The UN panel since September has published three separate reports into the physical science of global warming, its impacts, and ways to fight it. The study leaked yesterday, called the “Synthesis Report” intends to pick out the most important findings and present them in a way that lawmakers can easily understand. (Emphasis mine)
Why do I have a feeling the report to the politicians will have to read a lot like the Simple English Wikipedia, to the point where it might not be a bad idea to get the writers for that on it.
I'm not convinced that even the "Drunk History" version would make a significant impact on politicians.
One of the SAN vendors we met with a while back was arranging their drives within each drawer in such a way that it supposedly minimized/neutralized the RV effect.
Its very difficult to completely remove the effect; even vibrations that don't seem particularly noteworthy or even noticeable by humans could be enough to throw a drive head a few dozen nanometers (and that's sometimes all it takes) in the wrong direction and reduce the read signal enough to cause a read/write retry. Chassis design can greatly help, but cannot always completely eliminate the problem. Drives that have a higher tolerance for those vibrations can still perform better even in properly dampened chassis.
Welp, seems my post was a bit misunderstood. I was actually thinking transfer rates. Say you have an 8TB drive with 6 platters - the option could be to pair up the platters and write alternate bytes to each, doubling sustained read and write.
It could also be an option to turn on when you start using the drive, and if it gets half-filled up, it should be possible to decouple them and get the full size.
The tendency for many consumers is to have an SSD boot drive and a platter storage drive - but that platter drive takes some time to fill up, why not double speed it until it's half full?
I'm not 100% certain, but I believe the problem is that the hard drive head assembly moves as a single unit, which means all of the heads for all the platters must move in unison. But the precision required to move the heads to the precise spot on the tracks where the data is recorded is such that it would be too difficult to design the heads in such a way that when one was over its track, all of the others would be *guaranteed* to be over their tracks on their respective platters. To do this you'd need to have the heads each on their own arms with their own voice coils to keep them all on track simultaneously. But that would add enough cost to the drive, it would be cheaper to just buy two half-capacity drives and stripe them yourself.
Basically, I think its possible, but not economically logical to make hard drives in a way that would allow for this kind of in-box striping. That's what RAID is for.
Rotational Vibration (RV) is the vibration the drive experiences from the platters rotating at high speed. When you put a bunch of drives in a cage, some interesting harmonics build up which can shorten the life span of the drives further. Enterprise grade hard drives are built to better withstand these vibrations, lessening the chance of failure. (At least that is what their literature says -- personally I'd mount the drives using grommets or something like what Rackspace uses [rubber bands I think?]).
Actually, multi-drive rotational vibration tolerance is a design feature whereby the drive is designed to be capable of withstanding and tolerating induced rotational vibrations from outside the drive. Enterprise drives are normally designed to minimize the vibrations they generate and induce into their surrounding chassis. But on top of that, being able to dampen vibrations induced from the outside and function optimally can significantly improve the performance of the drives. In enterprise environments where performance is important, disk drives can theoretically tolerate a lot of vibrations by simply temporarily ceasing reads and writes until their read/write heads get back into alignment. But those pauses force the drive to wait for at least a full rotation before they can try again to read the same blocks. If this happens frequently the performance of the drive can be significantly degraded even if the drive lifetime isn't impacted. Multi-drive RV tolerance is not just about surviving the vibrations, its also about being able to function optimally without having to degrade performance when in a (relatively) high vibration environment, as is often the case in large high-density drive enclosures.
Without this feature, you can sometimes find your 4000 IOPS spindle array delivering only 2000 IOPS at random times, and not know why.
interesting.... however the problem lies in the fact thats it is higher than they thought, meaning it COULD still be worse than they thought, meaning AGW MAY NOT be the doom and gloom some make it out to be.
this little bit of information is not a gotcha moment, but it leads credence to the idea that we still have no idea
Scientists discover something new, which suggests they were wrong before, which means they could be completely wrong about everything. Just like when scientists discovered a new species of butterfly, proving we still have no idea if life exists on Earth.
Only for the subject of global warming can scientists discover a potentially new way in which climate change could accelerate over time due to man induced warming of the deep oceans, and that is used as evidence that maybe its not happening at all.
In the end, what this comes down to is whether we, as a society, should leave these kinds of decisions to government selected experts. You may be of the opinion that we should. But if you accuse people who disagree with you of being unscientific or corrupt, you have crossed a line.
I would also be perfectly happy with picking climatologists at random. The result would be about the same as picking physicists at random to decide whether gravity officially exists.
I'd flip it around. An automated car should be required to pass both a road test and a bevvy of simulated scenarios.
Certainly. But the question was whether automated testing should be considered sufficient. I think I would do my own flip-around. I think if Google wants to change the California law that requires road testing to make it so that simulation testing is sufficient, then I think Google should donate the simulator, and if an automated car passes the simulation but fails in the real world in a way real world testing would have uncovered but the simulator did not, Google should be held liable for all damages associated with that failure. Under that circumstance, I would be inclined to trust that Google's simulators are a sufficient match to reality to consider substituting simulation testing for road testing.
If Google doesn't want to subject itself to that criteria, then that's a tacit admission the simulation is not guaranteed to catch all the problems real world testing can catch, and I would consider their proposal to be invalid on its face.
Test in the fscking simulation and then test on the street. Win-win.
You don't need to ask for permission to test your car with simulations. You only have to ask for permission to replace real world testing with simulations. Personally, I'm not fond of replacing real world testing completely with simulations. The problem is that the point of testing software is to make sure the programmers have properly dealt with as many possible real world situations, and to reduce the likelihood the programmers haven't ignored an unexpected circumstance. Simulations can only test for what the simulation programmers have accounted for. Its substituting the system programmers' judgment for the simulation programmers' judgment. Its useful, but in my opinion insufficient.
And what benefit does jail time give the public? Jail time for non-violent offenders is the stupidest, most useless thing we could do with these people. There are all sorts of public services that are in dire need of manpower. A shit ton of community service as a punishment is far far far more useful than just incarcerating people. I find it astonishing how primitive and archaic peoples' thinking is when it comes to punishments for crimes. Just like we don't spank kids anymore because it's pointless and counterproductive, we should also stop "spanking" non-violent offenders but put them to good use instead.
So if I steal a hundred million dollars, the absolute worst case punishment I could receive in Anonymous Coward-ville is a billion years of community service? That's a better risk/reward ratio than any business opportunity I've ever been presented with. I'm in.
Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.
The free market has taken care of it. Good customer service is expensive. Consumers have demonstrated that they are unwilling to pay additional money for good customer service. Successful companies have aborted customer service to keep prices low.
Something to keep in mind whenever someone says "the free market will take care of it." The free market doesn't solve problems. It "takes care of them."
