Gore's role had nothing to do with DARPA. DARPA had the funding and created ARPANet three years before Al Gore was elected to Congress.
The ARPANET was a research project to design a network. The funding for ARPANET was about to end.
The Gore bill did much more than simply continue the original research funding, it was funding for a network to be used as a tool by academics.
The term Internet predates Gore's interest, but not by much. Without the funding of the US govt the Internet would never have existed, the ARPANET backbone would have been shut down and we would all be using DECNET, SNA or OSI.
Now granted, he doesn't claim to have INVENTED the internet. Instead, he claims to have CREATED it. What he REALLY did in 1986 was articulate somebody elses vision of widespread connected computing, and he introduced a follow-up bill to facilitate more widespread access to the network.
No, he claimed to have taken the initiative to get the funding for us.
In that he was entirely correct.
If there is anyone who has a right to get upset about the issue it would be Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee and fifty to a hundred other people like me who are only known in the business. I do not know one single person with the right to make that complaint who made it.
This whole issue was a Karl Rove manufactured issue just like the stories he planted that Ann Richards is a lesbian, the claims that McCain is psychotic, calling in the police to investigate a bug found in his office he later admitted planting himself. There is a reason Rove was fires from the Bush mkI campaign.
In a little under a years time the issue will be whether Karl Rove is allowed to pull another smear stunt, get Dufus elected or otherwise installed and proceed to work out whether an invasion of Syria or Iran will pay the biggest dividend at the polls.
Given how much they're paying Boies, I'd be very surprised if he didn't have more up his sleeve than that, although if his conduct of this case so far is anything to go by, anything is possible.
The statements in question were not made by Boies, they were made by the idiot CEO. So your argument based on the alleged expertise and honesty of Boies is irrelevant.
Your original argument was that the courts would not allow SCO to litigate this case and that Boies would be struck off for trying to bring it.
I would expect a swift summary judgement and sanctions against Boies if he was foolish enough to try. I do not expect him to try.
"Incidently...while I couldn't care less about what brand my shoes are (even if I was concerned about the style, nobody looks at the things anyway, and if they did, they'd hardly care),"
Shows you have never moved in the corporate world.
I don't think that a pair of Nikes will get you anywhere in the corporate world.
A pair of Church's a Brooks brothers suit and a Rolex will be perfectly adequate for a corporate career at any level. Going above that level can be risky, people tend to consider a dandy to be superficial.
In fact, when Nike sells a pair of shoes for $130, I agree that there is something highly disturbing about the fact that LeBron James pockets a larger share than does the person who made them.
What I find disturbing is the fact that people would consider a cheaply made shoe that cost less than $1 to make worth paying $130 for.
For $350 I could buy a pair of English hand made brogues which would be considerably more comfortable. Since the point of paying $130 for a pair of shoes is to advertise the fact that you can afford to pay $130 for a pair of shoes a pair of Church's would work far better.
If you want a pair of sneakers then buy a pair of Kirkland trainers at Costco for $12.
Quite why anyone would believe I would think more highly of them because they are a victimg to a marketting scheme that sells $12 pairs of shoes for more than ten times that amount is beyond me.
Contrawise I really don't know why Nike can't get a clue and start paying their workers a fair wage. The cost of doing so would hardly register. Some day they are going to discover that they have lost the next Jordan or Tiger Woods to a competitor because their management does not want to be tainted by association with Nike. Arnold Palmer did very well by turning down a lot of second rate endorsements early in his career even though they would have paid a lot more than the endorsements he did accept. Later on endorsers sought him out because of his previous association with Rolex etc.
Better tell the idiot having tea with the Queen that, he seems to think the US is a democracy.
The founders of the US had a lot of beliefs that we no longer agree with, slavery for example. I don't think their views are necessarily relevant, they are certainly not absolute truth.
Learn latin and then read dissertations by the founding fathers
You would do much better to read Karl Popper's work on the open society. The founding fathers did not invent the ideas in the US constitution, they were working from their extensive knowledge of what was then contemporary political philosophy.
Mao was wrong political power does not come from the barrel of a gun, it comes from belief.
