Given providing Wifi access has little to do with running an airline or an airport, that would strike me as exactly the kind of stipulation that gives contracts a bad name to begin with. Assuming the airline did sign such a contract, do you think the airline was given a straight choice, or was it more likely "Yeah, you can not sign if you want. Shame though, because we're the only airport you could possibly hope to use to provide service to Boston on any reasonable scale, and you do want to provide airline service here, right?"
I know the pseudo-libertarian mob thinks contracts are some holy concept that must never be undermined, but I personally think the entire concept should be thrown out and rethought. Until it is, allowing agencies to overrule contracts where one group is imposing ludicrous conditions on another (and banning 802.11 points certainly counts as that) strikes me as a right thing to do.
You need to think more strategically and more about the aims of the people involved.
Bin Laden's ultimate goal is very clear. He may have had "short term" issues, such as the whole Non-Islamic troops on the Holy Land thing which supposedly was a trigger for attacks on the West, but even that reflects an overall goal and overall view of the world. Bin Laden wants a united Arab superstate. That's it. That's the #1 issue.
Right now, the various countries that would make up such a state are divided and ruled by various "royal families" whose power would be reluctantly released. Unless they're on Bin Laden's side, to the point of eye-swiveling ideological madness, they're not going to give up power in favour of said superstate. They're not even going to set in motion a set of events that will lead to a united Arab superstate after their deaths, because as monarchs, that would be undermining their children and their own ideological reasons for believing they have a right to that power in the first place.
If you're Bin Laden, how do you change that? Is it through persuasion, or do you want to persue strategies that unite Arabs, and create chaos that undermines the existing governments?
Do you think Bin Laden expected the US to say "OMG! We've been so wrong in that part of the world" when he masterminded a plot to murder 3,000 Americans in a single morning in one of the most dramatic ways possible, and simply withdraw our troops from the region and rethink our policies on oil. Even if he did, do you think that a terrorist who, since, has done little but help (and probably not help very much) turn one war the US is involved in into a bit of a morass, would expect the US to have that response if he makes a speech just before an election praising the politician most likely to pull out of the region, and against the incumbent who has staked his reputation on a policy pretty much anyone can see is causing chaos there?
The important thing to recognize is that this isn't about changing the US's view of itself, it's about making use of the behaviour of the most powerful countries on Earth. If you view the US, as most do, as an intensely proud country with a streak straight out of a Wild West movie for vengence and justice, you don't attack them expecting the US to do what you've asked them to do. You expect the US to have one reaction, and that's to lash out at you.
Of course, it's possible Bin Laden is a complete dimwit who really doesn't think anything through, but the most powerful country in Earth hasn't been able to capture him in five years, and it's unquestionably true that US involvement since 9/11 has destroyed one of Bin Laden's major ideological opponents (Saddam Hussein), undermined most of the governments there, and stirred up a certain amount of Arab unity in opposition to the US and anything it might be associated with, including the local emirate governments. So either Bin Laden has accidentally been successful (Madrid bombings excepting, but the Spanish government fucked that up by lying about it), or this is more or less what he intended to happen. The idea that he wanted to demonstrate our vulnerability or persuade ordinary Americans of some awful truths of rest-of-world existance strikes me as a tad improbable.
I think your recollection may be a little hazy, but I'm not that surprised because WinOS2 was interestingly designed.
WinOS/2 worked in a similar way to "Classic" in Mac OS X or "Wine" in GNU/Linux. There was a subsystem that ran that ran the Windows applications within it. You had a choice in OS/2 (which is probably where the confusion lies) between sharing your desktop with Windows and OS/2 applications, or running the Windows applications on a seperate screen. Depending on the type of application you were running, frequently the latter was the only way to get the thing to work without buttons or icons being unavailable.
There's less such legacy issues with Linux under OpenBSD because, for the most part, Linux applications are using X11 and other shared APIs to interact with the user. At the same time, I can see people wanting to run GNOME/Linux apps under a seperate GNOME/X11 instance to OpenBSD apps, given they're linking to separate libraries, and in that case, two different "screens" might be useful.
Shouldn't be too difficult to find the culprit, just look for someone extremely dissatisfied with their service.
There is absolutely no way that a customer could have planted this bomb. Nobody who has ever been a PayPal customer has any idea how to contact PayPal, let alone their actual physical address...