I think a lot of people, even some actual scientists, do not understand the role of skepticism in Science. There's a difference between scientific skepticism and peanut gallery skepticism. Scientific skepticism is healthy.
Scientists can speculate and debate as much as they want whether it's getting warmer or colder. The issue with the global warming debate is the political demands to translate the science into specific actions, often by scientists who have no qualifications in economics or politics.
I believe climatologists have a better understanding of economics than economists or politicians have of climatology.
I think the people best in a position to think about this problem rationally tend to be actuaries; insurance professionals. Insurance professionals have to apply imperfect knowledge and incomplete risk models and make economic decisions within that environment all the time. They don't always get it right, but moreso than most they tend to balance the two on at least large scales on some rational basis. Insurance companies tend to believe that the odds of economic damage due to climate change are high enough to be financially material. In other words they are tending to bet it is happening, will get worse, and they have to budget for that eventuality.
That doesn't mean they are right or that Scientific judgment should rest with actuaries. It simply means if the argument is that unless Scientists are 100% certain, and even if they are, they shouldn't be telling people how to spend their money, that's actually true to an extent. But they do have the right to advocate no different than anyone else does, and that advocacy tends to be based on something other than political ideology. And the actual people whose jobs it is to actually try to understand the risks on a technical level and also the economics on a macro level aren't siding with the skeptics. So the skeptics can't argue that presuming climatologists are correct is not economically practical to people who have to think about money. Scientific consensus has been pretty broad for quite some time, but in the last five years I've seen a shift even in areas like the broader business community and the military that ignoring the real risks that global climate change will have significant negative impacts is foolhardy. They aren't betting it *will* happen, they are doing what risk managers do: they have assessed the risk that the scientists are *close enough* to being right that its worth acting on that risk.
So yeah, scientists should do Science and economists should do Economics, but what the rest of the world should be doing is risk management. By the time 100% certainty for all aspects of all elements of climatology arrives, it will be History. But its way past the point where practical people with unbiased objective outlooks should be considering risk management: reducing the risks where possible and planning for the risks where necessary. And even the cold blood bean counters are starting to do that in earnest now.
Regardless of the role of skepticism, everybody seems to be overlooking one key point:
If this paper were to turn out to be correct, current climate models are useless and will need to be completely reworked. Well, maybe not completely. Some more than others. But it would contradict some of the fundamental assumptions of most of those models.
Actually, that's not true, or at least its an exaggeration. If this paper is correct, what it actually says is that most of the models out there may have been basically correct, but missing an important parameter: an additional heat sequester due to deep ocean currents. No model is perfect, and when modelling a system as large and complex as the Earth, you have to work hard to simplify what you can to make the model work at all, while not oversimplifying to the point of eliminating the validity of the model's results. And most climatologists have known for a long time that the largest blind spot in most climate models is the Earth's oceans. That's why this sort of research even happens in the first place.
A lot of people don't the difference between a scientific hypothesis and a scientific theory. These climate change models are just hypothesis in software form. We won't able to run experiments for these hypothesis in our lifetimes, and in turn they will never reach the level of a scientific theory in our lifetime.
There's an oversimplified version of the Scientific Method that says we start with a scientific hypothesis, which is a conjecture or a guess, then we run an experiment, the experiment either contradicts the hypothesis or confirms it, and after X number of confirming experiments the hypothesis becomes a Theory. In practice, its more complicated than that and the transition from a conjecture to a theory is not binary. The theory of anthropomorphic global climate change is a large set of interlocking and overlapping smaller theories combined. For example, the theory of the greenhouse effect is strongly confirmed: different gasses in the atmosphere affect the absorption and radiation of infrared radiation in different ways, affecting the amount of net heat energy trapped on the surface of the Earth and lost to space. That's pretty settled. We can't, of course, experiment with thousands of different planet's atmospheres to test that theory in the simplified way, but we can do experiments on smaller scales and correlate them with Earth's atmosphere and the atmospheric conditions of other planets we can observe.
We know the first order effect of increased CO2: it tends to trap more heat energy. But that doesn't automatically mean global temperatures have to rise. That's the natural presumption, but Earth's surface is a complex environment. More heat energy could cause more clouds to form, causing a negative feedback effect which tends to slow or halt increased temperatures by blocking radiation from reaching the surface. The oceans have a huge impact on energy distribution on the surface of the Earth, and can sequester heat energy for a very long time in principle.
However, the net result of all of these various conjectures and theories in the aggregate is that the most logical explanation for the observed increase in global surface temperatures over time is the increase in CO2 caused primarily by human activity. That statement is less a theory, and more of an explanation for all the other smaller theories that individually explain small parts of the whole.
The transition from scientific hypothesis or conjecture rests not just with how many experimental wins the conjecture accumulates, but also the degree to which the conjecture accurately makes useful predictions and the degree to which it synergizes and accommodates other more well confirmed theories. We're never going to be able to experiment with other universes in all likelihood, but that doesn't mean the Big Bang will always be a scientific conjecture. Philosophers might make that claim, but the Big Bang is considered a genuine scientific theory because it makes testable predictions that are not just confirmable, but very powerful and wide-reaching. There's no obvious reason why we should observe the nucleosynthetic proportions we see in the observable universe, and yet the Big Bang makes very specific predictions about how much helium we should see relative to hydrogen. If the Big Bang was wrong, the odds of it making such a prediction accurately are extremely low. At some point, its not luck but skill, and in the same way at some point scientists decide a conjecture can't be that lucky, and therefore must, to a high degree of probability, incorporate some fundamental truth about the universe. It might not be precisely right, but it can't be completely wrong.
Over three hundred years after Newton published Principia, the theory of Newtonian gravity has held up remarkably well. Einstein didn't completely overthrow Newton, and after centuries its highly unlikely anything will: it simply makes too many predictions that are always confirmed. What Einstein did was modify Newton's
Sweet, I can't wait for next week's alternate explanation!
Go ahead "consensus" troll mods - do your worst to bury every skeptic questioning sketchy science on this story. Then go look in the mirror and call yourself a rational scientist.
Science is about skepticism. Even climatologists that support the theory of man influenced climate change are constantly questioning the data, and looking at alternate conjectures. The very article referenced explicitly states that many of the theories that were presented to explain why global surface temperatures in the last decade did not track the apparent heat load global warming induced were inadequate, and the subject of further inquiry like the research cited. That's how Science works. But Science doesn't discover all the facts instantly and doesn't advance in convenient textbook chapters. It isn't skepticism that tries to characterize Science as just a bunch of random guesses, one after the other. That's just ignorance of Science. Science works by incremental and sometimes studdering progress forward. There are lots of things we know with certainty. We know carbon dioxide traps heat in Earth's lower atmosphere. We know human activities have dramatically increased the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The net result is an increased amount of heat absorbed by the Earth. What precisely happens to that heat in all of the complex thermal systems on Earth is still not well understood. But that doesn't mean the core principles are just random guesses. We're still discovering how 19th century chemistry works, but no one thinks that new chemistry discoveries mean chemistry is left-wing conspiracy.
