Where does the patent say the "response to authorization failure" can't be handled directly by the application that requires greater privilege? Whether the OS invokes the authorization GUI or the application does, it's still "in response to an authorization failure".
Can you point out the text in the patent claim that makes a distinction between a gksudo-type program that is executed on demand by an application requiring greater privilege and a UAC-type module that is executed automatically by the operating system? It seems to me the patent would cover gksudo when invoked by an application that knows it doesn't have the necessary rights to perform an operation, but perhaps there's something I've missed?
According to patent law, the above example of murder-by-verbiage is supposed to help third-parties implement the invention described, but the language employed is clearly designed to accomplish the exact opposite. I think it's time to put the patent system out of its misery.
You used it. You've been around here long enough to know better than to try mis-using a term of art to make a point.
I don't think I was misusing it at all. Language is far more flexible than you give it credit.
What's wrong with that?
That's rather like asking what's wrong with IBM wanting to prevent Compaq and other computer manufacturers from making and selling IBM-compatible computers. The PC market has benefited greatly from the presence of IBM clones, making possible even Apple's own transition to commodity PC hardware. From IBM's perspective there was absolutely nothing wrong with preventing others from cloning the IBM PC, but the market would no doubt have suffered if IBM had been successful in its lawsuit against Compaq.
Whether Apple's behavior is wrong beyond the fact that it's bad for consumers is a moral argument I don't care to enter into. The best I can do is to look at what the market might look like if Apple weren't in the habit of intentionally crippling OSX on non-Apple hardware.
Of course Apple has a "monopoly" on Apple products, that's a tautology, not an argument.
I never said "Apple has a monopoly on Apple products". That's just a straw man you set up to pretend that what I said is tautological. In fact, there is nothing tautological about my actual claim, which is that "Apple has a monopoly on computers that can run OSX out of the box".
Forget about the word monopoly if you prefer. It's a small point. The important point is that OSX is tied to Apple hardware through artificial means, and that Apple does this in order to protect its position as the sole supplier of hardware that can run OSX without the need to circumvent Apple's anti-competitive technical measures.
I use the word monopoly in the colloquial sense rather than the legal sense of the word. I'm saying Apple has a monopoly on computers that can run OSX out of the box, which is really just another way of saying they are the world's sole supplier of such computers. Ignoring your nitpick about my use of the word "monopoly", my point remains the same: Apple is the sole supplier of hardware that runs OSX out of the box and it wants to remain the sole supplier at any cost, even if it means crippling OSX to fail on otherwise compatible hardware.
... because some cheap chipset might make the whole thing malfunction and users would be fast to blame apple for a bad product...
I'm sure that has nothing at all to do with it. What's actually happening is that Apple is the sole supplier of computers that can run OSX out of the box and it wants to make sure things remain that way. It's simply a matter of Apple maintaining a profitable hardware monopoly.
If I'm not mistaken, the Blizzard case involved the making of a second copy in RAM for the purposes of getting around restrictions in Blizzard's software.
According to TFA, "Judge Mosman concludes that Rule 41 and 18 U.S.C. 2703(a) require the notice to be served on the ISP, not the account holder, as a statutory matter." Thus, if the server is physically in your control I presume police would have to present you with a proper search warrant. The issue becomes less clear when the server is hosted at a third-party ISP facility but administered by the ISP's customer. In that case, must the warrant go to the server admin or can police get away with serving the ISP and giving no notice to the company that actually owns or administers the data on the server?
I hope they include QI in their international lineup. I've been waiting for that show to become available here since I first saw it on YouTube, but no US station has agreed to carry it. These days such videos are taken down pretty quickly, so a legitimate feed of BBC programs would be very welcome indeed.
I don't have a list of ISPs, but I've read several posts by ISP employees (on a public forum that caters to ISPs) discussing and even bragging about crippling P2P applications and doing so in a way that leads users to believe the problem is with the peer's connection rather than the client's connection.
An ISP would therefore need to seek the Commission's approval before it implemented a practice that would:
* block the delivery of content to an end-user, or
* slow down time-sensitive traffic, such as videoconferencing or Internet telephone (Voice over Internet Protocol) services, to the extent that the content is degraded.