The Do Not Call list doesn't cover these types of pre-recorded telemarketing calls (not least because, as the article points out, they're illegal anyway.) We receive them at home, I've even had a few to my cellphone. I'm on the Do Not Call list. I'm not even a US citizen so telling me who to vote for is doubly annoying.
And if they flout the DNC list, then, well, what's the point of being on it if you're not going to enforce it. You appear to be saying "You should put yourself on various lists you're on anyway, and then ignore it when people call." What a great idea! Render the list entirely useless!
I'm fully in favour of suing in these instances. We're not talking about bankrupting judgements of the "six-digit lawyers fees alone" variety, we're talking about small claims court, being used to enforce a law that is perfectly legitimate, whose flouters are being deliberately anti-social and committing offenses against you, the suer.
There are specific areas of the brain that light up when you lie, even if you aren't conciously aware that it is a lie, from what I understand.
I don't think it's a lie if you're not conciously aware of it. But assuming what's above is meant to be "an untruth" or something like that, could this revolutionise science and the pursuit of knowledge?
No longer would we have to do complicated experiments. Just determine a hypothesis, and then ask someone questions based upon predictions made by that hypothesis. Is there life on Mars? Was Venus once like Earth? Is Mad TV actually funny? Perform the lie detector test, and no matter how clueless the interviewee, the connection between what they say and what the detector says will tell you the truthiness of whatever it is you're trying to find out.
That's more of an open source NEXTSTEP. Certainly, massive components are missing if you want to replace OS X with GNUStep/Linux, even ignoring binary compatability issues. These include Carbon, various major frameworks, and Quartz. Much of what's "there" is half done - the Dock, for example, is implemented in both WindowMaker and GWorkspace, in the former being complete but not integrated with GNUstep, in the latter being incomplete and semi-integrated with GNUstep but not with anything else.
GNUStep is getting there, and could easily be competition for GNOME or KDE, but in some ways it's a little late for that. Leaving aside the massive headstart in mindshare of either of those two platforms, GNUStep's reliance upon unmanaged Objective C means it has a long way to go, whereas GNOME is beginning to integrate Mono, and both GNOME and KDE are integrating Python.
Patents are relatively damaging, they're a net removal of a technology from the public domain in the hope that the existance of the patent system itself will encourage invention over-all. Copyright only rewards actual creation with monopolies. If someone chooses not to make use of a copyrighted item, they're not restricted in any way.
Lifetime or X years, whichever is longer, strikes me as a reasonable copyright term length. Patents, on the other hand... I'd like to see them even further restricted, or abolished altogether in favour of a system of grants and prizes.
Well, true, and if the charge is fraud then it's easily dismissed. But there's no guarantee that it is fraud, just as if I produced a fake $100 bill, I'd be arrested, but not on fraud charges.
People get very hung up on "intent" and generally seem to assume it's either applied to everything in law or nothing. In practice, it seriously depends on the law (and often area of law) in question.
In Britain, whose libel law I'm more familiar with, truth is not an absolute defense. I raised this on a previous occasion and pointed out, for example, that describing someone as "drunk" who has no (proven and fair) reputation for alcoholism has, in the past, caused massive wins at the libel courts for the "accused drunks", even when said state of being was proven with witnesses. (The satirical magazine Private Eye uses the phrase "Tired and emotional" instead as a result, although arguably that's no less libelous, it just requires more work by the plaintiff to prove that an average reader would interpret that phrase as meaning "drunk".)
What I was then told by US lawyers is that, actually, yes, that situation is true in the US too. Describing someone as "drunk" is a can of worms, no matter how true the allegation is.
The problem is there are many statements you can make that are "true" that, nonetheless, would damage someone's reputation disproportionally and unfairly. Saying someone "even lies to their wife" on the (unsaid) basis that they disguised their true reasons for bringing the wife to a surprise birthday party, for example, would be extremely damaging and unfair. Yes, it's technically true, but the phrasing puts an idea into people's minds that leaves them with an entirely wrong view of the victim.
I don't know how US libel law works in that regard. I find it hard to believe that any argument that starts with "Well, my allegation was technically true" is going to hold up in court.
Judicial activism to me is any decision which is pretty obviously wrong.
