They only have to raise their prices in Europe, not in the rest of the world. Since the cap is based on world-wide revenues, it still allows for effectively passing the cost on to the European consumer.
Let's say 10% of MS's revenue is from Europe (~$10million/day). If they raise their European prices by 50%, that covers the fine, but raises their world wide revenue by $5million/day, which adds $250,000 to the fine, which can be passed on by an additional 2.5% of the original amount.
If I could remember my math I could figure out the exact amount they need to raise prices in Europe to pass all the costs on to Europeans, but I doubt it's over 53%.
The problem with this theory is that *every* email ever sent is "hearsay". It is one computer claiming to be telling you what some other computer claims someone said... With several additional "claimings" inserted in between.
It is true that it's quite difficult to insert ex post facto fake email (depending on exactly how you retrieve the mail, how it's stored, and how much time you have to prepare a trojan restore program).
It *is* however, very easy to fake *at the time* the original email was sent. It's even possible (probably easier, in fact) to do this from outside the building.
Modern mechanical and mental spam filters make it easier to get away with it, too, by making it more likely that the recipient won't read a carefully worded fake:-).
Given that fact (and I assure you it is a fact), how does anyone ever trust *anything* that appears in *any* email? It's not a question of it being faked after the subpoena, but one of verifying it's validity at the time of sending using only data available N years later.
It's hard enough to even figure out that headers were forged on an email you sent yesterday, but with sufficient will (and subpoena's:-) one can dig into the logs of intermediary hosts and prove it.
You might be able to assert with reasonably likelihood that an email from 2 years ago was forged, but I dare you to ever have any hope of *proving* it.
Surely with his experience with the Ender movie he's noticed that visual media and literature are different things...
By and large, good SF *sucks* when it's moved to the screen.
The only times that it's ever been done well has been when a completely new story was written for TV/movies, and most of those stories would be hopeless hacks in the world of literature.
We've all seen The Terminator, Alien, and many others moved to book form. They suck just as bad as the other way around.
Star Trek was good as a visual form of SF *for its time*. It dealt with issues that other dramas of the time were avoiding. The characters may have been wooden and the acting bad, but no one should make the mistake of thinking that it wasn't ground breaking.
Most of the followons have suffered from sequel disease: Regression to the Mean. Fair enough. Has it had it's day? Probably. Does it make sense to kill it off now? Probably. But none of that even begins to touch on why people were fanatics about the original series, nor why they continue to flock to the sequels (nostalgia, mostly).
Maybe I'm missing something here, but who cares if your key is lost or you drop out of the project?
The person that takes it up can just get their own key and sign it with that.
For corporations (and maybe the very largest of OSS foundations) there are valid reasons to care about these issues, because they have a name, and generally only 1 name, to protect. I just don't see what the point is for smaller OSS developers.
So what if the next version to come out is signed with a different key owned by a different person than the last version? If it's OSS that could happen anyway due to a fork.
If you think that there are a bunch of people out there that have developed a huge level of trust in your open source project, you're deluding yourself. If you really think people will need to have some kind of statement to the effect that the new developer should now be trusted, just write up that statement and sign it with your key before you leave the project.
If you lose your key for some reason, have the CA revoke it and give you a new one... Sure, it's a pain, but not as much of a pain as most of the suggestions I've seen here.
This isn't hard to answer. The difference is intent. If any of these things is done with the intent to defraud either Google or a competitor then it's fraud.
The legal system is quite adept at making this distinction, in spite of it being hard to write literally into law (or at least it considers itself to be adept:-).
Just because a stupid employee doesn't know the reason doesn't mean there isn't one.
Cell phone companies are among the most defrauded industries in the world. People constantly are coming up with new ways to get a phone, run up a huge airtime bill, and then disappear.
A deposit is a perfectly reasonably precaution.
And no, they aren't saying that you're a criminal any more than you're saying you're a reckless driver by buying insurance.
Looking back in the archives, I can't possibly believe that the asian tsunami didn't show up in the top three categories in late December 2004-January 2005.
Tracking the *datelines* of the articles is a lousy way to track what the article is about, and it seems like that might be what they did. There weren't many reporters on the ground in Aceh province...
There are going to be problems out there in mathematics that inherently have proofs that are too complex for a human mind to comprehend, and which have too many steps for a human being to accurately check by hand.
This is trivial to prove by induction:-). Any complex mathematics problem can be made more complex by taking an existing proof and augmenting the problem so that it requires 1 additional step to prove. QED:-).
Unless you accept by faith that all such problems can be reduced to the same number or fewer steps by human intuition adding a layer of abstraction, this implies that if we refuse to accept computer aided proofs, mathematics will eventually be inherently limited by the frailty of human brains.
