Insurance is supposed to have people with similar risk profiles pooling their risks and ending up with a lower risk profile. The more homogeneous the risk profiles, the more chance of ending up with a much lower one. You wouldn't want to end up with a higher risk profile because of you getting lumped together with those who drive like idiots, would you?
Yup, I stand corrected. According to her biography she was born in Brussels to a Dutch mother and a English father. That's the bit in my memory that got me mistaken. There wasn't a whole lot Belgian to her anyway.
That still makes perfect sense since common usage of the term spam to describe unsolicited bulk e-mail only would dilute Hormel's Spam trademark if their product involved any form of e-mail. Since their business is processed pork and thus has no connection with e-mail whatsoever it is quite easy for them not to object to the usage of the term 'spam' for unwanted e-mail.
Sometimes I wonder what's so bloody hard about trademark law that the slashdot geeks almost always get it wrong. Of all areas in law it has the most straightforward logic and one would suppose that it would be relatively easy for geeks to grok it.
Remember this: from a legal perspective trademarks are about the ease of laying a connection between the product and it's producer in the consumer's mind. As long as consumer's won't be confused or won't be likely to make such a connection anymore, there is nothing the owner of the trademark can do about it (apart from intimidation through threatening with lawsuits).
So Hormel's 'liberal' approach to spam and Google sending in the 'goons' are equally sensible approaches to completely different problems.
But I am afraid I have spent too much time on the soapbox already, the slashbots are as likely to get it as the average pointy haired boss is likely to really grasp an technological issue.
You are assuming that Linux is about beating Windows. It isn't. It is about getting a kernel that together with the GNU tools and other contributions constitutes an operating system that isn't crappy.
If that requires certain features, then they will be added as soon as someone feels an itch about the lack of them. If they are useless features that only should be included if Linux was in the game of beating Microsoft, but nobody actually will be using them, then they never will get in there.
No, that won't do. For example, you will be bitten by compiler upgrades. Let's assume that the binary part has been compiled using gcc 2.x, now try to run that in a kernel compiled with gcc 3.x. It _might_ work (it does for the Aureal Vortex drivers, which are similar), but it is not recommended. Actually, the kernel refuses to load such a module, you have to force it using insmod -f. Not only that, what if nVidia goes out of business? And yes, that is about as unlikely as the thought of 3DLabs going bankrupt was five years ago. You can bet that driver won't work in the next kernel generation anyway. Anyway, having experienced that ordeal once, I decided not to buy hardware with binary drivers only again (Binary drivers with wrappers like nVidia's are still binary). I couldn't care less about the extra fps you can get with those nice nVidia drivers, for now I'll stick to ATI.
Ever heard of Philips/Marantz? Philips is a European company, although its US subsidiaries have effectively brainwashed the US consumers to believe it is an US company.
Think about GPRS and 3G phones that allow instant messaging (heck, you can do that over SMS on older GMS phones if you want). What if MS Messenger only likes to interoperate with MS Smartphones? Another example: one of the things with interactive services is how you bill them. Wouldn't passport come in handy, because you can then bill even the customers that use prepaid phones? The same applies for online gaming, you will end up with online game environments with a mix of mobile and desktop users. The provider that can cater to both user groups through Microsoft better will have an advantage.
Sounds like an effective, though slow, way of delivering a nice amount of explosives in deeply buried bunkers. Or have I been playing too much Tiberian Sun with its underground tanks?
Blue Curve is really nice for those that come from the Microsoft world. Personally I am aching for the first icon-set RPMs that give me back the default Gnome look and I don't like the menus either. The latter bit is just bad for everyone, the menus are really confusing and inconsistent.
Yes, that is perfectly possible. In France you have a posh brand of lighting gear called Mazda while at the same time Mazda cars are marketed under the brand name Mazda. The two companies have nothing in common. I don't know about US trademark law, but under European trademark law trademarks are filed for market categories. That makes it possible that you have KLM airlines in the Netherlands and KLM clothing as well. The latter is a clothing brand for exceptional tall people. Both brands have been registerd by different companies for different market categories.
First of all, it is your code indeed, so there is no reason to hold you accountable for your licensing decisions.
Having said that, what about keeping an official tree that is up to your minimalistic standards and rejecting any patches that don't meet them? Let the infidels have their own forks, you will be the one maintaining the canonical version.
That is total rubbish. Tiny countries such as Denmark, Norway and The Netherlands each have a navy that can beat the Chinese Navy. Although the Chinese army is huge, it is nowhere the levels of sophistication of the European armies or even the Russian army. Armies that are all a generation behind the curve of the US army. Part of China's difficult relationship with the rest of the world is caused by a belief in its own superiority while at the same time being aware of its military insignificance compared to most of the developed world.
Although I have never written a single character of code in Java myself (I'm a functional designer, not a coder), I know that the last four to five really successful projects at the systems integrator I work at were all done in Java. And since these involve server applications, stuff like GUI's don't really matter. Deployment of applications in an typical mass-market end-user environment maybe tough, but don't forget that 90% of the code out there is being written for a single customer.