Then you're redefining it. Judicial activism is any decision where the decision is wrong legally and constitutionally. Kelo vs New London was absolutely right on both terms. What's wrong is the current state of law and constitution. The constitution should spell out more specifically what constitutes public interest, and the law should, in the mean time, clarify the issue to prevent obvious abuses.
The Supreme Court said, quite rightly, it wasn't in a position to judge what constituted the "public interest" in New London. The problem with the issue is the entirely subjective and localized phrase "public interest". It needs fixing.
None of the judges in Kelo vs New London said they thought it was a good use of eminent domain. None of the judges said they agreed it was in the public interest. They said the Supreme Court wasn't in a position to judge. Quite right. Now stop blaming them, and fix the laws.
It's worth pointing out that Jonathan Schwarz has gone out of his way to make it plain the GPL is being considered as a possible license. The main issue I think Sun has is that they prefer GPL3, with its patent retaliation clauses, to GPL2. GPL3 hasn't been released yet, and thus far is fairly controvertial (For reasons I continue to find bizarre.)
A somewhat controvertial example might be the original versions of the APSL (Apple Public Source License) under which early versions of open-source Darwin were released.
The FSF considered it non-free for a variety of reasons, not least Apple's ability to revoke it at any time. It was heralded as "Open Source" by ESR, then head of the Open Source Initiative. Of course, many people argued it wasn't, and it was part of the reason for the schism which ended up with Bruce Perens quitting the OSI, IIRC.
Only if you redfine 'leak' to be something other than data which is no longer reachable.
You mean redefine it back? A memory leak is simply a set of circumstances in which a program isn't freeing memory taken up by data that is no longer in use.
Whether that data is reachable is a slightly different, but related, issue. Data not being reachable yet remaining in memory certainly is one form of leak, because that is one set of circumstances in which unused data will continue to hog memory, but it's not the only one.
The misunderstanding that "unreachable" is the whole of memory leakage is one reason why automatic garbage collection should never be taught as a panacea. Regardless of whether you use it or not, you should work with it and ensure that you don't leave objects referring to other objects if there's no cause to.
I'm not going to go so far as to suggest boxed unencrypted VPN connection systems do not exist, but every VPN system I've ever come across has provided some kind of encryption between the remote machines and the networks they're connecting to.
I guess you can bodge something together to run pppd over telnet, but generally off-the-shelf systems tend to be more secure than that.
Sorry, not buying the notion Gates selected the chip. Gates wouldn't have suggested the 8088 if he wanted IBM to pick a "16 bit" chip, he'd have picked the 8086 or the 68000. So the very first paragraph is a nonsense. The remainder of the extract actually debunks the theory, albeit in a way designed to make it appear Gates actually proposed the 8088 to IBM at some point.
The only way I can see this working is if IBM had said "We're going to make a CP/M machine with an 8080!" and Gates had rolled his eyes and said "In 1981? Geez. At least use something more modern, even the 8088 is at least source compatible with the 8080." And clearly, that didn't happen, so the rest of the story is bullshit.
There's a great deal of stuff that people take for granted and repeat so often it gets published everywhere and then repeated as fact. There's the "fact" that QD-OS, the code MSDOS was derived from, was actually an illegal port of CP/M and that Gary Kildall was actually able to use a keyboard sequence in court to show it contained secret code. That's untrue. I'm amazed how many people overestimate the complexity of CP/M, I actually wrote a clone as a 17 year old student (including an 8080 emulator), it really isn't hard.
There's the "fact" Windows NT is actually a port of OpenVMS, with code stolen by former DEC engineers before they went over to Microsoft. Anyone can see that OpenVMS and NT have little resemblance beyond that any two 32 bit multitasking operating systems designed by the same person (and even then, only at the kernel level) would have. But that hasn't stopped people repeating this crap.
Gary Kildall was, of course, flying his plane when IBM called. Except that wasn't relevent (Kildall didn't handle the business side of DR), but the story's been repeated so often people think it's true and that DR really lost the contract because their top programmer wasn't in the office during the negotiations.
Bill Gates, presumably during his long thesis to IBM on how they should pick the "16 bit" 8088 (WTF?) over the 68000, told everyone that 640k should be enough for everyone. Only he didn't.
I've been following the business for long enough to know that anyone will believe any bullshit they hear on the subject especially if it makes someone in power look phenominally dishonest or stupid. While there have been many stupid and dubiously-honest decisions made in the industry, for the most part they're not the ones described.