Personally, I think that there is probably a considerable body of interesting mathematics that falls into this category, and so I would prefer we find some way to accept help from machines.
I read that as "we don't want the State of Massachusetts to come down on us like a ton of bricks on the heels of our successful slippery escape the last time, so we choose to be magnanimous and concede the point that people have a right to read government documents (since that won't really hurt us in any substantial way)".
Not to put too fine a point on it, but having read the article, those figures *still* don't include crystalizing the silicon in the first place, but assume use of semi-conductor industry waste.
I don't understand why they can't seem to calculate the correct value after all this time.
Ok, I'm going to go out on a limb here, but there is one major reason that MS garnered a monopoly in desktop OS's, and that's businesses.
Businesses aren't going to run their sensitive applications on someone else's server. Yes, you could push out a tech like this to local servers, but then you have to ask yourself why bother.
As for home machines... People *like* having the same OS running at home as at work. Learning time is non-trivial for non-geeks and geeks alike. You could mitigate this to some degree, but unless they're willing to get into look-and-feel wars with MS, Google isn't going to satisfy this need.
The *other* main reason people buy computers for home use is gaming. If it weren't for gaming, *no one*, and I mean *no one* would *actually* need a 3 GHz machine at home. Ok... except for people doing lots of video/image editing, which has more or less the same constraints.
If anyone thinks it's possible to run even a relic like Quake on a server, even with gigabit ethernet, and have it satisfy gamers, they're kidding themselves.
People like general purpose computers because they are *general purpose*.
The only people this is likely to attract are grandparents that want to keep in touch with their kids, and they've all already been slurped up by MSN/WebTV.
The whole reason that copyrights no longer have to be registered in the US is the Berne convention, which requires that signatory countries may not impose registration requirements on foreign nationals in order to obtain copyright protection.
Since there's no way to acertain without finding the copyright holder whether that person is a foreign national or not, even if we required registration of copyrighted works as a way to get around this, it still would violate the treaty.
About the only solution would be one similar to that cited in Candadian law, where the Copyright Office can determine that a work is orphaned, set a compulsary license fee, and collect it in case the author is ever found. They've granted a whole 125 of these licenses to date.
If you're asking "Did some unidentified person referred to as 'Jack the Ripper' break the law, the answer is almost certainly 'yes'".
However, if you were to phrase it as "Did Fred Brinkley, whom I believe to be Jack the Ripper, break the law?" the answer would be "no", even if your belief happens to be correct, *until* he is tried and convicted. Since that can't happen, then as a technicality there's no actual person who broke the law, even though some unidentified person did. Confused yet?
That's what "presumption of innocence" means.
(Ignoring, for the moment, that I know nothing about British law other than it is the source of Common Law precedence rules, and that they may not have a strict "presumption of innocence").
The problem is that invalidating a patent, even with prior art (in fact *especially* with prior art) is an expensive proposition.
The way large companies "protect themselves" from competitors with annoying patents is by having the trading cards necessary to force a cross-license rather than litigate. Usually if the attacker is a competitor, they will be doing things in the same space as said company.
The real danger to big companies is licensing farms with giant piles of (ultimately) useless patents with which they can extort money.
Increasing patent quality helps solve that problem.
As for Europe, Microsoft still wants *good* software patents. They seem to be arguing (justifiably) that they'd be better off with fewer stupid patents (even, or perhaps especially, including their own which are expensive to acquire/maintain and ultimately useless in the long run).
Big countries still want nuclear weapons, they just don't want them to be easy to acquire.
I've always wondered how they would "prove" (even to the level of preponderance of evidence) that you were up/downloading if you have an unsecured wireless router.
Sure, parents might be liable for the actions of their kids, but complete strangers?
Of course, it's hard to argue that it's a win to convert civil copyright infringment into felony obstruction of justice by carefully deleting all evidence of your up/downloaded files when you get the subpoena...
I agree with what you said in general, but there's one little bit I'd like to highlight. You said "obvious to any programmer presented with the same problem". The difficulty with this statement is that often the problem is 99% of the invention.
Clearly 1-click purchases aren't a good example (because they're stupid and hardly novel), but it's what everyone is familiar with, so here goes:
99% of the invention of 1-click purchases is stating the problem: "hey wouldn't it be cool if there were a way to let users buy stuff on the internet by pressing just 1 button".
Yes, yes, yes.... the answer to that is "no", and "it's been done before". But the invention *is* the question.