More than anything, I'm just p*ssed off at Jackson for making the statements at all. By creating a separate findings of fact, he made his rulings very difficult to overturn--and his big mouth made a lot of hard work come crumbling down.
Actually the appeals court observed in its rulling that the fact that Jackson asserted something to be a finding of fact did not make it so. The attempt to prevent review by the appeals court through this tactic was one of the issues that set the appeals court off.
Mouthing off to the press was just a very convenient excuse to throw the whole case back down to the circuit level. I very much doubt that the case would have been continued regardless of who won the election. Jackson's antics pretty much screwed up the case for the prosecution, they would have been much better off if the appeals court had required a retrial.
Consider for a moment what would have happened if the case had continued after the appeals court rulling. The appeals court had found that Jackson had been biased but refused to throw out his findings of fact. I don't see how anyone could be confident that the Supreme court would support that judgement. The chances were that the case would be litigated for five years or so before it finaly got to the Supremes and then get kicked out because of Jackson's original idiocy.
Okay, I'm neither a legal expert nor an expert in the history of the AT&T/BSD case, but I thought that the courts DID issue a ruling which was then appealed and that both parties settled out of court before going through with the appeal.
Good point, but as I pointed out a settlement is in this case even stronger than a judgement because the whole point of a settlement is that the parties have agreed to surrender further claims.
An out of court settlement does not set precedent that is binding on other cases. But it is certainly binding on the parties to the case.
The idea that you could somehow avoid the consequences of a prior settlement by selling a copyright claim to another party who would then be free to ignore the settlement is somewhat wierd.
Forgive me for saying so, but I don't think you have a very good understanding of torts.
Forgive me but a blanket negation of an argument accompanied by abuse is hardly a good way to convince others.
If this is true, you'll have no difficulty providing me with case law in support of your argument.
I would not expect anyone to be idiotic enough to try litigating it. If indeed it is the case that you are correct then there should be many cases of people trying this dodge and succeeding because it would be a pretty useful one.
1.) The original case was settled out of court, therefore there is no case law or court decision to refer to.
Settling a case out of court would make the argument much stronger since it is a contractual agreement (actually stronger than a mere contractual agreement) that is independent of the fact being claimed. SCO's claim to the copyrights is the result of a later contractual agreement which is inevitably a weaker claim.
Under what circumstances do you believe that AT&T could enter into a contract that would invalidate rights that AT&T had already granted under an earlier contract?
3.) I'm not arguing that SCO's case is necessarily winnable. Simply that it's actionable and that they'd have a right to bring it before the courts.
The term actionable is meaningless. There is no legal claim imaginable that is not 'actionable' in the sense that it is possible to commence an action by issuing a writ. The only way that a claim could not be actionable was if SCO were declared to be a vexatious litigant and barred from access to the court in question.
The case you refer to was ATT vs. whoever (the Regents of the University of California?) That case may have been litigated and closed. However, any case SCO brought would be a completely different case.
Absolutely not.
The case would be brought on the basis of the same copyright claim as the earlier AT&T case. That claim has been rejected by the courts. The fact that the underlying copyrights have since been sold do not allow the new owner to re-open prior litigation. The copyrights were bought with the constructive knowledge of the previous litigation and its result.
If the courts did allow this type of claim they would never be able to get rid of copyright claims and defendants could never obtain a final judgement in their favor.
Peculiar and mercenary though David Boies may be, I think you can fairly safely assume that he has a pretty good grasp of the rules of civil procedure in the US courts.
Which is probably the reason why he is talking trash, threatening to sue rather than issuing a writ. He knows that if he was actually to make a claim he could get slapped really, really hard.
Given Boies ludicrous efforts in the Napster case it is safe to assume that Boies is capable of making legal claims in court that the courts rapidly reject as unfounded. Let us see if he goes one stage further in this case and makes a claim that is sanctionable.
I strongly suspect that attempting to relittigate AT&T would be considered sanctionable, there is absolutely no reason that a lawyer should believe a claim that was littigated and lost nine years earlier to be winnable without a material change in the circumstances. I don't see the sale of the copyrights to SCO through Novell as a material change here.