Did Bill Gates have any hand at all in choosing the 8088? The evidence that he did is pretty much non-existant, and it sounds like all attempts to actually follow up the "Numerous published accounts" have drawn a blank. Actual engineers involved in the decision are responding "WTF." Nobody's claiming to have heard him actually suggest it. And with good reason. It never happened.
The 8088 (not the 8086, which didn't make it into an IBM badged PC until the faux-PS/2 Model 30) was a dog, but I've programmed worse.
I seriously doubt Bill Gates had anything to do with the choice of processor, and I've yet to read anything that suggested he did. At the time he was the part owner of a computer language company, which IBM wanted to contract to provide BASIC. The DOS thing was an accident. While everyone has their own explanations for the choice of 8088, the most likely is that it was source compatible with the 8080, and the standard system at the time was the S100 CP/M architecture. It was even IBM's original intention that the IBM PC run CP/M.
Microsoft, reportedly, wasn't happy for long with the choice of the 8088 and programmers there supposedly would have prefered the 68000.
It may be hard to believe today, but Bill Gates was not considered a major figure in computing in quite the same way as he is today back in the '70s and early '80s. The coup of getting IBM to ship his DOS was really the start of him becoming significant. That's not to say he wasn't well known, but before the IBM coup he was about as famous as Philippe Kahn or George Tate were in their primes. While his 8080 MBASIC interpreter was respected, he certainly was never considered, by anyone, as "one of the world's best microprocessor programmers at the time." Microsoft had sold BASIC to a variety of companies ported to a variety of CPU architectures before 1981, and IBM was merely the next client. I'm 99% sure that with MBASIC on the 8080, 6502, and even the 6809, Gates and his underlings knew enough about good CPU architecture to have not recommended the 8088 if he'd been asked.
God. That's so hard, and so needing of streamlining.
Apple's also the company that foisted the awful trackpad mouse-alternative upon the world. They're far from perfect, they're just better than Microsoft.
In other words, the MPAA can't go about suing people right and left for piracy and copyright infringement and behave differently when said people are their buddies. They're just not credible.
Yes they most certainly can, on every legal and moral level I can imagine.
If GUBA was flat-out attacking them, rather than providing something that the MPAA's members consider of value to them, then it'd make sense to sue. But if they feel its in their long term interests to strengthen GUBA, then that's what they should do. They're under no obligation to sue every single person who technically commits copyright infringement, and it would make no sense for them to do so.
Copyright is a legally granted monopoly, to do with as the holder sees fit. The holder may grant explicit authorization (licensing), may simply ignore infringement that doesn't hurt it overall, or may crack down on infringement where it sees a real threat. There's no "credibility" problem if they're more comfortable with certain types of infringement than others.
The fact that someone has the right to make a stupid, mis-informed, panders-to-ignorant decision does not make it any less stupid, any less mis-informed, or any less pandering to ignorant. Just as they have the right to make that decision, people have the right to complain about it. In a context where people are making the most outrageous and clearly untrue allegations about the game, a retailer who refuses to stock it on the basis of largely, apparently, bogus allegations deserves criticism, whether it's their right to refuse to stock it or not.
Every time there's a story about some institution promoting this kind of ignorance, there's always someone who comes up with the whole "It's their right!" bullshit. But nobody is saying it's not their right.
Quit it with the straw men and address the issues here. Stop acting as if everytime someone has the legal right to make a decision, it's somehow beyond criticism. Dixon's decision is very much open to criticism, far more so than Rockstar's decision to make the game in the first place.
And it isn't really suitable for use as an EULA anyway.
Aside from people confusing strictly optional licenses (as the GPL is) with EULAs, the other major reason I can think of why people make it compulsory is that it contains a "No warranty" clause, and it's just easier to copy and paste the whole damned GPL than to work out, if you're not a lawyer, a form of words that will achieve that job.
If you come across software that does this, it is, of course, your legal right to redistribute a version that doesn't require agreement to the GPL to just install and run. So how big a problem this is in reality is open to question.
Well, I know fuck-all about amateur radio, and by making a few educated guesses and remembering some elementary high school physics, I got 77.1 percent, which apparently is a pass.
