Submarine patents are against IEEE rules, but Wi-Lan has been talking about its OFDM patents for years.
Of course, Wi-Lan isn't the only company to have 802.11 patents. Almost every IEEE member company has some, and most license them under the IEEE's RAND policy. Not sure why Wi-Lan isn't doing the same.
Most newspapers make a loss on each sale: A large portion of the cover price goes to the newsagent, and the amount that the publishing company gets is rarely enough to cover the cost of printing and shipping. With a few exceptions, they boast to advertisers about how many copies are passed around: They want you to give your copy to someone else, leave it on the train, etc.
If publishers think your copy of a newspaper is likely to be read by enough people, they'll even make sure you get the newspaper for free. Doctors' offices get free copies of many newspapers and magazines, because so many people will read them in the waiting room. Supermarkets put magazines by the checkout so that people can read them (and be exposed to their ads) while standing in line, not in the hope that people will buy one on impulse.
It's possible to locate raders without using registration. Many sites use reverse DNS, and there are also companies offering proprietary databases that match geography to IP address. Sure, that's not 100% accurate, but it does help target advertising. For example, when I read British newspaper The Guardian from an ISP in the Bay Area, it displays a banner ad for flights from San Francisco to London. (Or at least, it used to before I installed an up-to-date Hosts file.)
OTOH, registration has other uses besides spamming and geographically-targeted ads. Even if you give fake info, the site can learn a lot from knowing when and what an anonymous individual chooses to read. They can do the same thing with cookies, of course, but that's less accurate, especially as even IE now makes it easy to block cookies.
I get spam advertising cheap copies of Windows XP nearly every day. If they send it straight to Microsoft, the BSA might actually do something useful for a change.
You're absolutely right. "Likely to be dragged through court" is more like "a miniscule possibility of getting draggged through court". There are so many free APs that the odds of one particular one being singled out are fairly low.
Of course, the large number of free APs also makes security easier: If all you're protecting is a DSL line, you can get away with using something crap like WEP, because everyone wanting free Internet access will go after the completely open APs first.
This is a real half-assed compromise. It will irritate many people using illegal copies, as well as a few legal users who are just using a CD key they found off the Internet (because hitting Google is easier than keeping track of each individual key). It might make Microsoft a few extra dollars in the short term, at the long term cost of driving others to alternatives, but I doubt that either is really likely: There'll be SP2 keys out there soon enough.
If Microsoft really wanted to screw the customer, they'd make updates available only to registered users, just like the anti-virus companies. Their "product activation" could easily be expanded to full-scale registration.
I'm not sure why they haven't gone this route. Maybe it's fear that screwing people too overtly will make Linux more attractive, or of anti-trust regulation. (Ashcroft may be more interested in going after medical marijuana and P2P users than abusive monopolies, but he won't be around forever, and MS also has to content with international and US state governemnts.) Or it could be that they they're just waiting for Palladium, which will automate enforcement of whatever EULA they like.
Martha Stewart's crime has a huge economic impact, because it affects confidence in the stock market. Average people are less likely to invest in stock when we see that the market is rigged to benefit insiders like her and Ken Lay. This drives the market down, and would considered a negative.
OTOH, the mugger in the bad neighborhood has a positive impact. Because you're afraid to walk through the neighborhood, you might spend money on a bus or cab, buy a gun to defend yourself, or (the fear-instilling news shows' favorite) take out a loan to buy a huge SUV. When the mugger actually shoots or stabs you, he's helping to boost the medical industry. All these show up as positives in the GDP figures. For the economy, fear of crime is good, and actual crime even better!
This is called the "broken window" fallacy, used to demonstrate the limits of traditional economics. It's particularly relevant to the computer security industry, most of which only exists because Windows is broken.
Many virus-writers are spammers. That's why most viruses don't bother corrupting data or wiping hard disks anymore. They'd rather hide themselves, creating a zombie army that can be used to send spam.
One problem is that the copper might decide to arrest you, because technically it's a crime to be drunk in a public place. Yes, everyone does it, but that won't hold up in court. If the copper's bored and he doesn't like your race, your face or your T-shirt, you will be the one who gets punished.
Sterile seeds can make contamination even worse. This farmer merely got sued by Monsanto. If the seeds had been sterile, he'd have had no crop at all, which in many parts of the world (admittedly not Canada) is the difference between eating and going hungry.
This is one of the reasons some countries ban GM imports: they don't want their farmers accidentally planting sterile seeds.
Popups are annoying, and I disable them every chance I get. But they do at least help pay for content, and they're actually less intrusive than TV or radio advertising, which (unless you're watching on TiVo or VCR) you can't just avoid with a single click.
What these companies are accused of doing is much worse than regular popups: They were allegedly using Gator-like scumware to hijack users' browsers, showing popup ads that weren't placed there by the sites the users were visiting. Arguably, it's even worse than spam, because it permanently infects a user's machine.