So ISPs can't slow down time-sensitive traffic without prior approval by the CRTC, but there's no restrictions on slowing down other kinds of traffi, perhaps even to the point where the link is useless without being completely blocked? That's exactly the reason why I fear traffic shaping. Far too often it's used as a way to cripple people's connections rather than provide clients with true "quality of service".
If card counting became some sort of protected thing by law or regulation or anything else, all the casino has to do is use more decks and shuffle after every hand. there goes the entire advantage offered by card counting.
That's exactly what casinos should do if they don't wish to suffer losses from card counting, and indeed what some of them are already doing. If a particular game is broken with regard to casino profits, they should either fix the game or get rid of it. What they shouldn't do is cheat their customers by offering a certain game and kicking them out for playing the game fairly and intelligently.
One final thought, if you think cheating by the casino is wrong, start your own casino that plays by your ethical gambling rules.
That's the sort of argument a 10-year-old would make. I don't care to start my own casino, nor do I need to do so for my criticism to be valid.
Don't tell me you can't compete against the big casinos, I'm positive you will have more customers than they do soon enough.
Better than having ethical casinos compete against unethical ones would be to require all casinos to behave in an ethical manner. No market should be so free that fraud goes unpunished. If the big casinos cannot survive without cheating their customers, then they simply should not survive. Ethical casinos will the flourish in the vacuum.
Casinos offer players the chance to win money under particular conditions dictated by the mechanics of the game. Card counters aren't altering those conditions but instead are playing intelligently according to the rules of the game. To kick players out for seeking an advantage within the rules of the game is actually form of fraud: the casino offers players potential winnings and then reneges on its offer once it decides it's against its best interests to allow the player to continue. The casino is cheating.
Whether or not a player has a legal right to be there is irrelevant. Once the casino allows a player into its premises it shouldn't be able to renege on its promise (express or implied) of potential winnings. Property rights are not supposed to enable fraud, but that's exactly the way casinos are using the law.
Unfortunately, the fact is that casinos are allowed to practice what is ultimately a form of legalized theft.
Net Neutrality rules could hinder development of the Internet in directions that are harmful to the public. Unlike the parties mentioned above, I feel that hindering harmful business practices is actually a Good Thing.
But are you seriously raising the question over whether having a broadband connection is any good if you can't access, what, a few hundred non-free porn sites and a single whiny blog?
I'm saying the guarantee of a broadband connection for all is meaningless if you don't also have guaranteed access to all legal content on the Internet. When police are able to block perfectly legitimate websites, and do so without even the due process of law, the guarantee itself becomes meaningless. That doesn't mean the connection is worthless in practice -- only that the guarantee is worthless.
Having said that, I'm happy to find out the filter has been nearly abandoned by Finnish ISPs.
What good is the right to a broadband connection if they don't have the right to an unfiltered connection? In case you didn't know, a filter maintained by Finnish police that's supposed to block child pornography also blocks other content, including a website critical of Finland's internet filter:
I dunno, the more I keep seeing the LHC fail and fail is that we may be experiencing quantum suicide. In each reality that the LHC properly starts up and smashs atoms, the world ends as we know it.
Unless such destruction can work its way backwards as well as forwards, I fail to see how there being no observers tomorrow precludes the possibility of there being observers today, right before the kaboom.
How long until the FBI does the same kind of end-run around the law by tapping into DMV biometric data? Right now the government can only obtain a person's fingerprints upon being arrested for some reason, but if the FBI adopts the same policy for DMV biometrics as for DMV pictures it could end up with a database of every licensed driver's biometric data without actually keeping such a database itself.
It seems to me they shouldn't get away with such a thing on a mere technicality of the law.
I read it the same way, but unlike you I thought the whining came after the initial judgment against him and the new judge overturned it so the guy would shut up.
Slashdot Mirror
Where does the patent say the "response to authorization failure" can't be handled directly by the application that requires greater privilege? Whether the OS invokes the authorization GUI or the application does, it's still "in response to an authorization failure".
Can you point out the text in the patent claim that makes a distinction between a gksudo-type program that is executed on demand by an application requiring greater privilege and a UAC-type module that is executed automatically by the operating system? It seems to me the patent would cover gksudo when invoked by an application that knows it doesn't have the necessary rights to perform an operation, but perhaps there's something I've missed?