If Boies goes ahead with this it could cost him his license. The sums demanded are very significant.
No - ignorant liberal. Democrats lost the recount
because every county in the state had a different
standard by which to count pregnant and dimpeled
chads.
When are you right wingers going to get over the fact that the tactics he used are the reason why he will never be anything more than your 'president'?
Actions have consequences. A person who goes to a court to stop the votes being counted can never be considered a legitimate president of a democratic country.
The problem with the right is that you all have this belief in entitlement. You think you can steal an election and are somehow entitled to be considered the legitimate winner. You think you can behave in an overtly partisan manner and then when you want to avoid criticism claim that you are entitled to the benefits of the bipartisanship that you rejected.
I am looking forward to the next appearance of the 'Mission Accomplished' banner at the Dean inaugural.
That is why he is fameous he beat the trust busters when they tried to prove ibm a monopoly.
The IBM case was dropped by the Reagan administration, I hardly think those circumstances exactly show great expertise on his part.
If Carter had been re-elected it is most likely that the US case would have ended the same way that the EU case did. That would probably have been a much better result for IBM if you remember what hit them in the early 90s.
have yet to see anyone do it successfully. AT&T couldn't do it 9 years ago, so what makes SCO think they can do it now? AT&T had a MUCH better table to stand on.
Particularly since the case has already been litigated and closed. Getting the courts to re-open a settled case is near impossible. The only claims that SCO owns are through the AT&T copyrights. If the courts allowed a losing plaintif to avoid negative judgement by selling the IP to another party there would be no way to achieve finality.
Courts tend to make finality of judgement a very high priority. Once a case is closed it is closed, the only way to reopen it is usually to show that there was something wrong with the process at the first trial, usually knowing use of false evidence, bribing a juror, judge etc.
I just do not see the courts accepting an attempt to re-open this case, particularly if the plaintif refuses to even specify what is allegedly infringing.
This looks like yet another SCO attempt to extract money through legal threats that are highly unlikely to succeed. It would be interesting to know the extent to which this type of threat would fall under insurance policies.
I'm also starting to hope that Boies will share the cell...
I find it very strange that Boies has reached this superstar status on the back of what is by any measure a lacklustre litigation record.
Boies first came to prominence in the Microsoft case. Athough the case was initially 'won' it was overturned on appeal. This has been Boies best result so far.
In the Florida recount case Boies lost what should have been a slam dunk case, demanding that the state perform a recount required by the election laws. Boies lost in this case because he was outmaneuvered by the Republican party lawyers who ran rings arround him.
Boies next took the Napster case, in this case he was successful in gaining a temporary stay of an injunction against Napster. But we later find this was only because one of the Appeals court judges was anxious that Napster survive long enough for the appeals court to be able to make a really important rulling in the copyright area...
I cannot think of a better council for SCO in this particular case. The court will require SCO to reveal the exact code fragments it claims are subject to copyright claims sooner rather than later. At this point the SCO case will quickly unravel since the fragments in question will be rewritten.
There are absolutely no grounds for supressing the specifics of the SCO claim. The whole point of the copyright bargain is disclosure in return for a limited term monoploy on exploitation.
At the risk of being troll or falimbait; Microsoft is pissing me off. Every day I come to/. and I see some new story about how Microsoft is ripping ideas off of everyone else.
Yes I agree, people should use Linux because it is the only operating syste that is entirely novel in every aspect of its design.
The vile accusations that Linux is somehow a 'copy' of the UNIX operating system or that it in some way borrows from the design of 'Minix' by Tannenbaum are completely unfounded.
Linux was in fact developed minus a decade before these earlier systems.
Linux has been highly innovative introducing the world to log based file systems minus a decade after their introduction in VMS.
Google's concept of a Web search engine is also highly innovative, appearing minus seven years after WebCrawler.
Interesting how everyone who thinks there should be a tax on email thinks that the money should go to their organization or government.
One of the flaws in the whole sender pays idea is that the cost of collecting any charge is vastly greater than the amounts people propose.