The history of scientific progress looks no different for any other subject than it looks for 21st century climatology. Our understanding of gravity, of the germ theory of infectious disease, of quantum mechanics all followed similar discovery and learning curves. The only difference is that general relativity and Schroedinger's equation aren't subjects politicians can effectively argue about.
I think a lot of people, even some actual scientists, do not understand the role of skepticism in Science. There's a difference between scientific skepticism and peanut gallery skepticism. Scientific skepticism is healthy. When a scientist is skeptical of prevailing theories and conducts intellectually honest research aimed at probing that skepticism, that's always valuable. Science isn't a poll: if a scientific theory is correct, it will survive skeptical research. If its wrong, it will eventually be contradicted by the evidence. But when someone with no understanding of the facts or the research misinterprets the natural skepticism that is at the heart of scientific discovery by filtering it through their own "common sense" then they don't understand why science is successful overall, and really ought to shut up about it.
"As a customer, how would you feel with a very simple product (much simpler than the competition but still a bit complex) that has no documentation?"
I would say if you believe you have a programming team full of programmers that can reasonably judge what end-users consider "simple" in terms of usability, you're either the luckiest dev team in the world to manage to catch such incredibly rare people or you believe in Big Foot.
I once encountered an entire room of end users who honestly could not identify the space bar on their keyboards (being people who had no previous experience with computers or typewriters). Most keyboards don't label the space bar. Your target audience may not be that inexperienced, but without documentation I can guarantee most will be unable to figure out how to use your product and will switch to one they can figure out - because there's good documentation or online help to assist them.
Usability is not the most important thing, its the only thing. It doesn't matter what software does. It only matters what the end users can make it do. If the end users can't make it do a thing, it doesn't matter that it can do that thing. And its never the end users fault, even when its the end users fault. Because they are the ones that get to choose which software they buy and use, and they will choose based on what they can make it do. Consider this when deciding how important good documentation is.
Silicon lithography will hit its limits after a few more iterations. But nano-assembly techniques may allow silicon transistors to be even smaller. After that we may be able to move to carbon nanotube transistors, based on spintronics to lower the heat dissipation. There is still plenty of room at the bottom.
The point of the article and the article it references is that its easy to say stuff like that, but also mostly irrelevant to practical computing because in the history of modern computing its never been absolute physical limits that caused major changes to how computing is implemented. Just because there's room at the bottom, doesn't mean its room we can use. We *may* be able to use nano-assemblers for silicon and *may* be able to use carbon nanotube transistors, but unless that gets translated to someone working on actual practical implementations of those technologies, they will apply as much to the average consumer as the SR-71 that's being discussed in this thread means to the average commercial air traveler. In other words, exactly zero.
When I was in college people were already talking about the exotic technologies we would have to migrate to in order to achieve better performance, and that was the late eighties. In the twenty-plus years since then, we're still basically using silicon CMOS. Granted the fabrication technologies and gate technologies have radically improved, but the fundamental manufacturing technology is still the same. Its been the same because there's hundreds of billion dollars of cumulative technological infrastructure and innovation behind silicon lithography. For these other "room at the bottom" technologies to be meaningful, and not just SR-71s, they need to be able to reach the same point silicon lithography with its multi-decade head start and approaching trillion dollar learning curve. Its not enough to just work in theory, or even in practice one-off. If it can't work at the scale and scope of silicon lithography, its just an SR-71. A cool museum piece of advanced technology almost no one will ever see, touch, use, or directly benefit from.
It isn't trivially obvious there exists a technology commercializable in the next few decades that can replace silicon lithography. Anyone who thinks that's obvious doesn't understand the practical realities of scaling these technologies.
You're conflating three distinct issues here: unlawful posession of a copyrighted work, unlawful copying and distribution of a copyrighted work and unlawful use of a patent.
Downloading the original GPLed work places Versata's customers in a position where they're entitled to posession of the derivative work. The path gets arcane but that's the bottom line.
I don't believe your interpretation of the law here is correct. Downloading the original GPLed work does not automatically grant a license to possess derivative works. There is case law here involving the legal status of "collages" and other such derivative work. License to a piece does not automatically grant rights to the whole, and the whole has a separate legal status from the status of the components. Once VTD-XML was incorporated into Versata's applications, the new application became a new work. The GPL makes that derivative work unlicensed unless Versata meets the terms of the GPL, in particular that they release source code if they redistribute it. They did not, so it is not. Downloading VTD-XML itself doesn't repair the fact the work is unlicensed, and therefore Versata's customers are not entitled to possess it.
Versata's customers are not entitled under the GPL to further distribute the derivative work without versata's source code. Period. They're liable for any such distribution, witting or otherwise, and Versata is liable to them for any damages they suffer as a result.
There's a decent case to be made that separately acquiring the software in a manner compliant with the GPL entitles the recipient to a license to use the Versata patents. Versata's behavior allows the statements they made about patent use in the GPL software to be interpreted that way. It puts the patent claim uncomfortably close to the 50% preponderance of the evidence line.
Patent licenses are not universal. By downloading VTD-XML someone gets a license to use XimpleHelp's patents, but only within the context of using VTD-XML itself. It does not grant them the universal right to use those patents in any way they see fit, including using them within an otherwise infringing work. It would be highly novel to argue that obtaining a patent license from a patent holder allowed the licensee to use works that infringe on the patent created by other people who did not acquire a valid patent license. I don't know what you mean by "close to the 50% preponderance of evidence line" because in this case its not the evidence that is in question, but the interpretation of the law. There's no such thing as saying I think there's a 55% chance the law means X.
It also hurts their position that the only mention of patents on VTD-XML's GPL web site (http://vtd-xml.sourceforge.net/) is: "Although VTD-XML is protected by US patents 7133857, 7260652, and 7761459, as long as you abide by GPL, you don't have to worry about patent infringement."
In what legal way does this hurt XimpleHelp? Patent holders are not required to announce that fact anywhere under the law, the only difference would be the issue between knowing and unknowing infringement (an issue of damages, not of culpability).
Versata is arguing bait and switch: that XimpleHelp allowed people to download the software "freely" and then now wants to spring a patent infringement trap on them. But that legal argument is completely invalid to me, because XimpleHelp did *not* allow people to download the software "freely." They allowed them to download and use the software under the terms of the GPL. People who do not follow the GPL should not presume that they have any right to the software, and at that point without a valid license all sorts of penalties can accrue to people who in effect steal something, up to and including the fact they may have infringed on other rights besides the GPL itself.
Its not a legal defense to argue "if I had known the software had patent protection, I wouldn't have stolen it."
