The article never says that such a system "could soon be rolled out in Europe." What it says is that the European Union is doling out grant money to researchers to study such a system, and that they might try some live experiments. It's pretty clear that this is still a research project, with many technical, regulatory, and societal hurdles to clear before we see it in action.
You don't write out "Hillary Clinton" or "Rudy Giuliani" on your ballot, you put an X next to their names. You screw up, just ask for a new ballot, and your old one is shredded in front of you plus an election official from each party.
Sure. But, do you recall all of the problems in the 2000 Florida election? What if your X is really big, and it strays into a neighboring box? What if your X mark is very faint, and can't be read clearly? What if you mis-read the ballot, and put the X on the wrong line, as happened with the famed Palm Beach "butterfly ballot"?
You also then have nearly no chance for mechanical counting of the ballots, and you have the opportunity for large errors in the human counting the ballots, instead of the human voting them.
The advantage of machine voting with a printed receipt is that, like in any good program, your input is validated at entry time, and you get a chance to fix any errors before it's too late.
I think you misunderstood. The voting machine takes your input, and prints out exactly one copy, which you then have to deposit in a box to have it counted. You don't get a receipt to take home with you, which would let you prove to a vote-buyer how you voted (though others have certainly suggested the receipt model in the past).
Or the paper and pen method... why introduce unnecessary mechanization? Occam's razor applies very well to voting. Simplicity is best.
Yeah, the problem with that is that you have to read peoples' handwriting. Also, it's rare that we conduct single-race elections. Try writing your votes for President, Vice President, mayor, Senator, school board, local judge and two local budget referenda on a single piece of paper, in a way that someone can unequivocally decode.
The idea of machine entry with a paper receipt is that the machine validates your input and prints it in a standard form, before you drop it into the ballot box. No hanging chads, no illegible candidate names.
Not so fast. While you're right about the 50/50 split (or worse) "Pick N" lotteries usually roll over the apportioned winnings to the next drawing, if there's no victor. It's not uncommon for the jackpot to rise to the point where the potential payoff is greater than the odds of winning. However, this can be counteracted by the chance of multiple winners having to split the jackpot.
I can't find a cite for this, but about 20 years ago, a European corporation was able to corner the Virginia lottery by purchasing a sizeable fraction of the numbers in play and winning the jackpot.
This doesn't mean that the lottery is a good bet every week, but it is possible to play selectively and have the statistics be on your side!
Regarding open spectrum. I don't deal with wireless tech that much so this may just be a stupid question. I understand the need to regulate natural resources to avoid collisions. But in all seriousness why does the FCC get to "sell" something they do not really own? Just a few months ago the community was all up in arms about DNA being copyrighted. What is the difference here? The FCC will not regulate the 700MHz spectrum afterwards, they will not do anything with it once it is sold so why the asking price?
The reason is simple... if they don't sell it, how do they allocate it to potential users? I suppose they could have a lottery, or let people sign up to borrow it for a day at a time, like a lending library. But, the best economic minds of our day, the people who win the Nobel Prize, have demonstrated time and again that an auction will generate the most efficient, most fair result. And, it has the side effect that the winner will pay the American people dearly for the rights to use this national resource. Finally, the winner will be highly motivated to manage this little portion of the spectrum in the most efficient manner possible, so as to squeeze the last MHz of value out of it.
Yes, those of us who use the spectrum in the future will pay back this lease in the form of higher bills. But, that's only fair -- the money should come from the people who use the resource. There's no reason to let it sit idle, or let a bunch of techno-pirates use it for free when others are willing to pay for it.
Thats like saying because you wanted to get a hand gun, your going to be a school shooter.
No, it's more like saying that if a school shooting is committed using a gun registered to you, the police can get a warrant to search your house. Although you might not like it, detecting criminal packets emanating from your router provides the reasonable suspicion necessary to get a search warrant. Now, neither the gun registration nor the packets are enough to get you convicted, much less arrested. To continue your analogy above, if the gun is not in your house, and you reported it stolen to the police three months before, you're probably not the bad guy. But, if the cops find something else illegal in their search (in either case), especially something related to the crime at hand, THAT could definitely get you thrown in jail.