Easyjet (the UK's worst, but cheapest, airline) does this. By law, it has to advertise the full price including all taxes and charges, so it uses the ads to complain about how much tax it has to pay. (Its main complaint is that taxes on plane tickets are a flat amount, not a proportion of the price.)
Then when you actually get your invoice, it's itemized with some creative accounting to show how much of the ticket price goes towards things like the credit card company's profits. They want you to believe that they'd like to give away air travel if only it wasn't for those greedy suppliers and governments.
But they're not all charging the same fees at the same amounts, which makes it difficult to compare prices when all the companies only advertise the price excluding the fees.
They're not just a pain to MS customers, though. All those Windows/Outlook viruses traveling through the Internet cause major headaches for everyone with an email address. Whether you use MS products or not, you still get spammed by the hacked systems of people who do.
He probably means that he had to pay a tax penalty, for under-witholding. This is due whenever you owe the IRS more than a certain amount at tax time ($1,000, I think).
Many people change ISPs often. For example, they move from dial-up to broadband. A hotmail (or Yahoo, and soon GMail) account is more portable, and it's also easier if people want to access their personal mail at work or from a Web kiosk.
Hotmail is in many ways inferior to other free Web-based email services, but it does have one important plus: Integration with Outlook and Outlook Express, which (if you're an Outlook user with a fast connection) makes it just as convenient as IMAP.
If they did, there's a real chance that there could be no more Internet for a lot of applications: people would just upload their Web pages to Google, users would log on to Google to search, and most email will go through Gmail.
This is a good thing for Google, but not for the world as a whole.
Employees who complain about stock performance are usually deluded. In most companies, the majority of stock is held by rich people who bought or inherited it, not employees. Employees are usually much better off getting paid more than hoping for a huge increase in stock price. (There are a few exceptions, like early employees of Microsoft and soon Google, but they're the winners in a very risky gamble. Stock options in startups are like lottery tickets.)
Having said all that, in the case of Sun and every other publicly-traded corporation, both employees and stockholders do have one basic common interest: that the company survive. Both already have the option of leaving Sun. Stockholders can choose to convert their stock to cash by selling it, and employees can choose to quit. Buying or holding stock is a statement of optimism in a company, and working for a dying company is usually better than being unemployed.
Society isn't best served by any company descending into software patent litigation, of course, but that's a separate problem, which really needs to be fixed by society.
True, and the 2.4 GHz. phones will also stop this chipset from getting a lot more than standard Wi-Fi. Basically, it's only useful if you have a single Wi-Fi AP and no other cordless phones, APs, Bluetooth gadgets or microwave ovens within a few hundred meters.
The best solution is to move to 5 Ghz. (802.11a), which has 13 non-overlapping channels. But this has a slightly shorter range, and chips are still slightly more expensive.
You can get around this by gate-checking your bags. Then it will get off the same stop as you. If you're really lucky, you'll be able to bring it as carry-on. (This only works if you have a relatively small amount of baggage, of course. The TSA won't let you bring a cartfull of suitcases through security.)
But you can only do this if you're on a one-way ticket (or the return side of a round trip). If you deliberately miss one flight, the airline will cancel the rest of your itinerary and you'll be stranded.
Bush has spent money on plenty of things beside Iraq:
The anti-ICBM missie shield, which doesn't work but will give lots of money to military contractors.
The prescription drug benefit for HMOs and pharmaceutical companies. He even lied about the cost of this, because other republicans wouldn't have supported it otherwise.
The totalitarian information awareness project, well known to everyone here.
Enforcement of the DMCA and other corporate-protection laws, also well known to everyone here.
The War on Drugs. This included giving millions of dollars to the Taliban (who were very anti-drug) shortly before 9/11.
The faith-bsaed initiative, which channels taxpayer's (well, deficit) money towards projects such as teaching creationism.
The tax cut to the rich. Okay, so harcore right wingers will say this isn't technically spending, but the effect is the same. And sometimes it is a straightforward handout. Many corporations already paid no tax under Clinton, so Bush made sure that their tax rate is now negative (ie. they get a big tax refund while never having paid the tax in the first place.)
People who are against regualtion forgets that the software market is already highly regualted, through patents, copyright and EUALs.
Want to install your copy of Windows on an extra machine? Want to reverse-engineer the code in your DVD player? Want to publish a benchmark about the poor performance of Microsoft's.NET? All of those are illegal, thanks to government regulatioin. (Well, actually I'm not sure if that last EULA term will stand up in court, but the first two definitely have.)
Mandating that source code be published is, of course, what RMS argues for. The GPL is a way of using the existing regulations to enforce it. Unlike him, I'm not sure that the GPL is the only acceptable model for software, but his position is no less extreme or dependent on governmet regulation than the existing situation.