XimpleHelp's legal argument as I understand it is that Versata violated the GPL when it used VDT-XML and *redistributed* the software in modified form without subjecting the derivative software to the terms of the GPL. That means effectively Versata did not have a valid license to VDT-XML, because they broke the GPL which granted it in the first place. Without that license, Versata was now not just in violation of the GPL, but also now violating XimpleWare's patent rights of the software - because Versata was using patent-protected software without permission.
XimpleHelp's legal argument is wacky. Either Versata agreed to abide by the GPL (in which case they're liable to damages to XimpleHelp for violating the contract but are not liable for copyright or patent infringement since they had a valid contract for them) or they did not agree to abide by the GPL (in which case they're liable for damages due to copyright and patent infringement but not liable for any breach of contract). It's one or the other, not a mix and match free-for-all from both.
I have no idea what you mean specifically by "mix and match free-for-all" but in the general case it is very common in legal arguments to argue that the facts support only one of a small set of possibilities, and the law entitles you to relief under all of them. That's a trivial method of logic that is perfectly acceptable in the law.
Either way, going after the customers is a risky play. It seems plausible (or at least murky) that Vyatta's customers could gain access to the IP rights simply by downloading the GPL XimpleHelp software. If they can, naming them in a then-dismissable suit potentially creates a tortious interference claim turning XimpleHelp into a bad actor.
Under the terms of the GPL, they could have up until the point where XimpleHelp denied them that relief by explicitly revoking that right. But even if that revocation is deemed invalid, there's the separate matter that downloading the software themselves is not enough to supply Versata's customers with GPL protection: the GPL would only allow them to use the base software itself, not the derivative work Versata created. To comply with the GPL, Versata would have to supply its customers with its base source code and allow its customers to patch in Versata's VDT-XML extensions themselves, which is allowed under the GPL. Under the GPL, you can download and modify GPL software for your own use, but you cannot redistribute that software. If Versata's customers could immunize themselves by simply downloading VDT-XML, that would make the GPL's protections effectively meaningless. Courts tend to be reluctant to interpret contracts and license agreements in a way that renders their literal text meaningless. I find it highly unlikely any reasonable court would rule the GPL's terms could be circumvented in this manner.
Sections 4+6. Shows the license is granted from the original licencor each time the work is distributed.
"4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance."
Versata is obviously not in full compliance with the GPL.
The code wasn't distributed for free. It was distributed under a choice of two separate licenses: One was the GPL, one was commercial. Clearly, the commercial license route wasn't taken, and the GPL license wasn't adhered to.
Irrelevant if the patent owners argument is accepted that the GPL license did not include a license to use the software because you also needed to obtain a license for the patent that the GPL'd source uses. It's like cops putting out a plate of free 'special' (unmarked as such) brownies next to a plate of $5-per regular brownies at back-to-school night and promptly arresting everybody who eats one of the 'free' brownies.
If Oracle pulled such a BS claim out in their Java lawsuits, everybody but the corporate lawyers would be puking in disgust at such a bold admission of intent to entrap users.
I believe Larry Rosen's warning to learn the facts carefully applies here. XimpleHelp's argument is not that the GPL license did not include a license to use the software. The problem is more complicated than that. XimpleHelp's argument, as I understand it, is that the software was offered under two terms: one: you could abide by the GPL and use it (and redistributed it under certain conditions) for free. Two: you could buy a commercial license and use (and presumably redistribute) the software without any need to follow the GPL. The VDT-XML distribution site is pretty clear on this: it took me only a couple minutes to find and read the relevant part of the FAQ:
* Can you explain the GPL license a bit more?
The GPL does not necessarily require one to disclose their source code when modifying a GPL-covered work or using GPL-covered code in a new work. This requirement arises only when the new project is "distributed" to third parties. If the resulting software is kept only for use by the modifier, no disclosure of source code is required. Although VTD-XML is protected by US patents 7133857, 7260652, and 7761459, as long as you abide by GPL, you don't have to worry about patent infringement.
All licenses to any parties in litigation with XimpleWare have been expressly terminated. No new license, and no renewal of any revoked license, is granted to those parties as a result of re-downloading software from this or any other website
If you don't like the restriction of GPL, XimpleWare also offers flexible commercial licenses for VTD-XML. Please email us at sales@ximpleware.com for more details.
XimpleHelp's legal argument as I understand it is that Versata violated the GPL when it used VDT-XML and *redistributed* the software in modified form without subjecting the derivative software to the terms of the GPL. That means effectively Versata did not have a valid license to VDT-XML, because they broke the GPL which granted it in the first place. Without that license, Versata was now not just in violation of the GPL, but also now violating XimpleWare's patent rights of the software - because Versata was using patent-protected software without permission.
Versata's customers may not have the right to estoppel they think they do, for the reason Rosen specifies: the GPL *would have* offered some protection to those customers if Versata itself had been compliant with the GPL. But since they are not, the GPL doesn't apply to Versata and neither does it apply to its customers - except insofar as they are in breach of it.
Addressing your analogy, nothing prevents Versata's customers themselves from downloading VDT-XML (or would have, before Versata terminated their ability to get a license because of the lawsuits) and using it, and nothing prevents anyone else from downloading VDT-XML and using it free from patent infringement allegations. If XimpleHelp tried to sue me for violating its patents just because I downloaded and used VDT-XML, they'd almost certainly lose that case both on legal merits and also because they explicitly said on their distribution site they would not do
But the bigger problem we have with new-grads and junior-devs, in general, is the same problem you'd have in any field: they're green. They don't test well, or at all. They don't think designs through. They don't communicate well. They ask too many questions, or maybe worse, they ask too few. They try to fix things that aren't broken. They're bad at estimating task sizes (admittedly, people rarely get much better at that even after decades.) In an attempt to not suck, they reach out for best-practices and apply them zealously and inappropriately. They can't imagine how things will fail, or be abused. They spend too much time fixing small problems, and not enough time fixing big ones. And maybe worst of all, they're under the illusion that what they learned in school ought to prepare them for the workforce, when really it just gets their foot in the door.
The way I summarize these problems is that the problem with most college graduates is that they thought and behaved as if the purpose of their college years was to learn stuff, when it was really to learn how to learn stuff. The first skill you will need in most of the jobs you might get after college is learning. You should have had a lot of practice if you approached college right, which most don't. You're right that *what* you learned in school does not and cannot prepare you for joining the workforce, but *practicing the act of learning* a wide range of skills and thought processes can prepare you very well.
I tell people if you want to be a professional, college is professional learning on training wheels. If the thought of learning as much as all the learning you did in college every couple of years until you die is not appealing, consider a non-technical non-professional career. Because you're going to suck at it otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
The UN panel since September has published three separate reports into the physical science of global warming, its impacts, and ways to fight it. The study leaked yesterday, called the “Synthesis Report” intends to pick out the most important findings and present them in a way that lawmakers can easily understand. (Emphasis mine)
Why do I have a feeling the report to the politicians will have to read a lot like the Simple English Wikipedia, to the point where it might not be a bad idea to get the writers for that on it.