Look at it this way: if you DO have a secured WAP, then proof of criminal access from that device could be considered prima facie evidence that you committed the crime. In this case, it merely makes you a suspect. And, in this case, that was enough to lead the police to the scene of a related, but different, crime. If the guy's computer had been clean and he hadn't had a big stack of kiddie porn sitting next to the CPU, then he would be a free man today, regardless of what his roommate did through his AP.
Does Verizon pay every ma and pa phone shop who's lines they use passing Cell Calls to land lines?
I highly doubt it.
Why do you doubt it? Of course they pay them. Check out this recent story on a company that was making millions off of these payments by redirecting incoming calls back out over VoIP, basically a form of bit-laundering.
What doesn't make sense though, is why hasn't the Motofone been released in the U.S.? The Motofone got a bit of hype, and a number of people have said it would be great to have a phone that is a phone and is good at it. A number of articles made the rounds on the net, including at Engadget and Gizmodo. Despite this, Motorola is dragging its feet getting it to the U.S., and if you want to import it, you have spend twice what it's worth. Makes me wonder, what's taking so long?
As another poster mentioned, Moto is planning to start US sales this summer. Don't know why there is a delay.
BUT, if you choose to buy one overseas, you should know that Motofone only has a 2-band radio, and an Indian/African Motofone will only support 900/1800 MHz, not the 850/1900 MHz bands used in the USA and parts of Latin America. A co-worker of mine bought one on EBay, and it's pretty much a paperweight.
Just wait, a non lethal weapon was developed that won't kill people. Now people will complain that it causes pain. Well, what would you rather have, pain or death?
The answer to your question is pretty obvious (I'll take the death:), but that's not the issue. The concern is that soldiers wielding a supposedly non-lethal weapon will have radically different rules of engagement. A weapon like this will end up getting used hundreds or thousands of times more often than a lethal device. But, if this heat ray causes a 0.1% increase in occurrence of skin cancer (for example) in its targets, then there will be deaths attributable to its use.
I have no particular objection to soldiers using it in combat, but wait until this baby shows up at the next WTO meeting or Republican National Convention.
Here's the thing I don't understand. If a group of people get together and buy the same stock, and tell their friends to buy the stock, so long as none of them are prohibited from doing so due to conflict of interest, where is the illegality? If a group of people get together and buy stock and tell everyone on the Internet to buy it, where is the illegality? If a company IPOs, issues their executive officers stock, and tells investors everywhere to buy their stock, where is the illegality?
It's illegal for (at least) two reasons:
1. Anyone who has an interest in seeing the value of a stock change is obligated to make that interest clear. This will help the recipient to make a fair judgment about any ulterior motives of the sender.
2. Predictive statements about the future performance of a stock are highly regulated, and for good reason: there is no way that someone can actually know what is going to happen to the value of a particular stock. At the least, stock picking spam should include the standard "forward-looking statements" clause.
One could argue that these legal protections are not necessary, because any halfway-intelligent person would naturally suspect the motives of a random spam in their inbox. But, as a society, we like to protect the less-than-halfway-intelligent as well.
What the summary is missing is that the polymer electronics built in this factory will be laminated to electrophoretic imaging materials made by E Ink Corporation to form flexible electronic paper displays. Thus, the final output of the factory will indeed be electronic paper.
No, I think it should be mandated that computers can be purchased OS-free for a price that is less than the price of one with the OS by a difference of the retail price of the OS. I think people should have the choice.
Why should it be less by the difference of the retail price? That's not what the manufacturer paid for it. Are you suggesting that they should lose money if you want to buy an OS-free machine?
Bundling is a nearly universal practice. Try walking into McDonald's with a cup, and asking them to sell you the differential volume between a small and large Coke, for the $.15 differential price.
I would like to be able to buy an OS-free computer as much as the next person, but I would not expect the price difference to be more than $10 or $15, which is what I estimate the big guys (HP, Compaq, Dell) pay per machine to MS.
I posit that slashdot's metamod system is broken, since it allows partisan mods to anonymously troll comment sections at their leisure.
At the risk of being modded off-topic, this doesn't mean that the moderation system is broken. It WAS broken at one point, and that is why meta-moderation was introduced. If a moderator is doing what you suggest, then it should be obvious in meta-moderation, and that person will become less and less likely to get mod privileges in the future.