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Given providing Wifi access has little to do with running an airline or an airport, that would strike me as exactly the kind of stipulation that gives contracts a bad name to begin with. Assuming the airline did sign such a contract, do you think the airline was given a straight choice, or was it more likely "Yeah, you can not sign if you want. Shame though, because we're the only airport you could possibly hope to use to provide service to Boston on any reasonable scale, and you do want to provide airline service here, right?"
I know the pseudo-libertarian mob thinks contracts are some holy concept that must never be undermined, but I personally think the entire concept should be thrown out and rethought. Until it is, allowing agencies to overrule contracts where one group is imposing ludicrous conditions on another (and banning 802.11 points certainly counts as that) strikes me as a right thing to do.
You need to think more strategically and more about the aims of the people involved.
Bin Laden's ultimate goal is very clear. He may have had "short term" issues, such as the whole Non-Islamic troops on the Holy Land thing which supposedly was a trigger for attacks on the West, but even that reflects an overall goal and overall view of the world. Bin Laden wants a united Arab superstate. That's it. That's the #1 issue.
Right now, the various countries that would make up such a state are divided and ruled by various "royal families" whose power would be reluctantly released. Unless they're on Bin Laden's side, to the point of eye-swiveling ideological madness, they're not going to give up power in favour of said superstate. They're not even going to set in motion a set of events that will lead to a united Arab superstate after their deaths, because as monarchs, that would be undermining their children and their own ideological reasons for believing they have a right to that power in the first place.
If you're Bin Laden, how do you change that? Is it through persuasion, or do you want to persue strategies that unite Arabs, and create chaos that undermines the existing governments?
Do you think Bin Laden expected the US to say "OMG! We've been so wrong in that part of the world" when he masterminded a plot to murder 3,000 Americans in a single morning in one of the most dramatic ways possible, and simply withdraw our troops from the region and rethink our policies on oil. Even if he did, do you think that a terrorist who, since, has done little but help (and probably not help very much) turn one war the US is involved in into a bit of a morass, would expect the US to have that response if he makes a speech just before an election praising the politician most likely to pull out of the region, and against the incumbent who has staked his reputation on a policy pretty much anyone can see is causing chaos there?
The important thing to recognize is that this isn't about changing the US's view of itself, it's about making use of the behaviour of the most powerful countries on Earth. If you view the US, as most do, as an intensely proud country with a streak straight out of a Wild West movie for vengence and justice, you don't attack them expecting the US to do what you've asked them to do. You expect the US to have one reaction, and that's to lash out at you.
Of course, it's possible Bin Laden is a complete dimwit who really doesn't think anything through, but the most powerful country in Earth hasn't been able to capture him in five years, and it's unquestionably true that US involvement since 9/11 has destroyed one of Bin Laden's major ideological opponents (Saddam Hussein), undermined most of the governments there, and stirred up a certain amount of Arab unity in opposition to the US and anything it might be associated with, including the local emirate governments. So either Bin Laden has accidentally been successful (Madrid bombings excepting, but the Spanish government fucked that up by lying about it), or this is more or less what he intended to happen. The idea that he wanted to demonstrate our vulnerability or persuade ordinary Americans of some awful truths of rest-of-world existance strikes me as a tad improbable.
I think your recollection may be a little hazy, but I'm not that surprised because WinOS2 was interestingly designed.
WinOS/2 worked in a similar way to "Classic" in Mac OS X or "Wine" in GNU/Linux. There was a subsystem that ran that ran the Windows applications within it. You had a choice in OS/2 (which is probably where the confusion lies) between sharing your desktop with Windows and OS/2 applications, or running the Windows applications on a seperate screen. Depending on the type of application you were running, frequently the latter was the only way to get the thing to work without buttons or icons being unavailable.
There's less such legacy issues with Linux under OpenBSD because, for the most part, Linux applications are using X11 and other shared APIs to interact with the user. At the same time, I can see people wanting to run GNOME/Linux apps under a seperate GNOME/X11 instance to OpenBSD apps, given they're linking to separate libraries, and in that case, two different "screens" might be useful.
It's very easy, just put in an order for a million smoke alarms and luminous watches.
There is absolutely no way that a customer could have planted this bomb. Nobody who has ever been a PayPal customer has any idea how to contact PayPal, let alone their actual physical address...