At this point well over half the resources of the telephone system are dedicated to billing. That equates to billions of dollars a year. There is no reason to believe that the problem is any easier on the Internet.
The most expensive system would be a payment transfer mechanism so when Alice emails Bob, Bob or his ISP gets paid for handling the message. This is expensive because it needs racks of controls to stop Bob defrauding Alice with bogus emails. One of the early phone phreak hacks was to set up a premium call number then hack into company PBXs to call it.
The cheapest system would be for all the charges to be paid to the company that runs the charging system. If you want the system to be telco system reliable it will not be cheap to deploy. Essentialy you are building a database that is going to be involved in every email conversation. Using the DNS systems as a guide, the fixed capital costs of deploying a scheme of this kind would be at least $100 million and the ongoing maintenance costs would be at least $20 million/year. I suspect these are massive underestimates.
Work out for yourself what you think the impact on email cost would be. Remember that in addition to the cost of the central system there would have to be expenditure by every ISP to pass on those charges.
And this before we consider the fact that the US is only one country that uses the Internet.
Looking at the results there appears to be an unaccounted-for mass concentration present in the reaction. If it's not a new type of particle then what?
One event? Could be anything. It could be two particles that happened to travel very close together. We are talking about one observation out of millions per second.
For that matter it could easily be a random equipment malfunction that just looks like a particle, or that good old standby the accidental injection of test data or calibration data polluting the data.
I'd say the Standard Model would fall under "any known particle scheme"... so yes, if their results are real and reproducable, this particle would violate the Standard Model.
I think when most folk talk about violating the standard model they mean something like finding parity being broken, or a completely unexpected fundamental particle.
A new composit of lots of little particles does not really do it for me, particularly not from a single event. If you go to CERN and look at the canonical picture of the first discovery of the z0 (possibly J/psi) it turns out that although that was the big press photo they later decided it was probably bogus.
You're right, it does help local companies. For Brazil, it's so true it's not even worth questioning.
See, Brazil has very few companies actually making software.
It is far from certain. OK a few Brazillian software companies may gain from a captive market. But protectionism has costs and in this case the cost is that the government ends up running bespoke software that is expensive to produce and maintain rather than Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS).
Overall US industry is not benefiting from the protectionist measures here. The protectionist steel tarifs have artificially raised the price of steel for the auto industry. The protectionist agricultural subsidies raise the price of food at home and accelerating the demise of the small farm.
Brazil was big in the days of 8 bit computing for a reason - protectionism. They were still locked into using obsolete domestic computer hardware years after it had become obsolete. They missed out on the first five years of the information technology boom and have been struggling to catch up since.
What is hilarious is the fact that some of the folk pushing open source protectionism are the type that blather on remorselesly about how Ayn Rand was right...
I'd like some "freedom and choice" with those Brazilian ladies.
I am sure that if you went to one of the local 'Thermas' you would find both...
I went to Brazillia and watched the open source debate. I think folk in the US are completely missing the plot. First off the Brazillian govt is dependent on Microsoft in the way the US govt is dependent on Cobol, Windows is their legacy infrastructure.
Secondly the big issue for the country at the moment is the balance of payments. The government is calculating that they can get better prices out of Redmond if they apply pressure.
Finally there is a protectionist angle, keeping out big US software companies helps local companies - perhaps.
IQ tests mean very little at any point.
That is a theory conceived by those with average scores.;-)
As I said I have scored between 160 and 180 in weekly tests.
So, it appears the science involved in "The Mismeasure of Man" is suspect at best, and that there is a strong political motivation to the work.
Bollocks, Gould gives a historical treatment. Nobody has disputed his claim that Spearman and his cronies were racists or that plenty of the IQ ideology comes from the eugenics movement. Burt's fabrications of his identical twins separated at birth studies are well documented independently.
IQ tests do have a place in the application they were originally designed for, testing the mentaly subnormal. They have no place as a general measure of intellect for the simple reason that intellect is not a one dimensional affair.
I spent ten years working at elite academic institutions (CERN, MIT, Oxford etc.) and you pretty soon work out that nobody has a monopoly on genius. Richard Feynman said the same thing repeatedly (a lot of my profs were Feynman students), he did not think himself cleverer than anyone else in the field but he did have a radically different intellectual style and that meant that he was the one that often solved the problems other people did not.