I'm not convinced that even the "Drunk History" version would make a significant impact on politicians.
One of the SAN vendors we met with a while back was arranging their drives within each drawer in such a way that it supposedly minimized/neutralized the RV effect.
Its very difficult to completely remove the effect; even vibrations that don't seem particularly noteworthy or even noticeable by humans could be enough to throw a drive head a few dozen nanometers (and that's sometimes all it takes) in the wrong direction and reduce the read signal enough to cause a read/write retry. Chassis design can greatly help, but cannot always completely eliminate the problem. Drives that have a higher tolerance for those vibrations can still perform better even in properly dampened chassis.
Welp, seems my post was a bit misunderstood. I was actually thinking transfer rates. Say you have an 8TB drive with 6 platters - the option could be to pair up the platters and write alternate bytes to each, doubling sustained read and write.
It could also be an option to turn on when you start using the drive, and if it gets half-filled up, it should be possible to decouple them and get the full size.
The tendency for many consumers is to have an SSD boot drive and a platter storage drive - but that platter drive takes some time to fill up, why not double speed it until it's half full?
I'm not 100% certain, but I believe the problem is that the hard drive head assembly moves as a single unit, which means all of the heads for all the platters must move in unison. But the precision required to move the heads to the precise spot on the tracks where the data is recorded is such that it would be too difficult to design the heads in such a way that when one was over its track, all of the others would be *guaranteed* to be over their tracks on their respective platters. To do this you'd need to have the heads each on their own arms with their own voice coils to keep them all on track simultaneously. But that would add enough cost to the drive, it would be cheaper to just buy two half-capacity drives and stripe them yourself.
Basically, I think its possible, but not economically logical to make hard drives in a way that would allow for this kind of in-box striping. That's what RAID is for.
Rotational Vibration (RV) is the vibration the drive experiences from the platters rotating at high speed. When you put a bunch of drives in a cage, some interesting harmonics build up which can shorten the life span of the drives further. Enterprise grade hard drives are built to better withstand these vibrations, lessening the chance of failure. (At least that is what their literature says -- personally I'd mount the drives using grommets or something like what Rackspace uses [rubber bands I think?]).
Actually, multi-drive rotational vibration tolerance is a design feature whereby the drive is designed to be capable of withstanding and tolerating induced rotational vibrations from outside the drive. Enterprise drives are normally designed to minimize the vibrations they generate and induce into their surrounding chassis. But on top of that, being able to dampen vibrations induced from the outside and function optimally can significantly improve the performance of the drives. In enterprise environments where performance is important, disk drives can theoretically tolerate a lot of vibrations by simply temporarily ceasing reads and writes until their read/write heads get back into alignment. But those pauses force the drive to wait for at least a full rotation before they can try again to read the same blocks. If this happens frequently the performance of the drive can be significantly degraded even if the drive lifetime isn't impacted. Multi-drive RV tolerance is not just about surviving the vibrations, its also about being able to function optimally without having to degrade performance when in a (relatively) high vibration environment, as is often the case in large high-density drive enclosures.
Without this feature, you can sometimes find your 4000 IOPS spindle array delivering only 2000 IOPS at random times, and not know why.
interesting.... however the problem lies in the fact thats it is higher than they thought, meaning it COULD still be worse than they thought, meaning AGW MAY NOT be the doom and gloom some make it out to be. this little bit of information is not a gotcha moment, but it leads credence to the idea that we still have no idea
Scientists discover something new, which suggests they were wrong before, which means they could be completely wrong about everything. Just like when scientists discovered a new species of butterfly, proving we still have no idea if life exists on Earth.
Only for the subject of global warming can scientists discover a potentially new way in which climate change could accelerate over time due to man induced warming of the deep oceans, and that is used as evidence that maybe its not happening at all.
In the end, what this comes down to is whether we, as a society, should leave these kinds of decisions to government selected experts. You may be of the opinion that we should. But if you accuse people who disagree with you of being unscientific or corrupt, you have crossed a line.
I would also be perfectly happy with picking climatologists at random. The result would be about the same as picking physicists at random to decide whether gravity officially exists.
I'd flip it around. An automated car should be required to pass both a road test and a bevvy of simulated scenarios.
Certainly. But the question was whether automated testing should be considered sufficient. I think I would do my own flip-around. I think if Google wants to change the California law that requires road testing to make it so that simulation testing is sufficient, then I think Google should donate the simulator, and if an automated car passes the simulation but fails in the real world in a way real world testing would have uncovered but the simulator did not, Google should be held liable for all damages associated with that failure. Under that circumstance, I would be inclined to trust that Google's simulators are a sufficient match to reality to consider substituting simulation testing for road testing.
If Google doesn't want to subject itself to that criteria, then that's a tacit admission the simulation is not guaranteed to catch all the problems real world testing can catch, and I would consider their proposal to be invalid on its face.
Real scientists don't need to perform these shitty expriment and can solve the problem with basic thinking and most of the time basic arithmetic.
For some definition of "real." Some pretty far-out definition.
Test in the fscking simulation and then test on the street. Win-win.
You don't need to ask for permission to test your car with simulations. You only have to ask for permission to replace real world testing with simulations. Personally, I'm not fond of replacing real world testing completely with simulations. The problem is that the point of testing software is to make sure the programmers have properly dealt with as many possible real world situations, and to reduce the likelihood the programmers haven't ignored an unexpected circumstance. Simulations can only test for what the simulation programmers have accounted for. Its substituting the system programmers' judgment for the simulation programmers' judgment. Its useful, but in my opinion insufficient.
And what benefit does jail time give the public? Jail time for non-violent offenders is the stupidest, most useless thing we could do with these people. There are all sorts of public services that are in dire need of manpower. A shit ton of community service as a punishment is far far far more useful than just incarcerating people. I find it astonishing how primitive and archaic peoples' thinking is when it comes to punishments for crimes. Just like we don't spank kids anymore because it's pointless and counterproductive, we should also stop "spanking" non-violent offenders but put them to good use instead.
So if I steal a hundred million dollars, the absolute worst case punishment I could receive in Anonymous Coward-ville is a billion years of community service? That's a better risk/reward ratio than any business opportunity I've ever been presented with. I'm in.
Don't worry guys, the free market fairy will take care of it.
The free market has taken care of it. Good customer service is expensive. Consumers have demonstrated that they are unwilling to pay additional money for good customer service. Successful companies have aborted customer service to keep prices low.
Something to keep in mind whenever someone says "the free market will take care of it." The free market doesn't solve problems. It "takes care of them."
