them? By patent standard the guaranteed profits alone, let alone lack of competition, should make it the most innovating and profitable thing possible. In only a few years science will be complete and the world, a worker's paradise.
Patents are the ones we hate because they are so ridiculously broad (covering concepts and ideas).
Mainly, I think, because they don't allow for independent discovery. There's something so monumentally unfair about creating some hard but obvious like b-frames and then being told someone else owns the idea - such that you can't even write FOSS with it.
Personally, I think the answer is just to ignore the law. Use whichever codec, even some explicitly patented one, and just develop outside their jurisdiction. See if the USA would ban Firefox/etc over it, and if it wouldn't just drive the popularity through the roof anyways. Currently it's an tangible organization but development could be decentralized at any time.
For instance, the piracy craze could switch to a patented format - ideally one infringing on so many competitors patents you could never actually implement it legally. Soon after, all patent-compliant applications (IE, Safari, Chrome) would become irrelevant, as would devices locked around them.
Considering that's about what Amazon has with the one-click patent, yeah sure.
But even MS though doesn't claim ownership of all patents developed on Windows, which is somewhat what this is would be like.
I really dislike how someone starts an ostensibly free service and then funds it with guilt, making their business choices your problem.
I don't know Google's thoughts but I doubt they're losing anything - just not making as much from this guy. I'd imagine simply keeping you from using an MS or Apple product has value, as does increasing their brand by more people using their domain for email. And then there's the advertising factor - if you did have to buy a pay service after ten years, who're you going to do it with, the people who've never nagged you or some random company you heard about via spam?
You're not as important as you think you are.
Neither are you, but they read all unencrypted email. Data-mining is just that cheap.
Considering that you drawing Mo isn't blasphemous, you realize the answer is that they'd riot if they got attention, regardless of the excuse.
The rule, such as it is, is for believers only and is roughly akin to the "no idols" rules of xtianity. That even historical pictures would be bad seems to be a recent invention, somewhat like the ~6000 year age of the Earth some xians believe came from the bible but was instead invented years later by a "scholar".
This is what you get though when you pander to religious people and act like any of their crazy fantasies are true - they then force you to continue the charade. Like a billion loony-bin Napoleons all demanding to be the emperor.
Thanks to the roll-your-own mentality and the prevalence of people who build custom kernels it's not half as risky as it seems. If you were going through making your own edits on production servers, that's risky, if you just use make menuconfig to turn off stuff you won't use it's as close to risk-free as you can get.
Besides, everything needs testing, even the vanilla distro. Most people talking about how trusting custom kernels is crazy probably don't fully test their apps before deployment on a stock kernel.
As an example of a non-kernel way to screw things up... I was wrapping up a contract and one of the last-minute questions was how to keep a cron job from hurting the realtime performance. I said "nice it" and was out the door. Three months later I was back, diagnosing random hard lockups. Bet you can guess where this was going... Instead of nicing the cron job up they niced all of their software down, a lot. Even the non-essentials.
The thing with Linux servers, is if you learn to do things the way they work, you're fine-- you need "telepathy" with whoever wrote the software, because it's nothing but dozens of undocumented assumptions.
It's funny, I'd have said with Linux you need persistence and with Windows you need telepathy.
I always had a terrible time configuring Windows (XP) to play video (as opposed to an empty magenta window) on my projector. It wasn't just a matter of changing the settings and exiting, you had to change them, go into the nvidia tab, make a change, cancel it, and then hit apply in the main settings window. (Or slightly different...) For some reason neither control panel fully worked alone, only this specific combo of the two.
The only clue was a slightly longer flicker when it really applied settings as compared to when it didn't. The specific incantation was discovered accidentally and took forever to reproduce the first few times.
With Linux you at least usually get an error message you can search for.
I guess I prefer a system that I know I can get working if I try to one that should work but is totally opaque when it does not.
The break of the peace charge requires a trial, evidence, etc.
A law against an off-lead dog on the other hand is just another zero-tolerance policy selectively applied.
we don't actually have the tech
Back in the 70s Iran had already started stockpiling mass, gigatonnes of it in finely-powdered high-density silica-composites. If they've continued to acquire mass (and we must assume they have) they could already have dangerous amounts. Leaked CIA documents allege they have access (via slant-drilling technology) to approximately 5.9 yottatonnes of high-grade mass. Enough, if extracted and compacted into a ball, to measure almost 13000km across!
Presumably, the terrorist nation would then attach powerful rockets to their illicit mass and accelerate it, producing powerful gravitational effects - identical (except in scale) to those you admit they already know how to turn into literally unstoppable weapons of mass destruction!
Clearly it's far more dangerous than anyone will admit.