The Do Not Call list doesn't cover these types of pre-recorded telemarketing calls (not least because, as the article points out, they're illegal anyway.) We receive them at home, I've even had a few to my cellphone. I'm on the Do Not Call list. I'm not even a US citizen so telling me who to vote for is doubly annoying.
And if they flout the DNC list, then, well, what's the point of being on it if you're not going to enforce it. You appear to be saying "You should put yourself on various lists you're on anyway, and then ignore it when people call." What a great idea! Render the list entirely useless!
I'm fully in favour of suing in these instances. We're not talking about bankrupting judgements of the "six-digit lawyers fees alone" variety, we're talking about small claims court, being used to enforce a law that is perfectly legitimate, whose flouters are being deliberately anti-social and committing offenses against you, the suer.
What's the problem with that?
I don't think it's a lie if you're not conciously aware of it. But assuming what's above is meant to be "an untruth" or something like that, could this revolutionise science and the pursuit of knowledge?
No longer would we have to do complicated experiments. Just determine a hypothesis, and then ask someone questions based upon predictions made by that hypothesis. Is there life on Mars? Was Venus once like Earth? Is Mad TV actually funny? Perform the lie detector test, and no matter how clueless the interviewee, the connection between what they say and what the detector says will tell you the truthiness of whatever it is you're trying to find out.
This could be big.
That's more of an open source NEXTSTEP. Certainly, massive components are missing if you want to replace OS X with GNUStep/Linux, even ignoring binary compatability issues. These include Carbon, various major frameworks, and Quartz. Much of what's "there" is half done - the Dock, for example, is implemented in both WindowMaker and GWorkspace, in the former being complete but not integrated with GNUstep, in the latter being incomplete and semi-integrated with GNUstep but not with anything else.
GNUStep is getting there, and could easily be competition for GNOME or KDE, but in some ways it's a little late for that. Leaving aside the massive headstart in mindshare of either of those two platforms, GNUStep's reliance upon unmanaged Objective C means it has a long way to go, whereas GNOME is beginning to integrate Mono, and both GNOME and KDE are integrating Python.
Why? The two things aren't remotely comparable.
Patents are relatively damaging, they're a net removal of a technology from the public domain in the hope that the existance of the patent system itself will encourage invention over-all. Copyright only rewards actual creation with monopolies. If someone chooses not to make use of a copyrighted item, they're not restricted in any way.
Lifetime or X years, whichever is longer, strikes me as a reasonable copyright term length. Patents, on the other hand... I'd like to see them even further restricted, or abolished altogether in favour of a system of grants and prizes.
Well, true, and if the charge is fraud then it's easily dismissed. But there's no guarantee that it is fraud, just as if I produced a fake $100 bill, I'd be arrested, but not on fraud charges.
People get very hung up on "intent" and generally seem to assume it's either applied to everything in law or nothing. In practice, it seriously depends on the law (and often area of law) in question.
It's certainly a shame Apple can't squeeze any profit out of those $130 OS X updates.
The cost of raw CDs, cardboard boxes, and glossy leaflets is just so absurd these days. It's a wonder they don't charge more!
In Britain, whose libel law I'm more familiar with, truth is not an absolute defense. I raised this on a previous occasion and pointed out, for example, that describing someone as "drunk" who has no (proven and fair) reputation for alcoholism has, in the past, caused massive wins at the libel courts for the "accused drunks", even when said state of being was proven with witnesses. (The satirical magazine Private Eye uses the phrase "Tired and emotional" instead as a result, although arguably that's no less libelous, it just requires more work by the plaintiff to prove that an average reader would interpret that phrase as meaning "drunk".)
What I was then told by US lawyers is that, actually, yes, that situation is true in the US too. Describing someone as "drunk" is a can of worms, no matter how true the allegation is.
The problem is there are many statements you can make that are "true" that, nonetheless, would damage someone's reputation disproportionally and unfairly. Saying someone "even lies to their wife" on the (unsaid) basis that they disguised their true reasons for bringing the wife to a surprise birthday party, for example, would be extremely damaging and unfair. Yes, it's technically true, but the phrasing puts an idea into people's minds that leaves them with an entirely wrong view of the victim.
I don't know how US libel law works in that regard. I find it hard to believe that any argument that starts with "Well, my allegation was technically true" is going to hold up in court.