Tracking lots of artillery shells is a piece of cake. That's what artillery radar is for. And that type of radar has been around since WW II. Actually, later generations of COIL systems might be able to knock out 155 mm artillery shells in midair. And yes, the Crusader is derided, and for good reason. It is the heaviest mechanised piece of artillery the US Army has ever proposed. That same US army has increasingly become reliant on airlift capacity. What is the point of having a big gun in your inventory if you can't get it close to the battlefield by plane?
Although the analogy you bring up certainly has merits, it is, as analogies often are, flawed. In the case of the internet it is quite hard to identify where each of the 100,000 units in your example are at a given time. It is not even possible to tell which route they took after the transaction has been completed. On top of that, the reason why the international shipment cases work the way they do is that most jurisdictions have exceptions in their laws specifically for the transportation of physical goods in order to make international trade easier to work from a legal perspective. These exceptions are specifically designed for these cases and are not necessarily easily applicable to internet transactions. Moreover, most of these national rules that allow other legal systems to take precedence over national law by contract, do not allow such clauses in cases were consumers are involved. Otherwise their consumer protection laws would be rendered invalid because every corporation would consider for example Afghan law to be applicable for any transaction you as an end-user would have with them and put such a clause in their standard contracts.
First of all I'd like to point out that Amsterdam is just a bloody city in the Netherlands, not a jurisdiction on its own. On the point of laws that are not enforced in the Netherlands, there is a distinction between public and private law in the so called civil law countries. Public law governs the relations between government and the citizens, private law governs the relations between citizens. Going after a citizen who has violated a regulation that is part of public law, for example the penal law on substances of abuse, is a typical governmental task. Here a peculiar principle kicks in. Penal laws that give the government the right to prosecute someone tend not to oblige the government to do so. Hence the government can decide to dedicate scarce law enforcement resources to prosecuting criminals they deem more harming to society, e.g. people mugging old ladies, than some pothead peacefully smoking his gear. Since copyright law is mostly private law, principles such as this do not apply at all. Basically copyright holders trying to get a court order in order to prevent their intellectual property from being infringed is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance is supposed to have people with similar risk profiles pooling their risks and ending up with a lower risk profile. The more homogeneous the risk profiles, the more chance of ending up with a much lower one. You wouldn't want to end up with a higher risk profile because of you getting lumped together with those who drive like idiots, would you?
Yup, I stand corrected. According to her biography she was born in Brussels to a Dutch mother and a English father. That's the bit in my memory that got me mistaken. There wasn't a whole lot Belgian to her anyway.
Wrong, that was that little country north of Belgium, AKA the Netherlands.
That still makes perfect sense since common usage of the term spam to describe unsolicited bulk e-mail only would dilute Hormel's Spam trademark if their product involved any form of e-mail. Since their business is processed pork and thus has no connection with e-mail whatsoever it is quite easy for them not to object to the usage of the term 'spam' for unwanted e-mail.
Sometimes I wonder what's so bloody hard about trademark law that the slashdot geeks almost always get it wrong. Of all areas in law it has the most straightforward logic and one would suppose that it would be relatively easy for geeks to grok it.
Remember this: from a legal perspective trademarks are about the ease of laying a connection between the product and it's producer in the consumer's mind. As long as consumer's won't be confused or won't be likely to make such a connection anymore, there is nothing the owner of the trademark can do about it (apart from intimidation through threatening with lawsuits).
So Hormel's 'liberal' approach to spam and Google sending in the 'goons' are equally sensible approaches to completely different problems.
But I am afraid I have spent too much time on the soapbox already, the slashbots are as likely to get it as the average pointy haired boss is likely to really grasp an technological issue.
We all know that MozillaQuest is the product of a colour-blind troll. And 'not being aware' holds no legal weight whatsoever.
The Burlington Coat Factory perhaps?
Ideas are not copyrighted. They may be patentable, but fall outside the reach of copyright. And let's keep it that way.
Make that Denmark.
You are assuming that Linux is about beating Windows. It isn't. It is about getting a kernel that together with the GNU tools and other contributions constitutes an operating system that isn't crappy.
If that requires certain features, then they will be added as soon as someone feels an itch about the lack of them. If they are useless features that only should be included if Linux was in the game of beating Microsoft, but nobody actually will be using them, then they never will get in there.
No, that won't do. For example, you will be bitten by compiler upgrades. Let's assume that the binary part has been compiled using gcc 2.x, now try to run that in a kernel compiled with gcc 3.x. It _might_ work (it does for the Aureal Vortex drivers, which are similar), but it is not recommended. Actually, the kernel refuses to load such a module, you have to force it using insmod -f.
Not only that, what if nVidia goes out of business? And yes, that is about as unlikely as the thought of 3DLabs going bankrupt was five years ago. You can bet that driver won't work in the next kernel generation anyway.
Anyway, having experienced that ordeal once, I decided not to buy hardware with binary drivers only again (Binary drivers with wrappers like nVidia's are still binary). I couldn't care less about the extra fps you can get with those nice nVidia drivers, for now I'll stick to ATI.