Post good stuff, moderate intelligently, and meta-moderate intelligently and often!
Why don't they make an OS that is immune from getting viruses just by clicking on a hot link or opening an attachment?
Because it's very, very hard. First of all, users are constantly demanding that progams interact with each other, and with each other's data. This gives the web browser permission to pass that hotlink off to another piece of code and process it, sometimes without your intervention. It's these hand-offs that cause the problem. All it takes is one good buffer overflow error to drop some virus code into the instruction queue, and you can make all kinds of interesting things happen. Programmers are learning to add boundary checks to their code, but every now and again, someone's going to make a mistake. Not to mention, many viruses today are actually straight-up executable code or scripts that users are fooled into running.
And, if that attachment is an executable, then no operating system ever created, or that ever will be created, can stop you from clicking your way to oblivion (unless you completely remove the ability for users to execute programs other than some pre-existing sub-set, which is completely impractical).
All you Linux users out there, stop snickering from behind your keyboards. I'm willing to bet there are one or two good holes in Firefox that could be used to install malicious code on a Linux box. Sure, it would run as the individual user, not as root, but that's not going to matter much when your ISP cuts off your data pipe because 'dumbuser1' has a spam bot running in the background.
Spammers are spoofing the return address as being one of the valid domains (i.e. google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com...)
Nope. Not a single credible anti-spam solution out there today pays any attention to the return address on the e-mail (unless it's explicitly in your whitelist). The filtering is done based on the actual origin of the message, or failing that, the first trusted server that handled the message.
The authors of the FA are saying that spam is ACTUALLY coming from gmail.com, which means it is probably being sent by legit gmail.com users (gmail requires a secure login to use their mail gateway).
It would work like this... get a gmail account, write a bot to send e-mail to other zombie gmail accounts for a while, wait until you have 100 invites to hand out, sign up for some more accounts, then spam like mad until gmail shuts you down.
It would be really, really hard for Google to come up with a solution to prevent spammers from getting out one good bulk mailing before Gmail shuts them down.
I am amazed that people do not see Google's action for what it is -- a huge and hugely inexpensive public relations stunt.
This is pretty much complete BS.
First of all, as others have pointed out, Google's stock has actually fallen as a result of taking part in this lawsuit. Fighting the DOJ may win favor with Slashdot readers, but it's not considered good form for respectable companies.
Second, after reading the FA, it seems like they have a pretty good chance of getting out of this subpoena. They've made some pretty good arguments, and quoted some really good case law. And, they've made the excellent point that the additional value from their search reports is small, now that the government already has data from AOL and MSN.
Third, this fight is important for Google's future. If they lose this one, not only will they be more vulnerable to future government requests for search data, but they could very well find themselves on the witness stand answering detailed questions about the internals of their search system. As the FA points out, the government's expert witness is also a consultant for an online advertising and search ranking company, who would love to get their hands on this dataset.
Finally, this brief alone represents hundreds of hours of billable time for Google's lawyers, not to mention quite a few hours of strategizing and deposing of some of Google's top engineers, like Matt Cutts. A week of Cutts' time is not "hugely inexpensive".
Yes, this case could result in some good PR for Google, but that's not the only reason they're doing it.
It is time to ditch the Firefox brand name in the Free Software world and pick an unencumbered one.... and there, I totally support you (though I have to admit I'm not up on the politics you're talking about). Grab the Firefox source, re-compile it, and come up with a catchy new name. If the Open Source world is on your side, your new brand will grow, while Firefox will wither. That's the way of the world. In fact, this is essentially what has happened WITHIN the Mozilla project as well -- Firefox has taken brand share from Mozilla, because it's smaller, faster, and basically better.
A trademark is started with common usage more often than not
Nope. Once a term becomes "common usage" for a class of products, it CAN'T be trademarked. However, people don't usually become aware of the implications of a trademark until the term becomes part of daily life.
Many former trademarks have come into common use, but only against the strident protests of the trademark owners.
One possible fix would be doing what happened with trampolines. "Trampoline" with a capital "T" is trademarked, but "trampoline" simply refers to the device itself. Perhaps "BitTorrent" could refer to the software package, and "bittorrent" to the protocol. Still, I doubt that Bram would settle for this.