Then you're redefining it. Judicial activism is any decision where the decision is wrong legally and constitutionally. Kelo vs New London was absolutely right on both terms. What's wrong is the current state of law and constitution. The constitution should spell out more specifically what constitutes public interest, and the law should, in the mean time, clarify the issue to prevent obvious abuses.
The Supreme Court said, quite rightly, it wasn't in a position to judge what constituted the "public interest" in New London. The problem with the issue is the entirely subjective and localized phrase "public interest". It needs fixing.
None of the judges in Kelo vs New London said they thought it was a good use of eminent domain. None of the judges said they agreed it was in the public interest. They said the Supreme Court wasn't in a position to judge. Quite right. Now stop blaming them, and fix the laws.
It's worth pointing out that Jonathan Schwarz has gone out of his way to make it plain the GPL is being considered as a possible license. The main issue I think Sun has is that they prefer GPL3, with its patent retaliation clauses, to GPL2. GPL3 hasn't been released yet, and thus far is fairly controvertial (For reasons I continue to find bizarre.)
A somewhat controvertial example might be the original versions of the APSL (Apple Public Source License) under which early versions of open-source Darwin were released.
The FSF considered it non-free for a variety of reasons, not least Apple's ability to revoke it at any time. It was heralded as "Open Source" by ESR, then head of the Open Source Initiative. Of course, many people argued it wasn't, and it was part of the reason for the schism which ended up with Bruce Perens quitting the OSI, IIRC.
You mean redefine it back? A memory leak is simply a set of circumstances in which a program isn't freeing memory taken up by data that is no longer in use.
Whether that data is reachable is a slightly different, but related, issue. Data not being reachable yet remaining in memory certainly is one form of leak, because that is one set of circumstances in which unused data will continue to hog memory, but it's not the only one.
The misunderstanding that "unreachable" is the whole of memory leakage is one reason why automatic garbage collection should never be taught as a panacea. Regardless of whether you use it or not, you should work with it and ensure that you don't leave objects referring to other objects if there's no cause to.
I'm not going to go so far as to suggest boxed unencrypted VPN connection systems do not exist, but every VPN system I've ever come across has provided some kind of encryption between the remote machines and the networks they're connecting to.
I guess you can bodge something together to run pppd over telnet, but generally off-the-shelf systems tend to be more secure than that.
Sorry, not buying the notion Gates selected the chip. Gates wouldn't have suggested the 8088 if he wanted IBM to pick a "16 bit" chip, he'd have picked the 8086 or the 68000. So the very first paragraph is a nonsense. The remainder of the extract actually debunks the theory, albeit in a way designed to make it appear Gates actually proposed the 8088 to IBM at some point.
The only way I can see this working is if IBM had said "We're going to make a CP/M machine with an 8080!" and Gates had rolled his eyes and said "In 1981? Geez. At least use something more modern, even the 8088 is at least source compatible with the 8080." And clearly, that didn't happen, so the rest of the story is bullshit.
There's a great deal of stuff that people take for granted and repeat so often it gets published everywhere and then repeated as fact. There's the "fact" that QD-OS, the code MSDOS was derived from, was actually an illegal port of CP/M and that Gary Kildall was actually able to use a keyboard sequence in court to show it contained secret code. That's untrue. I'm amazed how many people overestimate the complexity of CP/M, I actually wrote a clone as a 17 year old student (including an 8080 emulator), it really isn't hard.
There's the "fact" Windows NT is actually a port of OpenVMS, with code stolen by former DEC engineers before they went over to Microsoft. Anyone can see that OpenVMS and NT have little resemblance beyond that any two 32 bit multitasking operating systems designed by the same person (and even then, only at the kernel level) would have. But that hasn't stopped people repeating this crap.
Gary Kildall was, of course, flying his plane when IBM called. Except that wasn't relevent (Kildall didn't handle the business side of DR), but the story's been repeated so often people think it's true and that DR really lost the contract because their top programmer wasn't in the office during the negotiations.
Bill Gates, presumably during his long thesis to IBM on how they should pick the "16 bit" 8088 (WTF?) over the 68000, told everyone that 640k should be enough for everyone. Only he didn't.
I've been following the business for long enough to know that anyone will believe any bullshit they hear on the subject especially if it makes someone in power look phenominally dishonest or stupid. While there have been many stupid and dubiously-honest decisions made in the industry, for the most part they're not the ones described.