What the govt. should do (but won't, of course) is make copyright and patent protection dependent on source-code publication. After all, this is the supposed purpose of copyrights and patents: you share your idea with the world, and in return get a time-limited monopoloy on it. So software companies could choose: free as in beer or (eventually) free as in speech.
Slashdot Mirror
Submarine patents are against IEEE rules, but Wi-Lan has been talking about its OFDM patents for years.
Of course, Wi-Lan isn't the only company to have 802.11 patents. Almost every IEEE member company has some, and most license them under the IEEE's RAND policy. Not sure why Wi-Lan isn't doing the same.
1993 is recent. The usual patent term is 20 years (give or take various scams for extending them), so it's still only about halfway through.
Most newspapers make a loss on each sale: A large portion of the cover price goes to the newsagent, and the amount that the publishing company gets is rarely enough to cover the cost of printing and shipping. With a few exceptions, they boast to advertisers about how many copies are passed around: They want you to give your copy to someone else, leave it on the train, etc.
If publishers think your copy of a newspaper is likely to be read by enough people, they'll even make sure you get the newspaper for free. Doctors' offices get free copies of many newspapers and magazines, because so many people will read them in the waiting room. Supermarkets put magazines by the checkout so that people can read them (and be exposed to their ads) while standing in line, not in the hope that people will buy one on impulse.
It's possible to locate raders without using registration. Many sites use reverse DNS, and there are also companies offering proprietary databases that match geography to IP address. Sure, that's not 100% accurate, but it does help target advertising. For example, when I read British newspaper The Guardian from an ISP in the Bay Area, it displays a banner ad for flights from San Francisco to London. (Or at least, it used to before I installed an up-to-date Hosts file.)
OTOH, registration has other uses besides spamming and geographically-targeted ads. Even if you give fake info, the site can learn a lot from knowing when and what an anonymous individual chooses to read. They can do the same thing with cookies, of course, but that's less accurate, especially as even IE now makes it easy to block cookies.
piracy@microsoft.com
I get spam advertising cheap copies of Windows XP nearly every day. If they send it straight to Microsoft, the BSA might actually do something useful for a change.
You're absolutely right. "Likely to be dragged through court" is more like "a miniscule possibility of getting draggged through court". There are so many free APs that the odds of one particular one being singled out are fairly low.
Of course, the large number of free APs also makes security easier: If all you're protecting is a DSL line, you can get away with using something crap like WEP, because everyone wanting free Internet access will go after the completely open APs first.
This is a real half-assed compromise. It will irritate many people using illegal copies, as well as a few legal users who are just using a CD key they found off the Internet (because hitting Google is easier than keeping track of each individual key). It might make Microsoft a few extra dollars in the short term, at the long term cost of driving others to alternatives, but I doubt that either is really likely: There'll be SP2 keys out there soon enough.
If Microsoft really wanted to screw the customer, they'd make updates available only to registered users, just like the anti-virus companies. Their "product activation" could easily be expanded to full-scale registration.
I'm not sure why they haven't gone this route. Maybe it's fear that screwing people too overtly will make Linux more attractive, or of anti-trust regulation. (Ashcroft may be more interested in going after medical marijuana and P2P users than abusive monopolies, but he won't be around forever, and MS also has to content with international and US state governemnts.) Or it could be that they they're just waiting for Palladium, which will automate enforcement of whatever EULA they like.
Martha Stewart's crime has a huge economic impact, because it affects confidence in the stock market. Average people are less likely to invest in stock when we see that the market is rigged to benefit insiders like her and Ken Lay. This drives the market down, and would considered a negative.
OTOH, the mugger in the bad neighborhood has a positive impact. Because you're afraid to walk through the neighborhood, you might spend money on a bus or cab, buy a gun to defend yourself, or (the fear-instilling news shows' favorite) take out a loan to buy a huge SUV. When the mugger actually shoots or stabs you, he's helping to boost the medical industry. All these show up as positives in the GDP figures. For the economy, fear of crime is good, and actual crime even better!
This is called the "broken window" fallacy, used to demonstrate the limits of traditional economics. It's particularly relevant to the computer security industry, most of which only exists because Windows is broken.
Many virus-writers are spammers. That's why most viruses don't bother corrupting data or wiping hard disks anymore. They'd rather hide themselves, creating a zombie army that can be used to send spam.
One problem is that the copper might decide to arrest you, because technically it's a crime to be drunk in a public place. Yes, everyone does it, but that won't hold up in court. If the copper's bored and he doesn't like your race, your face or your T-shirt, you will be the one who gets punished.
Sterile seeds can make contamination even worse. This farmer merely got sued by Monsanto. If the seeds had been sterile, he'd have had no crop at all, which in many parts of the world (admittedly not Canada) is the difference between eating and going hungry.