This is complete hogwash. "Trampoline" only became "trampoline" when the trademark holder allowed the trademark to lapse. In all the common cases you can think of (Xerox, Kleenex, Coke), these companies have teams of lawyers running around harassing anyone who uses their trademark as a generic term. Failure to do so allows for "trademark dilution", and can be grounds for loss of a trademark. Learn more at Wikipedia; the discussion page for this article is very edifying.
No. This is an example of a greater pattern of abuse that needs to be addressed soon, especially with GPL3 set to enshine it as acceptable practice.
I have to disagree. These people aren't "monetizing" their trademarks. If you'd followed what Bram is doing, and read the FA, you'd know that he is trying to keep people from using the BitTorrent trademark to disseminate spyware and adware. As with Linux(TM) and Firefox(TM), the trademark is a tool to ensure the continued high quality and reliability of the Open-Source project. In your case in particular, Firefox can't exactly have hundreds of people distributing code that they call "Firefox," now can they? First thing you know, someone's hard drive gets wiped by a trojan lurking in one of those firefoxen, and panic ensues.
Umm, we have that system in the Good 'ol USA, too. It's called the Audio Home Recording Act, and it applies a 3% royalty to all digital recording media. Most blank CD's make it through because they're nominally for computer data, not music. But if you were stupid enough to buy a component audio CD recorder for your stereo (sold for a while by Philips), it will ONLY burn to these royalty-bearing audio CD's.
This should theoretically apply to DAT tapes, MiniDiscs, etc.
Yes, it is. The big deal is that they sell an additional piece of hardware/software that your admin installs inside your firewall, which bundles up all of your corporate e-mail and sends it out to the device. Add that to the included readers for most popular office formats, and the easy-to-use keyboard, and it becomes a mobile office.
Keep in mind that, for most people with firewalled email servers, a device like this is the only way that they can have remote access to their e-mail, if their sysadmin supports it.
This probably doesn't seem like a big idea to all the uber-geeks out there, but it's practically a miracle to salespeople and middle management types who can't configure a mail client on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
The article never says that such a system "could soon be rolled out in Europe." What it says is that the European Union is doling out grant money to researchers to study such a system, and that they might try some live experiments. It's pretty clear that this is still a research project, with many technical, regulatory, and societal hurdles to clear before we see it in action.
You don't write out "Hillary Clinton" or "Rudy Giuliani" on your ballot, you put an X next to their names. You screw up, just ask for a new ballot, and your old one is shredded in front of you plus an election official from each party.
Sure. But, do you recall all of the problems in the 2000 Florida election? What if your X is really big, and it strays into a neighboring box? What if your X mark is very faint, and can't be read clearly? What if you mis-read the ballot, and put the X on the wrong line, as happened with the famed Palm Beach "butterfly ballot"?
You also then have nearly no chance for mechanical counting of the ballots, and you have the opportunity for large errors in the human counting the ballots, instead of the human voting them.
The advantage of machine voting with a printed receipt is that, like in any good program, your input is validated at entry time, and you get a chance to fix any errors before it's too late.
Because buying and selling votes is illegal.
I think you misunderstood. The voting machine takes your input, and prints out exactly one copy, which you then have to deposit in a box to have it counted. You don't get a receipt to take home with you, which would let you prove to a vote-buyer how you voted (though others have certainly suggested the receipt model in the past).
Or the paper and pen method... why introduce unnecessary mechanization? Occam's razor applies very well to voting. Simplicity is best.
Yeah, the problem with that is that you have to read peoples' handwriting. Also, it's rare that we conduct single-race elections. Try writing your votes for President, Vice President, mayor, Senator, school board, local judge and two local budget referenda on a single piece of paper, in a way that someone can unequivocally decode.
The idea of machine entry with a paper receipt is that the machine validates your input and prints it in a standard form, before you drop it into the ballot box. No hanging chads, no illegible candidate names.
Not so fast. While you're right about the 50/50 split (or worse) "Pick N" lotteries usually roll over the apportioned winnings to the next drawing, if there's no victor. It's not uncommon for the jackpot to rise to the point where the potential payoff is greater than the odds of winning. However, this can be counteracted by the chance of multiple winners having to split the jackpot.
I can't find a cite for this, but about 20 years ago, a European corporation was able to corner the Virginia lottery by purchasing a sizeable fraction of the numbers in play and winning the jackpot.