Much like "wouldn't it be cool if there were a way to take the existing manual process for carding cotton and trivially transform it into a purely mechanical process?". Any competent engineer could have come up with the cotton gin even at the time if presented with this exact problem.
I would say that my opinion is that in modern times, humans will usually (though not always) be inferior to the compiler at performing local optimizations.
The only kinds of optimizations where humans have the edge are largely global ones. For example: protocols for optimizing thread usage and mutex exclusion.
While I'm unwilling to extend this confidence to all embedded compilers, I'm largely willing to extend it to those embedded compilers based on gcc.
I think the reason to optimize code in the source is in situations where it will actually *improve* the readbility or maintainability of the code, when taking into account comments, variable names, and other structural means of aiding this.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say 10% of MS's revenue is from Europe (~$10million/day). If they raise their European prices by 50%, that covers the fine, but raises their world wide revenue by $5million/day, which adds $250,000 to the fine, which can be passed on by an additional 2.5% of the original amount.
If I could remember my math I could figure out the exact amount they need to raise prices in Europe to pass all the costs on to Europeans, but I doubt it's over 53%.
The problem with this theory is that *every* email ever sent is "hearsay". It is one computer claiming to be telling you what some other computer claims someone said... With several additional "claimings" inserted in between.
It *is* however, very easy to fake *at the time* the original email was sent. It's even possible (probably easier, in fact) to do this from outside the building.
Modern mechanical and mental spam filters make it easier to get away with it, too, by making it more likely that the recipient won't read a carefully worded fake :-).
Given that fact (and I assure you it is a fact), how does anyone ever trust *anything* that appears in *any* email? It's not a question of it being faked after the subpoena, but one of verifying it's validity at the time of sending using only data available N years later.
It's hard enough to even figure out that headers were forged on an email you sent yesterday, but with sufficient will (and subpoena's :-) one can dig into the logs of intermediary hosts and prove it.
You might be able to assert with reasonably likelihood that an email from 2 years ago was forged, but I dare you to ever have any hope of *proving* it.
By and large, good SF *sucks* when it's moved to the screen.
The only times that it's ever been done well has been when a completely new story was written for TV/movies, and most of those stories would be hopeless hacks in the world of literature.
We've all seen The Terminator, Alien, and many others moved to book form. They suck just as bad as the other way around.
Star Trek was good as a visual form of SF *for its time*. It dealt with issues that other dramas of the time were avoiding. The characters may have been wooden and the acting bad, but no one should make the mistake of thinking that it wasn't ground breaking.
Most of the followons have suffered from sequel disease: Regression to the Mean. Fair enough. Has it had it's day? Probably. Does it make sense to kill it off now? Probably. But none of that even begins to touch on why people were fanatics about the original series, nor why they continue to flock to the sequels (nostalgia, mostly).
For corporations (and maybe the very largest of OSS foundations) there are valid reasons to care about these issues, because they have a name, and generally only 1 name, to protect. I just don't see what the point is for smaller OSS developers.
So what if the next version to come out is signed with a different key owned by a different person than the last version? If it's OSS that could happen anyway due to a fork.
If you think that there are a bunch of people out there that have developed a huge level of trust in your open source project, you're deluding yourself. If you really think people will need to have some kind of statement to the effect that the new developer should now be trusted, just write up that statement and sign it with your key before you leave the project.
If you lose your key for some reason, have the CA revoke it and give you a new one... Sure, it's a pain, but not as much of a pain as most of the suggestions I've seen here.
I'd like to develop a nation, but I'm missing a couple of key elements, land and people.
I guess I could simulate them, but if that's all it's talking about then this is really old news.
The legal system is quite adept at making this distinction, in spite of it being hard to write literally into law (or at least it considers itself to be adept :-).
Cell phone companies are among the most defrauded industries in the world. People constantly are coming up with new ways to get a phone, run up a huge airtime bill, and then disappear.
A deposit is a perfectly reasonably precaution.
And no, they aren't saying that you're a criminal any more than you're saying you're a reckless driver by buying insurance.
Does anyone doubt that this is the *real* reason Microsoft is pushing "Trusted Computing"?
Imagine a world where websites could *easily* refuse to serve you any content unless you are using an "approved" browser that doesn't block ads?
So you're saying it's anti-business, right?
Tracking the *datelines* of the articles is a lousy way to track what the article is about, and it seems like that might be what they did. There weren't many reporters on the ground in Aceh province...
It's not as obvious as it sounds.
Can I mod the article title -1 Troll, please.
As in hugely, enormously, ~7 orders of magnitude more dangerous than 747s.
So there!
This is trivial to prove by induction :-). Any complex mathematics problem can be made more complex by taking an existing proof and augmenting the problem so that it requires 1 additional step to prove. QED :-).