Scientists can speculate and debate as much as they want whether it's getting warmer or colder. The issue with the global warming debate is the political demands to translate the science into specific actions, often by scientists who have no qualifications in economics or politics.
I believe climatologists have a better understanding of economics than economists or politicians have of climatology.
I think the people best in a position to think about this problem rationally tend to be actuaries; insurance professionals. Insurance professionals have to apply imperfect knowledge and incomplete risk models and make economic decisions within that environment all the time. They don't always get it right, but moreso than most they tend to balance the two on at least large scales on some rational basis. Insurance companies tend to believe that the odds of economic damage due to climate change are high enough to be financially material. In other words they are tending to bet it is happening, will get worse, and they have to budget for that eventuality.
That doesn't mean they are right or that Scientific judgment should rest with actuaries. It simply means if the argument is that unless Scientists are 100% certain, and even if they are, they shouldn't be telling people how to spend their money, that's actually true to an extent. But they do have the right to advocate no different than anyone else does, and that advocacy tends to be based on something other than political ideology. And the actual people whose jobs it is to actually try to understand the risks on a technical level and also the economics on a macro level aren't siding with the skeptics. So the skeptics can't argue that presuming climatologists are correct is not economically practical to people who have to think about money. Scientific consensus has been pretty broad for quite some time, but in the last five years I've seen a shift even in areas like the broader business community and the military that ignoring the real risks that global climate change will have significant negative impacts is foolhardy. They aren't betting it *will* happen, they are doing what risk managers do: they have assessed the risk that the scientists are *close enough* to being right that its worth acting on that risk.
So yeah, scientists should do Science and economists should do Economics, but what the rest of the world should be doing is risk management. By the time 100% certainty for all aspects of all elements of climatology arrives, it will be History. But its way past the point where practical people with unbiased objective outlooks should be considering risk management: reducing the risks where possible and planning for the risks where necessary. And even the cold blood bean counters are starting to do that in earnest now.
Regardless of the role of skepticism, everybody seems to be overlooking one key point: If this paper were to turn out to be correct, current climate models are useless and will need to be completely reworked. Well, maybe not completely. Some more than others. But it would contradict some of the fundamental assumptions of most of those models.
Actually, that's not true, or at least its an exaggeration. If this paper is correct, what it actually says is that most of the models out there may have been basically correct, but missing an important parameter: an additional heat sequester due to deep ocean currents. No model is perfect, and when modelling a system as large and complex as the Earth, you have to work hard to simplify what you can to make the model work at all, while not oversimplifying to the point of eliminating the validity of the model's results. And most climatologists have known for a long time that the largest blind spot in most climate models is the Earth's oceans. That's why this sort of research even happens in the first place.
A lot of people don't the difference between a scientific hypothesis and a scientific theory. These climate change models are just hypothesis in software form. We won't able to run experiments for these hypothesis in our lifetimes, and in turn they will never reach the level of a scientific theory in our lifetime.
There's an oversimplified version of the Scientific Method that says we start with a scientific hypothesis, which is a conjecture or a guess, then we run an experiment, the experiment either contradicts the hypothesis or confirms it, and after X number of confirming experiments the hypothesis becomes a Theory. In practice, its more complicated than that and the transition from a conjecture to a theory is not binary. The theory of anthropomorphic global climate change is a large set of interlocking and overlapping smaller theories combined. For example, the theory of the greenhouse effect is strongly confirmed: different gasses in the atmosphere affect the absorption and radiation of infrared radiation in different ways, affecting the amount of net heat energy trapped on the surface of the Earth and lost to space. That's pretty settled. We can't, of course, experiment with thousands of different planet's atmospheres to test that theory in the simplified way, but we can do experiments on smaller scales and correlate them with Earth's atmosphere and the atmospheric conditions of other planets we can observe.
We know the first order effect of increased CO2: it tends to trap more heat energy. But that doesn't automatically mean global temperatures have to rise. That's the natural presumption, but Earth's surface is a complex environment. More heat energy could cause more clouds to form, causing a negative feedback effect which tends to slow or halt increased temperatures by blocking radiation from reaching the surface. The oceans have a huge impact on energy distribution on the surface of the Earth, and can sequester heat energy for a very long time in principle.
However, the net result of all of these various conjectures and theories in the aggregate is that the most logical explanation for the observed increase in global surface temperatures over time is the increase in CO2 caused primarily by human activity. That statement is less a theory, and more of an explanation for all the other smaller theories that individually explain small parts of the whole.
The transition from scientific hypothesis or conjecture rests not just with how many experimental wins the conjecture accumulates, but also the degree to which the conjecture accurately makes useful predictions and the degree to which it synergizes and accommodates other more well confirmed theories. We're never going to be able to experiment with other universes in all likelihood, but that doesn't mean the Big Bang will always be a scientific conjecture. Philosophers might make that claim, but the Big Bang is considered a genuine scientific theory because it makes testable predictions that are not just confirmable, but very powerful and wide-reaching. There's no obvious reason why we should observe the nucleosynthetic proportions we see in the observable universe, and yet the Big Bang makes very specific predictions about how much helium we should see relative to hydrogen. If the Big Bang was wrong, the odds of it making such a prediction accurately are extremely low. At some point, its not luck but skill, and in the same way at some point scientists decide a conjecture can't be that lucky, and therefore must, to a high degree of probability, incorporate some fundamental truth about the universe. It might not be precisely right, but it can't be completely wrong.
Over three hundred years after Newton published Principia, the theory of Newtonian gravity has held up remarkably well. Einstein didn't completely overthrow Newton, and after centuries its highly unlikely anything will: it simply makes too many predictions that are always confirmed. What Einstein did was modify Newton's
Sweet, I can't wait for next week's alternate explanation!
Go ahead "consensus" troll mods - do your worst to bury every skeptic questioning sketchy science on this story. Then go look in the mirror and call yourself a rational scientist.
Science is about skepticism. Even climatologists that support the theory of man influenced climate change are constantly questioning the data, and looking at alternate conjectures. The very article referenced explicitly states that many of the theories that were presented to explain why global surface temperatures in the last decade did not track the apparent heat load global warming induced were inadequate, and the subject of further inquiry like the research cited. That's how Science works. But Science doesn't discover all the facts instantly and doesn't advance in convenient textbook chapters. It isn't skepticism that tries to characterize Science as just a bunch of random guesses, one after the other. That's just ignorance of Science. Science works by incremental and sometimes studdering progress forward. There are lots of things we know with certainty. We know carbon dioxide traps heat in Earth's lower atmosphere. We know human activities have dramatically increased the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The net result is an increased amount of heat absorbed by the Earth. What precisely happens to that heat in all of the complex thermal systems on Earth is still not well understood. But that doesn't mean the core principles are just random guesses. We're still discovering how 19th century chemistry works, but no one thinks that new chemistry discoveries mean chemistry is left-wing conspiracy.