This is one of the reasons some countries ban GM imports: they don't want their farmers accidentally planting sterile seeds.
Popups are annoying, and I disable them every chance I get. But they do at least help pay for content, and they're actually less intrusive than TV or radio advertising, which (unless you're watching on TiVo or VCR) you can't just avoid with a single click.
What these companies are accused of doing is much worse than regular popups: They were allegedly using Gator-like scumware to hijack users' browsers, showing popup ads that weren't placed there by the sites the users were visiting. Arguably, it's even worse than spam, because it permanently infects a user's machine.
Easyjet (the UK's worst, but cheapest, airline) does this. By law, it has to advertise the full price including all taxes and charges, so it uses the ads to complain about how much tax it has to pay. (Its main complaint is that taxes on plane tickets are a flat amount, not a proportion of the price.)
Then when you actually get your invoice, it's itemized with some creative accounting to show how much of the ticket price goes towards things like the credit card company's profits. They want you to believe that they'd like to give away air travel if only it wasn't for those greedy suppliers and governments.
But they're not all charging the same fees at the same amounts, which makes it difficult to compare prices when all the companies only advertise the price excluding the fees.
They're not just a pain to MS customers, though. All those Windows/Outlook viruses traveling through the Internet cause major headaches for everyone with an email address. Whether you use MS products or not, you still get spammed by the hacked systems of people who do.
He probably means that he had to pay a tax penalty, for under-witholding. This is due whenever you owe the IRS more than a certain amount at tax time ($1,000, I think).
Many people change ISPs often. For example, they move from dial-up to broadband. A hotmail (or Yahoo, and soon GMail) account is more portable, and it's also easier if people want to access their personal mail at work or from a Web kiosk.
Hotmail is in many ways inferior to other free Web-based email services, but it does have one important plus: Integration with Outlook and Outlook Express, which (if you're an Outlook user with a fast connection) makes it just as convenient as IMAP.
Well, the French word is derived from Latin, so technically is related to the roman numeral M.
If they did, there's a real chance that there could be no more Internet for a lot of applications: people would just upload their Web pages to Google, users would log on to Google to search, and most email will go through Gmail.
This is a good thing for Google, but not for the world as a whole.
Employees who complain about stock performance are usually deluded. In most companies, the majority of stock is held by rich people who bought or inherited it, not employees. Employees are usually much better off getting paid more than hoping for a huge increase in stock price. (There are a few exceptions, like early employees of Microsoft and soon Google, but they're the winners in a very risky gamble. Stock options in startups are like lottery tickets.)
Having said all that, in the case of Sun and every other publicly-traded corporation, both employees and stockholders do have one basic common interest: that the company survive. Both already have the option of leaving Sun. Stockholders can choose to convert their stock to cash by selling it, and employees can choose to quit. Buying or holding stock is a statement of optimism in a company, and working for a dying company is usually better than being unemployed.
Society isn't best served by any company descending into software patent litigation, of course, but that's a separate problem, which really needs to be fixed by society.
True, and the 2.4 GHz. phones will also stop this chipset from getting a lot more than standard Wi-Fi. Basically, it's only useful if you have a single Wi-Fi AP and no other cordless phones, APs, Bluetooth gadgets or microwave ovens within a few hundred meters.
The best solution is to move to 5 Ghz. (802.11a), which has 13 non-overlapping channels. But this has a slightly shorter range, and chips are still slightly more expensive.
The main value they provide is not getting audited by the BSA. Think of it as a protection racket, only with the law on their side.
You can get around this by gate-checking your bags. Then it will get off the same stop as you. If you're really lucky, you'll be able to bring it as carry-on. (This only works if you have a relatively small amount of baggage, of course. The TSA won't let you bring a cartfull of suitcases through security.)
But you can only do this if you're on a one-way ticket (or the return side of a round trip). If you deliberately miss one flight, the airline will cancel the rest of your itinerary and you'll be stranded.
People who are against regualtion forgets that the software market is already highly regualted, through patents, copyright and EUALs.
.NET? All of those are illegal, thanks to government regulatioin. (Well, actually I'm not sure if that last EULA term will stand up in court, but the first two definitely have.)
Want to install your copy of Windows on an extra machine? Want to reverse-engineer the code in your DVD player? Want to publish a benchmark about the poor performance of Microsoft's
Mandating that source code be published is, of course, what RMS argues for. The GPL is a way of using the existing regulations to enforce it. Unlike him, I'm not sure that the GPL is the only acceptable model for software, but his position is no less extreme or dependent on governmet regulation than the existing situation.
What the govt. should do (but won't, of course) is make copyright and patent protection dependent on source-code publication. After all, this is the supposed purpose of copyrights and patents: you share your idea with the world, and in return get a time-limited monopoloy on it. So software companies could choose: free as in beer or (eventually) free as in speech.