Did Bill Gates have any hand at all in choosing the 8088? The evidence that he did is pretty much non-existant, and it sounds like all attempts to actually follow up the "Numerous published accounts" have drawn a blank. Actual engineers involved in the decision are responding "WTF." Nobody's claiming to have heard him actually suggest it. And with good reason. It never happened.
The 8088 (not the 8086, which didn't make it into an IBM badged PC until the faux-PS/2 Model 30) was a dog, but I've programmed worse.
I seriously doubt Bill Gates had anything to do with the choice of processor, and I've yet to read anything that suggested he did. At the time he was the part owner of a computer language company, which IBM wanted to contract to provide BASIC. The DOS thing was an accident. While everyone has their own explanations for the choice of 8088, the most likely is that it was source compatible with the 8080, and the standard system at the time was the S100 CP/M architecture. It was even IBM's original intention that the IBM PC run CP/M.
Microsoft, reportedly, wasn't happy for long with the choice of the 8088 and programmers there supposedly would have prefered the 68000.
It may be hard to believe today, but Bill Gates was not considered a major figure in computing in quite the same way as he is today back in the '70s and early '80s. The coup of getting IBM to ship his DOS was really the start of him becoming significant. That's not to say he wasn't well known, but before the IBM coup he was about as famous as Philippe Kahn or George Tate were in their primes. While his 8080 MBASIC interpreter was respected, he certainly was never considered, by anyone, as "one of the world's best microprocessor programmers at the time." Microsoft had sold BASIC to a variety of companies ported to a variety of CPU architectures before 1981, and IBM was merely the next client. I'm 99% sure that with MBASIC on the 8080, 6502, and even the 6809, Gates and his underlings knew enough about good CPU architecture to have not recommended the 8088 if he'd been asked.
The article's not even finished. The fragment quoted above is the end of the article, as posted, not the beginning.
Why the hell was this put on Slashdot's front page?
1-7-7-2-5-5-5-1-2-1-2-CALL
God. That's so hard, and so needing of streamlining.
Apple's also the company that foisted the awful trackpad mouse-alternative upon the world. They're far from perfect, they're just better than Microsoft.
Yes they most certainly can, on every legal and moral level I can imagine.
If GUBA was flat-out attacking them, rather than providing something that the MPAA's members consider of value to them, then it'd make sense to sue. But if they feel its in their long term interests to strengthen GUBA, then that's what they should do. They're under no obligation to sue every single person who technically commits copyright infringement, and it would make no sense for them to do so.
Copyright is a legally granted monopoly, to do with as the holder sees fit. The holder may grant explicit authorization (licensing), may simply ignore infringement that doesn't hurt it overall, or may crack down on infringement where it sees a real threat. There's no "credibility" problem if they're more comfortable with certain types of infringement than others.
The fact that someone has the right to make a stupid, mis-informed, panders-to-ignorant decision does not make it any less stupid, any less mis-informed, or any less pandering to ignorant. Just as they have the right to make that decision, people have the right to complain about it. In a context where people are making the most outrageous and clearly untrue allegations about the game, a retailer who refuses to stock it on the basis of largely, apparently, bogus allegations deserves criticism, whether it's their right to refuse to stock it or not.
Every time there's a story about some institution promoting this kind of ignorance, there's always someone who comes up with the whole "It's their right!" bullshit. But nobody is saying it's not their right.
Quit it with the straw men and address the issues here. Stop acting as if everytime someone has the legal right to make a decision, it's somehow beyond criticism. Dixon's decision is very much open to criticism, far more so than Rockstar's decision to make the game in the first place.
And it isn't really suitable for use as an EULA anyway.
Aside from people confusing strictly optional licenses (as the GPL is) with EULAs, the other major reason I can think of why people make it compulsory is that it contains a "No warranty" clause, and it's just easier to copy and paste the whole damned GPL than to work out, if you're not a lawyer, a form of words that will achieve that job.
If you come across software that does this, it is, of course, your legal right to redistribute a version that doesn't require agreement to the GPL to just install and run. So how big a problem this is in reality is open to question.
Well, I know fuck-all about amateur radio, and by making a few educated guesses and remembering some elementary high school physics, I got 77.1 percent, which apparently is a pass.
So I think the GP is more or less right.