The history of scientific progress looks no different for any other subject than it looks for 21st century climatology. Our understanding of gravity, of the germ theory of infectious disease, of quantum mechanics all followed similar discovery and learning curves. The only difference is that general relativity and Schroedinger's equation aren't subjects politicians can effectively argue about.
I think a lot of people, even some actual scientists, do not understand the role of skepticism in Science. There's a difference between scientific skepticism and peanut gallery skepticism. Scientific skepticism is healthy. When a scientist is skeptical of prevailing theories and conducts intellectually honest research aimed at probing that skepticism, that's always valuable. Science isn't a poll: if a scientific theory is correct, it will survive skeptical research. If its wrong, it will eventually be contradicted by the evidence. But when someone with no understanding of the facts or the research misinterprets the natural skepticism that is at the heart of scientific discovery by filtering it through their own "common sense" then they don't understand why science is successful overall, and really ought to shut up about it.
Sure we do, just look at a history book. Who are listed? How many of those directly or indirectly killed a lot of people?
None of my history books rank serial killers by their success rate. Perhaps you can recommend one.
if taking their shows down this party is hugely successful for Discovery, then people have themselves to blame.
We don't judge the morality of serial killers by how successful they are.
"As a customer, how would you feel with a very simple product (much simpler than the competition but still a bit complex) that has no documentation?"
I would say if you believe you have a programming team full of programmers that can reasonably judge what end-users consider "simple" in terms of usability, you're either the luckiest dev team in the world to manage to catch such incredibly rare people or you believe in Big Foot.
I once encountered an entire room of end users who honestly could not identify the space bar on their keyboards (being people who had no previous experience with computers or typewriters). Most keyboards don't label the space bar. Your target audience may not be that inexperienced, but without documentation I can guarantee most will be unable to figure out how to use your product and will switch to one they can figure out - because there's good documentation or online help to assist them.
Usability is not the most important thing, its the only thing. It doesn't matter what software does. It only matters what the end users can make it do. If the end users can't make it do a thing, it doesn't matter that it can do that thing. And its never the end users fault, even when its the end users fault. Because they are the ones that get to choose which software they buy and use, and they will choose based on what they can make it do. Consider this when deciding how important good documentation is.
Silicon lithography will hit its limits after a few more iterations. But nano-assembly techniques may allow silicon transistors to be even smaller. After that we may be able to move to carbon nanotube transistors, based on spintronics to lower the heat dissipation. There is still plenty of room at the bottom.
The point of the article and the article it references is that its easy to say stuff like that, but also mostly irrelevant to practical computing because in the history of modern computing its never been absolute physical limits that caused major changes to how computing is implemented. Just because there's room at the bottom, doesn't mean its room we can use. We *may* be able to use nano-assemblers for silicon and *may* be able to use carbon nanotube transistors, but unless that gets translated to someone working on actual practical implementations of those technologies, they will apply as much to the average consumer as the SR-71 that's being discussed in this thread means to the average commercial air traveler. In other words, exactly zero.
When I was in college people were already talking about the exotic technologies we would have to migrate to in order to achieve better performance, and that was the late eighties. In the twenty-plus years since then, we're still basically using silicon CMOS. Granted the fabrication technologies and gate technologies have radically improved, but the fundamental manufacturing technology is still the same. Its been the same because there's hundreds of billion dollars of cumulative technological infrastructure and innovation behind silicon lithography. For these other "room at the bottom" technologies to be meaningful, and not just SR-71s, they need to be able to reach the same point silicon lithography with its multi-decade head start and approaching trillion dollar learning curve. Its not enough to just work in theory, or even in practice one-off. If it can't work at the scale and scope of silicon lithography, its just an SR-71. A cool museum piece of advanced technology almost no one will ever see, touch, use, or directly benefit from.
It isn't trivially obvious there exists a technology commercializable in the next few decades that can replace silicon lithography. Anyone who thinks that's obvious doesn't understand the practical realities of scaling these technologies.
You're conflating three distinct issues here: unlawful posession of a copyrighted work, unlawful copying and distribution of a copyrighted work and unlawful use of a patent.
Downloading the original GPLed work places Versata's customers in a position where they're entitled to posession of the derivative work. The path gets arcane but that's the bottom line.
I don't believe your interpretation of the law here is correct. Downloading the original GPLed work does not automatically grant a license to possess derivative works. There is case law here involving the legal status of "collages" and other such derivative work. License to a piece does not automatically grant rights to the whole, and the whole has a separate legal status from the status of the components. Once VTD-XML was incorporated into Versata's applications, the new application became a new work. The GPL makes that derivative work unlicensed unless Versata meets the terms of the GPL, in particular that they release source code if they redistribute it. They did not, so it is not. Downloading VTD-XML itself doesn't repair the fact the work is unlicensed, and therefore Versata's customers are not entitled to possess it.
Versata's customers are not entitled under the GPL to further distribute the derivative work without versata's source code. Period. They're liable for any such distribution, witting or otherwise, and Versata is liable to them for any damages they suffer as a result.
There's a decent case to be made that separately acquiring the software in a manner compliant with the GPL entitles the recipient to a license to use the Versata patents. Versata's behavior allows the statements they made about patent use in the GPL software to be interpreted that way. It puts the patent claim uncomfortably close to the 50% preponderance of the evidence line.
Patent licenses are not universal. By downloading VTD-XML someone gets a license to use XimpleHelp's patents, but only within the context of using VTD-XML itself. It does not grant them the universal right to use those patents in any way they see fit, including using them within an otherwise infringing work. It would be highly novel to argue that obtaining a patent license from a patent holder allowed the licensee to use works that infringe on the patent created by other people who did not acquire a valid patent license. I don't know what you mean by "close to the 50% preponderance of evidence line" because in this case its not the evidence that is in question, but the interpretation of the law. There's no such thing as saying I think there's a 55% chance the law means X.
It also hurts their position that the only mention of patents on VTD-XML's GPL web site (http://vtd-xml.sourceforge.net/) is: "Although VTD-XML is protected by US patents 7133857, 7260652, and 7761459, as long as you abide by GPL, you don't have to worry about patent infringement."
In what legal way does this hurt XimpleHelp? Patent holders are not required to announce that fact anywhere under the law, the only difference would be the issue between knowing and unknowing infringement (an issue of damages, not of culpability).
Versata is arguing bait and switch: that XimpleHelp allowed people to download the software "freely" and then now wants to spring a patent infringement trap on them. But that legal argument is completely invalid to me, because XimpleHelp did *not* allow people to download the software "freely." They allowed them to download and use the software under the terms of the GPL. People who do not follow the GPL should not presume that they have any right to the software, and at that point without a valid license all sorts of penalties can accrue to people who in effect steal something, up to and including the fact they may have infringed on other rights besides the GPL itself.