Oh no, I've gone cross-eyed.
According to patent law, the above example of murder-by-verbiage is supposed to help third-parties implement the invention described, but the language employed is clearly designed to accomplish the exact opposite. I think it's time to put the patent system out of its misery.
I don't think I was misusing it at all. Language is far more flexible than you give it credit.
That's rather like asking what's wrong with IBM wanting to prevent Compaq and other computer manufacturers from making and selling IBM-compatible computers. The PC market has benefited greatly from the presence of IBM clones, making possible even Apple's own transition to commodity PC hardware. From IBM's perspective there was absolutely nothing wrong with preventing others from cloning the IBM PC, but the market would no doubt have suffered if IBM had been successful in its lawsuit against Compaq.
Whether Apple's behavior is wrong beyond the fact that it's bad for consumers is a moral argument I don't care to enter into. The best I can do is to look at what the market might look like if Apple weren't in the habit of intentionally crippling OSX on non-Apple hardware.
I never said "Apple has a monopoly on Apple products". That's just a straw man you set up to pretend that what I said is tautological. In fact, there is nothing tautological about my actual claim, which is that "Apple has a monopoly on computers that can run OSX out of the box".
Forget about the word monopoly if you prefer. It's a small point. The important point is that OSX is tied to Apple hardware through artificial means, and that Apple does this in order to protect its position as the sole supplier of hardware that can run OSX without the need to circumvent Apple's anti-competitive technical measures.
I use the word monopoly in the colloquial sense rather than the legal sense of the word. I'm saying Apple has a monopoly on computers that can run OSX out of the box, which is really just another way of saying they are the world's sole supplier of such computers. Ignoring your nitpick about my use of the word "monopoly", my point remains the same: Apple is the sole supplier of hardware that runs OSX out of the box and it wants to remain the sole supplier at any cost, even if it means crippling OSX to fail on otherwise compatible hardware.
I'm sure that has nothing at all to do with it. What's actually happening is that Apple is the sole supplier of computers that can run OSX out of the box and it wants to make sure things remain that way. It's simply a matter of Apple maintaining a profitable hardware monopoly.
How exactly does adding instructions to special-case-disable the OS when it's running under particular hardware tighten the code?
If I'm not mistaken, the Blizzard case involved the making of a second copy in RAM for the purposes of getting around restrictions in Blizzard's software.
According to TFA, "Judge Mosman concludes that Rule 41 and 18 U.S.C. 2703(a) require the notice to be served on the ISP, not the account holder, as a statutory matter." Thus, if the server is physically in your control I presume police would have to present you with a proper search warrant. The issue becomes less clear when the server is hosted at a third-party ISP facility but administered by the ISP's customer. In that case, must the warrant go to the server admin or can police get away with serving the ISP and giving no notice to the company that actually owns or administers the data on the server?
This is yet one more reason not to get a Kindle or buy any eBooks from Amazon.
I hope they include QI in their international lineup. I've been waiting for that show to become available here since I first saw it on YouTube, but no US station has agreed to carry it. These days such videos are taken down pretty quickly, so a legitimate feed of BBC programs would be very welcome indeed.
I don't have a list of ISPs, but I've read several posts by ISP employees (on a public forum that caters to ISPs) discussing and even bragging about crippling P2P applications and doing so in a way that leads users to believe the problem is with the peer's connection rather than the client's connection.
So ISPs can't slow down time-sensitive traffic without prior approval by the CRTC, but there's no restrictions on slowing down other kinds of traffi, perhaps even to the point where the link is useless without being completely blocked? That's exactly the reason why I fear traffic shaping. Far too often it's used as a way to cripple people's connections rather than provide clients with true "quality of service".
That's exactly what casinos should do if they don't wish to suffer losses from card counting, and indeed what some of them are already doing. If a particular game is broken with regard to casino profits, they should either fix the game or get rid of it. What they shouldn't do is cheat their customers by offering a certain game and kicking them out for playing the game fairly and intelligently.
That's the sort of argument a 10-year-old would make. I don't care to start my own casino, nor do I need to do so for my criticism to be valid.