This doesn't mean that the lottery is a good bet every week, but it is possible to play selectively and have the statistics be on your side!
Regarding open spectrum. I don't deal with wireless tech that much so this may just be a stupid question. I understand the need to regulate natural resources to avoid collisions. But in all seriousness why does the FCC get to "sell" something they do not really own? Just a few months ago the community was all up in arms about DNA being copyrighted. What is the difference here? The FCC will not regulate the 700MHz spectrum afterwards, they will not do anything with it once it is sold so why the asking price?
... if they don't sell it, how do they allocate it to potential users? I suppose they could have a lottery, or let people sign up to borrow it for a day at a time, like a lending library. But, the best economic minds of our day, the people who win the Nobel Prize, have demonstrated time and again that an auction will generate the most efficient, most fair result. And, it has the side effect that the winner will pay the American people dearly for the rights to use this national resource. Finally, the winner will be highly motivated to manage this little portion of the spectrum in the most efficient manner possible, so as to squeeze the last MHz of value out of it.
The reason is simple
Yes, those of us who use the spectrum in the future will pay back this lease in the form of higher bills. But, that's only fair -- the money should come from the people who use the resource. There's no reason to let it sit idle, or let a bunch of techno-pirates use it for free when others are willing to pay for it.
Thats like saying because you wanted to get a hand gun, your going to be a school shooter.
No, it's more like saying that if a school shooting is committed using a gun registered to you, the police can get a warrant to search your house. Although you might not like it, detecting criminal packets emanating from your router provides the reasonable suspicion necessary to get a search warrant. Now, neither the gun registration nor the packets are enough to get you convicted, much less arrested. To continue your analogy above, if the gun is not in your house, and you reported it stolen to the police three months before, you're probably not the bad guy. But, if the cops find something else illegal in their search (in either case), especially something related to the crime at hand, THAT could definitely get you thrown in jail.
Look at it this way: if you DO have a secured WAP, then proof of criminal access from that device could be considered prima facie evidence that you committed the crime. In this case, it merely makes you a suspect. And, in this case, that was enough to lead the police to the scene of a related, but different, crime. If the guy's computer had been clean and he hadn't had a big stack of kiddie porn sitting next to the CPU, then he would be a free man today, regardless of what his roommate did through his AP.
Really?
Does Verizon pay every ma and pa phone shop who's lines they use passing Cell Calls to land lines?
I highly doubt it.
Why do you doubt it? Of course they pay them. Check out this recent story on a company that was making millions off of these payments by redirecting incoming calls back out over VoIP, basically a form of bit-laundering.
And, it's "whose," not "who's."
What doesn't make sense though, is why hasn't the Motofone been released in the U.S.? The Motofone got a bit of hype, and a number of people have said it would be great to have a phone that is a phone and is good at it. A number of articles made the rounds on the net, including at Engadget and Gizmodo. Despite this, Motorola is dragging its feet getting it to the U.S., and if you want to import it, you have spend twice what it's worth. Makes me wonder, what's taking so long?
As another poster mentioned, Moto is planning to start US sales this summer. Don't know why there is a delay.
BUT, if you choose to buy one overseas, you should know that Motofone only has a 2-band radio, and an Indian/African Motofone will only support 900/1800 MHz, not the 850/1900 MHz bands used in the USA and parts of Latin America. A co-worker of mine bought one on EBay, and it's pretty much a paperweight.
Just wait, a non lethal weapon was developed that won't kill people. Now people will complain that it causes pain. Well, what would you rather have, pain or death?
:), but that's not the issue. The concern is that soldiers wielding a supposedly non-lethal weapon will have radically different rules of engagement. A weapon like this will end up getting used hundreds or thousands of times more often than a lethal device. But, if this heat ray causes a 0.1% increase in occurrence of skin cancer (for example) in its targets, then there will be deaths attributable to its use.
The answer to your question is pretty obvious (I'll take the death
I have no particular objection to soldiers using it in combat, but wait until this baby shows up at the next WTO meeting or Republican National Convention.