You should read the link I included above carefully. I agree that everyone will show improvement through study, but the peak intelligence that people will reach is largely innate, in my opinion.
In my opinion the ability to score well on IQ tests is taught but there is a limit to the effectiveness of teaching later in life. The brain rewires itself two or three times as it develops. If you do not start using symbolic logic early there is a good chance you will never get it. That has nothing to do with innate intelligence, it is environment.
The report authors include about fifteen leading researchers in the HEP field. If they can't get the report right they do not deserve the money.
Unfortunately, this also makes it difficult to argue for funding to work on the NLC, since it is motivated based primarily on the Higgs sector
In other words they do not expect to find anything. The only justification for a new accelerator would be if LHC discovers something interesting which requires a custom machine for detailed exam.
Even then a $6++ billion plus machine needs one hell of a good justification.
Even Norm Abrams has not yet found a need for a LINAC.
Slashdot Mirror
The ARPANET was a research project to design a network. The funding for ARPANET was about to end.
The Gore bill did much more than simply continue the original research funding, it was funding for a network to be used as a tool by academics.
The term Internet predates Gore's interest, but not by much. Without the funding of the US govt the Internet would never have existed, the ARPANET backbone would have been shut down and we would all be using DECNET, SNA or OSI.
The result would have been very different.
No, he claimed to have taken the initiative to get the funding for us. In that he was entirely correct.
If there is anyone who has a right to get upset about the issue it would be Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee and fifty to a hundred other people like me who are only known in the business. I do not know one single person with the right to make that complaint who made it.
This whole issue was a Karl Rove manufactured issue just like the stories he planted that Ann Richards is a lesbian, the claims that McCain is psychotic, calling in the police to investigate a bug found in his office he later admitted planting himself. There is a reason Rove was fires from the Bush mkI campaign.
In a little under a years time the issue will be whether Karl Rove is allowed to pull another smear stunt, get Dufus elected or otherwise installed and proceed to work out whether an invasion of Syria or Iran will pay the biggest dividend at the polls.
I think pretty much every adolescent male is in-fer-sex.
As Julius Ceasar said after his assasination, "infamy! infamy! they've all got it in fer me!"
I have eleven years experience. The first public demonstration of the Web was in Annecy in 1992.
The statements in question were not made by Boies, they were made by the idiot CEO. So your argument based on the alleged expertise and honesty of Boies is irrelevant.
Your original argument was that the courts would not allow SCO to litigate this case and that Boies would be struck off for trying to bring it.
I would expect a swift summary judgement and sanctions against Boies if he was foolish enough to try. I do not expect him to try.
Shows you have never moved in the corporate world.
I don't think that a pair of Nikes will get you anywhere in the corporate world.
A pair of Church's a Brooks brothers suit and a Rolex will be perfectly adequate for a corporate career at any level. Going above that level can be risky, people tend to consider a dandy to be superficial.
What I find disturbing is the fact that people would consider a cheaply made shoe that cost less than $1 to make worth paying $130 for.
For $350 I could buy a pair of English hand made brogues which would be considerably more comfortable. Since the point of paying $130 for a pair of shoes is to advertise the fact that you can afford to pay $130 for a pair of shoes a pair of Church's would work far better.
If you want a pair of sneakers then buy a pair of Kirkland trainers at Costco for $12.
Quite why anyone would believe I would think more highly of them because they are a victimg to a marketting scheme that sells $12 pairs of shoes for more than ten times that amount is beyond me.
Contrawise I really don't know why Nike can't get a clue and start paying their workers a fair wage. The cost of doing so would hardly register. Some day they are going to discover that they have lost the next Jordan or Tiger Woods to a competitor because their management does not want to be tainted by association with Nike. Arnold Palmer did very well by turning down a lot of second rate endorsements early in his career even though they would have paid a lot more than the endorsements he did accept. Later on endorsers sought him out because of his previous association with Rolex etc.
Better tell the idiot having tea with the Queen that, he seems to think the US is a democracy.