Its not a legal defense to argue "if I had known the software had patent protection, I wouldn't have stolen it."
XimpleHelp's legal argument as I understand it is that Versata violated the GPL when it used VDT-XML and *redistributed* the software in modified form without subjecting the derivative software to the terms of the GPL. That means effectively Versata did not have a valid license to VDT-XML, because they broke the GPL which granted it in the first place. Without that license, Versata was now not just in violation of the GPL, but also now violating XimpleWare's patent rights of the software - because Versata was using patent-protected software without permission.
XimpleHelp's legal argument is wacky. Either Versata agreed to abide by the GPL (in which case they're liable to damages to XimpleHelp for violating the contract but are not liable for copyright or patent infringement since they had a valid contract for them) or they did not agree to abide by the GPL (in which case they're liable for damages due to copyright and patent infringement but not liable for any breach of contract). It's one or the other, not a mix and match free-for-all from both.
I have no idea what you mean specifically by "mix and match free-for-all" but in the general case it is very common in legal arguments to argue that the facts support only one of a small set of possibilities, and the law entitles you to relief under all of them. That's a trivial method of logic that is perfectly acceptable in the law.
Either way, going after the customers is a risky play. It seems plausible (or at least murky) that Vyatta's customers could gain access to the IP rights simply by downloading the GPL XimpleHelp software. If they can, naming them in a then-dismissable suit potentially creates a tortious interference claim turning XimpleHelp into a bad actor.
Under the terms of the GPL, they could have up until the point where XimpleHelp denied them that relief by explicitly revoking that right. But even if that revocation is deemed invalid, there's the separate matter that downloading the software themselves is not enough to supply Versata's customers with GPL protection: the GPL would only allow them to use the base software itself, not the derivative work Versata created. To comply with the GPL, Versata would have to supply its customers with its base source code and allow its customers to patch in Versata's VDT-XML extensions themselves, which is allowed under the GPL. Under the GPL, you can download and modify GPL software for your own use, but you cannot redistribute that software. If Versata's customers could immunize themselves by simply downloading VDT-XML, that would make the GPL's protections effectively meaningless. Courts tend to be reluctant to interpret contracts and license agreements in a way that renders their literal text meaningless. I find it highly unlikely any reasonable court would rule the GPL's terms could be circumvented in this manner.
Sections 4+6. Shows the license is granted from the original licencor each time the work is distributed.
"4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance."
Versata is obviously not in full compliance with the GPL.
The code wasn't distributed for free. It was distributed under a choice of two separate licenses: One was the GPL, one was commercial. Clearly, the commercial license route wasn't taken, and the GPL license wasn't adhered to.
Irrelevant if the patent owners argument is accepted that the GPL license did not include a license to use the software because you also needed to obtain a license for the patent that the GPL'd source uses. It's like cops putting out a plate of free 'special' (unmarked as such) brownies next to a plate of $5-per regular brownies at back-to-school night and promptly arresting everybody who eats one of the 'free' brownies.
If Oracle pulled such a BS claim out in their Java lawsuits, everybody but the corporate lawyers would be puking in disgust at such a bold admission of intent to entrap users.
I believe Larry Rosen's warning to learn the facts carefully applies here. XimpleHelp's argument is not that the GPL license did not include a license to use the software. The problem is more complicated than that. XimpleHelp's argument, as I understand it, is that the software was offered under two terms: one: you could abide by the GPL and use it (and redistributed it under certain conditions) for free. Two: you could buy a commercial license and use (and presumably redistribute) the software without any need to follow the GPL. The VDT-XML distribution site is pretty clear on this: it took me only a couple minutes to find and read the relevant part of the FAQ:
* Can you explain the GPL license a bit more? The GPL does not necessarily require one to disclose their source code when modifying a GPL-covered work or using GPL-covered code in a new work. This requirement arises only when the new project is "distributed" to third parties. If the resulting software is kept only for use by the modifier, no disclosure of source code is required. Although VTD-XML is protected by US patents 7133857, 7260652, and 7761459, as long as you abide by GPL, you don't have to worry about patent infringement. All licenses to any parties in litigation with XimpleWare have been expressly terminated. No new license, and no renewal of any revoked license, is granted to those parties as a result of re-downloading software from this or any other website If you don't like the restriction of GPL, XimpleWare also offers flexible commercial licenses for VTD-XML. Please email us at sales@ximpleware.com for more details.
XimpleHelp's legal argument as I understand it is that Versata violated the GPL when it used VDT-XML and *redistributed* the software in modified form without subjecting the derivative software to the terms of the GPL. That means effectively Versata did not have a valid license to VDT-XML, because they broke the GPL which granted it in the first place. Without that license, Versata was now not just in violation of the GPL, but also now violating XimpleWare's patent rights of the software - because Versata was using patent-protected software without permission.
Versata's customers may not have the right to estoppel they think they do, for the reason Rosen specifies: the GPL *would have* offered some protection to those customers if Versata itself had been compliant with the GPL. But since they are not, the GPL doesn't apply to Versata and neither does it apply to its customers - except insofar as they are in breach of it.
Addressing your analogy, nothing prevents Versata's customers themselves from downloading VDT-XML (or would have, before Versata terminated their ability to get a license because of the lawsuits) and using it, and nothing prevents anyone else from downloading VDT-XML and using it free from patent infringement allegations. If XimpleHelp tried to sue me for violating its patents just because I downloaded and used VDT-XML, they'd almost certainly lose that case both on legal merits and also because they explicitly said on their distribution site they would not do
But the bigger problem we have with new-grads and junior-devs, in general, is the same problem you'd have in any field: they're green. They don't test well, or at all. They don't think designs through. They don't communicate well. They ask too many questions, or maybe worse, they ask too few. They try to fix things that aren't broken. They're bad at estimating task sizes (admittedly, people rarely get much better at that even after decades.) In an attempt to not suck, they reach out for best-practices and apply them zealously and inappropriately. They can't imagine how things will fail, or be abused. They spend too much time fixing small problems, and not enough time fixing big ones. And maybe worst of all, they're under the illusion that what they learned in school ought to prepare them for the workforce, when really it just gets their foot in the door.
The way I summarize these problems is that the problem with most college graduates is that they thought and behaved as if the purpose of their college years was to learn stuff, when it was really to learn how to learn stuff. The first skill you will need in most of the jobs you might get after college is learning. You should have had a lot of practice if you approached college right, which most don't. You're right that *what* you learned in school does not and cannot prepare you for joining the workforce, but *practicing the act of learning* a wide range of skills and thought processes can prepare you very well.
I tell people if you want to be a professional, college is professional learning on training wheels. If the thought of learning as much as all the learning you did in college every couple of years until you die is not appealing, consider a non-technical non-professional career. Because you're going to suck at it otherwise.