Here's the thing I don't understand. If a group of people get together and buy the same stock, and tell their friends to buy the stock, so long as none of them are prohibited from doing so due to conflict of interest, where is the illegality? If a group of people get together and buy stock and tell everyone on the Internet to buy it, where is the illegality? If a company IPOs, issues their executive officers stock, and tells investors everywhere to buy their stock, where is the illegality?
It's illegal for (at least) two reasons:
1. Anyone who has an interest in seeing the value of a stock change is obligated to make that interest clear. This will help the recipient to make a fair judgment about any ulterior motives of the sender.
2. Predictive statements about the future performance of a stock are highly regulated, and for good reason: there is no way that someone can actually know what is going to happen to the value of a particular stock. At the least, stock picking spam should include the standard "forward-looking statements" clause.
One could argue that these legal protections are not necessary, because any halfway-intelligent person would naturally suspect the motives of a random spam in their inbox. But, as a society, we like to protect the less-than-halfway-intelligent as well.
What the summary is missing is that the polymer electronics built in this factory will be laminated to electrophoretic imaging materials made by E Ink Corporation to form flexible electronic paper displays. Thus, the final output of the factory will indeed be electronic paper.
No, I think it should be mandated that computers can be purchased OS-free for a price that is less than the price of one with the OS by a difference of the retail price of the OS. I think people should have the choice.
Why should it be less by the difference of the retail price? That's not what the manufacturer paid for it. Are you suggesting that they should lose money if you want to buy an OS-free machine?
Bundling is a nearly universal practice. Try walking into McDonald's with a cup, and asking them to sell you the differential volume between a small and large Coke, for the $.15 differential price.
I would like to be able to buy an OS-free computer as much as the next person, but I would not expect the price difference to be more than $10 or $15, which is what I estimate the big guys (HP, Compaq, Dell) pay per machine to MS.
I posit that slashdot's metamod system is broken, since it allows partisan mods to anonymously troll comment sections at their leisure.
At the risk of being modded off-topic, this doesn't mean that the moderation system is broken. It WAS broken at one point, and that is why meta-moderation was introduced. If a moderator is doing what you suggest, then it should be obvious in meta-moderation, and that person will become less and less likely to get mod privileges in the future.
Post good stuff, moderate intelligently, and meta-moderate intelligently and often!
Let's all hope this is an early April Fool's joke ...
Why don't they make an OS that is immune from getting viruses just by clicking on a hot link or opening an attachment?
Because it's very, very hard. First of all, users are constantly demanding that progams interact with each other, and with each other's data. This gives the web browser permission to pass that hotlink off to another piece of code and process it, sometimes without your intervention. It's these hand-offs that cause the problem. All it takes is one good buffer overflow error to drop some virus code into the instruction queue, and you can make all kinds of interesting things happen. Programmers are learning to add boundary checks to their code, but every now and again, someone's going to make a mistake. Not to mention, many viruses today are actually straight-up executable code or scripts that users are fooled into running.
And, if that attachment is an executable, then no operating system ever created, or that ever will be created, can stop you from clicking your way to oblivion (unless you completely remove the ability for users to execute programs other than some pre-existing sub-set, which is completely impractical).
All you Linux users out there, stop snickering from behind your keyboards. I'm willing to bet there are one or two good holes in Firefox that could be used to install malicious code on a Linux box. Sure, it would run as the individual user, not as root, but that's not going to matter much when your ISP cuts off your data pipe because 'dumbuser1' has a spam bot running in the background.
Spammers are spoofing the return address as being one of the valid domains (i.e. google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com...)
... get a gmail account, write a bot to send e-mail to other zombie gmail accounts for a while, wait until you have 100 invites to hand out, sign up for some more accounts, then spam like mad until gmail shuts you down.
Nope. Not a single credible anti-spam solution out there today pays any attention to the return address on the e-mail (unless it's explicitly in your whitelist). The filtering is done based on the actual origin of the message, or failing that, the first trusted server that handled the message.
The authors of the FA are saying that spam is ACTUALLY coming from gmail.com, which means it is probably being sent by legit gmail.com users (gmail requires a secure login to use their mail gateway).
It would work like this
It would be really, really hard for Google to come up with a solution to prevent spammers from getting out one good bulk mailing before Gmail shuts them down.
I am amazed that people do not see Google's action for what it is -- a huge and hugely inexpensive public relations stunt.
This is pretty much complete BS.