Ever heard of Philips/Marantz? Philips is a European company, although its US subsidiaries have effectively brainwashed the US consumers to believe it is an US company.
Think about GPRS and 3G phones that allow instant messaging (heck, you can do that over SMS on older GMS phones if you want). What if MS Messenger only likes to interoperate with MS Smartphones? Another example: one of the things with interactive services is how you bill them. Wouldn't passport come in handy, because you can then bill even the customers that use prepaid phones? The same applies for online gaming, you will end up with online game environments with a mix of mobile and desktop users. The provider that can cater to both user groups through Microsoft better will have an advantage.
Sounds like an effective, though slow, way of delivering a nice amount of explosives in deeply buried bunkers. Or have I been playing too much Tiberian Sun with its underground tanks?
Looks like an ideal camouflaging method for my private Scud launcher.
Blue Curve is really nice for those that come from the Microsoft world. Personally I am aching for the first icon-set RPMs that give me back the default Gnome look and I don't like the menus either. The latter bit is just bad for everyone, the menus are really confusing and inconsistent.
Yes, that is perfectly possible. In France you have a posh brand of lighting gear called Mazda while at the same time Mazda cars are marketed under the brand name Mazda. The two companies have nothing in common. I don't know about US trademark law, but under European trademark law trademarks are filed for market categories. That makes it possible that you have KLM airlines in the Netherlands and KLM clothing as well. The latter is a clothing brand for exceptional tall people. Both brands have been registerd by different companies for different market categories.
First of all, it is your code indeed, so there is no reason to hold you accountable for your licensing decisions.
Having said that, what about keeping an official tree that is up to your minimalistic standards and rejecting any patches that don't meet them? Let the infidels have their own forks, you will be the one maintaining the canonical version.
Isn't the time spend in high school supposed to teach you these skills anyway?
Now I am even more confused about the US education system than I used to be...
You mean TLD's like as, au, ca, uk, nl, de, fr, sa, se, no, de, it, il, tw, jp, kr, in, ch, cn?
Sure, there is almost no chance that they are valid.
That is total rubbish. Tiny countries such as Denmark, Norway and The Netherlands each have a navy that can beat the Chinese Navy. Although the Chinese army is huge, it is nowhere the levels of sophistication of the European armies or even the Russian army. Armies that are all a generation behind the curve of the US army. Part of China's difficult relationship with the rest of the world is caused by a belief in its own superiority while at the same time being aware of its military insignificance compared to most of the developed world.
Although I have never written a single character of code in Java myself (I'm a functional designer, not a coder), I know that the last four to five really successful projects at the systems integrator I work at were all done in Java. And since these involve server applications, stuff like GUI's don't really matter. Deployment of applications in an typical mass-market end-user environment maybe tough, but don't forget that 90% of the code out there is being written for a single customer.
Tracking lots of artillery shells is a piece of cake. That's what artillery radar is for. And that type of radar has been around since WW II. Actually, later generations of COIL systems might be able to knock out 155 mm artillery shells in midair. And yes, the Crusader is derided, and for good reason. It is the heaviest mechanised piece of artillery the US Army has ever proposed. That same US army has increasingly become reliant on airlift capacity. What is the point of having a big gun in your inventory if you can't get it close to the battlefield by plane?
Yes, even the read-only module. It might be worth spending some time catching up on this matter by browsingthe archives of Kernel Traffic.
Although the analogy you bring up certainly has merits, it is, as analogies often are, flawed. In the case of the internet it is quite hard to identify where each of the 100,000 units in your example are at a given time. It is not even possible to tell which route they took after the transaction has been completed. On top of that, the reason why the international shipment cases work the way they do is that most jurisdictions have exceptions in their laws specifically for the transportation of physical goods in order to make international trade easier to work from a legal perspective. These exceptions are specifically designed for these cases and are not necessarily easily applicable to internet transactions. Moreover, most of these national rules that allow other legal systems to take precedence over national law by contract, do not allow such clauses in cases were consumers are involved. Otherwise their consumer protection laws would be rendered invalid because every corporation would consider for example Afghan law to be applicable for any transaction you as an end-user would have with them and put such a clause in their standard contracts.
First of all I'd like to point out that Amsterdam is just a bloody city in the Netherlands, not a jurisdiction on its own. On the point of laws that are not enforced in the Netherlands, there is a distinction between public and private law in the so called civil law countries. Public law governs the relations between government and the citizens, private law governs the relations between citizens. Going after a citizen who has violated a regulation that is part of public law, for example the penal law on substances of abuse, is a typical governmental task. Here a peculiar principle kicks in. Penal laws that give the government the right to prosecute someone tend not to oblige the government to do so. Hence the government can decide to dedicate scarce law enforcement resources to prosecuting criminals they deem more harming to society, e.g. people mugging old ladies, than some pothead peacefully smoking his gear. Since copyright law is mostly private law, principles such as this do not apply at all. Basically copyright holders trying to get a court order in order to prevent their intellectual property from being infringed is an entirely different kettle of fish.