Unless you accept by faith that all such problems can be reduced to the same number or fewer steps by human intuition adding a layer of abstraction, this implies that if we refuse to accept computer aided proofs, mathematics will eventually be inherently limited by the frailty of human brains.
Personally, I think that there is probably a considerable body of interesting mathematics that falls into this category, and so I would prefer we find some way to accept help from machines.
I read that as "we don't want the State of Massachusetts to come down on us like a ton of bricks on the heels of our successful slippery escape the last time, so we choose to be magnanimous and concede the point that people have a right to read government documents (since that won't really hurt us in any substantial way)".
I don't understand why they can't seem to calculate the correct value after all this time.
Businesses aren't going to run their sensitive applications on someone else's server. Yes, you could push out a tech like this to local servers, but then you have to ask yourself why bother.
As for home machines... People *like* having the same OS running at home as at work. Learning time is non-trivial for non-geeks and geeks alike. You could mitigate this to some degree, but unless they're willing to get into look-and-feel wars with MS, Google isn't going to satisfy this need.
The *other* main reason people buy computers for home use is gaming. If it weren't for gaming, *no one*, and I mean *no one* would *actually* need a 3 GHz machine at home. Ok... except for people doing lots of video/image editing, which has more or less the same constraints.
If anyone thinks it's possible to run even a relic like Quake on a server, even with gigabit ethernet, and have it satisfy gamers, they're kidding themselves.
People like general purpose computers because they are *general purpose*.
The only people this is likely to attract are grandparents that want to keep in touch with their kids, and they've all already been slurped up by MSN/WebTV.
The whole reason that copyrights no longer have to be registered in the US is the Berne convention, which requires that signatory countries may not impose registration requirements on foreign nationals in order to obtain copyright protection.
Since there's no way to acertain without finding the copyright holder whether that person is a foreign national or not, even if we required registration of copyrighted works as a way to get around this, it still would violate the treaty.
About the only solution would be one similar to that cited in Candadian law, where the Copyright Office can determine that a work is orphaned, set a compulsary license fee, and collect it in case the author is ever found. They've granted a whole 125 of these licenses to date.
Which doesn't really solve the problem at all...
However, if you were to phrase it as "Did Fred Brinkley, whom I believe to be Jack the Ripper, break the law?" the answer would be "no", even if your belief happens to be correct, *until* he is tried and convicted. Since that can't happen, then as a technicality there's no actual person who broke the law, even though some unidentified person did. Confused yet?
That's what "presumption of innocence" means.
(Ignoring, for the moment, that I know nothing about British law other than it is the source of Common Law precedence rules, and that they may not have a strict "presumption of innocence").
The way large companies "protect themselves" from competitors with annoying patents is by having the trading cards necessary to force a cross-license rather than litigate. Usually if the attacker is a competitor, they will be doing things in the same space as said company.
The real danger to big companies is licensing farms with giant piles of (ultimately) useless patents with which they can extort money.
Increasing patent quality helps solve that problem.
As for Europe, Microsoft still wants *good* software patents. They seem to be arguing (justifiably) that they'd be better off with fewer stupid patents (even, or perhaps especially, including their own which are expensive to acquire/maintain and ultimately useless in the long run).
Big countries still want nuclear weapons, they just don't want them to be easy to acquire.
Sure, parents might be liable for the actions of their kids, but complete strangers?
Of course, it's hard to argue that it's a win to convert civil copyright infringment into felony obstruction of justice by carefully deleting all evidence of your up/downloaded files when you get the subpoena...
Clearly 1-click purchases aren't a good example (because they're stupid and hardly novel), but it's what everyone is familiar with, so here goes:
99% of the invention of 1-click purchases is stating the problem: "hey wouldn't it be cool if there were a way to let users buy stuff on the internet by pressing just 1 button".
Yes, yes, yes.... the answer to that is "no", and "it's been done before". But the invention *is* the question.
Much like "wouldn't it be cool if there were a way to take the existing manual process for carding cotton and trivially transform it into a purely mechanical process?". Any competent engineer could have come up with the cotton gin even at the time if presented with this exact problem.
The only kinds of optimizations where humans have the edge are largely global ones. For example: protocols for optimizing thread usage and mutex exclusion.
While I'm unwilling to extend this confidence to all embedded compilers, I'm largely willing to extend it to those embedded compilers based on gcc.
I think the reason to optimize code in the source is in situations where it will actually *improve* the readbility or maintainability of the code, when taking into account comments, variable names, and other structural means of aiding this.
Every line of code is a potential bug.