The founders of the US had a lot of beliefs that we no longer agree with, slavery for example. I don't think their views are necessarily relevant, they are certainly not absolute truth.
Learn latin and then read dissertations by the founding fathers
You would do much better to read Karl Popper's work on the open society. The founding fathers did not invent the ideas in the US constitution, they were working from their extensive knowledge of what was then contemporary political philosophy.
Mao was wrong political power does not come from the barrel of a gun, it comes from belief.
Actually the appeals court observed in its rulling that the fact that Jackson asserted something to be a finding of fact did not make it so. The attempt to prevent review by the appeals court through this tactic was one of the issues that set the appeals court off.
Mouthing off to the press was just a very convenient excuse to throw the whole case back down to the circuit level. I very much doubt that the case would have been continued regardless of who won the election. Jackson's antics pretty much screwed up the case for the prosecution, they would have been much better off if the appeals court had required a retrial.
Consider for a moment what would have happened if the case had continued after the appeals court rulling. The appeals court had found that Jackson had been biased but refused to throw out his findings of fact. I don't see how anyone could be confident that the Supreme court would support that judgement. The chances were that the case would be litigated for five years or so before it finaly got to the Supremes and then get kicked out because of Jackson's original idiocy.
Good point, but as I pointed out a settlement is in this case even stronger than a judgement because the whole point of a settlement is that the parties have agreed to surrender further claims.
An out of court settlement does not set precedent that is binding on other cases. But it is certainly binding on the parties to the case.
The idea that you could somehow avoid the consequences of a prior settlement by selling a copyright claim to another party who would then be free to ignore the settlement is somewhat wierd.
Forgive me but a blanket negation of an argument accompanied by abuse is hardly a good way to convince others.
If this is true, you'll have no difficulty providing me with case law in support of your argument.
I would not expect anyone to be idiotic enough to try litigating it. If indeed it is the case that you are correct then there should be many cases of people trying this dodge and succeeding because it would be a pretty useful one.
1.) The original case was settled out of court, therefore there is no case law or court decision to refer to.
Settling a case out of court would make the argument much stronger since it is a contractual agreement (actually stronger than a mere contractual agreement) that is independent of the fact being claimed. SCO's claim to the copyrights is the result of a later contractual agreement which is inevitably a weaker claim.
Under what circumstances do you believe that AT&T could enter into a contract that would invalidate rights that AT&T had already granted under an earlier contract?
3.) I'm not arguing that SCO's case is necessarily winnable. Simply that it's actionable and that they'd have a right to bring it before the courts.
The term actionable is meaningless. There is no legal claim imaginable that is not 'actionable' in the sense that it is possible to commence an action by issuing a writ. The only way that a claim could not be actionable was if SCO were declared to be a vexatious litigant and barred from access to the court in question.
Absolutely not.
The case would be brought on the basis of the same copyright claim as the earlier AT&T case. That claim has been rejected by the courts. The fact that the underlying copyrights have since been sold do not allow the new owner to re-open prior litigation. The copyrights were bought with the constructive knowledge of the previous litigation and its result.
If the courts did allow this type of claim they would never be able to get rid of copyright claims and defendants could never obtain a final judgement in their favor.
Peculiar and mercenary though David Boies may be, I think you can fairly safely assume that he has a pretty good grasp of the rules of civil procedure in the US courts.
Which is probably the reason why he is talking trash, threatening to sue rather than issuing a writ. He knows that if he was actually to make a claim he could get slapped really, really hard.
Given Boies ludicrous efforts in the Napster case it is safe to assume that Boies is capable of making legal claims in court that the courts rapidly reject as unfounded. Let us see if he goes one stage further in this case and makes a claim that is sanctionable.
I strongly suspect that attempting to relittigate AT&T would be considered sanctionable, there is absolutely no reason that a lawyer should believe a claim that was littigated and lost nine years earlier to be winnable without a material change in the circumstances. I don't see the sale of the copyrights to SCO through Novell as a material change here.
If Boies goes ahead with this it could cost him his license. The sums demanded are very significant.