First of all, as others have pointed out, Google's stock has actually fallen as a result of taking part in this lawsuit. Fighting the DOJ may win favor with Slashdot readers, but it's not considered good form for respectable companies.
Second, after reading the FA, it seems like they have a pretty good chance of getting out of this subpoena. They've made some pretty good arguments, and quoted some really good case law. And, they've made the excellent point that the additional value from their search reports is small, now that the government already has data from AOL and MSN.
Third, this fight is important for Google's future. If they lose this one, not only will they be more vulnerable to future government requests for search data, but they could very well find themselves on the witness stand answering detailed questions about the internals of their search system. As the FA points out, the government's expert witness is also a consultant for an online advertising and search ranking company, who would love to get their hands on this dataset.
Finally, this brief alone represents hundreds of hours of billable time for Google's lawyers, not to mention quite a few hours of strategizing and deposing of some of Google's top engineers, like Matt Cutts. A week of Cutts' time is not "hugely inexpensive".
Yes, this case could result in some good PR for Google, but that's not the only reason they're doing it.
It is time to ditch the Firefox brand name in the Free Software world and pick an unencumbered one. ... and there, I totally support you (though I have to admit I'm not up on the politics you're talking about). Grab the Firefox source, re-compile it, and come up with a catchy new name. If the Open Source world is on your side, your new brand will grow, while Firefox will wither. That's the way of the world. In fact, this is essentially what has happened WITHIN the Mozilla project as well -- Firefox has taken brand share from Mozilla, because it's smaller, faster, and basically better.
A trademark is started with common usage more often than not
Nope. Once a term becomes "common usage" for a class of products, it CAN'T be trademarked. However, people don't usually become aware of the implications of a trademark until the term becomes part of daily life.
Many former trademarks have come into common use, but only against the strident protests of the trademark owners.
One possible fix would be doing what happened with trampolines. "Trampoline" with a capital "T" is trademarked, but "trampoline" simply refers to the device itself. Perhaps "BitTorrent" could refer to the software package, and "bittorrent" to the protocol. Still, I doubt that Bram would settle for this.
This is complete hogwash. "Trampoline" only became "trampoline" when the trademark holder allowed the trademark to lapse. In all the common cases you can think of (Xerox, Kleenex, Coke), these companies have teams of lawyers running around harassing anyone who uses their trademark as a generic term. Failure to do so allows for "trademark dilution", and can be grounds for loss of a trademark. Learn more at Wikipedia; the discussion page for this article is very edifying.
No. This is an example of a greater pattern of abuse that needs to be addressed soon, especially with GPL3 set to enshine it as acceptable practice.
I have to disagree. These people aren't "monetizing" their trademarks. If you'd followed what Bram is doing, and read the FA, you'd know that he is trying to keep people from using the BitTorrent trademark to disseminate spyware and adware. As with Linux(TM) and Firefox(TM), the trademark is a tool to ensure the continued high quality and reliability of the Open-Source project. In your case in particular, Firefox can't exactly have hundreds of people distributing code that they call "Firefox," now can they? First thing you know, someone's hard drive gets wiped by a trojan lurking in one of those firefoxen, and panic ensues.
Umm, we have that system in the Good 'ol USA, too. It's called the Audio Home Recording Act, and it applies a 3% royalty to all digital recording media. Most blank CD's make it through because they're nominally for computer data, not music. But if you were stupid enough to buy a component audio CD recorder for your stereo (sold for a while by Philips), it will ONLY burn to these royalty-bearing audio CD's. This should theoretically apply to DAT tapes, MiniDiscs, etc.
Yes, it is. The big deal is that they sell an additional piece of hardware/software that your admin installs inside your firewall, which bundles up all of your corporate e-mail and sends it out to the device. Add that to the included readers for most popular office formats, and the easy-to-use keyboard, and it becomes a mobile office.
Keep in mind that, for most people with firewalled email servers, a device like this is the only way that they can have remote access to their e-mail, if their sysadmin supports it.
This probably doesn't seem like a big idea to all the uber-geeks out there, but it's practically a miracle to salespeople and middle management types who can't configure a mail client on their own.
Slashdot subscription: $10.00.
Getting to download the next version of Firefox before the site gets Slashdotted: priceless !