Better than having ethical casinos compete against unethical ones would be to require all casinos to behave in an ethical manner. No market should be so free that fraud goes unpunished. If the big casinos cannot survive without cheating their customers, then they simply should not survive. Ethical casinos will the flourish in the vacuum.
FCC rules should apply to companies that have a legal presence in the United States. Other companies should be regulated by their own countries.
There's a lot the FCC can do by regulating US ISPs, and it can also regulate any multinationals that have a US presence.
Casinos offer players the chance to win money under particular conditions dictated by the mechanics of the game. Card counters aren't altering those conditions but instead are playing intelligently according to the rules of the game. To kick players out for seeking an advantage within the rules of the game is actually form of fraud: the casino offers players potential winnings and then reneges on its offer once it decides it's against its best interests to allow the player to continue. The casino is cheating.
Whether or not a player has a legal right to be there is irrelevant. Once the casino allows a player into its premises it shouldn't be able to renege on its promise (express or implied) of potential winnings. Property rights are not supposed to enable fraud, but that's exactly the way casinos are using the law.
Unfortunately, the fact is that casinos are allowed to practice what is ultimately a form of legalized theft.
Net Neutrality rules could hinder development of the Internet in directions that are harmful to the public. Unlike the parties mentioned above, I feel that hindering harmful business practices is actually a Good Thing.
I'm saying the guarantee of a broadband connection for all is meaningless if you don't also have guaranteed access to all legal content on the Internet. When police are able to block perfectly legitimate websites, and do so without even the due process of law, the guarantee itself becomes meaningless. That doesn't mean the connection is worthless in practice -- only that the guarantee is worthless.
Having said that, I'm happy to find out the filter has been nearly abandoned by Finnish ISPs.
It's a Yahoo server, and it seems the domain is registered to Foreman himself.
Whois record for mmi-gov.com:
[Querying whois.internic.net]
[Redirected to whois.melbourneit.com]
[Querying whois.melbourneit.com]
[whois.melbourneit.com]
Domain Name.......... mmi-gov.com
Creation Date........ 2004-09-08
Registration Date.... 2004-09-08
Expiry Date.......... 2011-09-08
Organisation Name.... Frederick J Foreman
Organisation Address. 14525 Chamberry Circle
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. Haymarket
Organisation Address. 20169
Organisation Address. VA
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES
Admin Name........... Frederick J Foreman
Admin Address........ 14525 Chamberry Circle
Admin Address........
Admin Address........ Haymarket
Admin Address........ 20169
Admin Address........ VA
Admin Address........ UNITED STATES
Admin Email.......... eckmaster12@msn.com
Admin Phone.......... +1.5712456546
Admin Fax............
Tech Name............ YahooDomains TechContact
Tech Address......... 701 First Ave.
Tech Address.........
Tech Address......... Sunnyvale
Tech Address......... 94089
Tech Address......... CA
Tech Address......... UNITED STATES
Tech Email........... domain.tech@YAHOO-INC.COM
Tech Phone........... +1.4089162124
Tech Fax.............
Name Server.......... yns1.yahoo.com
Name Server.......... yns2.yahoo.com
What good is the right to a broadband connection if they don't have the right to an unfiltered connection? In case you didn't know, a filter maintained by Finnish police that's supposed to block child pornography also blocks other content, including a website critical of Finland's internet filter:
http://www.effi.org/blog/kai-2008-02-18.html
By the time the situation has escalated to such a degree that you're becoming emotional, isn't it already too late to fix the problem?
Unless such destruction can work its way backwards as well as forwards, I fail to see how there being no observers tomorrow precludes the possibility of there being observers today, right before the kaboom.
How long until the FBI does the same kind of end-run around the law by tapping into DMV biometric data? Right now the government can only obtain a person's fingerprints upon being arrested for some reason, but if the FBI adopts the same policy for DMV biometrics as for DMV pictures it could end up with a database of every licensed driver's biometric data without actually keeping such a database itself.
It seems to me they shouldn't get away with such a thing on a mere technicality of the law.
I read it the same way, but unlike you I thought the whining came after the initial judgment against him and the new judge overturned it so the guy would shut up.