When are you right wingers going to get over the fact that the tactics he used are the reason why he will never be anything more than your 'president'?
Actions have consequences. A person who goes to a court to stop the votes being counted can never be considered a legitimate president of a democratic country.
The problem with the right is that you all have this belief in entitlement. You think you can steal an election and are somehow entitled to be considered the legitimate winner. You think you can behave in an overtly partisan manner and then when you want to avoid criticism claim that you are entitled to the benefits of the bipartisanship that you rejected.
I am looking forward to the next appearance of the 'Mission Accomplished' banner at the Dean inaugural.
The IBM case was dropped by the Reagan administration, I hardly think those circumstances exactly show great expertise on his part.
If Carter had been re-elected it is most likely that the US case would have ended the same way that the EU case did. That would probably have been a much better result for IBM if you remember what hit them in the early 90s.
Particularly since the case has already been litigated and closed. Getting the courts to re-open a settled case is near impossible. The only claims that SCO owns are through the AT&T copyrights. If the courts allowed a losing plaintif to avoid negative judgement by selling the IP to another party there would be no way to achieve finality.
Courts tend to make finality of judgement a very high priority. Once a case is closed it is closed, the only way to reopen it is usually to show that there was something wrong with the process at the first trial, usually knowing use of false evidence, bribing a juror, judge etc.
I just do not see the courts accepting an attempt to re-open this case, particularly if the plaintif refuses to even specify what is allegedly infringing.
This looks like yet another SCO attempt to extract money through legal threats that are highly unlikely to succeed. It would be interesting to know the extent to which this type of threat would fall under insurance policies.
I find it very strange that Boies has reached this superstar status on the back of what is by any measure a lacklustre litigation record.
Boies first came to prominence in the Microsoft case. Athough the case was initially 'won' it was overturned on appeal. This has been Boies best result so far.
In the Florida recount case Boies lost what should have been a slam dunk case, demanding that the state perform a recount required by the election laws. Boies lost in this case because he was outmaneuvered by the Republican party lawyers who ran rings arround him.
Boies next took the Napster case, in this case he was successful in gaining a temporary stay of an injunction against Napster. But we later find this was only because one of the Appeals court judges was anxious that Napster survive long enough for the appeals court to be able to make a really important rulling in the copyright area...
I cannot think of a better council for SCO in this particular case. The court will require SCO to reveal the exact code fragments it claims are subject to copyright claims sooner rather than later. At this point the SCO case will quickly unravel since the fragments in question will be rewritten.
There are absolutely no grounds for supressing the specifics of the SCO claim. The whole point of the copyright bargain is disclosure in return for a limited term monoploy on exploitation.
Yes I agree, people should use Linux because it is the only operating syste that is entirely novel in every aspect of its design.
The vile accusations that Linux is somehow a 'copy' of the UNIX operating system or that it in some way borrows from the design of 'Minix' by Tannenbaum are completely unfounded.
Linux was in fact developed minus a decade before these earlier systems.
Linux has been highly innovative introducing the world to log based file systems minus a decade after their introduction in VMS.
Google's concept of a Web search engine is also highly innovative, appearing minus seven years after WebCrawler.
One of the flaws in the whole sender pays idea is that the cost of collecting any charge is vastly greater than the amounts people propose.
At this point well over half the resources of the telephone system are dedicated to billing. That equates to billions of dollars a year. There is no reason to believe that the problem is any easier on the Internet.
The most expensive system would be a payment transfer mechanism so when Alice emails Bob, Bob or his ISP gets paid for handling the message. This is expensive because it needs racks of controls to stop Bob defrauding Alice with bogus emails. One of the early phone phreak hacks was to set up a premium call number then hack into company PBXs to call it.
The cheapest system would be for all the charges to be paid to the company that runs the charging system. If you want the system to be telco system reliable it will not be cheap to deploy. Essentialy you are building a database that is going to be involved in every email conversation. Using the DNS systems as a guide, the fixed capital costs of deploying a scheme of this kind would be at least $100 million and the ongoing maintenance costs would be at least $20 million/year. I suspect these are massive underestimates.
Work out for yourself what you think the impact on email cost would be. Remember that in addition to the cost of the central system there would have to be expenditure by every ISP to pass on those charges.
And this before we consider the fact that the US is only one country that uses the Internet.
One event? Could be anything. It could be two particles that happened to travel very close together. We are talking about one observation out of millions per second.
For that matter it could easily be a random equipment malfunction that just looks like a particle, or that good old standby the accidental injection of test data or calibration data polluting the data.
I think when most folk talk about violating the standard model they mean something like finding parity being broken, or a completely unexpected fundamental particle.
A new composit of lots of little particles does not really do it for me, particularly not from a single event. If you go to CERN and look at the canonical picture of the first discovery of the z0 (possibly J/psi) it turns out that although that was the big press photo they later decided it was probably bogus.
Well the particle in question did not exactly stay arround long enough to appear in person on Larry King 'y know.
Anyone remember the 17.3Kev neutrino?
I would be somewhat cautious before announcing the end of the standard model - even though it currently does not really play nice with relativity.
It is far from certain. OK a few Brazillian software companies may gain from a captive market. But protectionism has costs and in this case the cost is that the government ends up running bespoke software that is expensive to produce and maintain rather than Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS).
Overall US industry is not benefiting from the protectionist measures here. The protectionist steel tarifs have artificially raised the price of steel for the auto industry. The protectionist agricultural subsidies raise the price of food at home and accelerating the demise of the small farm.
Brazil was big in the days of 8 bit computing for a reason - protectionism. They were still locked into using obsolete domestic computer hardware years after it had become obsolete. They missed out on the first five years of the information technology boom and have been struggling to catch up since.
What is hilarious is the fact that some of the folk pushing open source protectionism are the type that blather on remorselesly about how Ayn Rand was right...
I am sure that if you went to one of the local 'Thermas' you would find both...
I went to Brazillia and watched the open source debate. I think folk in the US are completely missing the plot. First off the Brazillian govt is dependent on Microsoft in the way the US govt is dependent on Cobol, Windows is their legacy infrastructure.
Secondly the big issue for the country at the moment is the balance of payments. The government is calculating that they can get better prices out of Redmond if they apply pressure.
Finally there is a protectionist angle, keeping out big US software companies helps local companies - perhaps.
That is a theory conceived by those with average scores.
As I said I have scored between 160 and 180 in weekly tests.
So, it appears the science involved in "The Mismeasure of Man" is suspect at best, and that there is a strong political motivation to the work.
Bollocks, Gould gives a historical treatment. Nobody has disputed his claim that Spearman and his cronies were racists or that plenty of the IQ ideology comes from the eugenics movement. Burt's fabrications of his identical twins separated at birth studies are well documented independently.
IQ tests do have a place in the application they were originally designed for, testing the mentaly subnormal. They have no place as a general measure of intellect for the simple reason that intellect is not a one dimensional affair.
I spent ten years working at elite academic institutions (CERN, MIT, Oxford etc.) and you pretty soon work out that nobody has a monopoly on genius. Richard Feynman said the same thing repeatedly (a lot of my profs were Feynman students), he did not think himself cleverer than anyone else in the field but he did have a radically different intellectual style and that meant that he was the one that often solved the problems other people did not.
You should read the link I included above carefully. I agree that everyone will show improvement through study, but the peak intelligence that people will reach is largely innate, in my opinion.
In my opinion the ability to score well on IQ tests is taught but there is a limit to the effectiveness of teaching later in life. The brain rewires itself two or three times as it develops. If you do not start using symbolic logic early there is a good chance you will never get it. That has nothing to do with innate intelligence, it is environment.
The report authors include about fifteen leading researchers in the HEP field. If they can't get the report right they do not deserve the money.
Unfortunately, this also makes it difficult to argue for funding to work on the NLC, since it is motivated based primarily on the Higgs sector
In other words they do not expect to find anything. The only justification for a new accelerator would be if LHC discovers something interesting which requires a custom machine for detailed exam.
Even then a $6++ billion plus machine needs one hell of a good justification.
Even Norm Abrams has not yet found a need for a LINAC.